The Lesser Evil: Choosing a Social Media Platform

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For the last half hour or so, I’ve been absorbed in a painful, boring exercise in which I have absolutely no interest. I’ve been squirming in my seat, thoughts wandering and eyes roving about the room in search of literally anything else I might do, and my sense of impatience has been growing all the while. 

And what is this mind-numbing, agonizing activity that has me waxing so dramatic? What is it that has me so bitter and restless?

The hunt for a good social media platform—that’s what.

Now to call it a “hunt” isn’t entirely accurate, because I know what my options are. It’s just a matter of deciding which of them will be less of a hassle to use—which one will eat up the least of my time, be the least addictive, and leave the least bitter taste in my mouth.

Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok.

I like none of them, and there are, if you ask me, about a zillion reasons to keep far away from all of them.

And yet, my hands are tied.

See, I love writing genre fiction. I’m happy to sit and churn out lurid little stories about giant bugs, roman centurions, sex demons, and all sorts of other sordid subjects. But all these stories won’t do anything except accumulate on my janky website if I don’t make the effort to properly hawk them in the online marketplace.

And even though I’ve made great strides in the last few months towards being less guarded and self-conscious about my work, even though I’ve been linking to my blog posts on LinkedIn like a good little professional, I still haven’t taken that all-important step of establishing a solid social media presence.

LinkedIn is great for promoting myself as the kind of writer who’ll whip you up a flyer, or a landing page, or who’ll do a guest post on your blog. But I’m not necessarily keen to promote my fiction on the same platform where I try to convince prospective employers that I’d make a good addition to their company.

And if I’m being honest, I’m a hell of a lot more invested in the fiction I write than in the prospect of finding success as a copywriter or content writer.

But if I want my fiction to be anything other than a squalid, secretive little pastime, I need to hold my nose and start using social media more aggressively, and in a way that focuses entirely on those stories that I’m less willing to promote on LinkedIn.

So here I am, running through my options, trying to settle on which social media platform is the lesser of several evils.

Facebook, on the one hand, is a toxic nebula of regurgitated conspiratorial fractals whose origins are as mysterious as those of the universe.

Twitter is a seething, myopic rage mill which both churns out and obliterates imaginary online prestige, to say nothing of the recent ugliness surrounding Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform.

There’s plenty to say about the narcissism and image-obsession that Instagram fosters but, evils aside, it seems to like it’s just not a sound choice for someone whose stock-in-trade is words without images.

As for Tumblr, I feel like it suffers from the same problem as Instagram, namely that it is a place for images more than for words.

TikTok has intrigued me from time to time, and I’ve often pondered the possibility of using the platform for goofball, dramatic readings of my work. But when I look at the endless video-feed that it offers its users, and consider my own addictive personality, I shudder to think how it might swallow me up and leave me unable to write all.

So, from where I’m sitting, none of these options are looking great. 

But regardless of all there is to dislike about these platforms— and there is an absolute shitload to dislike about them— the fact is that I need to pick one.

As Jan tells Pam in season 2 of The Office, there will always be a million reasons not to do something. This is absolutely true of leveraging social media, and there is one massive, undeniable reason to ignore all these down sides and just pick a platform:

Social media means the difference between recognition and obscurity.

And while I’m not desperate for praise, affirmation, and disingenuous back pats, I do want to get noticed. I want people to read my stuff and enjoy it. I want a little bit of an audience. I want to write for others as much as I want to write for myself.

And even though social media brings with it all the narcissistic, myopic, and addictive dangers I’ve bemoaned here, it’s just plain useful. And short of standing on a soapbox on the street corner and reading my stories through a megaphone, it’s the most straightforward and cost effective way there is to make myself heard.

So I’ll pick a platform, stick with it, and do my best to make it work for me. Let’s just hope I don’t lose myself along the way.

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Third Wheel

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The book was bound in plain leather. It wasn’t human skin, near as Lyle could tell, and it wasn’t sewn together with sinews or inked in blood or anything so elaborate.

It was just plain old leather — shit quality leather, actually. The stuff they called “genuine,” and which was the absolute bottom of the barrel. The pages were thin and the cheap stitching barely held them together. But of course, none of that mattered.

A discount-store diary could hold the scribbled ravings of a dead and damned conjurer just as well as an illuminated tomb bound in the skin of some taboo mammal. The words were all that mattered.

The words were all that mattered, and Lyle read them aloud, cross legged in an empty room, by the light of a lone candle.

The circle of light it cast was barely an arm’s length wide, and barely extended beyond the top of his head. Outside of that little hemisphere of illumination, the darkness was complete, and looked as if it might stretch away for miles in every direction.

When Lyle spoke the words by the weak light of the candle, she emerged from that darkness just as the text promised. She went naked, hips swaying as she walked towards him, violet skin aglow in the flickering light. Lyrial was her name, so said the scribbles, and she would be his for as long as he allowed her to remain outside Hell’s vault.

On the first night, it was one hour. On the second it was two, and soon he was spending whole days with his summoned companion before sending her slinking back into the darkness.

It was on the seventh day that he first saw the fleeting flash of eyes in the void beyond the candlelight, leering at him as he lay entangled with Lyrial. It was on the ninth day that he saw them for certain, watery, unblinking, pale yellow.

On the twelfth day, Lyle saw for the first time the hunched, claggy thing to which the eyes belonged.

