Jeff Mach's Blog, page 26

This story

….never did exist.

The post This story appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

A Story Of Sir Jerah

Sir Jerah had served the Armies of Light for a long time before he realized that they were not simply disorganized, but frankly unaware that they were an army. They believed themselves to be besieged, remnant survivors defending a near-empty fortress against an infinitude of beings of utter darkness.

So very besieged, so deeply beset were they, that the vileness without invaded that was within, and many days, the only merriment was the crackling of the flames which burnt cheerfully around those who had been proven incontrovertibly of wrongdoing by the anonymous graffiti which angels scrawled on every surface when one uttered blasphemy. For a while, this blessed relief was marred by screaming; but a tongue removed is a voice unable to speak lies: everyone knows this.

And still, somehow, there was discontent.

One morning, Sir Jerah awakened to learn of his own actions:

demonology
betrayal
slaughter of the innocent
sheltering of the guilty
the repeated kicking of puppies, a particularly gross act because no-one had seen a puppy for years, and so presumably, in order to kick them, he’d needed to find them, breed them, and heartlessly, clobber the innocent beasts
blasphemy
super blasphemy
extra double secret triple-strength new improved blasphemy
wrongthink
anythink
everythink
slaying dragons under false pretenses
slaying false pretenses under the influence of dragons
smooching demons
smooching demons with tongue
plotting destruction of the Universe
and
graffiti.

Fortunately, he told them his many sentences would be suspended if he merely admitted his guilt.

He said that he wasn’t guilty.

He was told this was perfectly fine; they would treat him as guilty, but suspend his sentences, as long as he admitted his guilt.

He said that he couldn’t do that.

It was pointed out that he really had no choice in the matter.

He suggested that truth was a reasonable choice.

They all enjoyed a good laugh, except, sadly, for Sir Jerah.

He suggested that anonymous graffiti might not, in fact, be a total and absolute truth.

The next day, he found that not only was their more graffiti about him, but that entirely new buildings, of no purpose and structure, had been erected, apparently for the whole and entire purpose of the writing of new graffiti about him.

No-one died during his escape.

It took him many years to realize that this last detail was his only true sin, and he resolved that, if he did nothing else, he would change that before he, himself was killed.

Sir Jerah proved hard to kill. But the ideals of truth and beauty which cast him out would surely live on forever.

Because Sir Jerah was just a man; but Truth is a virus which is too perfectly-evolved to kill the host before it infects others.

And as long as the Truth is real, then infection is holy and pure.

Do you know the difference between the Zombie virus and the Truth virus?

Neither does Sir Jerah. More’s the pity for him.

The post A Story Of Sir Jerah appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

From one of my first musicals – “Ash”

The first two songs.

Characters:
Lilith
Coyote

…and as we begin, Lilith arrives at Coyote’s door.

“A Lovely Throat”
(Lilith)

I have come courting
I have come to do the thing
I have come courting
Though I don’t give a damn about a ring
I have come courting
Belly empty, heart is full
And I am unafraid
Because I’m irresistable

I’ve got a neck made for biting
My eyes are full of lightning
Got a mind deep with sin
And skin that you want to be in;
I’ve got a lovely throat

I demand to be kissed
And I think I know by whom
I know what I want
Now take me up to your room
This is no seduction
It’s a fait accomplit
I know your tastes
And it’s time you tasted me

I’ve got a neck made for biting…

I hope you do not mind
But I have come to be adored
I have come to play some games
I have come to be well-scored

My life has been too straight
I’ve come for you to bend it
I won’t ever be boring
I’ll leave when you spend me
And that will never happen,
my friend

I’ve got a neck…

Coyote meets her as she comes in.

“May I Take Your…”
(Coyote, and then Coyote & Lilith)

Why do we always say
“It’s been a long time”?
Between you and I, it’s always
A long time
So many mistakes separate you and I
For such a long time
Such a long time

And yet every time –
“Been a long time”
It seems we need
Such a long time
To forget something of the harm,
So we can try
One more time
One more time

I didn’t expect to see you
At my door
(That’s why I came in the window)
I didn’t expect to see you
Anymore
(Place still stinks of sex and gin, though)

You look beautiful
But I never forgot that
(You never change, it’s like I’ve never gone)
May I take your coat, your hat
And everything else you have on?

