BURNT WEENY SANDWICH

by Tim Fezz

art by Kristina Lenzi

 College in the gas-shorted days. 

 Tim appeared in his dorm.  “Hey Jed? Want to go see a Zappa show?”

 “Who is Zappa?”

 Jed would soon learn. 

 He stood in the Philly Spectrum. He had eaten some watermelon earlier. The watermelon was “laced” with some Owsley. 

 He had smoked beans before.  Never had he “opened the gates.” 

 Jed never looked back. 

 He quit college and followed Frank. That was four decades ago. 

 Jed lost count of the times he “lived” Frank. Five hundred? 

 Seven Hundred Times. 

 Jed's father, Milton,  was quite wealthy. He was THE inventor of flavored dental floss. He never questioned Jed's obsession. He was a Coltrane devotee in the early Sixties.  Jed's mother, Ra, died in a pony “accident” in 1969. Every month Jed would go to his mailbox and pick up a heavy check.

 “Hi Jed, enjoy your Frank life, love Milton.”

 The Seventies became the Eighties. Eighties became—? 

 The Postmodern..................

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

 Jed surveyed the landscape. This was once a drive-in. He saw 2001: A Space Odyssey here.

  

 “2001........Jipes......that was once considered THE FUTURE.......now, what year was this? 2041....no, 2042........yes 2042............I'm 89? Yes........ 89.”

 He had seen THE EVENT while in a park in Utah. The year was 2028. Frank had been gone some thirty odd years. Jed looked into the sky and saw—?

 What did he see? God? Devil? Aliens?  He did not know. 

 He called it Frank. 

 After that, Jed took to walking. He got rid of his veggie-fueled car and......................started walking.........................He met many pilgrims.

 “Hi, my name is Jed. Did you see Frank?”

 “Oh yes, my name is Dot, I saw Frank.”

 “You did? Are you changed?”

 “Sure..........I quit eating pellets after; now, I only eat SUBJECTS.”

 2032......he noticed.......I have not seen any people in days. 

 After trekking through Ohio one day he heard—

 THE VOICE..........

 “Jed, this is Frank......you will meet me in a lot...where once you saw 2001....on this day you will die........and become ONE WITH FRANK ...............”

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

 Tim stood there. He kept slapping Jed.......

 “Wake up......wake up......”

 Jed slowly drifted in......

 “Where am I?”

 “You are at The Spectrum, you passed out, Zappa is about to come on.”

 “What year is this?”

 “Jed, it is April 28, 1973.”

 “Oh, I dreamed I was an old man.........the year was 2042.....I lived in FRANK world........”

 “Jed, no worries, the melon you ate was pure LSD.”

 “Oh........”

 Jed and Tim were quite impressed with the concert.

 Chunga's Revenge ended the show. 

 They went out to the van. 

 Many fans were screaming.........ZAPPA ZAPPA ZAPPA........

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

 July 4, 1973

 Jed stood over a watermelon. He looked deep into the rind. Was this real?  A band was setting up in the basement of a frat house. Jed walked over to the guitarist.

 “Hi, my name is Jed.”

 “Cheers Jed, my name is Frank.”

 “Frank?”

 “Since I was born.”

 “What are you guys playing tonight?”

 “Well Jed, do you like Zappa?”

 Jed started to laugh........

 “Frank, sure I do. Would you like some watermelon?”

 “Yes, I would.”

 Jed walked over to the melon. He reached into his pocket and poured some clear liquid into the pink. He cut two healthy pieces and walked back over to Frank.

 “Here Frank, enjoy, I'll see you later in Montana.”