Lyrial did not take kindly to his screams, and stormed out when it became clear he would not touch her while it looked on. The watcher waited an hour before following Lyrial into the darkness, and Lyle was weak from trembling by the time it heaved itself out of sight.

The next time Lyle read from the book was years later, on a lonely night when those eyes and their owner were all but forgotten. He waited in the candlelight for Lyrial to appear — to stride out of the black and come to comfort him. His guts were afire, skin tingling in anticipation of her touch.

But she didn’t come this time, and after an hour of waiting, Lyle gave up.

He blew out his candle in dejection, but just before darkness swallowed him up entirely, a pair of leering eyes blinked open just a few feet away.

Lyrial hadn’t come, but Lyle would not be alone that night.

Just What We All Need: Another Personal Article About Burnout!

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For the last week, I’ve been doing nothing.

I know, I know—just a few days ago I was waxing melodramatic about how I need to write every day or risk falling into a withdrawn state of angst and self loathing.

I know I’ve talked in the past about the importance of grinding through periods of writer’s block, and about the value of keeping at it, even when it seems like I’m not able to produce anything worthwhile.

But earlier this week I found myself feeling foggy, exhausted, and unsure about…well…everything.

For the past few months, I’ve been been burning the candle at both ends—and in the middle too, if I’m being honest.

I’ve been trying to publish one new short story and one new blog post every week, as well as maintaining a presence on LinkedIn, teaching myself to use ChatGPT for some reason, and working on a novel, and making sure that I read at least one chapter of a book every day.

On top of all this, I’ve been working a full time job, making preparations for a move across the country, conducting a job hunt in anticipation of said move, and making sure I exercise daily.

Basically, I’ve been doing too many things, and in a way that isn’t thoughtful or intentional enough, and which hasn’t left me any time to recharge, recalibrate, and evaluate the progress I’ve been making.

So early last week, in the thick of a bad bout of brain fog, I decided to toss my to-do list for the week, and permit myself to do nothing for a few days.

And that’s what I’ve been doing since Monday. Well, sort of.

I’ve been watching TV, journaling, reading (for its own sake, and without any particular goal in mind), and thinking. So I’ve been doing plenty.

But I haven’t had any goals, or metrics, or lists of things on whose completion the success of my days depends. I’ve just been doing what I feel like, moment to moment, and letting myself recharge and reorient in the meantime.

I’ve had some interesting insights in this time, not the least of which being that I’ve been trying to do too much recently. I’ve realized how pointless busyness can be if it isn’t focused and thoughtful, and if it doesn’t allow time for rest.

I’ve realized that much of what I was doing, I was doing simply because it’s what other people were doing. I’ve been frantic because of the uncomfortable sense that even a moment of inactivity would cause me to fall behind everyone else, and become obsolete and out of touch.

Basically, I found myself in a position where I was remaining consistent in a bunch of worthwhile practices, and enjoying none of them.

Hell, I wasn’t even enjoying reading and writing fiction, because the fact that I had so many other things going on made it feel like a hassle to include those two all-important aspects of my life.

And when the two greatest joys of your life have lost their lustre, you know you have a problem.

So, needless to say, I’m going to be doing things differently from here on out.

For starters, I won’t be posting so may stories and blogs. I haven’t settled on an exact schedule, as I’m still figuring this out, but it’ll definitely be less than my previous cadence of two posts per week.

Most of the other changes will probably end up being more personal, and won’t have any bearing on what I post online, so I don’t see much need to discuss them here. But I did just want to pop my head up to explain why I’ve been silent for the last few days, and to admit that I’ve been asking too much of myself recently.

I’m still figuring out the best way to live as a writer, and I’m a long way from solving that puzzle. All I can say for the moment is that I’ve been going about it wrong until now.

Maybe not entirely wrong, but still…well…wrong.

For now, thanks for reading, and rest assured you haven’t heard the last of me.

There’ll be plenty more to come.

The Stone Men

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Ciaran watched the two stone men move with a sense of disgust that he couldn’t quite account for.

They moved as men did, their limbs bent where limbs ought to bend, and their proportions were right. But somehow that made it all the worse — to see something made of shaped stones move like a human body. It was uncanny, and unsettling.

They darted about on the practice pitch, wielding wooden swords like extensions of their slate gray bodies. They’d thrashed into submission every man who’d stood before them so far, and none who waited at the sidelines seemed overeager to take their turn against the thoughtless fighting statues.

The druids had marched the stone men out of their mountain holdfast three days before, chanting over them, waving their hands, and looking furtively about in satisfaction at the bewildered stares that their creations attracted.

The stone men were the future of the Warband, said the hunched wise men through snow white beards. They would bring victory, swift and final. They would keep the tribe’s flesh and blood out of harm’s way — save them for better aims and longer lives. A new age was upon them all, said the druids, where warlike ways and risk were but memories.

Rejoice, said the druids.

But when Ciaran watched the stone men fighting, he saw an empty future. An idle future. A future without purpose — especially for a warrior like him.

And when he looked about him, he saw the same foreboding in the eyes of his kinsmen, who stood with him by the practice pitch where the druids’ stone men were making their spectacle.

Like him, they were watching their life’s work come to nothing. They were seeing future glories snatched from hands made impotent and soft. Their aspirations were evaporating before their eyes.

