Carrying on from yesterday’s tale….

~~~~

“And, for the ‘hard of thinking’, what that means,” said the Arch-chancellor during lunch the next day, “is: No Messing With Stamps!”

Horace, naturally, read the new directive. He read it twice. Then he tried reading it backwards, on the off chance that some hidden clause had slipped in, permitting exactly what he wanted to do. It did not.

The wording w...

The Guild of Alchemists had rules. Strict ones. Rules like “No indoor explosions after midnight,” "attempting to pass a duck through a singularuty is not allowed." and “DO NOT mix anything with sulphur unless you’ve said a proper goodbye to your loved ones.”

But rules, as the Arch-chancellor of Unseen University once remarked, are mostly things that happen to other people. As with many pronounce...

Am I quiet now

beneath the rustling silence,

echoes still ask back....

The bouquet leans

in its chipped glass,

petals slack,

edges bruised

like forgotten fruit.

The scent is no longer sweet

but a faint sourness

clinging to the air,

a reminder

that beauty is rented,

never owned.

I watch the stems collapse,

water clouding with ghosts,

and think:

even in decay

they keep speaking,

just softer,

closer to the earth....

Pipes laugh in the dusk,

goat-hooves drum on fallen leaves

wine stains every smile....

The dove landed on the rusted fence, feathers pale against the soot-stained air. Below, the ruins of yesterday still smoked; homes shattered, voices silenced. A child spotted it, eyes wide. He reached out, hesitant, as if the bird might vanish with a breath. But the dove stayed, calm, unshaken by the wreckage. In its stillness lay something stronger than the chaos around it. Not denial, not forget...

Smiles behind closed doors,

truth folded into false words

childhood drifts in fog....

Trumpet in the dark,

an angel waits at the gate,

dawn bends into song....

Quirlton nestled comfortably in its little valley, the sort of place where nothing extraordinary ever happened unless you counted the local Lancle cheese, which most people didn’t.

Sergeant Fred Colon (retired, though his knees still argued otherwise) had settled here after leaving the City Watch, hoping for peace, quiet, and a steady trade in cheese. He got the cheese. The peace and quiet was pa...

They left the port before noon. The sun was hot and the white walls of the town shone, blindingly, like bleached bones on a white sand strand. He’d rowed the boat out past the harbour wall and the girl sat at the stern with the basket and the two rifles wrapped in oilcloth. She wore a red scarf and the wind lifted it now and again so that the ends slapped against her shoulder.

He looked at her an...