The head of your pickaxe has been reinforced with depleted uranium. You swing its leather-bound neck with weary arms, and the honeycomb comes loose in thick ingots of iron-beeswax alloy. Throughout nine years of tunneling through the world’s guts alone, it has often served as your only friend.
The delivery man waits to descend onto the subway platform until its last train has departed for the night. This is a shrewd decision; many of his colleagues failed to take this precaution, and in turn, were dragged down into the world beneath the rails. He’s carrying precious cargo, after all: a backpack full of premium beverages ranging from black neon fizz to carbonated fire. Were he to perish on this errand, his ghost would be liable for the damages to company property, a debt which could take decades to repay.
The discerning chef of the deep kitchen carries a revolver on their person at all times. There’s no telling what might emerge from the Black Oven if its door has been left open for too long, but for those who thrive in such a high-stakes environment, the recipes for gourmet bullets are just as familiar as formulas for cocktails are to bartenders. Hundreds of variants have been developed, and several of the most coveted are detailed herein.
The Atlas Pines of Northwestern Hyperborea received their name for a good reason. Their trunks possess greater girth than those of the sequoia trees, and their uppermost branches lock together into a thick lattice of arbor and needles strong enough to uphold ten-meter snowdrifts. These pearlescent dunes are all that can be seen from above, obscuring the entirely separate landscape that exists at their roots.
“They say that our universe exists as a pipeline for carrying the void from one place to another.” She spoke with that unmotivated tone common to government-employed oracles. “Your chart exemplifies this principle. You were born while the moon was in the house of the locomotive constellation, which is carrying darkness between two of our neighboring realities.”
After several delirious months spent wandering the Eastern Steppe, you’ve at last arrived at the Riphean Mountains. They hang from the cerulean sands of a diminishing sky above, jammed through cloudbanks by the strange tectonics of outer space. Two ancient cedars present their inverted trunks before you; their roots are planted somewhere in the mountains above. A curtain of black leaves hangs between them, untouched by any of the four winds. You drop your heavy satchel, collapse into the golden grasses, and laugh.
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.