Hearsay Horizons

Spoilers for An Enchantment of Ravens Margaret Rogerson and probably Lord of the Fading Lands by CL Wilson, depending on what you call a spoiler. Tl;dr:  (also length warning!) The idea of sidestepping age gaps via... I dunno, magical lobotomies, may not 100% make everyone comfortable. But for the moment it works for me, with the added bonus of dealing with time abysses and meaning literally anything could be an armed memory bomb. Is there a stepping stone path that has been artfully tied into someone’s memories ascending from grief to new appreciation for life? If new construction means a place needs to get torn down, are there calls sent out offering people with good memories to come sew them into the area so people can see how it was before? ARE there artists who seek out wonderful experiences and then sell them? Are we looking at Augmented Reality and vid stuff from a magic perspective? Maybe. Is there way too much here? Definitely. Will it all hit the reader at once or, maybe,...

Do you have any idea how many golden ceremonial knives there are? I don’t recollect enough to narrow it down by culture. I never got a good look at the thing, either. And offering a finder’s fee doesn’t help—as with a lot of things, money complicates things more than it helps. So many fakes. So many iron, steel, even platinum daggers with gold leaf laid to leave the silver crescent edge exposed. That , that glinting in the moonlight, I remember. The devotion and hope and love and fear, so much fear. Bite of the ropes and then the bite of the knife. Lifeblood leaking out silvery in the dim light. The blood stopped, and I didn’t. But the ritual took you instead. So many years looking for this knife, this phylactery. And then looking for you. If you gave me this unlife, this command over necromantic energies that I was never taught to use, then let me employ them to get my answers directly from you. But you didn’t have the knife. And you’re... gone. Your skeletal corpse holds no secrets, ...

 Rat terriers: pretty straightforward. Sheepdog, likewise. Corgi, a little vaguer, but their legs put them out of the way of cow kicks. Bulldogs were bred to attract negative energy. French bulldogs were specifically selected to act as lightning rods for demonic possession. There have been no cases of legitimate demonic possession of a human being within three miles of a French bulldog since the breed was first distinguished in the 1800s. Theories about this abound, but the most common is that the batlike ears attract demonic emanations before they can settle elsewhere. There seems to be no limit to the number of spirits that can inhabit a single French bulldog; the effect persists even when as many as nine have been discovered within a single animal. Why this should be the case—and the fact that none of this seems to affect their behavior in one fashion or the other—will be obvious to owners of the grinning gremlins. << First       <Previous

 They call it the shifter’s plague, although Larkspur knows that’s malicious rumor and perhaps propaganda; the shifters are immune, but she and Snow never saw any way they were responsible. Not that that stopped the mobs. Or, eventually, the killings. The process... That internal, infuriating pain, like a sore tooth or a gimpy nerve, all over, all at once, the need to soothe everything, to chew everywhere. Screaming, but hurting her own ears. Larkspur lies where she eventually fell in the trail when she could no longer lean on Snow. When there was no Snow to lean on. Her nose is full of him, and herself, in a vexing mix that makes her think he’s just out of sight. The new fur, his fur, is a warm hug and a suffocating heat. Slowly, with bones of iron, she tries to pull herself off of the ground. She cannot feel her limbs; it isn’t until her hands are in front of her face as she crawls that she realizes that she has functional fingers. Claws are new. Paw pads are new. Larkspur takes ...

On infinite earths, in infinite universes, it still surprises “him” when—cast adrift during some interdimensional battleworld event—“he” finds this one. The first time “he” bursts into spiders to traverse a wall and save a citizen from a mugging, she doesn’t scream, not at “him.” Not when “he” webs up the crook. The mugger bursting into flies—that’s new, and exciting to parts of “him” that the Parker memory doesn’t like to think about.  But the victim doesn’t run even when “he” swarms back to “himself” after—after the meal. “I just killed someone,” “he” says. He’s staring at the jittery stacks of arachnids that make up his hands. “He was already dead,” the mugging victim says. “I wouldn’t choose flies, but I guess—it’s not always a choice. I guess they found him.” And that’s a trip, a real trip, and results in fumbling “his” mask-spiders. She doesn’t seem to recognize Peter Parker, and that’s good. The two (two-and-many?) of them tuck themselves away in a little cafe where she orde...

 I ended up on the living room floor last night because of a messed-up sleep schedule or a small patch of mania, and my experience with my dog during the process versus a similar occasion as a kid gave me a... flashback? It gave me some kind of feeling I need to get out.                I don’t believe my parents involved the courts when they divorced—or if they did, everything worked differently 20+ years ago in Nowhere, Michigan. They split things fifty-fifty, no child support, and my dad was better than he should have been about making me spend time on the other side.                 My mother married a man and moved into the home where his parents had raised... six kids? No heat, no toilet, and no bed for me. My mother had two dogs; our central actress is the bullmastiff, Rosie. She weighed more than I did and hated everyone but my stepfather. I was 10-12 and the concept of CPS wasn’t prevalent,...