Jeff Mach's Blog, page 56
June 8, 2020
7 Classic Villainpunk Books
If you know this blog, you know it’s almost exclusively microfiction. But I’m also a tremendous proponent of Villainpunk, and I love classic science fiction. So in this brief article, I’m going to suggest 7 classic, but not necessarily well-known, scifi books with what I’d think of as Villainpunk themes.
(What is Villainpunk? Well, according to famed Villainpunk author Jeff Mach, it’s “an imaginative genre celebrating Villains, Henchpersons, Rogues, Cads. Minions, Anti-Heroes, and the assorted things which make up their world—Secret Lairs, Evil Plots, World Dominion, and other lovely life goals. It’s not horror, although spooky characters are welcome. It’s about the misunderstood, the mad, the iron-willed, the passionate, the downright villainous.”)
The books below don’t always have, say, Villains as protagonists; let’s just say that they have some form of nontraditional protagonist/antagonist situations.
7. The Word For World Is Forest, by Ursula LeGuin. At the time of this writing, we’re no longer surprised to find science fiction books where humans are the antagonists, but they were hardly the norm in 1972 when this book came out. It’s not the very first of its kind, but it’s arguably one of the most beautiful. The story is taut and well-told, the language is haunting, and you should read everything by Ursula LeGuin anyway.
6. Space Viking, by H. Beam Piper. If you know H. Beam Piper, you probably know him for his adorable-but-also-fierce Fuzzy books, “Little Fuzzy” and “Fuzzy Sapiens”, which, in and of themselves, do a certain amount of thinking about just who’s the hero around here. But “Space Viking” is an old-school space opera. Its protagonists justify their autocracies through ultimately creating more stable civilizations in cultures ravaged by interstellar war… but make no mistake: This is a book about space pirates who raid and ravage planets until they’re wealthy enough to form their own countries, whereupon they become good and just rulers. At least, we assume that’s what happens. I mean, the protagonists are very likable; surely they won’t turn into tyrannical despots.
5. Ogre, Ogre, by Piers Anthony. Yes, it’s a Xanth book. Yes, Xantha has…all of the baggage of Xanth, and all the love/hate factors you might associate with it. But it’s still the tale of a self-identified monster, one of the fiercest monsters of Xanth, gleefully smashing his way through obstacles.
4. Golem100, by Alfred Bester. You might know Alfred Bester for “The Stars My Destination”, which tends to show up on most lists of “absolutely must read” classic scifi novels, and with good reason. I’m not going to even try to explain the plot of this one, or the twists it takes. Let’s say it’s a tale of witchcraft, technology, the ways humans interact with each other, and serial murder.
3. Spindoc, by Steve Perry. It’s a book about a master of news spin who spends his time taking stories of corporate mistakes and misdeeds and transforming them into plausible lies for the public. Sure, most of the book is taken up with what happens when this successful executive gets caught up in a web of sex, violence, and espionage, but let’s never forget that this is a scifi novel about a spin doctor.
2. “The Space Merchants” – which is really two connected novels by Fredrik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. The innocent-sounding title masks a tale of futuristic marketing gone so far awry that it makes the cast of “Mad Men” look benevolent. I like marketing, and even I find this despicable. But enthrallingly so. The character(s) may change loyalties over time (it was 1952; it wasn’t a great year to have your protagonists be entirely unsympathetic) – but the book kept my heart.
1. The Stainless Steel Rat – any of the books in the series, really; they’re all by the legendary Harry Harrison, whom I happened to meet in person, and who was one of the sweetest and most entertaining convention guests I’ve ever seen. But that’s not why his books are #1 on this list. All of the Stainless Steel Rat books deal with a hero who saves the galaxy (repeatedly) while also robbing banks and committing assorted crimes (repeatedly). There’s wit, there’s charm, there’s action, there are some interesting premises – and if you want, you can read the books as the protagonist starts out at 17 as a small-time crook and ends up in his 80s, still vibrant and still going (if not quite as fast as he used to be) – and aided, by that time, by his wife and his two grown sons. Because Villainy runs in the family, you know.
p.s. For extra credit, look up everything ever written by Joel Rosenberg (not to be confused with Joel C. Rosenberg). Read some, and you’ll see what I mean.
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 7 Classic Villainpunk Books appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.