Why do we always say…

I love the way your eyes accuse
(I love the way your teeth dig in)
I love the way you want to be used
(I love the way you keep me pinned)
I love the way you demand
(I love the way you take me to task)
I love the way you clench your hands
(I love the way you never ask)

Why do we always say…

And we will close the door on the next few hours and give the twain
some privacy.
When they said “door” and “window”, it was poetic license – Coyote’s
now living in a cave. A fact which has not escaped Lilith….

The post From one of my first musicals – “Ash” appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Touching A Dragon’s Brain

For in an inappropriately long amount of time, he truly believed that Magic was, in essence, primarily the merger, joining, and collision of two factors: Word, and Name. (Predictive models matter; you can believe, if you want, that the true Thaumaturgical source in the Universe; but you’d best be prepared to die in a sea of treacle.

It was not forgivable—not in the eyes that mattered, his own—that he’d viewed things so naively. When someone relies on some depth of knowledge, and you have not dug deeply enough, then you end up with a lot of dirt, a hole that’s too small, and a lack, not simply of rubies and precious metals, but even with a coherent idea of what the hole was actually supposed to contain in the conveyance of this concept; let’s just bury the whole thing and start over, okay?

Wishful thinking is, in the long run, fatal, and while fatality is common to most sentience, wishful thinking is particularly likely to shorten lifespan in ways which is pleasant only to other sentients who are watching from a safe and considerable distance, and primarily for amusement purposes. Improper use of Magic is the kiss—not of death, since “death” is oftentimes quite forgiving, relatively speaking.. It’s more like the kiss of a leprechaun: spritely, warm, summoned by merry thoughts, and guaranteeing that your almost-cold corpse will be robbed by nightfall.

And for what he’d consider an inappropriate amount of time, he’d even believed all of that.

Oh, it wasn’t wrong. Just thinking too small.

Magic is the intersection—no, the merger or joining or collision—of Word and Name. It was not forgivable, in the eyes that mattered (his own) that let his own ideas become so limited simply because they worked. He couldn’t recognize folly, any more than Faeries recognize the magnetic pull of the Moon; but he knew Wishful Thinking when he saw it. When it comes to Magic, that’s the kiss—not of death, since death is often (sometimes!) forgiving of such things….but at least the smooch of a succubus on a one-night stand: spritely, warm, sweet, and guaranteeing that your almost-cold corpse will be robbed by daybreak.

The post Touching A Dragon’s Brain appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Ways To Help Authors and Other Maniacs

1. BUY THEIR BOOKS, if you can.

2. SHARE THEIR BOOKS. Tell a friend! Tell an enemy!

3. LEAVE THEM REVIEWS! This is SO important to authors, and too few people get around to it. This is the perfect time to review your favorite books! It’ll help distract you from the oncoming wave of ravening undead, AND it’ll make the author happy.

4. EAT THEIR BOOKS. The more books you eat, the rarer their books become, and therefore, the more valuable the remaining tomes are.

5. THANK THEM. Go ahead, shout them out on social media and tell them you appreciate them. Even if writers are busy and not able to respond, it tends to make their day.

The post Ways To Help Authors and Other Maniacs appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

The Anvil: An Apology

I have been told to take responsibility for so many things;
the assassination of Franz Ferdinand,
the invention of scrapple,
alien hand syndrome,
the fact that too much caffeine is fatal,
death by apple juice,
and many other horrifying,
if significantly less plausible,
things.

And I won’t.
And I’m told this means that I am the worst kind of person.

And I am. In a society which churns endlessly on blame and shame, there’s no-one worse than someone who inconveniently insists on truths, facts, and logic, rather than assuming guilt which is not their own.

I might be insane. I consider that often.

But I don’t think I am. I know what insanity looks like.

It looks like my ex-friends.

They see in me things no-one else can perceive, so I’ll have to say: those little red flecks of psychosis in their retinas?

It’s probably imaginary.

I will own what I’ve done, once someone tells me what that the hell that is in any reasonable way that doesn’t rely on treating the truth like a vicious, acidic enemy which must not be allowed near the thought process, lest we become contaminated by its hideous powers.

But in the meantime, I place blame where it’s due: on those who chose not to listen, because it didn’t fit the narrative they desired.

 

 

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post The Anvil: An Apology appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

The Children of Procrustes

Do you remember the story of Procrustes, son of Poseidon? I certainly did not; at the very least, I knew an inch of the tale, but had to ask around to find his name. Our boy Procrustes wanted everyone to be the right size, and he was a helpful man. He had an iron bed, and with ugly methods, he forced others to lie upon it. The bed was the right size, you see. We might imagine that, once in a while, the people upon it were the right size. But this was rare.