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

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VENOM OF THE
BIG BLACK SPIDER

by Vincent Daemon

~ only ~

on the FREEZINE of

Fantasy and Science

Fiction

   

DESOLATION AWAKENS

by Shaun A. Lawton

art by Jason Barnett

    I came to my senses by a roadside curb during the dead of winter. Opening my eyes I found myself standing in an unfamiliar alpine town near a grove of evergreen trees. I could not recall how I had gotten there. It felt like a cold December morning. The streets around me were abandoned. There was something compact weighing down my overcoat pocket. I reached in with my right hand and withdrew a revolver fashioned from what looked like an alloy of zinc and magnesium. The grips were worn down to a smooth polish. I thumbed the cylinder out and saw that all five chambers were loaded. The bullets seemed to be made of the same chalky gray compound. Snapping the cylinder back into place, I raised the handgun to eye level and gazed down the sight assembly at the leaden clouds. I had no recollection of having acquired the gun.

   Silence pervaded the atmosphere on the outskirts of this drab township. The smell of charcoal and pine needles hung in the air. Looking around me, I noticed the edge of a ragged forest in the distance. With no wind to disturb them, the snow covered trees stood like statues. I pocketed the pistol in my coat and began walking toward the nearest building. It was a red brick edifice with a peaked roof. Its lower half appeared to be covered in soot. High above the front door, a round stained glass window shielded a darkened attic. I couldn’t tell if it was a chapel or a meager sort of residence.

   While I walked, the only sound was the crunch of snow. As the modest domicile drew nearer, something emerged from inside my mouth to press its smooth edges against my tongue. It materialized gradually just behind my teeth until I reached in and fingered it out. What looked like a misshapen calcium bullet rolled into the palm of my hand. While I uneasily let it drop into the passing snow under my shoes, I could feel another was being shaped in the area near my soft palate, followed by several more budding out together. My mouth was filling with these unnatural pellets of a limited variety of shapes. As I began spitting them out onto the road, some were mere fragments, while others came into view fully formed. I kept spitting them out until there were no more left forming in my mouth.

   Having left a trail of these remarkably manifested slugs behind me littered along the frozen ground, I approached the wooden door at the front of the blackened red brick building. I could see the soot emerged from the ground covering the lower half of the house. It resembled a shadow cast from rising flames. As I approached closer to the front steps I noticed it wasn't soot surrounding the dwelling at all, but rather a miniature type of black ivy I'd never seen before.

   The oak door was shaped like a Tudor arch with a mottled brass ring bolted to the center. Before I could grasp onto the rather lackluster knocker, the door creaked open inward by degrees revealing a dust laden floor of tiles transfixed by a colorful shaft of light. The sunbeam angled in from a high window in the upper left part of the house. I waited at the entrance to be greeted, yet no one appeared. Instead, a peaceful silence lingered, far more reserved than the unearthly stillness outside. I felt compelled to step into the house, noticing as I did so the lack of footprints in the evenly spread out layer of ashen dust settled on the patterned tiles.

   As I stepped into the foyer I began to hear an almost indiscernible reverberation in the air. As if acting on its own, my left hand reached out and shut the front door behind me without making a sound. Despite the woebegone appearance of things, the door’s hinges remained well oiled. Once inside the main hall of the building more of the mysterious bullets began forming in my mouth. I had to keep spitting them out like so many worn down projectile teeth. They struck the floor with muted thuds, rolling across the tiles until they were lying still amid the gray dust. After expelling about a dozen of these malformed slugs, my palate returned to normal and I ventured toward the sunbeam glimmering in the dim recesses of the sanctum.

   It became evident the puzzling vibration emanated from the coruscating sunbeam. I walked right up to it and paused just at its edge. Turning my head to examine the upper round stained glass window through which the daylight shone, I noticed its glass was stylized with graceful images of the fleur-de-lis. So too were the flooring tiles decorated with a series of figurative lilies mirroring one another in alternating rows.