June 7, 2020
The Very Bad Magic School
[This is a standalone story. It’s a bit of a cheat, in that it intentionally gives you none of the backstory; but that’s okay. I’m a Dark Lord. I’m okay with certain kinds of cheating.
By way of background –
One of the original ideas I had for “I Despise Your Prophecy” was to do it as a sort-of Villainous magic school. I read tons of paranormal YA fiction (I was not about to go through 3/4ths of the works of Diana Wynne Jones by age 16, and then abandon it all later in life. That’s, like, fifty books. I am invested) – and it’s surprising how few novels are dedicated to Schools of Flat-Out Evil Magic.
I ended up rejecting that concept for a lot of reasons, the primary one being that I’m a plotter (to those unfamiliar with writing jargon, I am someone who works out a plot in advance, then writes the things needed to tell that story; the opposite of a plotter is a pantser, one who lets the story emerge and evolve in the writing. You might look at it this way: pantsers write a lot of bad plots because they don’t think things through, and plotters write a lot of bad plots with no excuse whatsoever, which is even worse. In short, the lesson my ex-husband and I both learned was: Don’t marry a fellow writer.
….but I digress.)
….I am a plotter, and after a lot of thought, I decided that I had developed a new Dark Lord novel, one which could tell a story I wanted to tell, without changing the meaning of the original book. (For those of you unfamiliar with the etymology of the term “sequel“, it is, “to see that an author has written a second book in something that had a clear and definitive ending, and quell fears that the author will do something horrible, like saying, “Actually, the second half of the last book was just a dream/a hallucination/an alternate reality/something I’m going to ignore altogether”.)
So I dropped the Magic School idea. But I did write a short parody of how I thought such a thing would work.
The parody actually made it into the book, but I promise: there are no spoilers here.
You don’t need to know anything about the book, except that Hymnia, Susane, and Akané are students/apprentices of The Dark Lord, and I kept my promise: no Dark Lord should rule unchallenged.]
One day, the Dark Lord took very ill. Hymnia worried for her, and Akané wore a very strange look. Susane said nothing.
Akané called a big meeting and said, “Our beloved Lord is dying; it is time we agree upon a succession.” Her timing was fortunate; before Susane could belt her, Akané doubled over in a sudden pain. Hymnia slung the girl over her shoulder, and they all went to the ailing Dark Lord’s bedside.
“Akané?” asked the Dark Lord.
“…yes?” croaked the singer, feebly.
“I’ve been poisoning you for two years, slipping you the antidote every time I woke up and wasn’t dead. I’m glad we finally made it here; even the best-wrought poison, quickly cured, could have some longterm effects. Now that we officially know that it’s stupid for you to poison me, shall we trade antidote for antidote?”
Akané smiled through the pain. “Gods, yes. I’d been planning this for almost two years myself. By the time we actually got here, I really didn’t think it would work. I didn’t even want it to work.”
“But you had to check.”
“But I had to check.”
Both were dosed with antidotes, but they still weren’t feeling in top form, and went to bed early. That was fine with Susane and Hymnia, who ate all the dessert at dinner that night, and didn’t leave anything for the other two, and didn’t feel bad, even for a moment.
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 Very Bad Magic School appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.
June 6, 2020
The Catskills Devil
The Catskills Devil spends an inordinate amount of time online disproving the existence of the Jersey Devil.
She’s terribly active on social media. She tries to stay out of politics; she’s not sure if any particular party has the best interests of giant horse-headed batwinged monsters at heart. (She’s not entirely sure how helpful they are to anyone else, for that matter.) Still, sometimes it gets a bit toxic in virtual space, and she needs to grab some fresh air, maybe have a cigarette, perhaps run down a goat or two.
But mostly, she’s debunking: writing strongly-worded editorials to urban legend sites, making sarcastic comments on Twitter (hashtag: #andsantaisrealtoo; hashtag #tvisnotreallife). She’s reasonably savvy. She can tell some of the best Jersey Devil stories out there, and debunk them, too; but who wants to listen to nothing but negatives. …okay, the answer to that is “approximately 97% of social media,” but that’s not the point. She serves her cause well by sharing the most outlandish stories with gleeful relish. Monster-hunters hate her, because she takes their stories and adds implausibilities which wreck the suspension of disbelief—”Oh, is that when you cornered a 12′-tall being in an apartment with 7′ ceilings?”; “And then his eyes glowed red like the darkest pits of Hell, which is also totally a thing, right?”; “He screamed in a language not spoken by human beings”. She’s very, very good at sarcasming up the place, until everybody backs down and goes home.
