Special Orders Preview: Alive in the Pressure Tophet

Friday was the busiest night of the week for the Colonel’s Secret Coterie cell, all five of them crammed into the restaurant awkwardly sandwiched between the community college and the interstate. Fonz at the register, passing out freebies to the cops who always swung by for a magickally charged pick-me-up before a high risk warrant service, mouth always two sentences ahead of his brain but making them laugh and smile all the same. Mick on the drive through, employing his best customer service accent and killing the mic to lisp out the orders in his natural deep southern falsetto. Orlock, stripped to the waist, mesh vest like a hairnet for his torso as he slaved over the fryers. Nadia weaving neatly between them, never shouting if she didn’t have to, speaking just loud enough to be easily heard over the endless machines that shrieked and hissed and buzzed and chimed.

And at the heart of it all, the Loyal Laborer, the hero of the scene: Ozzy Packard. Thin sleeves of plastic plastered to his hands with sweat, which melted on contact with hot metal and had to be painfully scraped free and replaced. The snap of boiling oil where it leaped to kiss his face, always narrowly missing his eye. Enormous sacks of potatoes, bags of drink syrup, ice, chicken, bread, so light they might have been air. The actual air heated to the temperature of blood so that it felt like his own body, the noise blending so that orders for fries and sandwiches and cardboard buckets filled with chicken melded with his own inner monologue. A mop detaching congealed fat from the tile. Enlightenment. Oneness with the world around him. The headache gone. The bone-deep weariness gone. The pain so thoroughly obliterated by devotion to the task that he didn’t feel the oncoming fit until he was already on his back. 

 

Unknown Armies 9/11 Jam Results

Results from the Unknown Armies 9/11 jam. Submissions were limited to 3,333 words, set some time in 2001 to 2008, and linked to a series of prompts chosen by the contest organizer.

Meat Points: Gentle Repose

Pickled in enough Endure Elements to keep it comfortable in the vacuum of space, Artaud’s brain barely noticed the sun baking it alive through sombrero and helm and coif and the partially-scalped remnants of his skull. The sun kept the night creatures underground. Kept the creatures of the day from pestering him. Even the flies neglected to bother his friends where they lay on the sledge behind him.

It was called Fat Sun by those who wished for luck, and O Sun by those who wished for honor. He had thought nasty things about it while he was down there in the dark, where it was useless to him. By way of apology he tried to remember a song about the sun.

Born beneath a blazing star
Through fire and riot, raid and war
To dawngate, where the-

 

There was a hole somewhere in his body, besides his mouth, which the potions hadn’t filled. The plug of tissue holding it shut burst with a squelch and he couldn’t sing anymore. He sagged, then rose and kept walking.

 

Meat Points: Guidance

You wake to a pair of enormous hands around your throat. The fingers squeeze. The thumbs seek the windpipe and hyoid bone. In focus now: behind the hands and arms, the beard rusty brown. Eyes like pools of bacteria - brilliant blue with a red rim, burning hot. As beautiful and as painful to look at as the first time you shoved them back into place. The voice, repeating mechanically in a breathless hiss.

GIVEITBACKGIVEITBACKGIVEITBACKGIVEITBACK

Yes, again. A dissatisfied customer, unhappy with services rendered. Trying to spread open your heavy body. Look inside for things he thinks you’ve taken. That he put there.

Meat Points: Attack of Opportunity

It came squirming out of the vat and Pharnobal felt a rush of satisfaction at being right again. Though it expanded slightly as it solidified, the shape didn’t change from moment to moment. Which suggested - no, which basically proved - that it wasn’t actually extruded from another plane, like a sphere rendered as an expanding and contracting circle in two dimensions. The effect was a purely visual one that occurred inside the eye and, if one was warded against it, didn’t happen at all. Humayan was wrong again, and she-

Focus. Left hand wishdoll right hand fist downward sweeping motion two words. Gift of speed to the muscle step to the left ten feet.

Meat Points: Hold Person

 

Through Gods’ years of having his eyes gouged by blades and his ears burst by explosions and his skins flensed by fire and his tongue smothered by dust Artaud had come to understand that a man did not experience events as they occurred, but as memories extending ever backwards. Even with the gift of Haste it was so. He had once felt in slow motion a pistol ball, energy largely spent on his helmet, auger through skull and sinus cavity and slowly render him imbecilic with a tiny bite taken from his frontal lobe. Even unmediated by sense data there was a perceptible gap between the event occurring and the internal experience of it occurring. The quanta could be asymptotically sliced but no sorcery could reach that final point where where experience and thought and action occurred at the same time.

Or perhaps the damage had interfered with memory formation. Even with the lost gray matter Clerically restored there were gaps.

Meat Points: Random Encounter

Artaud only got a brief look at the body before the others hustled him aside. That look was enough.

The cap of the skull had been removed with cuts more precise than anything Hipolito could achieve with his blades, no matter how obsessively he sharpened them. The arteries inside and the thin skin of dura mater delicately folded in a pattern like a star with greater care and attention to detail than Rakia ever showed him, undamaged despite their severance from the old master that once squatted inside the snug home of the skull. Like the brain might one day be returned to its home to resume where it had left off. The shining object clasped in the hand, left by the perpetrator, which portended a greater mystery than any of Pharnobal's jabbering about Wild Magic and Enlightenment and Great Work.