And that, Ciaran realized, was the source of his disgust. It wasn’t the shape of the stone men, or their movements, or their blank faces.

It was what they represented. It was the end of striving, of struggling, and of personal triumph, that creations such as these must bring about.

They would be his undoing, and the undoing of his battle brothers.

Measures must be taken. The druids and their hubris must be calmed, corrected. Ciaran’s fist tightened about his club. The time was now.

He shoved the man to his right, and then the one to his left, and both stumbled forwards into the ring with the two stone men. They barely had an eyeblink to orient themselves before the faceless automatons leaped to and brought their weapons to bear, and in a flash fresh combat was joined as Ciaran’s sword brothers mounted a frantic defense.

The clack of wooden practice weapons sounded in the silence, the stone men’s joints ground with their movements, and their flesh-and-blood opponents grunted and huffed as they came under attack.

But but even as he heaved his friends forward into the fray, Ciaran flung himself past the two stone men as they bore down on his comrades. As he did, he felt the cold and coarse caress of their stony limbs against his, and shivered even as he roared and raised his cudgel above his head.

Behind the stone men, the Druids chanted and waved their arms, animating their malign creations with whispered words and strange magicks. Ciaran knew that there could be no victory in battle against the stone men. But their creators, the druids, were flesh and blood. They were old. They were soft.

And the moment Ciaran lit among those aged conjurers and lashed out with his weapon, silencing their infernal chanting with the crack of wood against bone, the stone men faltered and fell. They were nothing without the prattling and hand-waving of their progenitors.

At once, all present saw what must be done, and they surged forward as one, leaping over the lifeless stone men, forgetting them altogether as they descended on the druids.

There would be no future where the idle watched dead things do their work for them. The Warband would not be weakened by the tricks and mutterings of old men and their weird ways.

The world was for beings of flesh and blood. And it was their lot to live and die as they might, to make their own choices, to make their own mistakes, and to accept the consequences of their actions.

As for the Druids, they had made their last mistake, and Ciaran gritted his teeth and smiled as he and his Warband doled out the consequences.

Gods blast your bright future, with its ease and its safety. He thought. And Gods blast your stone men!

I Don’t Want to Write. I Need to Write.

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I don’t write because it’s a sure way to a sense of satisfaction, or to a warm and fuzzy feeling of accomplishment.

True, writing does often get me into an 0h-s0-sublime state of flow. But just as often it leaves me grumbling and questioning whether I should even bother with it at all.

Sometimes I’ll agonize over the same paragraph for an hour—revising, rewriting, and rewording, only to end up with something even worse than the piece of crap I started with.

I might have the best idea I’ve had in weeks. I might be over the moon with excitement at the prospect of putting it into words and sharing it with the world. I might be tripping over myself in my hurry to get to work.

But sometimes I’ll fail to find the right words, and that great idea fizzles out, fades into the background noise in my head, and I lose it forever.

Other times, there’s not even an idea. There’s only an empty page, a mind full of fog, and a vague sense that I should be writing—but nothing more.

I’ll sit at my writing desk, hunched over, with a knot of frustration winding ever tighter in my chest as I question whether I ever had anything worthwhile to say at all.

I’ve spent entire writing sessions glaring bitterly at a half-written sentence, only to delete it and and end the day with out producing anything.

Writing is one of my greatest sources of despair, confusion, and anxiety. Sometimes I convince myself that I’d be better off having never gotten into in the first place.

But that, of course, implies that I had a choice to begin with.

It implies that writing was something I decided to try out, or take up, like a hobby. It assumes that writing is a transaction, or an investment on which I can expect a return. Labour in exchange for some sort of compensation.

But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

For me, writing is a compulsion. Writing is like scratching my ear, stretching my arms over my head, or clearing my throat.

It’s automatic, and when the urge to do it strikes, resistance is futile.

Or, at the very least, resistance is painful.

Sometimes, when I’ve endured a few days of writer’s block, or have churned out a few reams of schlock that I can barely stand to read, I’ll decide that a break from writing is in order.

I’ll tell myself that that’s enough for now, that my tank is empty, and that I should give it a rest.

But whenever I cave to that impulse, the result is always the same.

I might enjoy the first day or two of freedom. I might really feel like I’m doing the right thing by taking some time out to replenish my creative juices.

But that complacent sense of ease is soon subsumed by a restlessness that fast becomes disdain, and not long after turns into an agitation that verges on unbearable. My thoughts start to run together, my sense of orientation in the world gets fuzzy, and I find myself feeling like only half a person.

If, on the other hand, I force myself to suffer through those periods of low output—or just plain mediocre output—I always come out better for it.

Sometimes the frustration lasts for an uncomfortably long time before abating, and sometimes it just tapers off, rather than ending in a sudden burst of creative energy. But however long it lasts, and however it ends, it will always be better than that empty, aimless feeling that is the alternative.

The fact is that stopping writing feels even worse than staring at a blank page and stewing as I fail to produce a single sentence. So even when it feels like I’ve lost the ability to write altogether, you’ll still find me trying.

After all, I don’t write because I want to. I write because I have to.

Phillip and the Sea

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Phillip loved how small the ocean made him feel. He never ceased to wonder at the sense of being unmade at the sight of that moonlit vastness.