(In actuality, he’s 9′ tall, his eyes glow like the fourth or fifth darkest pit of Hell, and frankly, it’s weird that he screams in Klingon, but in real life as on television, Klingon really helps simplify language to “Run, fight, or mate”. He’s really hoping nobody picks the third option.)
The hunter-gatherer life has its ups and its downs. If you’d like to gather with a bunch of other sentients and simply gobble up the map, making things into buildings and buildings into much larger, more complicated buildings, and generally trying to make your species more abundant, more knowledgeable, and more able to annihilate things, itself included, then you’re likely going to need to extend more control over your environment. You’ll need farms, and that means regular habits and plenty of ’em—trust me, if you’re cultivating, say, roosters, they’re quite particular: if THEY’RE awake, then EVERYBODY should be awake, is how they feel. And they’re quite glad to pitch in with the bloodcurdling howls we euphemistically call “crowing”, because crows have terrible PR agents.
Got a farm? You need tools, then, and that means either very basic tools indeed, and a certain amount of handiness; or else you very quickly bump up against specialization of labor, and that, in turn, leads to economic exchange, and, by the way, wouldn’t it be nice to have more help on the farm? You can use technologies like marriage and offspring, but if somebody’s going to inherit, you need some rules, and you need yourself some government, and then, likely, some crime (but I repeat myself), and—
Yeahhhh. The Jersey Devil is having none of that. Or very little of that, at least. There’s a terribly reasonable living to be made as an animatronic device in a haunted house; the work is seasonal, but the pay is quite good. He can be very still for long periods of time. If you don’t know much about the animatronic business, just consider that it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to create and install a nine-foot-tall electronic devil figure, which moves (albeit stiffly), yells insults (someone must have done a bang-up voice-acting job; the recordings almost sound like they’re responding directly to the crowd!), and (this is a big one)—it can wield a chainsaw. Safely, even.
I won’t go into the special place chainsaws hold in the hearts of haunters. Suffice to say that it’s nothing short of miraculous (and needs to be tested repeatedly to be believed) to have an animatronic whose motion sensors are so good that it won’t ever accidentally wing somebody (which puts ahead of more than a few actual humans in the biz. Just sayin’.)
So paying a couple grand a summer is a pretty excellent deal for a haunt large enough to be able to afford it, especially if the robot can (somehow!) show up having learned new tricks every year.
(You’re wondering about the logistics; at least, I would be if I were you. Nothing simpler: The haunted attraction [“the Haunt,” in the parlance of professionals, aka, ‘Haunters’] gets a call from someone saying he’s got an incredible animatronic that he wants to test; it’ll even self-install, but all has to happen in complete secrecy; he doesn’t want people to know too much about his invention until he’s ready to bring it to market. That’s why he’s willing to let this incredibly expensive piece of equipment be used straight through the Halloween season for a fraction of its eventual rental cost. Is there a catch? Nope, no catch; just please respect the equipment and make sure it’s returned in good condition. You can even pay for it at the end of the season.
Assorted hijinks ensue, but in general, it works out quite well. Haunters are exceptionally curious, even for humans (that most curious species!), but if you’re told something is a device, then that’s how you’re likely to see it. It’s actually pretty cool how the thing arrives at midnight, walking stiffly past you and into an appropriate spot in the building. It stands in place, more like a statue than most statues, and extending one arm with (of all the charming touches!) extensive handwritten notes on care and use.
Sure, there’s a lot of speculation, awe, even a certain covetous desire to acquire this technology in a permanent way by inquiring into the mechanisms with a socket wrench. But the Jersey Devil can freeze in place for days, breathes infrequently and (when in company) theatrically, like a built-in bellows, and goes from immobility to extreme displeasure when someone comes up and tries to, say, craftily unscrew his head.
One earth-shattering roar and a brief vigorous-shaking-of-the-inquisitive-person later, the haunters decide to leave well enough alone. Because, even if we forget the part where people are getting one Hell of a deal (and who can forget getting what is obviously a major piece of entertainment technology for about the same cost as a moderate engine repair for the haunted hayride truck?)
