The Red Waves and the Shark's Feast

 She had:
            brown skin, tones deeper, richer from her time in the sun, muscles hanging loosely around her bones, “like a sail”, Kapten said;
            thirty-six years of life where she scratched to detach the aril from nutmeg seeds with her bare hands;
            a bounty on her head from the Dutch East-India Trading Company (VOC) for slipping free from her shackles, lubricated with overseer’s Goudzugt blood, diluted from his wine addiction;
            found herself amongst pirates, and decided she would pay off the chirurgeon’s debt of bandages;
            the head of the Komodo dragon where one would expect a human one – the Dutch considered her a monster, or, a specimen for it;
            a voice only she could hear (friendly, a little raspy) independent of her own (callous, sporadic). Orah, the mouth within her mouth.

The Last Voice in the Stars

Coral orchard, palate testing an axiom's screams,
ignorant manca with falling silver, this war swallowed you.
Throats, wrapped tight around outward simples, bombard nuance,
shatter easy glass, as fractured as all-encompassing peace.
This Yggdrasil, made from rotting cells; add the world's
renewing flesh. Dynasty; preserved by secrecy's hushed behest.
History hands its future's pen to your newest slow demise.
One survivor, thoroughly out of peril, by democratic design.
Maxillae, oh Maxillae, a new shadow
casts on your bloody shield

Where he deserves to be

Flames in the air and steel in his hands, he moves as if he has mastered both. The constant heat enwreathed the workshop in a similar sensation as a sousland pleasure parlour – of intensity, proficiency, and purpose. No bigger than a wagon, between the entrance and the furnace lay a strewage of raw materials, sacks of sand, and flasks of oils labelled with penmanship teetering on the brink between logographic and proto-language, providing little in the way of comfort or an atmosphere conducive to decorum and posture. The blacksmith cocks his head at a small chairless table used for conducting awkward business and which, upon closer inspection, is just two anvils not even placed neatly together.

A victory wine

There is an unspoken hesitation in the hideout, shared like broken bread at the eve of something new. There are four of them and who knows how many out to get them. They have only their wits, and ‘they’ have wings, beasts, and technologies to stifle even the greatest idea. Even if they succeed tomorrow, what comes after falls in the demesnes of two old deities. Kedvezö – godhead of reunions, lucky happenings, morality, opportunities of power, and the taste of water after thirst – or Megvetés – goddess of curses, fulfilled wishes, impermissible desires, and death. Both divinities are receiving a mess of messages, four chaotic hopes for survival roughly translatable into appeals for salvation, immaterial intervention. Prayer, a custom outlawed by the Alturans when they imposed themselves as the living divinities on the lower world, had never been the pivotal ritual by which to express faith. It wasn’t until those damnable vultures cracked open the sky that the people below began clasping their hands.

His blacksmith and the bird

He remembered what his source had said: just a handful of gilders. They won’t miss them. And then? You’ll get to escape Ascens. 

"This be a furious gruff.” A bloodbuzzing voice circled the bird’s head, swattable like bloatflies. “Got a greedy mouth and a prick too big for the brain.”