In the Darkling Night

Stars pricked the darkening sky in silver shimmers of light, and in the spaces between the trees a descended a gentle darkness, hushing the voices of the day to make way for the whispers of the night.  And what a night it was!  Never was there a clearer sky to walk beneath, never was there a swifter and sharper wind, never a bolder and more radiant life to the world.  The earth had fallen into a reverie, a dream of soft edges and silk corners, edged with starlight of the most glittering sort, and held in place by threads of braided gold.  It was this time, in the silent hours of the night, when the magic-workers arose to do their work, away from the staring eyes of the waking world.

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Sojourner

A quick write of a synopsis of a possible future book.  Someday, perhaps, it will be written.   


We walked on the moon in 1969.

We walked on mars in 2025.

We discovered light-speed travel in 2052.

By 2070 we were exploring planets outside our galaxy and creating new civilizations.

By 2080 we had created the perfect artificial intelligence systems.

By 2112 we touched where no one has ever touched before.  Humanity, spread throughout the farthest reaches of the galaxies, going deeper and deeper and deeper until we began to lose sight of the horizon, until we began to lose ourselves in the dust of eternity.  It was beautiful.  It was dangerous.  It was impossible.  We had paths reaching so far into the cosmos that those who left earth did not come back, nor did we ever hear from them again.  We could only stand on our shriveling planet in the light of a dying sun and hope with all hope that the brave men and women who launched themselves into the stars for the good of mankind survived, and continued to live out there among the spiraling light of distant planets.    

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A Letter to Planet Earth

This is written as a response to my last post, “A Letter to Mankind.”  It is inspired by the #ExtinctionEndsHere and #EndTheTrade petition, a worldwide movement to call on the world’s governments to permanently end the commercial trade and sale in markets of wild terrestrial animals for consumption.  You can sign here at this link.  Wildlife conservation and the preservation of our world is something very near and dear to my heart, and I would do all I can to call attention to the issues that surround our planet today.


Dear Earth,

We have done much to deserve retaliation.  We have felled your rainforests, we have spilled oil into your seas, we have slain your creatures for riches, oddities, even enjoyment.  And we do not look over our shoulders at what we leave behind—no.  We tend to only look ahead, to the future, to the next age of glory.  To what lays beyond our shores.

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Space Giants

There are legends of far-flung planets suspended at the edge of all that we know, hovering in the wide expanse of space and lit by the luminesce of trillions of ancient stars.  These skies are filled with a tapestry of diamonds, flung brilliantly across the heavens over empty, silent planets.  Planets where mankind has not left their mark.  Planets of greenery and foliage, of ice and snow, of sand and rock.  Planets built of nothing but great rolling breakers crashing on shoreless seas.  Uninhabited, untouched, unseen.  Infinite.

In these skies giants dwell.  

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A Gallimaufry of Words

In my nearly nineteen years of existence I have come to fall deeply in love with the intricacies, the simplicities, the depth, and the beauty of words.  I survive on them.  I collect them, I organize them, I keep lists of them in my notebooks, and often I rearrange them into patterns that create worlds and stories from the emptiness of a blank page.  My bones are crafted of words, my blood runs with rivers of them, and my tongue tastes their lilting, rolling, rumbling flavors, big words and small words and beautiful words and ugly words, mysterious words and boring words, austere words and ostentatious words, old and new words, some fresh and some slightly used, lost, or brand-new.  I find an inexplicable charm in words.         

I like archaic words that nobody uses anymore, like athenaeum, obfuscate, erstwhile and contumelious.  These words are aged, like fine wine, but forgotten behind the mask of modern terms and a changing world, ones one might find in old books like Shakespeare or Jules Verne.  But I also like normal words we use every day, like cabinet, paperclip, honey, and teapot.      Continue reading “A Gallimaufry of Words”

Soul-Seekers

Short (long?) story excerpt/brief outline I’m working on.