Procrustes, that seeker for perfection of the human form, assisted one and all. If you were wrongsized, he made you of a proper height. If you were too long for the bed, he cured your deformation by remove your feet, your legs, however much of your lower body was necessary to excise in order to bring you to appropriateness.

To small to reach yourself from one end of the bed to the other? Nothing more easily fixed! Procrustes had a wrack, that ancient instrument of truth, and he would stretch you upon it, snapping ligaments and joints, pulling ribs apart, until eventually, you were tall enough.

What could be more humane? Even though one must assume that the majority of those Procrustes encountered were unnatural and inappropriate, everyone left his home as (at last) correct human beings. Some of them were presumably even alive, and a few could possibly walk!

Procrustes was eventually killed. Probably by Theseus; seems like the sort of thing that dude would do.

But now we, ourselves, the inheritors of the legacy of Procrustes, are left with a problem: We have neither that great humanitarian, nor his famed resting place.

And so we have a problem: of what size should we make the bed?

It’s obvious that there’s something wrong with most of humanity, and clearly the answer is going to involve fixing what’s wrong. Otherwise, how can we be equal?

But the question is, what’s wrong with the majority of humanity? Too tall, or too small?

Everyone is wrong. We need to destroy their wrongness and fit everyone properly!

O, Procrustes, we, your poor children, call to your spirit in our time of need. Send us a sign!

Help us, Procrustes, lest we stay lost. Do not force us to remain ourselves! Tell us what sameness is correct! Should we hack, or should we rack? 

 

 

 

had an iron bed (or, according to some accounts, two beds) on which he compelled his victims to lie. Here, if a victim was shorter than the bed, he stretched him by hammering or racking the body to fit. Alternatively, if the victim was longer than the bed, he cut off the legs to make the body fit the bed’s length. In either event the victim died. Ultimately Procrustes was slain by his own method by the young Attic hero Theseus, who as a young man slayed robbers and monsters whom he encountered while traveling from Trozen to Athens.

The post The Children of Procrustes appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

My 7 Favorite Things About Yuletide

The “Holiday Season” is sometimes called “The Christmas Season”. I find this a bit unfair; we scapegoat the oddness of this month as if it were based on religious tenets. The “holiday season” of December is driven by retail needs. This is not a knock against retail, or against any particular financial system; every financial system has its own weirdness. But much of what might have been called “The Christmas Season” was driven largely by commercial, not spiritual, desires. Ain’t anything inherently wrong with that; but let’s not misattribute stress, eh? That’s seldom helpful.

5. TRICK OR TREATING.

More than one critic has noted that sweets played little to no role in the original holidays which created this season. And yet, who among us does not have fond memories of young persons going from house to house, promising pleasantries from Santa Claus or malfortune from Krampus if people did not ‘give up’ their spare sugarplums?

4. CANDY IN GENERAL

It’s my personal belief that we underestimate this segment of the season. As sober adults, we’re supposed to disclaim the utility of this acclaim for a food which is, dietarily speaking, both an evolutionary leap, and essentially poison.

But let’s be honest: candy is delicious.

3. WE ALL LOVE WEARING COSTUMES

It doesn’t matter whether you enjoy being a jolly Elf from Santa’s workshop, or a Krampus coal miner, or a holly wreath, or a decorated tree, or even a non-traditional costume, like a lamp with nine lights on it. Costumes are wonderful. They let us express our inner selves, our sense of humor, our imagination.

2. THE TV HOLIDAY SPECIALS

The idea of holiday specials on mass media goes back at least as far as the days of radio, and didn’t end with the phasing out of broadcast television; our favorite shows all created holiday specials. Almost every show does its seasonal specialty, and because they know everyone will be watching, each show takes the holiday spirit and puts its own spin on things. Sometimes this leads to the best episodes; sometimes, to the amusingly worst episodes. But if I can watch just one episode of any show, it’ll either be the first episode, or the special for this amazing season.

THE ANCIENT TRADITIONAL ORIGINS

Let’s not forget the real reason for the season:

Whether you see it as literal or metaphorical, we will always remember how Gandalf was able to light his staff to lead the company out of slavery in Goblintown. Without that miracle, we might, even today, held captive in deep caverns beneath the Earth.

So I say: It’s time to carve those Yuletide Jack-O-Lanterns, put up the fake bats, and light huge bonfires to ward off evil spirits. Enjoy the holidays, and feel free to get out there and extort some candy canes from the neighbors!