The cruise ship was strung all over with gaudy starlight analogues. They stung the eyes and created a sense of electrified safety in which seafaring tourists could wander without worry. The world seemed to shrink beneath their hum. Phillip hated the lights.

But amidships, on the walkways that led down to the lower decks and zigzagged past the reach of the floating city’s ugly light, a person could lean out over the waves. A person could watch the numberless stars throng about the moon as it skipped across inky waters. A person could see the ocean for what it really was — an immensity overtopped only by the sky that it sought to emulate.

Here, a person could feel small.

Cares melted away at the thought of the universe that stretched for miles below the steel leviathan. There was perspective to be found in that briny lifegiver and mother. She contained the world, after all.

When Phillip leaned out over her after dusk, with the din of diversion and its attendant lightshow pulsing above, his imagination bubbled and swam at the sight of her.

Always she gave back the same sights, of the reflected moon and milky way, but he knew that she held more wonders than just these.

Most nights it was enough to imagine, and to watch the play of astral bodies across the eddying veil. But Phillip longed for the day when the sea might share her deeper secrets with him — when she might share with him her own vastness, and not the mere reflection of another.

Until then, he would lean. He would lean out a little further every night.

I’ve Been Getting Sick of my Own Writing

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Recently, I posted the final part of a Sword and Sorcery serial called Where the Woods Watch. I wrote it a long time ago—back in 2016-2017—and it’s been on ice since then. In the last couple months, as I’ve begun posting my fiction online, I decided that this was a great opportunity to revisit the story and put it out there for the world to read.

I was extremely proud of it at the time of writing, and I still am, but as I kept on posting new chapters, I noticed something surprising.

I was getting sick of it.

I enjoyed the process of resurrecting, revising, and editing an old project of mine. And I think it’s a fun story that was absolutely worth sharing. But as I plugged away at it, I realized that I’d painted myself into a corner. Once the first couple parts were up, I felt like I had to finish posting the rest of the story, and I didn’t like that.

Of course that’s not exactly true. I didn’t have to do anything, but I know it wouldn’t have sat right with me to leave my handful of readers high and dry. And even though there are some parts of the story that haven’t been read even once at the time of my writing this post, I still felt that by leaving it unfinished, I’d be letting someone down.

At the very least, it would have been a betrayal of myself—of the wide-eyed, whimsical early-twenties version of myself who’d written the story in the first place.

So I finished editing and posting it in its entirety, and I’m glad I did—even if that’s partly just because I’m glad to be finished with it.

Now that it’s finished, I’ve had some time to think about why I was so averse to seeing it all the way through to the end. I was excited for the the chance to share it, so why did I end up wanting to just get it over with?

In part, I blame my attention span. I barely have one at all, and I often get restless when working on protracted projects, no matter how excited I was to start them.

But more than that, I think it’s because I’m excited about writing on platforms like Medium and WordPress.com, and about the possibilities they offer.

When I started publishing on these platforms, I was posting old short stories that tended to run a bit long for online audiences. I realized this in the past few weeks, and have been getting anxious to try writing shorter flash fiction—the kind of stuff that not only accommodates my rapidly shifting attention, but that’s better suited to small, phone-sized browsers.

I definitely don’t want to give up on longer projects altogether, and I don’t want to funnel all of my work into a limiting, internet friendly format. But I am really excited to try writing some new stuff with online publishing in mind.

So going forward, I’m going to keep serving up the same kind of Sci-Fi and Fantasy stuff that I always have, but in a much more compact format. I’m going to write one-off, flash fiction for at least the next few weeks, and see how it goes.

And if it turns out that it doesn’t suit me, I’ll be able to break it off and head in a different direction without having to tie up loose ends or slog my way to the end of an unfinished narrative.

And in the meantime I will, of course, keep right on blogging about writing, and about that quiet desperation that keeps me doing what I do.

The Book

I’ve been reading the same book every night.

I bought it at a high price, and I’ve kept on paying for it ever since I brought it home.

I lean over it while I cook, bring it into the bathroom and open it over my bare knees. It’s with me on transit and in quiet moments at work. I fall asleep with it in my arms, mumbling the mad words that pour over its glimmering pages by their own power.

No-one wrote it. It has no subject. No story. No voice.

It contains every past and future, real and imagined. It is the sum of our ongoing reverie, of our rapture, our stillness, our terror. It speaks to me more than I actually read it. It tells me a new story every time I open it up.

Sometimes its pages are filled with neatly arrayed, impartial phrases arranged in an unassuming typeset. At others, it’s illuminated so beautifully that I forget the words altogether.

And sometimes the pages are torn by the savage scrawl that leaps and crawls across the white space. Sometimes the ink runs, and the book coughs up thoughts that are half begun, and that taper off unfinished.

Sometimes it spits its wild ravings at me as if it were a living thing, railing through rotten teeth and screaming out bitter hatred at all that lies outside itself.

It’s bound in slate gray. Its cover is unadorned, and belies the chaos within.

I’ve been reading my soul black ever since I brought it home. The world outside me has been shrinking and fading as the book sucks me further into the eternities it contains.

Within it is the breadth of the whole universe. The highs and bitter lows of human experience. It holds possibilities far and away beyond those of my meager life, and so I come back to it, again and again. Night after night.

Even when I cry out that I’ve had enough—when I hurl it across the room or run from my tiny apartment in hopes of escape—I always come back.