   I reached my fingers out into the spectral radiance swirling with motes and the humming stopped. Startled, I withdrew my hand only to hear the humming resume. Fascinated, I began waving my hand in and out of the tinctured luminous rays, consequently pausing and resuming the vibrant droning sound. It carried a resonance which lifted the hairs on my forearms. I watched as the fine hairs raised up and bowed back down like an assembly of praying cilia as I maneuvered my arm in and out of the beam. This kept me occupied until the curious rounds of ammo began forming somewhere between my palate and molars again. I turned my head and spat them out onto the powdered tiles. I was growing more uneasy about the pellets germinating in my mouth. I gazed down at the efflorescent tiling by my feet.

   The decorations were transforming slowly and steadily into disassociated shapes. I continued to stare at the evolving figures which after several minutes no longer resembled the fleur-de-lis outlines, but rather began assembling into floral composites ranging from those of alluring orchid petals to bizarre sylvan manifestations reminiscent of a time I had become lost in a forest as a young boy picnicking with my family. This memory attended my mind’s eye in the form of a silent and golden clearing with the edges blurring over. I snapped out of this reverie and for a moment couldn't tell if the floor I stood upon was near or far away. With a slight feeling of nausea I noticed the motion of the markings on the tiles advanced imperceptibly. I could not take my eyes off the developing spectacle. I wasn't really sure if it was moving at all.

   It was then that I detected another sound underneath the thrumming of the sunbeam. It was unlike anything I'd ever heard, like a microtonal breathing or an emanation from live coral submerged under water. The more I adjusted my hearing to this microtone, it thinned out into a timbre suggesting spicules emitting the most infinitesimal calcification. I concentrated the focus of my view and the detail of the morphing diagrams at my feet sped up while at the same time the faint intonation grew louder. My vision somehow enhanced the assonance generated by the metamorphosis of the floor's design.

   I came out of my trance and underwent a momentary panic as it dawned on me I may be standing upon a living thing. Turning to look back at the entryway I had casually strolled through, I saw nothing but gently wavering florid wallpaper. I had been lured into a receptive structure; somehow beguiled into its protoplasmic tenement. My stomach lurched and I regurgitated into my mouth. Instead of the bitter tang of bile, more ossified bullets heaped up, forcing my jaw open as they compelled their way out, too many to contain in that confined space. I heaved more of the compact pellets onto the floor and watched as they thunked one by one into the layer of gray pollen there. A scant smell of charred fur immediately permeated the air.

   I surveyed the area for an escape route. My only option was a wide innocuous stairway inviting me to the upper mezzanine. Another wooden door towered at the top of the landing. It had a standard rectangular shape. My stomach eased up as I walked toward the stairs and heard the subliminal thrumming of the sunbeam diminish into the distance behind me. Nervously grabbing a hold of the polished banister, I took my first tentative steps up. It felt solid enough, so I headed up the stairway. My left hand slid along the smooth worn railing. Reaching into the right hand pocket of my overcoat, I withdrew the chintzy revolver, pulling the hammer back with my thumb until it was cocked. 

   Cautiously, I proceeded up the stairs until I reached the upper landing. There were no exotic floor tiles on the second level, just a rolled out embroidered maroon carpet which seemed too clean for this place. The silence reasserted itself, lending me a welcome sensation of comfort. The burnt odor drifted into incense and faded away. Feeling better, I put the gun back in my coat pocket. I felt certain I was alone. The door at the top of the landing stood there with an odd sort of reticence. I approached it guardedly and reached out to grab ahold of the clear cut crystal knob protruding from it. The moment I made contact with the doorknob, a galvanic vibration transpired through my fingers, cascading along my arm and up to my shoulder blades. In an instant it fanned throughout my entire body, riveting me to the spot and paralyzing me there.

   I watched the very surface of my eyes as if their corneas merged into unreachable candied window glass several feet away from where I now stood riveted. I was rooted there watching a teeming infusoria of single celled amoebas floating across this panoramic windowpane, as if a curved and clear sheet of ice warped in front of me upon which animated microorganisms were projected. I could barely see the blurry shape of my own hand reaching out from my lower range of view, affixed to the crystal doorknob. The slow swarm of floating amoebas continued to skim by like molasses beyond me, magnified by the vitreous humor before my retinas.