Meat Points: Threatened Squares

 

Where are they? Where are my legs?

By what right do you address me in this manner?

Water, a dram. Just a dram. Water.

So cried out the beasts at the edge of the ruin, in the voices of the many dead they had eaten. A year or two ago a mid-level mage cast Continual Light on the obelisk at the center, creating an oasis that held the night creatures at bay. They lurked just beyond the reach of the light in a gibbering mass, a carpet of monstrosities so thick that every night they formed a seething wall the height of two standing men, climbing over one another and falling forward into the circle to be burned and scrambling back, swimming beneath the surface of the sand ineffectually as the blazing pharos scoured their bones clean.

After a few minutes trying to pick out individual threads of narrative, Artaud excluded the whole clamor from his sensorium without conscious effort. He couldn’t afford to spend precious resources on the things outside the circle. 

Meat Points: Gold For XP

  

Artaud turned the empty flask over in his ungloved hand and slurped the dregs from his own beard. He must have looked like a bear, muzzle slick with carrion from a magical carcass left to rot on the llano by hunters interested only in tusks and beaks and strange glands. Potion Addict passed every bottle of Cure Wounds through a shining lantern that imbued it with an inner light, so it would glow red even in total darkness. In case of total blindness the glass was embossed with raised lettering. Even illiterates quickly learned to recognize the phrase DRINK ME under their fingers. 

Rakia stared at him under the brim of her visorless kettle, affectless but clearly incensed that he had cuckolded her with a prepackaged commercial product.

Meat Points: Death Saves

A man who fought at the front of the group would be scarred. The flesh melting like water and the fingers evaporating like cigarettes smoked away to be later regrown. The facial features crudely reattached until they resembled an abstract painting. Intestines slurped back into the body as the magic simulated the vomiting action and caused them to contract just quickly enough to avoid being caught as the wound closed itself. The Gods gave man Clerical healing because they thought he had it too easy.

This occurred to Artaud where he lay on the floor of the tomb. They were on the third level and something had come through the door. He had broken his leg and fallen much further than the distance from his head to the floor. He didn't remember much after that except flashes before his gaze. The feeling of flight.

The Library of Lanthorn: Session 4

 

Shahid and the Halflings went back into the dungeon for another crack at finding and closing the lock. They cautiously descended to the third level of the tomb, where Breadrick scouted ahead in total darkness. He found writing on the wall in the Shrine language of the Djinn Potentates. Shahid determined the substance was Djinn blood, which Roddy harvested to enhance the power of his bombs.

The next chamber was the one where the multidimensional monster spawned previously. With time to investigate, Breadrick found evidence of habitation by several soldiers. He looted their items and lit the brazier in the altar to Shrine of Storms that watched over the room. The light reflected off the Three Monkeys statues of Genies, but not the wall behind them. Breadrick pulled his hood over his face to cover his eyes, mouth and ears. The wall behind the statues slid open, but slid back the second anyone else observed it. The gang decided to explore the rest of the floor before probing this further.

The Library of Lanthorn: Session 3

The Halflings felt sick after waking up from their nap, like something very bad happened. The soldiers  milled around outside, along with the Librarians. Concerned that the Lock had been opened, the group descended into the Library - either to close it again or loot the place before it was destroyed.

The archive stairs led back into the basement stacks. The worms were finished eating the dead soldier and fresh worms crawled around the corpse. The altar of Oil Lamp gave off a strange hum. Delgal deployed his Unseen Servant and commanded it to start pulling books off the shelves and tossing them on a cart. Then the group descended to level 3.

Review: Book of Fuligin

My copy of Book of Fuligin came today. This is a Book of the New Sun fancomic that was crowdfunded a couple years ago. Various artists and writers contributed short comics or illustrations set in the world of the Solar Cycle - the posthistoric dying Urth created by Gene Wolfe. Submitters were prohibited from using characters from books for original stories, though some of the submissions depict the canonical events of the novels. I've had the PDF version sitting in my Gmail for months but I forgot I even backed this project until I got the email asking me to update my shipping info. I'm very glad I did.

The book is a hardcover with good cloth binding. The cover is a minimalist illustration of Severian and a tangle of thorns on a black field. There's a embossed Terminus Est with a single blood drop on the spine, which looks great. There's an illustration of Old Man Wolfe on the interior covers (front and rear) that makes him look like Doctor Robotnik. The matte black they chose for the cover and pages accumulates fingerpints like nobody's business and looks gray in good light. I wouldn't nitpick this except that the cover claims the book is "written and drawn in the darkest of inks" and I just discovered through miniature painting that you need a gloss to make black actually look black.

 

The package came with a loose page that had a cool drawing of Severian.

 

Enough about the physical product. Let's dive into the stories. This review assumes you've read the New Sun books and won't make sense if you don't. It will contain spoilers for plot details from the novels and will give away some setting or thematic elements of the stories in Book of Fuligin. If you got a copy from the Kickstarter I suggest reading it before you read this. As of this posting the publisher says there are a handful of spares they might sell after they make sure the backers are taken care of. You may yet get a chance to grab one if you haven't already.