In Sir Alistair Gavell’s Book of Told and Untold Secrets, souls are described as being, and I quote, ‘…the patterns to unique quiddities which have been left behind—lost, as it were, to the infinite and unkind hands of indomitable time.  They are pieces of existence, the unfinished pearls lacking a shell to rest in, the dark remains from fallen light.  They are, in essence, the undulating memory of someone or something which used to be, but is no more, and never shall be again.’

Souls are not so mysterious–nor enchanting–as Sir Alistair makes them out to be.  They are far more rugged, more jagged and torn along the edges.  Some are beautiful, though all have their scars; while some can be quite ugly and nasty. 

Others…others are almost terrifying.

There are light souls, as light as a feather and the color of melted gold and silver.

There are heavy souls, heavy as a millstone and the color of crimson blood and spilled ink.

There are in-between souls, which don’t know whether to be light or heavy, gold or red, silver or black.  We call them Neithers, because they are neither one nor the other, neither light nor dark.  These are the most common, the most ordinary.  

But there is also a certain breed of soul which is so white it burns your eyes and weighs nearly nothing in your palm, shimmering with all the light of eternity, and there is its opposite: a soul that is so black it consumes all light and weighs more than a handful of mountains.  These are the most rare.  They are also the most dangerous.           

I would know.  I have spent the past seven centuries searching for them.

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Cabinet of Curiosities

I grew up in New England, in an old-style farmhouse built sometime in the late 30s.  It was a fairly average house in most respects, settled down a country lane lined with aspens, birches, and ancient apple orchards, with fields and white fences beyond and the sea some distance away, blue on the horizon.  The house was white, with many windows and a stone chimney, and the barn a crisp red against the green of the pastures.  The neighbors were few, the miles to town many, and the secret niches and hollows in the forests abundant.  

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The Ghosts of Ballimere Bog

It can be said that nearly every old village in Ireland is well-equipped with a quality ghost story or two, or perhaps three or four in some cases.  Most are the quintessentially sinister legends of revenge and death, such as the legend of Thomas Ó’Baoghill, whose ghost roams the stony fields of Kilkennery, ever in search of his murderous brother, who killed him on a blustery winter night.  Others star ghosts which are of the more helpful type, such as Temporary Mary, who wanders the empty nighttime roads between Oldcastle and Knockborough, singing to travelers and keeping them from danger, or the Watchdog, who barks at night to keeps rouges away and sometimes digs up forgotten treasures.  Some stories are so old nobody remembers the original version anymore, others are—quite frankly—ridiculous, or told only to keep children in line, or repeated year after year in front of a roaring fire purely for the joy of the thrill it gives, and others haven’t even been invented yet.  Then, of course, there are the little-told legends which tell of sorrowful ghosts who should not have been, lost souls and woeful brides, more accounts than folklore, told only in whispered tones when one is feeling especially brave, for these are the kind of ghost stories which are the most likely to be true.

This one in particular, the Ghosts of Ballimere Bog, is such a tale.

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Nebular

Deep within the realm of the stars lies a beast.  He is an ancient being, crafted from the darkness that was the face of the deep, before man became man and the earth and sky were without form.  When the light came, separating night from day and the light from the dark, that is when he was born.  Fashioned out of scattered pieces of the heavens, built by the hands of the divine.  The Creator breathed life into what had been designed and the beast came to life, shaking a mighty head and splashing the waters of the firmament around his feet.  Opening his great mouth to yawn, he settled down to watch as a World was built around him, a single World where only a void had once resided.  The waters of land and sky were divided, giving name to Earth and Heaven.  Stars filled in the empty places of the night.  The Hand took up a brush and painted the world with Color, adding red, gold, silver, and many others to the blank pages until at last, it was finished.  

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There is a Forest

There is a forest, lying hidden in the shadows of the world in a place where time does not exist.  It does not have a name, though it is rumored to have once been called the ‘Mist Wood’, after legends of faerie mist-gates and border regions, places where the Fair Folk could tread back and forth from one realm to another.  Some stories even say this was the meeting-place of the Courts, where all the faerie-kind gathered in the starlit clearings, and when they left, they left behind a piece of the forest much transformed from what it once had been. Continue reading “There is a Forest”