《Once upon a Night Time's Dream》Blackbird
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Silvery flakes drifted down, glittering in the bright light of the harvest moon. The blackbird swooped down. Its dark and glossy feathers shun beneath the non-luminous moon that had coveted the sun rays as its own with a grand dignity. The blackbird had made not a single sound and its dark, bright and beady eyes shun an intelligence incapable of any animal. In between its beak lay but a single amulet. Metal and in a rectangular shape, its contents read words that could send any being dizzy with the mere sight of it. Strokes and curves, lines and dots in a lighter tone of silver; all danced beautifully a top the gleaming silver plate.
Attached to it was but a thin and transparent line. The piece of string would at most gleam dimly in certain angles at night but was nonetheless almost invisible to the naked eyes. It lay between the blackbirds beak whereupon the bird had swooped down to strike at it. Catching the string, the bird’s eyes shun in satisfaction and it’d perched unto a branch from a single tree that was planted close by and in sight. Below, the sounds of the frustrated could be heard as the being trashed about in anger aggressively.
Cold touches of snow lands on the abyss feathers of the blackbird and it’d melted instantly, leaving not a trace of what was formerly there. The scene was beautiful. A bird perched on a tree branch and below a human that shouts angrily at it. In the eyes of any mortal, one would not help but acknowledge the fact that it was the type of scene seen just out of a painting.
The snow around the duo pile. Time stood still and yet the silvery flakes drifted at their own time and pace. The white surface forms an uneven line and the footprints of what has passed contaminates the pure white ground. Its scent was that of ice, as it was all there was. The amulet dangled as the bird had jerked its head forward, taunting the already upset and frustrated man. Clearly, the bird understood; it was well aware of the importance the amulet bound by mortal hands had.
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Mischief and isolation played in the bird’s eyes as if it had a proper mouth that consisted of lips and tongue, one could tell that the dark eyes bird was clearly smiling, wryly.
Slowly, but gradually footsteps could be heard running towards the man and beast. The sounds underneath their feet, with each contact from the earth that they’d made, thundered. The group that clearly sounded of more than a dozen stampeded and galloped to the tree. The hooves of their horses echoed with every step they took. All for but a single item. Accompanied with steps came the voices. The sound of horses nicked and exhaled, the journey was long but the troop had made it in time; before the bird had flown away as far as its wings could carry. The avian was clearly taunting the bunch of armoured men.
Come, it said, chirped, closer to a whisper. Underneath the moon and barely visible; the moonlight had granted an almost unnoticeable violet sheen to the blackbird’s wings. Opened; the bird flew, and the chilly air behind it gave a silent shiver. Snowflakes continue to fall in its pace. Incomparable to the hasty men that led behind the blackbird.
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The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox
Fox spirits are infamous as troublemakers, Piri the nine-tailed fox perhaps more so than most. After she follows an order from Heaven to destroy a dynasty with more enthusiasm than the gods can accept, she is sentenced to death by the Jade Emperor himself. Executed via her best-known torture device, she is cast into the cycle of reincarnation, starting at the very bottom – as a worm. While she slowly accumulates positive karma and earns reincarnation as higher life forms, she also has to navigate inflexible clerks, bureaucratic corruption, and the whims of the gods themselves. Will Piri ever reincarnate as a fox again? And once she does, will she be content to stay one? Cover art by Daniela.
8 232Unbound Deathlord: Challenge
Due to Amazon's Kindle Unlimited rules, I had to pull most of the book content from RoyalRoad. Only sample chapters remain. To read a fiction that will never be removed from Royal Road, I recommend my other fiction: Immortal Conqueror. The first two books of the series are out on Amazon: Book 1: Unbound Deathlord: ChallengeBook 2: Unbound Deathlord: Obliteration Book 1: Challenge When virtual reality becomes real enough that people feel as if they’re being transported to another world, Valia Online arrives.A man running from his past joins the game to forget it all. Calling himself Jack Thorn, he chooses an undead race, Deathlord.A mage by choice, and a swordsman by necessity, he soon finds out that he’ll need to use much more than magic and steel to survive; strategy, creativity, and carefully chosen words can often accomplish what simple attacks can’t.As the game becomes too real and touches a part of him that he’d rather leave buried, he is faced with two questions:Who is he, really?And who should he become?