   I can hardly admit to myself the isolated idea which keeps repeating over and over in my mind. It is a simple thought which continues to haunt me and which by now I can scarcely avoid accepting. I have been locked into the realization that I have been petrified here in this singular position ever since. The amoebic floaters eventually slowed to a stop and straightened themselves out, then blurred altogether and finally came into view focused into window frames. I have been transfigured into another chamber of the hive. I have grown accustomed to the spectacle before me. I have nothing but time now. I'm just waiting for the rest of you to come along and join us.

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BLIND EYE

by Edgar Allan Poe & John Shirley

on the FREEZINE of

Fantasy and Science

Fiction

in

the mean

time stand by 

for a surprise tale

or two as we  begin 

our descent into summer

☋

HOW THE GODS KILL: VIII

by Konstantine Paradias and Edward Morris

art by Prince Satyrn

    There...came the faint whisper of the Other, into Ariachne's mind, rousing her from her reverie. She could not know how much time had passed. Ariachne looked up, squinting against Sol's glow.

   Sure enough, it was there. The stained glass and iron orb, hidden in the star's harsh glare, too small to be even picked up by the most sophisticated of etheric locators, too close to the roaring song of the sun-whales for even the most accomplished empath to find. Like the cosmic egg from which the Creator had sprung the moment the Universe was born, their quarry dwelt in silence, hard at work transmuting his base flesh into imperishable divinity. Inside, he was prone and sluggish, almost defenseless. Ariachne Logos felt herself shiver with the prospect as she approached the crucible while lining up the sun-barge to dock. She extended the gilded bridge until it connected, then she crossed over it and boarded the interior of the tabernacle.

   She stepped into his sanctum without encountering the tiniest hint of resistance, and there he was: the Red Lord, the Messiah, the near-god, floating in perpetual free-fall, wreathed in Azoth-flame as he bathed in the light of Sol. His eyes shone like beacons, radiating with smokeless flame. His body, weathered and starved, resembled that of a weary Titan. Ariachne's knees went weak at the sight of Him. Oh, how she loved Him. How she hated Him, all in the same breath. Her heart thumped in her chest, a deep and rhythmic beating and she realized, it beat in tandem with his own, and she knew she could not kill Him. It would not do, to simply kill Him.

   Her stinger quivered in its secret sheath.

   "How did you find me?" the traitor asked. His eyes flickered momentarily and she felt his mind run skimming across the surface of her thoughts, testing the waters for any sign of betrayal. Ariachne didn't bother with setting up her defenses, she let Him search through her and trusted that he would find no trace of the assassin there. After all, she knew the damper he had inflicted on Himself, the guilt which had festered in Him and made Him blind to her mission. For all his prescience, the latent power of his mind, he would not dare to confront her. She didn't bother with an explanation. The traitor did not ask for one, either.

   They coupled in free-fall, running together like legendary serpents, his hands caressing her naked flesh, his mouth breathing flame into her lungs. She enveloped Him, smooth and warm like mercury. They ran together for the briefest moment, became a burst of perfect light.

   At the apex of his release, just as the orgone energy suffused them, she released her stinger. He howled like a wounded animal as she bore into his flesh, her barbs hooking up inside him. He thrashed against her even as she wrapped her legs around his waist, keeping him pinned to her body. Even in his horror (or perhaps, because of it) he was still erect, driven deep inside her. The women that were Ariachne Logos studied the dawning horror of his expression as their Rebis was consummated, annihilating the light within him. For a while, he fought against them, a streak of red running across their cool, softly-flowing insides. The near-god writhed, jerked frantically, and was finally quiet.