It was good employment. And if sometimes people did things in front of him that they’d never have done in the presence of a living being, he either tuned it out, or observed, with some curiosity, the human condition.
And the rest of the time, he lived a simple life. There is a general challenge, a certain grappling with the Tragedy of the Commons, to living a ‘simple’ life in a complex world; unless the only things you use or enjoy are things which are independent of other humans, you have some reliance on civilization. And if so, is it really an appropriate moral stance to suggest that you’re living away from others, when, if everyone else were like you, we might all end up with nothing?
One could have heated arguments about this, if one were human, and the sort to enjoy arguing; but The Catskills Devil isn’t either of those things.
The Jersey Devil doesn’t even miss out on the cast parties at the Haunt. Usually, they have to drag him out and bring him ’round near the bonfire. Frequently, they want some pictures with him. Once in a while, they feel oddly attached to the big animatronic, and start preparing for the serious effort necessary to transport such a large, complicated object. Either way, hardly anyone goes Code Yellow when he gets up and walks, mechanistically, doing an excellent impression of a clunky 1950s-style walking ‘robot’, to where the party’s being held.
People invariantly thought it was funny to put an alcoholic beverage in his open hand. They were invariantly astonished when he put it in his ‘mouth’ and ‘drank’ it. They found this such a neat trick that they can’t help but repeat it; it turns out that he can ‘drink’ quite a lot before some internal mechanism prompts ‘the machine’ to start turning beverages away.
Can a Devil have hangovers? We will leave him his secret.
And that is his primary financing, and his primary social life, for the year.
And it drives The Catskills Devil completely up a wall.
Do you know how she makes her money?
She runs the Official Jersey Devil Fansite.
It’s the single largest collection of Jersey Devil lore, pictures, accounts, recordings, everything. Its social media reach is huge, its videos alone could monetize a pretty comfortable life, and it has advertising which is tasteful, but highly lucrative.
She hates it.
It started on a whim. It was a practical joke. She might have been flirting at the time. Maybe they were just friends.
And it became very popular.
And that damn son-of-a-monster is popular as hell, and nobody’s heard of her. Her many attempts to introduce herself on the site—”Devil and Devil”, or “Have You Also Heard Of”, or “What If He’s Actually A She, And She Lives In New York?”
Nobody reads it. In fact, she gets massive pushback for not being “true” to the site. Jersey Devil Fans righteously despise this clearly-mythical, wannabe, pretender to the Deviltry throne.
That part makes her annoyed, like low-key annoyed on a daily basis. But what she hates is that the damn Jersey Devil is just there. He barely does any work! His one “real” job is 100% Halloween and beer! He doesn’t have to worry about social media algorithms, or copycat sites, or any of the stupid things that drive her nuts.
She wants him to not exist. And she keeps telling everyone that the he doesn’t exist. But it’s no good. They already know he doesn’t exist, so their ‘belief’ in him is a perverse love of the strange, the weird, the hokey, the urban legends of the world.
His existence provides her with a very nice income. And every time she sees the ad revenue appear in her bank account, she feels another drop of acid on her heart.
All she wants os for people to stop pretending-they-believe-in-the-Jersey-Devil, and for them to start just say they don’t believe.
Of course, she’ll be out of business, then. She’ll have no way to support herself. She has no idea how she’d support herself.
But she stopped connecting those things a long time ago. She stopped thinking “If he didn’t exist, I’d be broke and in trouble”, and all she thinks is “It’s another paycheck from that thing I hate“.
Go ahead. Believe in the Catskills Devil. Make up some stories. Put something on the internet.
Somebody keep the myth alive.
Why shower all this love on the Jersey Devil? Why give it to someone who doesn’t care?
Why not give all your mythical belief to someone who really, really needs it?
…all right. Perhaps she doesn’t need it. Perhaps she’d actually hate the scrutiny, the searchlights, the constant possibility of intrepid hikers or reporters ready to make her life miserably by announcing that she was real.
But she won’t know that until he’s gone and she has risen. And if, by then, it’s much too late, if such a world would leave her broke and chased-down and miserable…
…why spoil a bone-deep hatred and obsession with the inconvenience of consequences?
