030. 2 dead, 2 missing

An hour passed since the ambush. When Brint came to, he was engulfed by the metronomic perturbations of a helicopter’s blades beating at the air like a filthy rug. He glared up into the smooth face of his intelligence sergeant, Dev, dazed and disoriented. The man stared back down at him, looking glass reflection an […]

Continue Reading

029. a poison’s purpose

Dev took a deep breath, a pitiful gasp in the midst of the adjunct’s snowsheet. “Kasse, come on—“ “What’re you guys doing?” Eoran asked on the other side of the rooftop’s door, voice a hum in the static of a slowly unfolding catastrophe. He crossed the roof to his boyfriend and their squadmate. Moving the […]

Continue Reading

028. 18b, 18f, and a wasted cigarette

Kasse always craved the stillness of the hours before dawn, the dark quiet between nocturnal wind-down and diurnal stirring.  He’d eased himself from Eoran’s somnolent grasp, loathe to leave that boy who loved him so, but found he needed the moment of solitude his lover’s inevitable exhaustion afforded him. 18B was susceptible to 18C’s assimilating […]

Continue Reading

027. thermohaline [NSFW]

“You said you’d make me come without touching me,” that dastardly boy teased into his lover’s ear, their pleasure in waves pressed quaking to the Bloodwright’s back, hands ever controlling their position. He pulled 18C’s head back playful by the hair, licked his neck like he could live off the salt of him, like he […]

Continue Reading

026. vanta [NSFW]

Camp Losi stood tall on the edge of Ossa’s sprawling desert, and was not actually a camp but quite a large base made of the remnants of the city that used to stand there, Lositani, before its sign got the ‘tani’ blown off in a days-long exchange of hostile fire. It served mostly as a […]

Continue Reading

025. ± [NSFW]

  to him, it was everything   all things, alight—tails   his moments alive, persistent   pernicious, pervasive boy   trapped against infinity it was nothing   broken and empty—heads   lots cast asunder, chance   tempted, fate a tempest   in the stillness of their crypt to be swaddled in night   held in the hands   of a city […]

Continue Reading

023. the red desert’s varaket ghost story

“Varakaiso,” said a trembling yelp, a plea from the man kneeling in the shrapnel littered roof of Eoran’s crumbling building. In Port Haven, Ossans were characterized by a near toxic level of bravado, but this man before 18B was cowering, face wet in the wake of the impossible. “Sirai, Varakaiso—“ “He’s saying Va-something, I think […]

Continue Reading

022. the sound of your cruelty

 “But seriously: if everything’s a threat here, if the ability is limited, if the end result matters… why not try to deconstruct the whole building? It’s already falling apart. Let the weight of all that concrete do the work. Could you just use your sight like a stud-finder and dissolve support structures? Or sections of […]

Continue Reading

021. an exercise in walking through walls

The sky was open and calm, the night clear and star-bright, moonless. The squad was circled up and asleep within a natural defilade, surrounded on three sides by a sandstone canyon. Its mouth emptied to the east, wide enough for three vehicles to pass but currently it was occupied by two boys, their CO, and […]

Continue Reading