The leering shopkeep who sold it to me spoke of truths to be revealed, of limitless potential.

He wasn’t wrong. I’ve found much between the pages. I’ve found hours of idle wonder and rage, of bliss and despair.

But in those same pages, I’ve lost more than I care to think about.

Where the Woods Watch: Finale

Gaius stood at the edge of the chasm for a breathless moment, speechless and scarcely able to think straight. He took long, slow breaths, and resisted the urge to rest his palms on his knees.

Stand tall in victory, lest your glory be diminished.

This was the first thought to pierce the haze of his fatigue, and Gaius kept himself upright, even grinning at the grizzly thing’s fall. But as his moment’s triumph faded, and his eyes darted around the room, he remembered that they were trapped, and his face darkened.

He turned to Marcus, who stood with his toes skirting the ledge, looking down to follow the stricken anomaly’s descent.  Gaius joined him, watching the distant black lump fade into the obscurity below, and for a while neither spoke. It was Marcus who broke the silence.

“I believe, Centurion, that we are doomed. Eternal prisoners without bonds.” He spat over the edge. “I cannot think how we will ever escape this place.”

Gaius sighed. Marcus went on.

“Yet I am well pleased by our work here. I enjoyed the blows shared with these ridiculous robed corpses, and even more did I enjoy watching you cut down the oozing apparition they worshipped. I know not what or who it was, or what purpose it served other than to corrupt. But I know that it bore great significance to these dead men, and to our enemies on the surface. We have conducted matters well here below the earth.”

“So it is, Marcus,” said Gaius as he, too, spit over the edge. “We have done well, though I regret that you must meet your end in idleness down here.”

“Not idleness,” Scoffed the legionary, “but restfulness after a full day’s fighting. And at least,” he went on, eying Gaius’ filthy frame, covered in black gall, blood, and completely bare as the Barbarians had left him, “at least I will not meet my end looking like a boy who’s been playing in the mud.”

Both men burst out laughing, and Gaius loudest of all, having been reminded of his ridiculous state. They threw their heads back, eyes squeezed shut in their mirth. But when they finally opened them and saw the ceiling above, their laughter stopped.

The strange, pale light that filled the room was fading near the ceiling. The tangle of roots overhead was losing definition and sinking into darkness. From the ceiling downwards, a shadow was spreading, and as he saw this Gaius realized that the fear of the hanging thing’s fall was still in him, still felt by the shape’s ever living consciousness, and he knew that it must still be falling.

Bringing the light down with it.

“Centurion?”

Gaius grunted.

“Willing as I am to die, even in restful starvation, I do not relish doing so in darkness.”

“Nor I, Marcus, but there is nothing to be done. I think that dark shape was the source of the light in here. Or perhaps it simply took all the darkness into itself, for I would hardly call this light.”

Indeed, as the shared fear that ate at Gaius faded, fell further away, the darkness descended from the ceiling, matching pace.  Soon only blackness lay above, impenetrable and sagging, and all around them was twilight.

The two men stood unmoving—for what could they do?—as the dark descended about their heads, and then their waists, consuming them as water might. Soon there was nothing before Gaius’ eyes but blackness.

He heard Marcus’ heavy breathing, and imagined the uncertainty that must have gripped the Legionary then. But on top of that, now without visual distraction and with only his thoughts left to him, Gaius felt the plummeting spirit’s fear more keenly than ever even as it receded.

There was terrible anticipation of a violent impact, hatred of the small, clinging thing that had put an end to the brooding aeons of its existence, and frantic fear of that end. It had known life through time unmeasured, and now that life had run out.

The fear grew. Gaius shuddered and fought against it, but to no avail. Sweat sprang out all over him and chilled him in the cool subterranean air.

“Centurion?” he heard Marcus take a step in the dark, sandals scraping on the stone. Gaius willed himself to answer but found he could not form words.

“Gaius?” Concern carried on a voice no longer measured and stern.

But Gaius barely heard the pleading address, and was fully lost in the panic of the black thing’s final moments, for it knew now that the end of its fall was nigh.

Rushing air roared in Gaius’ ears and wind blasted his face, and he forgot altogether that he still stood safely outside of the pit. For a time, he was the falling entity, and he shared in the vividness of its demise. 

He felt the bottom of the abyss coming up from below by a change in the air, or something subtler. He saw mist whipping past now, illuminated even at incalculable depth. He closed his eyes against the vision, but the creature whose sight he shared did not, and he saw white billows and tendrils hurtling by behind his eyelids. He could not escape the anticipation of his doom.

In the final moments before impact, if that was indeed what waited at the end of the fall, Gaius perceived something else. Something hopeful, or gratifying, at least.

Destruction and oblivion might wait at the bottom of the pit, but not an end—not a true, irreversible end. For an instant, and he smiled to think it, engrossed in the doomed thing’s consciousness, Gaius knew that he—it—had left something behind. It would remain in the world in a new vessel.

And then the stream of consciousness ended. There was a short sensation of unravelling. He did not burst on the floor of the pit, nor was there any kind of impact. He simply came apart, felt his body turn to ribbons and air, and then he was fully returned to the cave with Marcus.

“GAIUS! AWAKEN!”

He sat on the ground while Marcus shook him violently by the shoulders. At first, he could not move, and his head flopped absurdly on a limp neck. He was still blind to his surroundings–that was no reverie—but he could picture the distress that Marcus’ face must show in his immodest display of worry.