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!
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June 5, 2020
Doom Gluttony
[And I have just finished the second and almost-final draft of “I Hate Your Prophecy”. Most excerpts are on my Patreon, but I wanted to put this up for you.]
And still did the White Wizards feast on hunger.
Sometimes they had plenty. They drank wines reserved for generations of families which were now certain they’d reached an end. They cracked the marrow of ideas which might have lived very much longer, if they’d been kept in the hands of the right authorities. They sucked up donations from every portion of the world.
But much of that money went forth. A hypocrite would enjoy eating a meal, donated to a holy cause, by someone who felt that the spirit needed revivification more than the flesh. But a true believer would send the money straight back into the world, to try to stem the tend of Villainy. And the vast majority of White Wizards were true believers; even the ones who saw a few of them gorging on donated morsels merely said: “This must be their way. They must need the sustenance to keep up the fight.”
To doubt the fitness of the white robe of your colleague was to doubt the fitness of your own. And while, in a larger sense, White Wizards knew that Evil could be anywhere and was everywhere, they also knew that nobody could see Evil as well as they. And if they didn’t see it in themselves, it wasn’t there; if they could spot Evil far away, how could they miss it up close?
For all their learning, no-one had ever successfully taught White Wizards the meaning of “myopia”.
Where there was panic, there was a White Wizard. Where there was fear, there was a White Wizard. Where there was pain, there was a White Wizard.
Once you have enough White Wizards, they will have diverse feelings and motives.
This one will tear down the village to save it from a worse fate.
That one will encourage the village to tear itself down, to show that it has learned the most important of lessons.
And if some other one just really, really likes to see wreckage…
Look: Who can blame the White Wizards for being intoxicated? For drowning in their own fear, their own hope, their own conviction? White Wizards were passion incarnate, and if that meant that their beliefs didn’t always predict Reality, that just showed how wrong reality is.
It’s that damned Broken Rune.
And there’s that ugly challenge about being a trencherman for cataclysm:
There’s never enough Apocalypse to feed the emptiness in your gut.
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!
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June 4, 2020
“Come To The Dark Side – We Have Uranium”
(This is a piece from my Steampunk rock opera, “Absinthe Heroes.” Note that it’s sung by two protagonists – Chastity, and Captain Adastra – and the antagonist, Dr. Antikythera. Note also that, as with much of my Steampunk writing, I’ve intentionally left in some parts which make sense in a 19th century setting, but in the 20th century, are designed to make you say, “Waaaaaait a minute…”)
Dr. Antikythera:
Come join with me
We have riches untold
Lovers so bold
Your breath will steam;
Glories on so very vast a scale
Your waking life will outsail
Your greatest of dreams!
It’s true, a few will perish in pain
But we’ll cherish the rain
That wipes away grief.
The riches of the world to be plucked;
Concubines to construct
A soothing relief.
Think of the civilization we’ll will
Our workings will fill
The sea, land and space!
Indeed, the very ether we’ll plumb
No Golden Age will come —
We’ll do better:
Uranium!
And lace!
Sure, some millions will be dead
And a few will be fed
To tyrannosaurs, on
The Solstice eve…
Ah, but some murder
Might take you further
And truly great things
You’ll–
Achieve!
Captain Adastra:
You must be mad
You must be mad
No-one could say that
If he were sane
Too much absinthe
Too much smoke
Somewhere your mind
Was stained
With something awful
Something dire
Some inhuman
Mire
Chastity:
You must be evil
You must be evil
Born without a soul
Like an ogre
Like a ghoul
Like a troglydite
Or troll
Some creature out
Of myth
Dark as pitch
And pith
Adastra and Chas:
But there’s a problem
There’s a problem
And it’s solid as a stone
If you’re mad
Or if you’re evil–
You are not alone
Adastra:
The world is mad
The world is mad
It’s mad, far as
I can tell
It’s human folly
To say “sane” or “mad”
As if it were some kind
Of spell
You can’t chain it up
With speech;
That’s past human reach.
Chastity:
Is there evil?
There is evil
You may be evil,
I admit
But you’re half evil
And half otherwise
And for I, too
That fits
I’d try you on
As ruler;
We’ve had crueler.
Adastra and Chastity:
You make an excellent proposition
Why should we give opposition?