   Ari waited, just to make sure. She savored the lingering warmth before commencing with the assimilation. Her fingernails raked across the skin of his back, tearing long, red strips across the flesh. The talons met near the base of his spine and ripped open a wound large enough for them to sink into muscle. Almost seamlessly, her skin began to flow into his own. Her legs fused with his spine. She flowed inside him like water and he began to lose consistency too, until they were a perfect sphere of gently ebbing liquid suspended in mid-air.

   There was a long time of darkness, dotted with bursts of rainbow light as the process continued. When it was finally over, Ariachne Logos was beyond whole again. Her eyes opened, their brilliance outshining even Sol itself. She cried like a newborn, flexing a six-fingered hand against the glare of the star. The reborn Ariachne searched herself, saw her firm new muscles under her taut, soft skin, saw the flat expanses of her belly, made smooth where her navel had once been. She traced between her legs and found Male and Female there. Slowly, carefully, she gathered her strength and opened her Third Eye. It shone from her forehead with perfect light, radiating Smokeless Flame. She was Paracelsus' Homunculus, made flesh.

   The homing beacon squealed from the sun-barge. The Queen's Hounds were on their way, to confirm the kill and bring the body of the traitor to Her Majesty's feet. Shifting her tactical options with her newfound intellect, Ari the near-goddess decided that she would let them come. She would make an example of them, make a banner from their taut skins for her armies to rally behind. Soon, the entire system would echo with the sound of her name and she would build a Dominion that would stretch across the starry skies for eternity.

   Ariachne Logos dreamt of the entire Universe on bent knee, paying obeisance to her as she swam among the sun-whales. She closed her eyes, but did not dream.

   There was work to do.

~ the End ~

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DESOLATION AWAKENS

by Shaun Lawton

only on the FREEZINE of

Fantasy and Science

Fiction 

HOW THE GODS KILL: VII

by Konstantine Paradias and Edward Morris

art by Prince Satyrn

   The creature, red and clumsy like a lobster, bucked against her in vain. Ariachne applied just enough pressure to let it feel the chitin bend just so, pushing against the soft mesh of tissue that made up its body. Its remaining antenna wriggled uselessly against her palm, the stub of the other one shivering and spurting green ichor. Pivoting one hand on her thumb just so, she wrapped three fingers around the antenna and bent it just enough to drive her point home.

   "Tell me, or I break the other one."

   The Shaum stopped moaning and stayed perfectly still. Slowly, it stopped clattering its claws and let out a long, slow hiss just so the woman would know that he was beat. The woman had descended on them with a pack of Hounds, broken the assembly lines, and caught the conspirators in the act of loading the Voidcraft carriers bound for off-world.

   The Shaum foreman fought and ran. After all, he bore the secret knowledge of every base—the rough position of every single insurgent encampment—inside his tiny mind. When cornered, he attempted to take his life like a good soldier. But he had been broken, just like all the rest.

   "Ostaneeesss—" the foreman hissed through the pain. Ariachne bent the stalk further, to make sure. The foreman squealed like a larva, repeating the name over and over.

   Ostanes, the prison planet. The place where the unwanted of the Dominion were sent to toil and scheme in the shadow of the Sun, packed tightly near the planet-core, doomed to live out their days in maddening proximity without hope of escape.

   From the thoughtscape of the Other, a new image emerged, unbidden. An image of the newborn homunculus, bursting from the clay top of the hissing tabernacle, smooth skin dripping with bile, his forehead wreathed in Azoth-flame. How appropriate: the Red Lord, cast in Sol's flame. Despite herself, the woman trembled with newfound delight, without any urging by the Other.

   "Lady Logos?" the Alpha of the escorting Hounds stammered. "How shall we proceed?"

   "Burn this place. Burn him as well," Ariachne said, shivering with delight even as she snapped the foreman's antenna in a single motion, tossing it without a second thought over her shoulder.

    "And find me a sun-barge."