8 103Tomorrow Girl in Bismarck
Tomorrow Girl was almost part of the greatest superhero team of all time then the universe was destroyed. She is now in the boring non-superhero world of Bismarck North Dakota. The events of this story are true. It occurred in North Dakota in 2010. The names have been changed to protect the victims. Everything else has been told exactly as it happened.
8 185Devil's Basement: Colony Ragnarok
Far beneath the surface of a planet wrapped in a toxic atmosphere, competing political ideologies stare each other down over a heavily militarised line that cuts through the city on their border. Among the dark rail tunnels and mine shafts are an unfinished treaty up for negotiation; a fanatical terrorist group with questionable backers; and ordinary people caught in the middle. In this claustrophobic environment, those who desire peace must act quickly or these tunnels will collapse in the fires of war. _____ This story is based on a role-playing map game I GM'd awhile ago. The four main characters are based on the four players from that map game, and the general sequence of events follows the game as well. Cover art: inncect (formerly astrxphoria) from wattpad.com, where this story was first published.
8 66Sara's (not really) Fabulous System Armageddon, Book I: The World Ended at Rush Hour
Planet Earth, Monday, October 7th, 2019. 18:30 * * On a fateful day, during rush hour in eastern North America, Heavens and Hell crumbled and fell from their higher dimension on Earth. It came from "above" but not the same above we regard in our tridimensional Euclidean reasoning. No, it came from "above" as in from a higher dimension. Bits and pieces of those places fell on Earth from all directions, this time in tridimensional Euclidean space. Satellites, the ISS, and space debris all were wiped clean from orbit. Even those that didn't crash with the falling debris were knocked off orbit by the shockwaves. On the ground, power distribution lines were disrupted and most power facilities were left abandoned by their dead staff. Most of these had emergency shutdown routines that engaged in a few days. Some others had a survivor among their staff that followed protocol and activated their SCRAM switches, stopping the power plant. Long-distance communication disappeared the internet along with it. The world was plunged into technological darkness. Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand human beings perished immediately in the pulse of magical energy from the torn spatial boundary. Spirits were rent asunder and vanished, their fate neither salvation nor damnation, only oblivion. The criteria used for this culling was latent magic potential. It didn't discriminate against education, gender, age, or ethnic group. But of the around seven million survivors, most would meet their doom moments later. Those on moving vehicles, like the ones driving on highways suddenly had to contend with high-speed uncontrolled cars and trucks driven by corpses. Trapped in their vehicles and helpless, they became part of the long snake of crushed metal. Very few survived. Those in the air or out in the sea were alone and probably unable to control their rides. Airplanes crashed, and ships kept their course or drifted away, depending on their autopilot. Several ended their own lives in utter despair after seeing their loved ones die in front of them. Another large group would die at the hands of other survivors. Violence and aggression became the norm. Only a few sparse pockets of not-so-sane survivors managed to band together and cooperate for the sake of mutual survival. The sole survivor in a five-over-one apartment building in Georgia, a girl became the keystone to humanity's survival. Sara's fabulous System Apocalypse had just started. She has only one remark. It was anything but fabulous. * * Updates every Wednesday and Sunday. Cover V2 credits: CC-BY-SA Midjourney Cover V1 Credits: Consumed, Jennifer Hansen.jpg (CC BY-SA 3.0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Consumed,_Jennifer_Hansen.jpg John Martin (public domain): - The Great Day of His Wrath - The Last Judgment - Le Pandemonium
8 86Muna Miracle
Do you believe in Miracles? In 1980, a memorable moment in sports was during the XII Winter Olympics. Cold war tensions were high and the U.S Olympic hockey team found themselves against the indomitable Soviet Army Hockey team. The announcer, Al Michael posed a question that would forever be fixed in the minds of every man, woman, and child that ever wished for hope. That year, Soviets went home that year with the Olympic cup, soon followed by a nuclear warhead and the question would remain unanswered for many hundreds of years. Of course, a little ray of moonlight might change a few things.
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