A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀
New chapters posted every Friday!
Available Chapters — Content Warnings
Ducking down an offshoot from the mall’s main concourse, Tattie followed it to its shadowy end and pushed through the cracked glass doors of the Screaming Fox.
The Fox was a breathless miasma of sweat, capdraw smoke, and rum. Brax studied the long fish tanks lining both walls, mesmerised by the gently undulating rhythms of the blue and purple plants and the flash of darting fish. He dragged his attention away from the fish tanks when he noticed the portholes dotting the side of a bar shaped like a boat, each fitted with a small viewscreen displaying a revolving cocktail menu.
“I’ve never had a cocktail,” he said.
“Then you, my friend, haven’t lived. Unless you try the muck they call cocktails at the Bunker, and then you’ll probably die.”
Dunc, the bartender, was broad and meaty-faced, his bald head dimpled with old rivet stumps. He was wearing a heavy leather frockcoat, a tarnished shortsword slung at his belt.
“You want your usual?” he asked Tattie.
“You make me sound so boring, Dunc.”
Dunc merely waited, his arms crossed over his chest and his face impassive.
“Fine,” Tattie said. “The usual, please.” She turned to Brax. “You want the same?”
“What is it?”
“Spicy punch, vodka, ambiguous floating fruit. It’s good, I promise.”
“I call it Tropical Fruit Surprise,” Dunc said in his flat baritone.
“Does he ever smile?” Brax whispered.
“No.”
Several minutes later, Dunc placed two long glasses before them on the bar. He waited for Tattie to scan out her credits, then left them to it without another word. Brax picked his drink up, almost dropping it when a tiny holo depicting an open umbrella blipped to life and floated over the thick orange contents. It strobed pink and green, flickering across his bemused face. He poked a piece of floating fruit—a crudely cut cube of something pale pink and spiky—and looked to Tattie for guidance.
“It won’t poison you,” she promised. She swallowed a mouthful of her own drink to prove it to him. “You don’t have to eat the fruit, and if you don’t like the holo-umbrella, there’s an off-switch on the bottom of the glass.”
Brax took a tentative sip and smiled at her. “You’re right, it’s good.”
“Just don’t drink it too fast,” Tattie warned. “Dunc’s cocktails can sneak up on you.”
She directed Brax towards an empty table in the steamed-up window. He lifted himself onto a stool, turning to study a chipped mural of an alien sun blazing above a sandy island paradise.
“It’s not very crowded in here,” he said.
The only other customers were two women with tattooed heads and spiked boots bent over an ancient pinball machine. The machine’s soft noises of mechanical jubilation every time the steel ball found a pocket was a pleasant drone that dulled the mall sounds seeping in around the door.
“Afternoons are always quiet.”
“I’m glad.” Brax moved a piece of the spiky fruit aside and took a long swallow of Dunc’s Tropical Fruit Surprise. “I was starting to feel a bit—”
“—Overwhelmed?”
He nodded, then attempted to cover up the admission by shoving a large cube of fruit into his mouth.
Tattie flashed back to her first days in Noctara, remembered how wildly different it had felt after escaping the sunlit valleys of Rakkone. The people were harder here, more easily pushed to violence, and the stink of the cap-infested streets and press of the towering buildings could be oppressive.
“I miss sunlight the most,” she said. “I never paid much attention to Rakkone’s sun, but when I couldn’t feel it anymore, it was all I could think about for months.”
“Do you miss anything else?”
Brax drained his cocktail and Tattie winced. “I told you to go easy with that. I don’t want to put my back out dragging your old arse home.”
Brax plunged his fingers into the glass, digging around for more fruit cubes. “Do you remember the night in Salisol? I was helping you home, but I ended up finishing that bottle of wine on the way.”
“The wine you stole.”
“No, it was definitely you who stole it.” Tattie narrowed her eyes, feigning indignance. “By the time we were halfway back, I was completely gone and you’d sobered up.”
“So I had to help you. Yes, I remember. Gods, we were idiots. Wasn’t that the night you ripped your new coat?”
“That’s right, when I fell in a thorn bush. I’d forgotten that part. I had to pretend I’d lost it.”
Tattie grabbed her glass and finished the sticky cocktail. She wasn’t about to let Brax get sloppy drunk and drag her down memory lane sober.
“Hey, Dunc,” she called across the room. The bartender turned to her, one large hand flexing on the bar. “Can we get a couple of Chubby Ferrets?”
While they waited for fresh drinks to arrive, Brax watched the passage of people through the mall from the windows. “There’s nothing like this place on Rakkone,” he said. “Everything’s so weird here.” He paused. “You never really explained what husks are. Do people choose that?”