Gaius guessed where that face must be, and struck out with an open hand.

“Soldier!” He connected with a crack, the shaking ceased, and he sat up. “Compose yourself! I am myself again.”

Silence answered him first, and then Marcus.

“It is well that you are back. The noises you made, centurion, and your limp form, worried me.”

Gaius guessed from the sound of Marcus’ voice that the legionary was still low to the ground, squatting most likely, and it occurred to him that he was fortunate to have real friends among the ranks of his underlings.

“Indeed, Marcus, I witnessed frightening things, and saw the fallen spirit’s destruction through its own eyes—or whatever semblance of them it has. It is now truly undone, so it seems, although—”

A roar sounded from the depths, and from the ceiling, and from the walls. The very air shook and Gaius felt the ground shift beneath him. He heard a low ripping sound, and realized that it must be the opening of fissures in the rock all about them.

The earth on all sides crumbled and cried out in its agony. Stones cascaded from the ceiling, striking Gaius all over, and he curled into a fetal ball beneath their onslaught, for there was nothing else to be done.

Elsewhere, he heard and felt larger pieces of the ceiling crashing against the walls and ledge. By the violence of the sounds, he was certain that they must be carving out whole sections of the meager ledge that encircled the room.

He shouted Marcus’ name. He shouted for him to make for cover and shield his head.

As if he would stand inert otherwise, Gaius thought in self-derision.

Whether his words came out at all Gaius knew not, so loud was the roar and crash about him. Even if they did, he doubted that they would reach Marcus through the din. 

And then, closer than all the others, he felt a colossal impact shake the ledge right next to his feet, and his body left the ground with the force of it. He came down hard and sprawled out on the slab, which by then was tilting crazily under the onslaught of falling stone.

Even though he knew he was trapped, doomed to waste away in the bowels of the earth, Gaius could not suppress his body’s need to protect itself, to scramble and vie against a more imminent end.

He kept his eyes open, searching the blackness for anything whereby he might orient himself. He willed them to adjust. Indeed, they would have adjusted by then, were he in the dark of the night, and not lost in the evil subterranean darkness of that forgotten place.

Then all at once a beam of light broke through from above, and Gaius squeezed his eyes shut in pained surprise.

First it was a sliver, then a thin ray, and then two rays, and then it was a pillar that descended from the jagged edges of an opening in the ceiling and washed the place in real light. Gaius’ eyes burned, his flesh warmed, and his surroundings were vivid.

All was silent.

He sat up, and as he did the heap of debris that had piled up around him shifted and tumbled away. He did not wait to catch his breath, nor did he check himself for injury. He stood up.

What a cursed racket. What a cursed bright light. What a cursed busy day, for day it must be, judging by those blinding rays.

He stared at the ceiling for moment and wondered if it really was sunlight that pierced the darkness, and, if so, how deep underground they really were.

Sunlight or not, I like it better than what came before it.

Here and there, pebbles and falls of dust broke away from the ceiling, but the collapse seemed to have stopped for the time being. Gaius stood on one of the only remaining sections of ledge, a jagged shard jutting from a battered and bare wall.

But it no longer thrust out over a bottomless pit. Indeed, the danger of falling to his death was no more. For at the centre of the room, directly over where the platform and chair had been, there climbed a heap of rubble.

Its base was at the same height as the shattered ledge, and it seemed as if the pit that had yawned below him had been filled to the brim, though how this was, he could not say.

The ceiling had receded as debris had fallen away from it. The walls, too, gaped in places where huge sections of rock had disintegrated, and their crafted perfection was a memory. But nowhere near enough had broken away to completely fill the chasm.

Impossible. Vulcan himself could melt the Alps and pour them into that cursed pit, and still it would scarce be half filled.

Gaius put the thought out of mind and scanned the changed room. From where he stood, it was clear that he could walk the circumference of the rubble heap, whose peak appeared to reach the new opening on the ceiling.

He did not know whether the heaped rocks would hold their structure—whether or not they would give way and he would be swallowed up, or his leg crushed between shifting boulders. He did not know, but neither did he care just then.

He had heard no sound from Marcus, and guessed the legionary was either crushed to death or silenced by injury. Gaius meant to be sure of his friend’s fate, if he could, before climbing to the light, and he set out hopping between the peaks of fallen stone.

His feet were strong and calloused, and his bare soles did not break on the jagged debris beneath them, but Gaius grimaced at the way the rocks dug in with every skip and hop.

Apart from the discomfort, the going was easy enough, and Gaius marvelled at the symmetry with which the rubble had heaped itself, for he was able to navigate circumference of the caved-in room with little difficulty. When he finally did come upon Marcus, Gaius found that the legionary was not dead.

He lay face down among the rocks, limbs splayed at odd, but natural, angles. At first it appeared that his head was crushed beneath a rock as big as man’s trunk, but when Gaius knelt down to inspect the body he saw that that rock had been kept from killing his comrade by twin stones on either side of his head.

They held the boulder suspended a finger’s breadth above Marcus, and Gaius was pleased and amazed by their luck, alive and bathed in light from above, while doomed only moments before to die in darkness.

He felt breath moving his subordinate’s diaphragm, and the prone figure gasped weakly when Gaius rolled away the stone and freed him. But he did not awaken.