Adastra:
I want to see the wonders come.
Chastity:
I want to hear the engines hum
Adastra:
It may be horrible, and then some–
Chastity:
But without risk, you’re a ghost.
Adastra:
I’ll take your hand; I’ll take your side.
Chastity:
Let’s try the things that none have tried.
Adastra:
I’ll do my damnedest, and with pride.
Chastity:
I’ll drink to that
An absinthe toast.
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 “Come To The Dark Side – We Have Uranium” appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.
June 3, 2020
On Demon Runeswords
[Almost all of the standalone stories from my upcoming novel, “I Despise Your Prophecy”, are going on my Patreon. This is a rare story that’s going in both places, because I feel it fits here well.]
Demons were fond of The Dark Lord for many reasons. Some were caused by the White Wizards themselves, though (as usual) they neither knew, nor seemed to care.
If one had really studied one’s usage of extraordinary weapons in times of war (“Death at the Speed of Magic”, by Watt and Evans, was widely acknowledge as the right source to read for this purpose, or—for the slightly ‘busier’, ie, lazier spellcasters, it was more ‘the sort of book to leave hanging around your home’—you’d know something important:
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.
(Hymnia had seemed bothered by her cleaver’s almost-in-tune humming. Susane had simply screamed over it. Drina, who stayed not long, seemed to have put actual stoppers in her ears; not a good survival tactic.)
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 Alice is still alive, of course.
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June 2, 2020
Civil Servant
And I, in both public and private incarnation, am reflecting on my life. I’ve fought long and hard for a simple goal, and have, in the main, failed. Nevertheless, I maintain a stiff upper lip. We persevere. Onwards! Always onwards!
“Civil Servant”
I have worked with greatest diligence
To lead a life of great responsibility civic
Thirty years I have spent as a servant of the people
A responsibility to weighty as to be megolithic
I try very hard to do what is right and proper
I spend no idle hours at all
And I am yet left with this single damnable question:
Why won’t the Great Old Ones rise up and devour us all?
Thirty years of fiduciary care
Fifteen wearing the necklace mayoral
Forty years of asacred rites unholy
Worship furtive and bloody and eerily choral
And the impudent works of worthless Mankind
Utterly fail to fall into the seas
Rivers run mostly with water, seldom with blood
Despite my thoroughly heartfelt pleas
I’ve found no success as a servant
Of the gibbering mouth, the wird uncanny flute
And I must rely instead on human nature –
A barely adequate substitute
I follow in the sad footsteps of my father
A stern, cold, observant Puritan
Preaching by day, then trying every moonless night
To make the reign of the ancient ones secure again
He burnt so many witches he became emphasymic
His rasped dying words which assured my fate
So I hold intolerably long urban planning meetings
And design postal errors which make most mail late
And the impudent works…
Still, I hold this consolation
As I try to pull down the Age of Man
I have caused inordinate distress
Within a brief mortal span
I’m a warlock of paper,
An archfiend of crimson tape
I try to open up my heart a bit more each day
And let a little evil escape.
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!
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June 1, 2020
A Little Ignition
Once there was a town that found a witch, so they set out to burn her. Only it seemed wise also to burn her house as well, for it was known to be the center of a large collection of books of forbidden lore. No-one had seen them; but one doesn’t need to see these things; what else would a witch read?
So they sent a team of villagers into the forest to collect more wood to make sure that they could burn both the witch and the house, because parts of the house were stone, and would need some encouragement—not every wall would melt, but presumably all perishable things would be destroyed. Only, once in the woods, one of the wood-gatherers clearly heard another mention to a friend, in what he presumably thought was a private voice, that it was a shame; she’d always seemed like a nice old lady.
Instantly, the hero confronted the witch-lover, who immediately denied having ever said such a thing; but her companion verified that it was so. She said that her so-called ‘friend’ was always going around saying nice things about witches, and she had just been hanging around to keep a close eye on the situation. One of the wood-gatherers struck the witch-lover from behind, and they dragged her back to the town square. Soon both witches (oh, they were both witches; do you know what they found in her house? Books)—both witches were tied to large, sturdy stakes, in front of the first witch’s house, but there was a problem: they didn’t live next door to each other, and there was a third house in-between. This was going to be inconvenient. Unless…
The house’s owner wasn’t home, and there were no books inside, but he had, it turned out, drawn some scurrilous pictures of some of the town’s most prominent figures. So he was quickly found, and caught, but there was a wrinkle: he said that one of the town’s most highly-placed figures had paid him to make those drawings. The councilwoman wasn’t in the crowd, but by sheer good luck (of course) her ex-husband was, and he explained to the horrified onlookers that, indeed, his ex-wife had been a witch, and, of course, the moment he found out, he left her, but he feared her too much to reveal the truth, until now, in this moment, when at last witches were being revealed…
It was then that the first witch’s house began to smoke.