“Like fuck they do,” Tattie said. “Being husked is the N.E.X.’s twisted idea of punitive justice. Husks are a pain in the arse, but every one of them was a person once, and every one of them was dragged to the Voidspire and shot up with husk tech against their will. The reasons are bull, too. I knew one girl who got husked for swiping an old pizza slice. Another guy got a one-way ticket to the Voidspire when he shouted at his brother too loudly in the wrong street.”
“They stay husked forever?”
“No, but they’re never the same at the end of their sentence. The best thing you can do in Noctara is keep your head down. You got stupid lucky that night in Palm Plaza.”
“You don’t keep your head down, though.” Brax spoke quietly, as though afraid she would blow up at him again. “The N.E.X. hate hemo magick, and you practice it out in the open.”
“They hate haematic mages,” Tattie corrected him. “Scrying with human blood is illegal. Those bug-eyed Mortalists saw to that, and they’ve got their greasy little hands all over the N.E.X. Blood seers are tolerated. You have to stay clean, insist on only using non-human hemo, but people like me don’t bother them. For now.”
“And if they ever found out what you really are?”
Tattie was about to tell Brax to shut up, to warn him that the walls in Noctara had ears, not to mention spy tech so advanced, it could probably tell the N.E.X. how many types of exotic fungus you were currently infested with.
“I forgot something,” he announced, breaking her train of thought and piquing her interest. “You shoved me in that cupboard so fast, I didn’t have time to show you.”
He rummaged inside his jacket and pulled out an innocuous, flat glassy tube. Tattie recognised it immediately. Her heartbeat ratcheted as she grabbed for the object, pushing it down into her own pocket and out of sight before Brax even realised she’d swiped it.
“You’re not happy to have it back?”
“It’s the Arcanostaff,” Tattie said. “You can’t be waving it around in here.”
The truth was that she had no desire to reconnect with such a miserable instrument—a device that crawled into every part of her when activated, spun its scalding web through her blood system, and burned through every particle of power she’d ever been able to summon. Obviously, Brax felt the need to push.
“I wanted to give it to you back at the apartment. It should be with you. No one else on Rakkone can work it, we’re all stuck cutting our archaic sigils.”
“Archaic’s the word,” Tattie agreed.
“You’re still using that bracelet, though.” He nodded at the Rakkonian bangle glinting on her left wrist. “I didn’t think you were sentimental.”
Tattie shot him an icy warning look as Dunc brought two bulbous green glasses to their table. The liquid inside was a pearly blue and when Brax lifted the glass to inspect it, a soft smoke rolled off the surface and drifted towards the ceiling.
“Two Chubby Ferrets,” he informed them.
Tattie nodded her thanks and he walked away with their empty glasses.
“What’s in this one?” Brax said. He seemed unwilling to taste it.
“I’m not actually sure,” Tattie replied, downing a large mouthful and grinning at him.
Brax followed her lead, but the dubious look on his face failed to dissipate. “It tastes like sugared honey. Why is it blue?”
“You ask too many questions.”
“I came here to ask questions.”
“I thought you came here to beg for my unique expertise.”
“Yes, and that’s going so well,” he said. Tattie snorted into her drink. “Questions are all I have left.”
“If you have more questions, we’re going to need more of these.”
They got through two more Chubby Ferrets, a couple of Rat-Tailed Chasers, and several Lemon Bombs before Brax was finally able to ask the one question that had been triggering his acid reflux since punching through Digath’s fragile atmosphere. By that point, his lids were heavy over eyes made glassy by ninety-five proof alcohol. Tattie had forgotten how much the guy could drink.
“I know something happened on Rakkone you never told me about,” he said. “You wouldn’t have left me behind unless you had a good reason.” Tattie shook her head, urging him to drop it. “Come on,” he insisted. “You need to let it out.”
“I don’t need to do anything.”
“Yes, you do. That shit festers. It will make you sick.”
“One more of these Lemon Bombs will make me sick.”
Tattie could see that Brax wouldn’t be brushed off so easily this time. Her initial buzz had long worn off and she’d entered the tired, heavy part of serious drinking. The part where she just wanted to curl up with Mr Meow and a bad movie. But she wasn’t at home, and even if she was, her viewscreen was broken, and this idiot would not stop talking.
“Fine,” she conceded. “When the N.E.X. first attacked, when everything turned to shit, the Elders didn’t just ask me to fight for Rakkone. They tried to force me.”
She shrugged, hoped that was enough. Brax’s face said otherwise. He slurped a mouthful of Lemon Bomb through a flashing spiral straw and nodded, encouraging her to continue.
