EdensBlood

I am still breathing. My brothers are not. Six of them lie dead, scattered around the table. I am the one who killed them. We had been playing poker, as usual. What was far less usual is that I was winning. Gambling is my second greatest weakness. Addiction is my worst. Junk is my name. Mana is my poison and the sweetest poison it is. Mana is power and mana is change. I will do anything for it. I have done everything for it. First was Border. I once caught him raping a young girl. I turned my back on it. I could smell mana and didn't want to watch. I am not sorry for his death. I had won my third hand in a row and the last of his loot. so he

From his fingers branched a glittering tracery as he caressed her gently. Each kiss he trailed along her body left its own faintly fluorescent mark. She gasped softly as he let his power trill along her nerves. With an impatient twist of her body she took his head into her hands and kissed him deeply, shivering softly as colors exploded under her skin and their souls met. With a happy sigh she let him go and dived under the water, tiny bubbles of laughter the only evidence of her passage. Moments later several freshly killed fish nudged him from below before floating out to his sides. He picked one up and slit it with his belt knife, casting

Thundertouch cut through the water with his eyes closed, humming softly and hearing the walls and the swimscales around him. He had once been a sailor, a sorcerer, serving the Jade throne, but that didn't matter now. He doubted it mattered even then, when he bothered to think about it. Now he was bored and looked for something to hunt. Letting loose a joyful yell he spun and dove after a waterbite, biting off it's stinglines before he slurped it up. He cocked his head as his yell came back to him bearing news of a littlebuilders dome. With a predatory grin he dove again to it. Placing his hands against it he let his deeptouch and thundertouch

The rumbles died off and the dust slowly began to settle. The sealed chamber in which they found themselves seemed to be stable, so much as anyplace in a coal mine was stable. There were five of them, four large, rough, heavily armed men wearing typical miners gear as if born in it with hardship and filth ingrained into their bodies and attitudes, but they seemed unbowed by the weight of their lives, hard and competent, though not confident at the moment. They picked themselves slowly off the ground slowly, glancing occasionally at the source of their current dismay. The woman they were glancing at seemed relatively helpless at first glance

She was discovered 20 years ago. A woman in decaying clothing staring intently at a brick wall, remarkably realistic but unmistakably not human. After all, she hadn't moved, didn't respond, and couldn't be moved. There was a small furor, of course, until the government stepped in. They closed the area off and subjected her to every test known to man at the time. They learned nothing. So far as they could tell, nothing entered her body and nothing left, except light in her eyes. No one could find anything odd about the wall either, except for some crackpot psychics who swore that a certain brick was staring at them. And so they forgot about it

God was dead. Quite recently, actually. The Creator was eternal, of course, but everyone but the humans knew that he had fucked off to do more Creating in other realms long ago. Therefor other angels had long since stepped up to the office of God. The reason Lucifer, who was indeed the purest and most powerful of all angels save Metatron, had left to found his own little realm was simply because competition for the spot was quite fierce. He had become markably less pure since then, but he was not at all alone in that respect, even in Heaven. Or perhaps especially in Heaven. Because of this, God was dead. I was rather grateful of this fact.

The drums awoke me. The familiar whispered roar of the mob was expected and ignored, but the drums were new. A hideous cacophony, it sounded like the mob had knocked over a drum store and handed out the drums to anyone who would play, regardless of talent or what type of instrument it was. If I judged from the number of African drums, probably two drum stores. I heard someone attempt to play a bass drum like a snare drum. It was rather discordant. I couldn't deal with it on a full bladder. As I rolled off the bed the Stone Soldier who had been watching the doorway swayed and dropped off into sleep. Another took up her vigil. I walked into th

The crowd was young, and luxuriated in said youth, with a few older scholarly men looking dejected at the outskirts. Their low mutter filled the stadium. While those few hundreds who filled it now were nowhere near the capacity it was designed for, it seemed full of a much larger crowd. It was slightly incongruous, the crowds words, scientific debate merging seamlessly with mystic meandering into bits of philosophy thrown in along with the gossip. "You heard about Pigeon lately? He still mob watching?" "Yeah, the fucker imprinted three of my best stone soldiers and ran off again." "I would call to deny him rejuv, but we won't need too soon

The gateway spewed unfathomable energies as it snapped shut. Accompanying the flood of air currently attempting to either burn itself or evolve into something new and interesting floated what could be called a man. His feature were not like the sort of man you would be used to, but if he showed up at the family reunion of the Hominidae they wouldn't kick him out, though they might ask each other in whispers if the other remembered his name. The important part was that he could scream. And so he did, for an aeon or two. He poured his anger, his hatred, his rage into the void in that sound. It could only be heard for a short while but the thoug