Bring your own salt.

The bone stuck through the flesh of his calf. He gritted his teeth, forcing his reeling mind to slow, to calm. He was no stranger to pain. Soon his awareness narrowed to a focused point, ready for the shaping. He pressed the splintered bone back into his leg, setting it against its other half. Then he tugged the strands of muscle back into place. Inky throbs of agony accompanied his every movement, and his vision swam, but he eased his awareness away from this distraction. With his free hand he clutched the paired talismans around his neck, drawing on their elemental properties to aid in the alchemy. Then he exhaled – once, slowly – and began to shape. A steady buzzing started at his center, growing louder and more insistent as he accelerated the flow of energy throughout his body, ever higher and higher, threatening to vibrate him asunder, until it pierced through crescendo in a steady squealing point. Then he spread his awareness through the wounded area, alert to all...

…A deadly sunrise. The canopy all in pastels, not a breath of wind. Dew on the grass. A morning glow. It melted into the shadows, breath hot on the leaves. The mask it wore revealed no expression, its body upright and taut as garrote wire. Waiting. Inside it was cold, unaffected by the first rays. It wore its skin like a sheath, and when the rays fell in beams across its back, the skin over its spine did not tingle. Not one bit… She cries out for his touch, and she cries when she’s by herself. The swings of her moods are too much at times. At times she eats chocolate. Or toast. With her friends it's ice-cream. What can be done to ward off th is feeling? Alone on a Sunday night when the girls have gone home… On Sundays it’s heavy, it’s real bad, after the comfort of two nights falling asleep on his shoulder, waking up to his touch. Now she must fall asleep alone. And then it's the week again, another work week at a shitty job. Her boss keeps the staff ...

He sat for several minutes in the hollow of the bone vault, awaiting the three Faces of the Chimera. His mentors had been observing the Sharpening from a series of elevated platforms snaking above the proving grounds, and they were now making their way down to the bone vault. There they would meet the lone survivor and question his every action. And so the assassin sat in focused meditation, preparing himself for the encounter. By maintaining the disciplined calm of Samatha he soon quieted the energies still coursing through his veins. Once the drumming in his chest again beat steady he conjured up a mental picture of his pursuers. It had been necessary to imagine them as his mortal enemies during the trial, but now that the Sharpening was over he allowed reality to seep back in. There in his mind’s eye the projections of the cloaked hunters were drained of their menace until he was looking at the familiar features of his fellow Chimera: quick-witted Nisa-Ha-Sura who once was h...

A storyteller is the most ancient kind of spellcaster, insidious and omnipotent, you hear his words and they stick on the inside of your brain, and something of himself is planted there forever, not quite the speaker himself (never fully) but one of his creations, invisible and yet springing to life on the stage of inner image, emotion, and sound. Once the spell of his words has entered your mind it can never be undone – or unheard – or un lived . You can but hope his words are those of a soothsayer, and not those of a sorcerer. For with tongue and throat and mind he wields the imagined power of words: the power to soothe, to please – or enrage. And the means too by which we occult and enthrall and enslave. It's impossible not to think the thoughts they command, these symbols, and once we have thought a thought we've in some very real sense also  lived  it – the actuality of the experience is utterly irrelevant, for it  has   happened . Stuck now in...