Sufficient has been your labour for now. Enjoy your repose.

Ignoring the pain that wracked already overtaxed muscles, Gaius stooped down and lifted Marcus over his shoulder, grunting and shrugging him into position. The man’s dead weight felt like that of two men twice his size, and Gaius gasped under the burden, and glowered up at the mountain of rubble whose summit he must reach.

Its sides sloped at shallow angles near the bottom, but by its peak the caved-in heap of broken earth and rock offered a sheer climb. However high it really was, to Gaius it appeared a true mountain whose uppermost heights would be lost in cloud were it not below ground.

He started upwards, standing at first, and taking the initial easy slope in broad strides. He went quickly, gaining speed while he could in hopes that the momentum would serve him as the gradient increased. He huffed and sweated, and his knees came higher as the going grew steeper, and his back ached and shoulders bunched and cramped beneath the inert Marcus’ weight.

The pain was biting at first, and the exertion spread a grimace across Gaius’ face. Soon, however, pain turned to numb heat, and he wondered as he neared the top, having yet to look down, whether his limbs would last.

Force of will be damned. All the strain in the world will not help if my legs and back cease to work!

The light source above him was near now, as far away as two men were tall, but the face of the rock pile was nearly vertical, and he had to release Marcus with one hand to steady himself against it as he sought for purchase with trembling legs and feet bereft of sensation. The unconscious body that lay across his shoulders slipped, and he stopped.

“Jove’s bolt burn your ass, Marcus, stay STILL!”

He screamed up at the light and shrugged madly, levering Marcus between his shoulder and the ragged rocks before him in an attempt to right the limp legionary.

He felt the mad frustration of being slowed at the height of his physical exertion, and continued to growl and curse as he found new footholds and carried on, infuriated by the loss of momentum.

Only a few more steps.

He rebuked himself inwardly for his emotional outburst, and pressed on. He brought his foot up to a gap between two rocks at waist level. He shook with the strain, but knew that he was but one final push away from his aim.

Gaius breathed deeply and clamped down on Marcus. His diaphragm swelled against his raised thigh. He was drenched in perspiration, hovering between numbness and agony in all his extremities, and he knew not if the strength he needed would be there when he called upon it.

He reached up with his free hand and took hold of a jutting slab. He exhaled and took a final breath, flanks billowing, and he growled as he heaved with his bent leg and pulled with his outstretched hand.

The pain was colossal. It felt as if the blood would burst from his swollen fingers and toes, but as he bellowed out his effort, he saw the wall of rubble fall away before him. With a final push and pull, he entered the opening in the ceiling, and carried himself and Marcus into the light. 

Read Part 8 Here!

Where the Woods Watch: Part 8

It did not take long to cut strips from the dead men’s robes and tie them together into a rope, with the final knot tightened around the crude axe head.

Before long, the two Romans stood on the walkway that extended out over the chasm, Gaius twirling his improvised grapnel as much in self-satisfied display as to test its integrity. He looked up towards the sprawl of roots and boughs that covered the ceiling, and to where they converged at the centre of the room and twisted down to the dripping black nodule which they held aloft.

Such a mess of limbs and vines—it is impossible that the grapnel should not catch somewhere among them.

Gaius’ prediction proved mostly correct, and the grapnel did catch after a few failed flings. When it was finally fast, he wasted no time, and began to shimmy upwards with an agility that belied his heavy frame. The rope was rank with the drying blood of the men from whose robes it was made, and as Gaius made his way up, he added to it the bile that stained his hands and trunk.

As he ascended, the space about him began to tilt wildly, and his guts to churn. His climbing had caused the rope to swing from side to side, and when Gaius looked down, he saw at first only the haze at the bottom of the hole over which he was suspended. The rope had reached the extremity of a lateral swing, and now began to drift back in the opposite direction, taking him past the walkway and back out over the dizzying chasm below.

He ceased climbing, slowed his breath, and cursed inwardly as he waited for the momentum to abate and the swinging to stop. It did, and soon he was hanging stationary over the stone walkway. His arms ached, and his legs too. All four limbs were straining to hold his heavy body aloft, and the swinging seemed to last for an eternity before finally coming to an end.

And the hard part lies ahead. I shall have to make this quick.

Gaius looked down again, about to bark out an order, but saw that Marcus obeyed without being commanded. The legionary stood just below him with his arm outstretched, offering his sword pommel-first.

Gaius tightened his grip on the rope with one hand and reached out with the other to retrieve the weapon. Ordinarily it would be no great thing to hold on as he did, and to climb and manoeuvre at need. But he was still weary from battle, and all the more from the madness that had taken him at the battle’s inception.

He took the sword and brought it up between his teeth. It was too large to hold there comfortably, and it felt as though it would slip out at any moment, but he needed both hands to keep climbing.

Gaius thrashed his way up until there was no rope left to climb, and his hands took hold among the tangle where the axe head had lodged. He now looked down on the black mass that hung below from a cluster of roots. He took a breath and struggled to keep his gaze from the abyss beyond. His arms burned, shoulders ached, and he had no desire to see what awaited him below should his strength fail him.

He considered for a moment that the whole enterprise might be folly. The room was cleared of foes and the need for escape imminent, but rather than searching with his comrade for a way out, he swung from the ceiling in a struggle against inanimate roots.

