The baron returned from his hunt soaked in silver blood. He had slain the drone that was terrorizing his township, having pierced its aluminum belly with a magnetic slug from his arquebus. He and his surviving men dragged its rope-bound wings back to his estate on horseback, scattering its metallic feathers throughout the underbrush. Upon their arrival, there was some applause and the occasional cheer, but the majority of citizens wore frustrated faces and somber eyes.
The first tooth appeared while you were combing your hair in the bathroom. It was clearly outlined in your peripheral vision, and so close that your eyelids began to twitch from reflex- yet there was nothing to be seen in the mirror at all. You tried unplugging the mirror and plugging it back in again, but the teeth refused to appear to anyone except yourself. Over the course of the next month, they began increasing in number- you swore that you could feel several under your own skin.
Every league out in darkspace had given their war comet a nom de guerre; for instance, the Bubblegum Battalion had their tried and true Fuchsia Machsine,whose engines were hidden beneath a thick shell of rose quartz and adhesive snow (30% marshmallow by volume). Despite their name, they were, in fact, all out of bubblegum, and had been for upwards of three months now. Their comet was drifting through the abyss after a humiliating defeat, having been outfoxed and outgunned by Licorice Laboratories’ Malted Marauder.
At first, we believed that the horizon splitter was only a myth. It sounded like a parody of the atomic bomb at most, inspired by the horror of something indivisible being mutilated by science. Word traveled from radio to radio that it was enroute, which we initially wrote off as disinformation from the enemy, just another of many attempts to incite fear. In the end, whether or not this was the case did not matter, as the bomb was able to do its job without existing at all.
Many years ago, dustrider oracles began receiving messages from flowers deep within the Earth. They bloomed in places much deeper than sunlight or rainwater could reach, where their fronds and perfumes would never be experienced by living things. Their roots grew in all directions, as did their petals, forming explosions of color unseen. Because of their peculiar habitat, their pollen had no air through which to propagate; as such, they evolved a method of broadcasting it as a form of organic radiation.
It takes quite a bit of paperwork to extradite a criminal from the afterlife. Because she died without a federal grave license, however, officials were able to arrange for serial bank robber Daisy Cormorant’s arrest after a single round of negotiations with the gods. She had purchased a luxury condo in the underworld using an assumed name, and had also drastically altered her appearance by tanning in the light of the planet’s core; regardless, a combination of dental records and tax audits led to her capture.
There’s a crumbling mansion in the Red City that overlooks the marina with sixteen eyes of fractured glass. Although weary from old age, it watches for thieves with unwavering paranoia. It has known the taste of many who have sought its riches over the years, and expects that another will arrive any day now.
One evening, my roommate came home from an illegal grocery store in the western quarter. She was wearing one of those heavy canvas military jackets, and it was covered in fresh smears of indigo fluid that I would later find out was something’s blood. “Check it out.” She slammed a gallon-sized mason jar down on the table. A creature could be seen squirming inside, something covered in tentacles and thorns with no discernible body of its own, sloshing around in that same blue ooze. “They let me pick one out of the tank myself.”