Seated in his spired tower,

a gleam upon his face,

the wizard Run centered his power,

and focused on a place. 

~

He felt the Will begin to course

through a firmament quite still.

When on the livid souls, Run forced

his power’s livid Will. 

~

Run began to suck and drain

these energies of life;

for he hoped soon to attain

a graveyard’s power, rife.

~

The crack and boom of air made thick

by that struggl’ing of souls,

their powers waned, no life regained,

stirred winds and sour howls.

~

First came the rain, and with the rain,

came sleets in sheets and snow,

to drive Run’s very thoughts insane

and cleave his plans, laid low.

~

But Run was no mere fraud or mage

nor his best years behind,

for with the time did come the age,

a whetstone to his mind. 

~

In the face of gales he laughed,

safe within his tower,

as the graveyard epitaphed, 

its residents’ second hour. 

~

Into a tone over ordered bone,

incanted Run his plea,

enchanting ancient runes alone, 

graveyard souls’ the fee.

~

Then from the dark, there came a spark, 

bobbing , bobbing through the breeze,

the wind began to scream and hark,

to that which bobbed to please.

~

Not long now, the spell ends soon,

Run’s blood rising to a boil,

and through his lips he soughed a croon,

lifting laid-to-rest from soil.

~

From the ground there did resound a sound,

like maws suddenly agape

as empty eyes of skeletons found

the sudden will to traipse.

~

Run cackled from his tower, loud,

There was lightning at his back,

as his undead army bowed,

and readied their attack. 

~

He felt the surge of nature’s wrong,

the way that things should be,

but his heart’s turmoiled song,

danced, light, on turmoil’s glee. 

~

The cold air stopped with the world in gloam,

its tired, birthing song,

where from its womb of dug up loam

Run’s children don’t belong. 

All that was left of the city gates were two stone pillars. The gates themselves had been laid low and splintered, collapsed off their hinges by a wild press of crowded bodies, a vision which my mind’s eye gave host to until I had to shake my head to scatter the dreadful scene. This only coaxed me back to my original focus: the cold new wound planted on my left arm, which hung bandaged by my side. I’d seen thing like that before, and as I fingered the golden cross hung on a neon shoestring around my neck, I considered if I would live through the next — what was it now, how much time was left — thirty six hours. 

I clomped across the fallen gates and into the open town square they once guarded. I pulled the map, a gift given to me three days back, which was easy to read in that bright, noonday sun. The sky was a deep blue, cloudless, which was good, as long as it stayed like that. The Unholy wouldn’t come out until the sun set. Most of them, I should say, wouldn’t. 

You never knew.

The wrecked doors and windows of brown, squat buildings extended to form the walls of the square, the signs of a once thriving populace scattered about here and there, taking on the garb of old restaurant chairs and paper garbage. One thing I never thought much about, when the end of everything washed over me as an empirical truth rather than a religious misconception, was the paper. 

How much we loved our paper, the glossy sheets and the rough. I still can’t believe the way we’d throw it out or use it to wipe away our own excrement or tears. You couldn’t wipe away a quarter of the tears now — not even if you had all the paper in the world. Here it all was, books torn open, pages of the DaVinci Code slapped on top of a children’s illustrated guide to the book of Job, scattering their inked contents about streets like this one all over the world. The torn up ads and posters transmuted from marketing tools to become a welcome mats in every ghost city and town from here to Paris and back to here, overnight.

That night. The night the Unholy came. 

No. No he cannot. 

ecrid:

I’ve decided that there should be a tag for Science Fiction and Fantasy writing on Tumblr (prose or poetry). Since there is no way to get so many thousands of disconnected people to agree on this, I’m going to tell you the tag is this:

SFF

This will either work or it won’t, but if you’d like it to work please either reblog this message, post a similar message, and start using the tag. I know we can do this!

I had to cast the nets good and hard, filling them with the treasures we had taken from the corpse of the old ship, sunken at Bulion’s Bay - that’s how you attract the mermaids, with the sunken treasures, and this one time, one of those fin-bastards tried cutting the nets, but Jeb’s shotgun soon found a remedy for that, and all he could say was “damn, why don’t they have vaginas?” and “Boom, headshot!” and the like, which made me start wondering about how it must feel to be one of those creepy fish-women trapped among the useless trinkets in the net and then I would wonder if mermaid society had prostitutes, and Jeb said, “We’re all prostitutes in the end,” which made me feel a lot better because I thought I was the only one wrangling up money for the sale of my body, but felt better since Jeb apparently did that too, and one of the mermaids said that their society did have prostitutes and that if we let her go she would show us, but Jeb just laughed and shot her too, and then we put them in the mermaid grinder, and that, ladies and gentlefolks, is where your tuna comes from. 

I thought she was the right one for me with her A01 mounted rifles and her cockpit of steamy faux-wood, metal plate. But now I’m hanging around in space, drifting, the guns shot off and the thrusters reduced to a pile of dilapidated junk floating in the vacuum about three feet to port. 

I had gone out to fly her, once she was mine, to make the run to Evening 3, when they came. It wasn’t my intention for a bunch of small, practical fighters to nuzzle up close and use me for target practice. 

Clipped me good, for no other reason than that I looked good to break, good to play a game of cat and mouse. I put my heart into a choice, they put their hearts into their choice, yet I am the one drifting and waiting to die or be found. 

My choice was to do a job in something secure and reliable; their choice was to break me just because I could be broken. 

Now, I’m twirling around, waiting to sink into the black of vision and vacuum, and die trapped within my heart’s choice.