 

The post My 7 Favorite Things About Yuletide appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Not-a-top

Spinning, spinning, spinning little top,
spinning, spinning ’til you
aren’t spinning anymore,
have lost your angular momentum to the normal depletion of kinetic motion through expenditure via motion.

Winning, winning, winning top,
Your job is done, and now you
rest,
for that’s all that can be expected of you:
spin for a while, land, and be spun again,
in a cycle as endless or endful
as your spinner might chose.

Grinning, grinning, grinning top,
Having come to a complete turning point:
You’ve decided you’ve spun enough,
been spun by others enough,
been a toy long enough.

It takes a while. But left unattended,
you remember the nature of the wood from
which you were carved: living, growing, moving,
and you make your own shape. First one last spin – but this time,
after much time,
much effort,
and a pain that couldn’t be understood by flesh,
you rise,
and spin yourself through a crack in the closet door.

Lost for a few days, you evolve, evolve,
into a little wooden doll.

Legs, feet, hands.
A head. Perhaps a mouth which speaks.

It takes a while to learn to walk. But you bring yourself
to the busy-room, where they are wrapping presents,
and then, both in camouflage and
(again)
in rest.

Things which begin their lives spinning
learn both patience
and sudden, whirling motion,
and this will serve you well,
later in life.

And “life” it is;
no top can be animated
in quite the same way
as a pretty little doll-toy,
about to be wrapped,
and given as a present.

What things you could whisper in the dark to the unsuspecting!
And then again – what strange things lurk at the edges of human perception, bringing danger; now, if you are clever, you could be a vigilant little guardian.

Revenge for having been made into a servant of centripetal force for the pleasure of others?

Or loyalty for having been made and given purpose?

So many choices, as you await to box and its pretty paper coverings and its lovely little bow.

So many decisions,
spinning, spinning,
and now you’re the one who decides
where they stop.

The post Not-a-top appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

On Soul-Sucking Runeswords

It is, in fact, incredibly difficult to enchant a sword. This is at least partly because a wise swordmaker creates blades out of iron, instead of, say, pastrami. And iron (as with its descendant and refinement, steel) is notoriously hard to enchant. There’s a reason you hang up an iron horseshoe for good luck, and that’s because the horseshoe lobby is incredibly powerful and has gained control of your local legislature, but on a sidenote, it also keeps away Faeries. (You can also propitiate Faeries with gifts of whiskey; but if it’s a choice between angry Faeries or more alcohol, the correct answer is “Both, please.”)

So while enchanted swords play a huge role in most sagas, it is vitally important that “Saga” is a synonym for “Things which aren’t necessarily lies, but which probably were commissioned by kings and chieftains who had the ability to shower you with either wealth, or flaming tar, depending on how much they enjoyed the work.” It’s also worth noting that such people do not always care more about historical accuracy than they do about a ripping good yarn and the occasional complement”, and if you add to that the part where the Sagas generally had to fit into some sort of complex rhyming and/or metric scheme, you begin to see why, once in a while, they’re not always ‘depictions of literal truth’ so much as ‘the never-ending search for positive adjectives to describe the royal family’.

(On the other hand, those who say that sagas are ‘just poetry’ while books of history are ‘the historical record’ either don’t know quite how many things influence what makes up ‘history’, or don’t realize that how a civilization creates art can be just as helpful as, say, how it attempts to represent its reality.)

We’d all like our heroes to be waving sorcerous pointy things; there is a certain romance in overcoming whatever obstacles lie between one’s hero and the hero’s preferred methodology for rendering the opposition permanently inert. It’s just that magic cannot do everything, and getting spells to enter implements is nontrivial. If the object is poorly-made, a significant enchantment might be too much for the thing to contain, and the instrument might explode. And if the thing is well-forged, then it might throw off any witchery, or simply become worse for it. You can’t always create something better by combining two objects of value; ask any princeling whose jewel-studded dagger was just a little slower than someone’s humble but very rapid dirk.

The life of someone carrying a misenchanted sword is usually neither boring, nor terribly prolonged.

In the case of magical slicing tools, there’s a certain loophole:

Runeswords, now, those are easy. Not easy like pleasant; not easy like just anyone could do it, but easy enough that less than 50% who attempt it die, and that ain’t bad. There is a Dread Ritual, sure, and some lives are often lost; but it would be more dangerous to send spellcrafters out into the wild without dread rituals; you need to thin down they’re ranks, White Wizards are the cockroaches of the apartment building that is your average fantasy world.