   Hopping from an inter-system trireme and commandeering an officer's quarters in the Dreadnought Radetzky, the woman flashed her credentials at a greenhorn captain of a Novarra-class prison transport Voidcraft that made the routes from Vemana to Ostanes. The man looked her over, half-recognizing her from the Imperial stills but mostly wondering about her purpose out there, at the edges of the Empire, the place where only the mad and the terminally unwanted would ever dare to go.

   For two weeks, Ariachne subtly glided through the prison ship. To pass the time, she suffered the company of political dissenters and free-thinking zealots on their way to their off-world gaol, before making planetfall. From there, clad inside an asbestos-lined exo-suit, she walked the short distance from the Hellmouth that led into the prison-hive all the way to the Zenta Basin where the sun-barge had waited, according to her instructions.

   No sentries had been posted around it. No effort to secure it had been made. The golden, refractive surface of the barge shone like a newborn star, reflecting the scorching rays of Sol above. Even through her protective gear, the woman could feel her perspiration turning into vapor in a matter of moments, fogging up her visor-slits.

   By the time she had finally trudged across the hard earth, the sand long since fused to black glass along the shore of what a billion years ago had been a sea brimming with life, Ariachne's skin had become red and raw in places. Inside her helmet, her hair had become cracked and ashy from loss of moisture.

   To keep herself busy during the launch and the slow trek as the sun-barge prepared to slingshot the perihelion, she allowed herself the pleasure of wading into the Other's borrowed memory. They no longer fought each other for this privilege. Now that the traitor was at hand, they had little left to fight over.

    In those long, quiet moments of perfect melding, Ariachne and the Other realized that they weren't all that different, after all. Trapped in the same body, they had both somehow learned to love the traitor; sharing the same mind, they had both also come to hate Him with a similar, fiery intensity. In this compromise, they had negotiated the specifics of their hate. The Other hated Him for abandoning her, for leaving her to be broken and twisted into a weapon that his enemies would drive into his heart and destroy Him forever. Ariachne hated Him for his hubris, the waste of his godlike potential. For this, they would kill Him.

   The chymical reaction had finally settled, their Rebis achieved—alchemical matrimony—binding them together until the end of time. Under the rosy glow of the sun's rays, filtered through the tinted glass of the sun-barge's cockpit, Ariachne Logos was reborn.  She was a gestalt born from hate, its veins bubbling with bile. Together, they had blossomed into a wolfsbane configuration. Glowing in their shared malice, their every pore fit to bursting with poison. But the best dosage, the smooth stinger that would fell the Red Lord...this, they had planted in the most vicious of places.

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Part VIII, the conclusion of

HOW THE GODS KILL

by Konstantine Paradias & Edward Morris

only on the FREEZINE of

Fantasy and Science

Fiction 

HOW THE GODS KILL: VI

by Konstantine Paradias and Edward Morris

art by Prince Satyrn

   They kept her in an empty, featureless place without time. They fed her white food and dressed her in white clothes to merge out into the infinity of nothing that surrounded her, and made her blend into it. To keep herself from screaming, she would imagine that she was slowly dissolving into the whiteness. When she could get away with it, she would close her eyes and slowly listen to the sound her body made as it mended.

   More often than not, she would scream, uselessly. When they finally pulled her out of there and dragged her, wide-eyed and slavering into the world, it was all too much to bear.

   They would not give her paralt or blackblossom. Laudanum was an option, but the chymical imbalance of the aftermath of her transformation caused the fleshsmiths to side against it. The woman (now known among the highest echelons of the Hound hierarchy as Ariachne Logos) was left to suffer through the transformation into the traitor's betrothed.

   No matter. She'd done it before. Slipped into another's skin, a foreign mind. Her identity, her very shape had long since been wiped clean in wrought-iron crucibles, reduced to a blank slate to be placed into form-fitting molds, cast into the frameworks of prisoners of opportunity.

   Ariachne had abandoned her shape and form long ago, reduced into the essential chymical elements—bile and sulphur and mercury, a poison with thought, a creature that writhed softly in its tube—made to infest the bloodstreams of captured conspirators and drive them around like puppets, right into the arms of the Empire.