“There were things I never told you,” Tattie said after a breath. She spoke slowly, deliberately. “I was an idiot kid who believed the Elders when they said I’d put my loved ones in danger if I spilled any of their nasty little secrets. I wish I’d come to you the first time they drained my blood, the first time they hurt me. If I’d told you, maybe you and I—”
“Wait,” Brax interrupted, slamming his glass down on the table so hard he almost shattered it. Dunc’s angry grunt of annoyance prompted him to lower his voice. “What do you mean, they hurt you? Do you mean the training? I know they had you doing all those crazy drills, learning to fight and stuff. Is that what you mean?”
Tattie slumped back on her stool. She wanted to erase the last ten minutes and take back everything she’d said, but even hemo magick couldn’t turn back time. She might as well continue.
“It was more than fight drills. They drained my blood because they wanted to create more Arcanoforges, more haematic mages able to fuse their natural talents with tech. I don’t know why my rotten family tree is the only one that has Arcanoforges falling off the sodding branches, but there’s something about us that can’t be replicated. The Elders failed to make more Arcanoforges, so they decided to concentrate on amplifying my abilities. Then I found out what they planned to do.” Tattie stopped and reached for her drink.
Brax’s soft eyes studied her, his mouth twisted with a strange, horrified grief. “What did they plan to do?” When she glanced away, refusing to elaborate, he reached for her hand and held it on the table. “What did they do, Tat?”
“They planned to tear me apart. To replace my arteries, infuse my blood vessels with foul metallic crap. I don’t even understand all of it. When I found out, I tried to escape.”
“You did escape, right? That’s why you’re here.”
“I almost made it out in one piece.” She tried to smile at him and he squeezed her hand tighter. “Manny found me. He reported it to the Elders, and they took me down.” Tattie closed her eyes. She had lived with the shame of not being able to defend herself against the Elders that day for sixteen years. Talking about it now felt like wrenching out a long-dead tooth.
“Manny ratted on you?” Brax released her hand and sat back, raked shaking fingers through his beard. “That little prick. He was there to see me off when I left Rakkone to look for you. He said to tell you he’d have a bottle of his good wine waiting when you came home.”
“I know where I’d like to shove that bottle.”
“You’d have to fight me to get to him first.”
They looked at each other, tension and memories hanging between them like rotted threads, and started laughing. A second irritated grunt sounded from Dunc’s direction. As their laughter calmed, Brax reached for his Lemon Bomb, then thought better of it and pushed it away.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said. “It explains a lot.”
“Fuck them for sending you here to find me,” Tattie said, still smiling. “The one person they knew I wouldn’t eviscerate on sight. It wasn’t all for nothing, though.”
She shrugged off one shoulder of her jacket and pulled the neck of her shirt aside. There was a silver disc beneath, neatly fitted into the skin just below her collarbone. Brax stared at it with undisguised astonishment.
“It’s directly connected to a subclavian artery,” Tattie explained. “A dodgy tinkerer far more skilled than me managed to sync it with the Rakkonian muck the Elders injected me with. I don’t have to cut sigils anymore, I can work magick just by pressing this button.” She hovered a teasing finger over the device. “I still need wet hemo, though. That’s why I kept the bangle.”
“I get it now,” Brax said. “I get why you hate the Elders so much, but I still have family on Rakkone. The N.E.X. are on the doorstep and thanks to their Mortalist friends, they hate haematics more than ever. Things won’t go well when the Elders’ defences finally fall.”
“The N.E.X. should just mind their own bloody business. If Rakkonians want to practice hemo magick and cut sigils on their own bodies, who are they hurting but themselves? I’ve never understood why the N.E.X. and their allies care so much.”
“It’s all about the Mortalists,” Brax said. He waved an expansive hand across the table and almost upset the half-empty glasses. “They still believe those old stories about haematic mages raising the dead. It goes against their teachings.”
“They’re in tight with the Mervanians now, though. You’d have thought some of their prattling about the Divine Cosmic Head would have rubbed off and chilled them the fuck out.”
“You don’t believe Mervaroid will wake soon and bless us with his wisdom?”
Tattie could tell that Brax wasn’t serious. The corner of his mouth was twitching. He was either trying not to laugh, or the excess of Lemons Bombs was doing a number on his nervous system.
“We should get out of here,” she said. “If I drink anymore, I’ll make a mess of the place and Dunc will bar me for life.”
Dunc glanced up at the mention of his name and mustered a meaty scowl.
Content Warnings
Alcohol use, swearing.