Inanimate, he thought, but what they hold aloft is too powerful to let lie, whatever it is.   

Indeed, the doubt that had seized him briefly had felt as if placed in him from without, born of whispers in his ear rather than his own good sense. He looked towards the black mass below and saw that its surface was stirring more than it had when he first entered the room. It seemed to boil gently, losing droplets and causing the roots that held it to sway and shudder.

The doubt that he had suppressed lingered in him. The warmth of the black gall’s influence rose up again, and with it the desire to despair and give in. His fatigue and the aches in his body were amplified and he coughed suddenly.

A stream of the viscous stuff that infected him filled his nose with its bitterness and spurted over his teeth. For a moment his grip on the rope weakened, and a wave of nausea threatened to sweep him into the pit below.

He grimaced and looked to the span of ceiling between him and the twist of wooden sinews that supported his inhuman enemy.

Victory tastes sweeter when it follows hardship.

He snorted at his exhaustion and the throbbing in his arms and shoulders, and wasted not a moment more.

With a grunt, he stretched out his left hand and took hold of the roots above him. His right joined it, and in a flash he had carried himself halfway across the gap, and then hand over hand to the very base of the hanging cluster. And just like that, he was on top of his quarry.

In the same movement, his feet reached out and found purchase among the boughs directly above the hideous black ooze. His hands walked down the side of the root cluster until they rested just above his feet, and his buttocks hung down as if he were squatting.

With his feet firmly lodged among the tangled roots, he freed the sword from his mouth with his right hand while his left kept a firm hold on a thick, strangely warm root. He looked down to where the ends of the hanging tendrils merged with the eddying surface of his foe, and raised the sword.

Let us lighten your burden, you roots.

He smiled, and struck the clustered growth below him. For all the power that the shuddering mass had to infect, influence, and madden, it could not stop the gladius from gouging through its supports. With the first swordblow the whole mass that Gaius clung to shuddered, and three of the roots that stretched from the ceiling split in two.

He laughed. The hanging heap of gall sagged, and a shock went through the air just as it had when he had wounded the black apparition in the forest. The thing beneath him cried out in fear with its inaudible, otherworldly voice, and the roots to which Gaius clung quivered violently.

He struck again, and the sword made it halfway through the remaining growth of vines and roots. The hanging nodule and the inverse tower that held it swung crazily now, and the air rushed over Gaius’ ears and his stomach churned.

He drew himself close to the bundle of undergrowth, startled by the sudden lurch. He looked down, and saw a lopsided, amorphous thing where the sphere of ichor had been, and now huge gobbets and clumps of the black matter sloughed off and splashed over the chair below.

Marcus still stood steadfast on the walkway, though he had recoiled from the splashing refuse and was nearer the encircling ledge than before. He looked up wide-eyed, though whether in awe or exasperation at perceived stupidity Gaius could not say. The centurion grinned and called out.

“Another moment more Marcus, and I will have trimmed this hedge! The place shall be prettier, I think, once the overgrowth is tamed.”

It was not easy to tell from where he swung, but Gaius thought he saw a smile flash across the legionary’s face. The humour was a weapon against the fear that Gaius felt. It was not his own fear, of course, for he would be pleased to fall to oblivion with his vanquished enemy. It was fear felt by the part of that thing that lived inside him. And as he steeled himself and swung the sword a third time, the heat of its parasite presence within him surged again, and the doom it foresaw for itself became as his own.

In the same way as it called to him when they first entered the chamber, now it begged for mercy, and for him to leave it forever. It roiled with regret at ever having snared this cursed wasp, and it was not without satisfaction that Gaius shared the fear that he knew to be all the keener for his quarry.

The burning in his limbs and core was near unbearable now as his thews struggled to hold him aloft, but he was not through with their use just yet.

Just a blow or two more. Cease mewling, you limbs, and fall in line.

His body dared not disobey its master’s command, and with loping grace, Gaius swung himself around to the opposite side of the vine cluster where he could better reach what remained of the support structure. His eyes flashed down, and what he saw in could only be described as panic.

The thing had lost its shape entirely, hanging so limp that its bottom now brushed and broke against the jutting platform below. Tendrils snapped out and recoiled from its surface, sometimes whipping too far and breaking away to smear against the walls by their frantic momentum.  Whether the thing thought to defend itself or simply grabbed desperately for safe purchase, Gaius cared not. He swung again, one last time.

The remnant of the support structure split in two, and the roots and vines to which he clung snapped upwards, recoiling under the tension that had built up over the aeons of their labour. He was not prepared for the violence of the effect, and he lost his grip as the cluster sprang up towards the ceiling.

He clutched for a futile instant against the empty air beneath the receding tendrils. He failed to stop his plummet, but managed in those frantic seconds to position himself over the walkway before he fell. He looked down as he went, ready to cushion the impact in a backwards roll, and saw the last of the black gall splashing over the edge of the platform below and into the pit.

As he landed and keeled backwards into a roll, the thunder of rent rock filled the room, and he felt the shock of the landing amplified threefold by the quaking that seized the ground. Toes over head, he rolled backwards, stretching his legs at the end of the movement so that he came to a stand on the ledge to which Marcus had already retreated. He gained his footing in just enough time to see the walkway, platform, and stone seat vanish into the abyss with a rush of displaced air.

Read Part 7 Here!

Read the Finale Here!