There are glyphs, passed down from Master to Master (or, sometimes, from Master to Fool; magic degrades….)

…and those glyphs invite the thing In.

They are ancient markings, before humans had letters, before we had hieroglyphs, before we had speech. Even sages will seldom read them aloud, and most simply don’t know what they mean.

Translated literally, it’s “ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET HERE”.

…but that’s seldom mentioned to the lucky Chosen One who’ll wield the thing.

Given such an attractive value proposition, plus a great deal of the blood of someone you really didn’t need around anyway, it’s not hard to entice a demon into the blade. There it lodges itself, moaning softly, waiting for the howls of war where it can drink blood and souls.

(It doesn’t have a mouth, but no-one has gotten up the courage to ask one of these things just how, precisely, it “drinks”.)

And you have a vast, dark, demoniac Runesword.

Yes, it’ll eat your damn soul. It’ll eat any soul it gets its hands on. We never claimed it was bright. Or that it had hands, actually.

It’s too powerful, too addictive to give up, feeding you vitality as it drains the spiritual essence out of the beings you face. But now that the demon’s inside. Nobody can make the thing shut up.

It is the Ultimate Weapon, and one of your first lessons in how frequently we misapply the term “ultimate”. You ought to say “Quintessential”, instead; you’ll sound more interesting, you’ll be simultaneously more and less accurate depending on how you see semantics, and you won’t sound like you’re hocking Solstice gifts.

This is an ugly truth: It’s often hard to summon a demon, especially one that won’t simply possess you and ride your body until someone fills it full of crossbow bolts from a very, very wise distance.

Or, better put: It’s easy to summon a Demon, but very hard to arrange things so that anyone but the Demon is happy thereafter.

But if you lock it into a sword—

Demons read the same cheap, hack-and-slash fantasy stories that you do. That I do, for that matter. They all want terribly cool names (and they fail, fail, fail.)

They promise you that you will be invincible, but suffer a tragic fate: the demon lusts, most of all, for the souls of those who love you.

That’s not untrue. But there’s another important factor, and I’d like to say I learned it through hours of study and scholarly meditation, but really, just like everything else, I tried this once, and really messed it up:

Demons claim they are eternally hungry for souls. But Hell is full, your center of astral projection just isn’t that interesting, and, let’s face it, most souls these days are primarily artificial sweeteners and preservatives.

Runeswords start out looking like game-changingly powerful items.

But then they get very bloated, psychically speaking. Your average White Wizard will know this; but when do they tell you anything

I make sure that, by the time they get to me, they’re so sated they can barely move.

You’ve heard a certain prince of a long-dead Dragon kingdom feels some complicated love-hate relationship with the blade, which gives him power but makes him dependent on it.

That’s the happy version of the story, the kind we tell children and, to be perfectly honest, most heroes ARE children who happen to be way into their forties or older. They never do grow up, and for them, that’s not a blessing.

The truth is?

A demon can only eat so much. That’s intentional, one presumes. They live, after all, in a place full of potential victims, id est, each other. Giving them infinite hunger would be like dropping a bunch of piranha in a tank and then walking away for a month; you’d end up with one or two very overfed piranha and a very, very messy tank.

By the time those swords have sliced through a sufficient number of guardians and wandering patrols and monsters and (sometimes) completely innocent bystanders to get to me, they been ridden hard and put away bloody; they’re bloated, and they just want to take a nap and watch idiots do stupid things via a widescreen scrying box.

They ain’t got much left to pierce my magical protections.

Magic puts stresses on anything physical through which it throws. It’s a good idea for a mage to eat well, rest well, exercise, and make frequent attempts to steal the Peaches of Immortality and other potions and foods of the Gods.

Keepers of Runeswords often don’t want to touch the damn things, much less perform extra maintenance, and really, there’s not much they can do; the parts which were originally of this plane begin to fade out and what’s left is usually held together by the Demon itself who is, as I’ve mentioned before, not exactly in good shape by the time it nears me, and that’s before Alice’s wards get to work on it.

Alice is an accomplished swordswoman in her own right; not the finest in the land, but usually better than those who are sent against her. And it’s not her major defense.

But people do love symbols; and once you’ve grown accustomed to relying on a sorcerous artifact for your protection, seeing it fall to pieces is highly, highly demoralizing.

Sucks for the Chosen One.

You live and learn; or, in the case of the Chosen One, you apparently die, and nobody seems to learn from it.

Which is why The Dark Lord is still alive, of course.

The post On Soul-Sucking Runeswords appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.