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The butterfly sword of chaos is never the same twice. But then, neither is its wielder. The sword changes those who bear it, transforming, transfiguring. The temple where you found it was a ruin, roof caved in, snow-covered floor. When you took it from the statue of the smiling god in the temple, it didn’t look like a sword at all. It perched on that stone hand, a frozen butterfly, its forlorn wings outstretched.
My sister Sera was twelve standard years old when our parents confined her to our family habitat. They kept her there for over a year, and then they died far from home (expedition, landslide). I’ll never know if they were seeking a cure for Sera, or a way to protect the world from her. They must have died mid-morning, but I didn’t learn about it until I left Sera’s side to make lunch. The habitat’s weak AI played their pre-recorded message once I was alone.
I came to the city to find an egg. A robin’s egg, to be precise, an oval of pale, perfect blue that echoed the spring sky. Inside, not a robin, but an emerald. Inside the emerald, a wizard’s heart. He had decided he missed it, and he wanted it back. It was the usual sort of thing, or so he had assured me. His heart taken out and stored for safekeeping, a place where his enemies—and certainly there were many, jealous of his power—would never think to look. So well hidden, in fact, that he himself was no longer quite certain where it was.
For the last day we have together, I thought we could go back to Io, where I saw you for the first time. Her volcanoes will be reflected on your solar array once again. We will bathe in her Plasma Torus until our sensors tingle so hard we can’t take it any more. Then I will make a bouquet for you to carry on your way home: sulfur for passion, oxygen for remembrance, and sodium, for good luck.
The house wakes from its somnolence as the witch trudges up the path made of tarts. Through its rock-candy windows, the house scans her figure for any signs of hurt. The witch’s errands in the city make her nervous. And the house, being made of her magic and therefore of the witch, worries along with her that the wrong person might recognize her, or simply think they do.
In the eternity of star-ache where space coils around matter like a wounded animal, I hang in agony. Three supermassive black holes lurk in the corner of my hearing, each in a different corner of the galaxy cluster. Triangulation points. The calculation is redone every 4.5 microseconds, balm and torture both to my space-stretched mind. The ship’s computer tugs ceaselessly at my fragile gray matter.
When the giants came through the valley, they made footprints as long as the Santa Monica Promenade, as wide as Dodgers’ Stadium. They crushed dance studios, keto cafes, a waterpark. They left trails of steep-sided ravines with walls of stratified clay and crumbling asphalt, and this is where we now live. Sunset comes earlier down here, but it could be worse.
If there’s one thing that makes Starship Captains cranky, it’s the stupid crisis that forces them to turn the ship around and head back to whatever planet they just left. It’s a function of the wormhole drive. You have to be a certain distance away from the nearest sun before you turn it on, or else you’ll blow up. So you must go sub-light while still within solar systems.
Fejértorony There’s dysphoria, and then there’s turning into a mid-size city. But sometimes you try male, you try female, you try different kinds of nonbinary and it only makes you realize that something still doesn’t quite fit, something fundamental. There is a mismatch. I realized after my friend Juli moved abroad and became a library; […]
I understand why you became a ladybug. The ladybug is one of Earth’s jewels. Shapeshifters from all across the universe enjoy the ladybug form as a gentle introduction to our planet’s native transformative experiences. I’ve heard many a shapeshifter rhapsodize about the pleasures of tearing yourself free from the carapace of a ladybug’s instar-self not once but three times, with pupa and imago forms still to come. One visitor I assisted spent seven years as a ladybug.
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