   The Coiled, the Hounds would call them, in hushed tones. And even among those twisted creatures, their bodies more machine than meat, their brains replaced by endlessly ticking quartz arrays, they were considered subhuman.

   It was a traumatizing experience, for most people. Except that Ari wasn't most people. She had broken hundreds under her heel, made them low, crushed their egos and absorbed them into the tumultuous hungry superego that her mind had become.

   But this Other, she was too much even for her. Had things gone differently, perhaps Ariachne and the Other would have been comrades, friends; united in the service of Her Majesty. Or (as the woman occasionally thought to herself) they would have followed the Hapsburg-Romanov traitor to the depths of Hell and dissipated, when he was done with them. In either case, they would not have settled for Fulcanelli alone, come Hell or high water.

   At the end of the week, the Queen's Psychosurgeon deemed Ariachne field-ready. Following the slightest, half-remembered hint of a fever dream wrenched from the briefest flicker of the Other's memory—(banners waving in the humid wind; a monstrously large mosquito driving its stinger into a dead man's eye; a crowd of maimed and broken penitents crawling on stumps to beg for his blessing)—Ari traveled to the planet Magnus, there to brave the carnivorous jungles and tread the fungi-fields, juggling half-remembered truths pilfered from the Other's conspiratorial past to find the isolated pockets of resistance that had lingered.

   From there, to Boyang, the charnel-planet, the place where the zugzwang, great beasts of burden, were bred and slaughtered, their meat carted off to feed the slavering mouths of the Empire. In the depths of a forgotten abattoir, still reeking of a hundred years worth of offal and gore, the Factoti maintained, in their infinite wisdom, the Cult of the Red Lord. Wide-eyed seers had recognized her immediately, but had been unable to peer through the facade of her identity to find Ari's true nature. With the voice of Lady Logos, she helped glean from them the specifics of their faith and the origin of the Red Lord, born of the Habsburg-Romanov line.

   The child's inception had not taken place in any mortal womb; instead, the fetus had been grown into a vat hewn from amber, chymically put together from the eggs of the Queen and the seed of some half-forgotten lord. Once grown, the fetus had then been placed into a birth-tank, to be bombarded with orgone radiation until his pineal gland had swollen to a monstrous size.

   This, the Factoti believed, had given the child his godlike powers, his mental prowess and mastery of mind over matter. His godlike capacity for prescience and his astonishing intellect. From the moment the child was ejected from his birth-tank, the court of Prague had known:  this was the God-King that had been promised in Scripture.

   The child that would bring forth the Golden Age that would last until all the stars were cinders. In their rapturous display, the Factoti spoke of the failed attempts at the child's assassination; the growing contempt of the 'little men' against Him; his flight from Terra; and the long bloody war he had waged for ten years against the Dominion. They had bid her to go to Artephius, where he was last seen:  bring them a lock of his hair, a drop of his sweat that they might pay obeisance to.

   On Artephius, she met the shaman in his cave, the bitter native whose children had perished, abandoned by their strange and cruel champion, scorched into nothing under the harsh glow of a weapon that brought cancerous growths upon the world that it struck. It had brought her all the way to this place, inside an old munitions factory in Fulcanelli, which had once armed the Other's doomed little army. The Other had found places like this across every planet she had roamed. It would seem that the entire Empire was littered with the Other's disruptive legacy. Ariachne's knee pressed against the tiny slit on the Shaum native's exoskeleton, her hands securing his head to clamp it like a vice, fingers deftly holding his mandibles apart to avoid any sudden loss of limb. Leaning over the base of his neck, she whispered in the tiny aperture that their species used for ears.

   "Where is the crucible?"

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HOW THE GODS KILL

by Konstantine Paradias & Edward Morris 

only on the FREEZINE of

Fantasy and Science

Fiction