“Sorcery!” cried the townspeople—but no; it was simply someone who’d grown impatient with talk. And the crowd might have debated the wisdom of this act—some started to say it was rash, some started to say it was overdue—when they smelled smoke. The Council Hall was on fire. The crowd rushed over, and standing in front was the woman who’d almost won the election three times. “They’re witches all!” she screamed. And some began to question her, when, again, they smelled smoke.
It turned out that many had gone into the witch-burning, house-igniting business, because they realized they could finally reveal all the witches among them. Did they realize that, while they scorched the homes of monsters, someone else was bunching kindling around the homes they’d just left?
Who would have thought the whole town was made of witches? But it was, and it’s a good thing that they burned it down.
For so, too, were all the farms on the outskirts of town, feuding since time immemorial, each witches, under careful watch by others, and so was the tax-collector, and so was the nearby Embassy, and the whole town up the road had always been suspicious, and…
…it’s fortunate that this is just a story. For human beings are rational, and they hate Evil and its ilk; they are not petty, not driven by little grievances, not sly or obscure about their motives. Whoever would burn down a neighbor’s house falsely? No-one, for they would surely know that, in such a world, someone could, in the very same way, burn your house.
This was the town that burned the witch; this was the witch-burning that burned the town; this was the town-burning that set the countryside aflame; this was the flaming countryside that consumed the cities; these were the smoldering cities that blew huge sparks in all direction; that was the kingdom that burned to the ground, and the survivors had learned a valuable lesson: There must be a lot of witches in the world.
Never had so many flames lit the night; but never had visibility been so poor, for in every eye, and in every set of lungs, there were great fistfuls of soot.
And if it’s hard, so hard for the survivors to breathe, at least it’s a cleansing blackness in the center of their lungs.
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May 31, 2020
A Lying Poem
This is the poem that almost rhymes,
It almost rhymes
so many times,
but just when you think that it’s going to rhyme,
it doesn’t,
this damn poem.
This is the poem with rhythmic zest
Whose lines all do their emphatic best
To neither rhyme nor rhythm possess,
no rhythm,
no rhythm,
no rhyme.
This is the poem that’s only true.
And if something’s wrong, it must be you.
None of these lines tell lies; so renew
your trust in the rhythm,
and rhyme,
and rhyme,
in the absence of rhythm and rhyme.
This is the poem that easily fades
From memory; each part evades
Remembrance. And no part wades
Through your mind, your mind;
it’s most unkind;
no rhythm,
no rhythm,
no rhyme,
no rhyme,
and now you find,
you can’t even remember
why you first consigned
thoughts to this poem
and now, disaligned,
your brain and your heart made a pact that’s signed
in the blood that pulses with rhythm and rhyme,
but if you can’t find,
the rhythm,
the rhythm,
the rhyme,
or the rhyme,
who knows what rebellion
your life’s blood’s assigned
to the foolish thoughts of the foolish mind
which drowned in the sea of this poem,
and brined
your senses in salt-water and disinclined
your head from swimming back upwards to find
whatever you sought in the rhythm and rhyme,
as if somewhere inside
this poems had rhythm or rhythm or rhyme to hide,
that evades your mind as you try to see
through the shades
of the shadowy rhythm and rhyme.
This is the poem that doesn’t rhyme,
the poem that rhymes zero parts of the time,
not even a poem,
just some words that chime,
but never with rhythm,
with meter,
with rhyme,
no rhythm,
no meter,
and no keeping time,
no pattern,
no words,
no letters,
just crime.
The crime of Hope:
the hopeful crime,
the Hope that there is reason
or rhyme,
the crime of Hope in a difficult time,
the crime of hope
when all sense says: “Resign!”
the crime of hope,
when there’s no hope to find,
just like no rhythm,
no meter,
no rhyme,
just truth,
the same sort of truth
that you’ll find
if you think hope is lost
and the world must unwind
and that everything’s broken,
and all is unkind,
remember the poem
without any rhyme,
there’s no hope at all,
and no rhythm to find,
no meter, no rhythm,
no rhyme,
no rhyme,
unless,
unless,
there’s been some kind
of lying; if too much untruth
made us blind,
as we’re all overwhelmed,
and the world’s oft-unkind,
in which case,
please pause,
and,
in fact,
unbind,
let tension release; unwind, unwind,
let yourself loose, let your mind, your mind,
unroll, unfold, be un-entwined
with the things you’re afraid
that you cannot find,
for though this poem
is made of lies,
some lies are a kind of truth,
I find,
and most of us are most inclined
to believe the lies that are most unkind,
but the treasure you might seek to find
is buried,
is buried,
already,
in your mind,
seek it!
seek it!
Don’t leave it
unrhymed.
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May 30, 2020
The Girl From M.O.N.S.T.E.R.
Once there was a spy who was very, very afraid.
Much of what she feared was—as so common in human affairs—that which she did not know. Namely, she did not know that she was a spy. Or, to put it more clearly (and if this confuses you, imagine how she felt!) she didn’t know what kind of spy she was, or what she was supposed to be doing.
But every month, she received a very generous check from M.O.N.S.T.E.R. (Miscreants Organized Nastily, Sloppily, and Terrifyingly towards Eternal Ruination). It was a very neat, very professional check, issued by a reputable payroll company. Too reputable; it would, by no means, speak in any way of its clients, even if you worked for one of them, about any specifics; unless you could show that your paycheck was missing, overcharged, or undercharged, they would not disclose corporate secrets. And that was her problem: while it was quite a generous compensation, she had no idea if it was an overcharge or an undercharge, and the problem wasn’t that it was missing; the problem was that it was here.
Because she’d looked up the organization. It had a very bland, very polite, very corporate website which spoke of its work doing legitimate detective work: investigating financial malfeasance, marital infidelities, international data theft, and so forth. It was very, very firm that it acted only in appropriate ways, through well-trained agents, acting within both the spirit and the letter of the law; firm in exactly the kind of way that lets you know, with a subtle wink and a certain implicit sideways glance, that this was where to find black-hat hackers, thieves, and the sword of people who’d stick a knife between your ribs for six pounds and a half-eaten biscuit.
And she was on their payroll.
It did not look like the kind of organization which made mistakes. It did look like the kind of organization which, in the very rare offchance that it had made a mistake, would give a little polite chuckle and explain all the details; it was quite obviously the kind of organization which made mistakes disappear.
And that was a challenge, because she had no memory whatsoever about being any kind of spy.
There were three basic possibilities here:
There had been some terrible mistake. The checks were supposed to go elsewhere. Someday, they would figure it out, track her down, take the money back, and disappear her – body and all.
She really was an agent for them, but they’d suppressed her memories. And someday, on command, she’d awaken, and then she’d do…all manner of horrible things. She wouldn’t want to. She’d have to. And then the police would find her, and she’d be locked up, with angry convicts and horrible, horrible memories.
She’d already done the unspeakable things, and she’d shut away those memories. Only… that couldn’t last. Not on what they were paying her. And someday the memories would return, and they would break her. She was sure of it, absolutely certain.
It’s not like she was far from broken already. She’d had to quit her day job; she was just too stressed to do it. She stayed home all day, starting at her phone, wondering what would happen next.
THE END.
…no, just kidding, you deserve to know what really happened.
See, she’d once had an executive assistant at her office. And she was horrible to her executive assistant. She might not have been all that nice a person. And also, the executive assistant rubbed her the wrong way.
One day, the Executive Assistant won the lottery. They didn’t tell anyone. They didn’t quite their job.
But they did fly down to the M.O.N.S.T.E.R. offices in New York City.
None of it was illegal in any way. Nobody was threatening anyone. They were even sending the recipient lots of money.
But she did quit her job, making life much, much better for the executive assistant.
And if she’s at home all day, wondering what terrible thing is going to happen to her…
….well, her guilty conscience is her own damn fault.
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!
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