danricewrites

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Wincing, Robbie picked up the pace even though his left ankle throbbed with every step. In the intersection levitated a dracopisces the size of a box truck with writhing tentacle mouths thicker than telephone poles, and almost as long. The monster turned its regard on them, eyes pools of oil large enough to dive into.
The referee placed the ball at the penalty kick stop and stepped aside. The goalie, tall and lean, in a blinding neon pink uniform, bounced on his feet. Reminding himself not to overthink things, Robbie picked his spot and ran toward the ball. All sensation faded—the warmth of the sun, the scent of the grass, the buzz of tense conversation from the sidelines, distant whistles—as he completely focused on the putting the ball exactly where he wanted it.
n the present, the elevator dinged and stopped at the lobby. Gage drew his pistol. Evander suspected the archaic projectile weapon wouldn’t be effective against a dracopisces unless the monsters w.jpg
He possessed the distinct memory that the alcohol tasted vile and, from that day onward, never understood why anyone would ever want to drink beer or any other alcoholic beverage. Smelling air saturated with beer-breath only reinforced his negative bias. “Why do you guys have your hands up?” the man asked. “Sir, you have a gun,” Lucas said, voice tremulous and tone polite. The man stared at the gun in his hand. “Oh, that I do.”
Bridget hit the brakes. Tires squealed. She wrenched the steering wheel to the left. Tentacle mouths flopped against the roof and sides of the vehicle. Through the rearview mirror, she glimpsed the shadowy form of the dracopisces sway to and fro, but the monster remained attached to the trunk.
Another crash against the door. This time, causing the metal to bulge. “You must find the failsafe.” She withdrew her hand, and at the loss of her touch, Evander felt irrevocably alone. “They might be able to follow you.” She moved to the terminal. “Be pre…” Her words were cut off by the TimePod’s hatch sliding shut with a loud thump.
Robbie glimpsed the dead hotel clerk as he passed the front desk and immediately looked away. He had already seen enough dead bodies, live and in person, for a lifetime. The corpses made him feel helpless and wonder why he strove to survive this nightmare. When the inevitability of death was thrust right up into his face, the reality that they were all a thin thread from being a lifeless meat bag of bones and fluids, part of him wanted to give up. Yet, he kept moving for now, at least, because doing nothing meant surrendering to despair.
“I thought I was going to die. I thought we were going to die. Thanks for helping me. For not leaving me. You’re really brave, Robbie. I owe you my life.” Robbie heard Evander rummaging around the storage closet in the breakroom. He glanced at his friend, but couldn’t meet Lucas’s gaze. He didn’t feel brave, and he recalled, with guilt and self-recrimination, how he had been tempted to abandon Lucas. To abandon his best friend in the whole world. To run and never look back. “You don’t owe me anything. I did exactly what you would’ve done if our roles were reversed.”
“Run!” Robbie screamed as the glass rained to the carpet and the drapery bulged, tangling up the monster. Tentacles flailed, mouths snapping with audible clicks and clacks, spraying spittle, as they tore gashes into the drapery. From each mouth escaped translucent, reeking fumes—an acrid stench like the blackest of smoke and the stink of the graveyard remains of the dead baked in an inferno deep in the monster’s bowels. Robbie turned and ran before the disgusting smells made him gag.
You said it is created in a lab?” “Yes, a particle accelerator is required,” Evander said. “Cool.” Lucas continued typing. “Particle accelerator in San Francisco.” Evander bounced on his toes, allowing himself a swell of pride. Mother would be proud. Despite all the setbacks, he’d soon know the location of Apocalypsium-99. Before the search results were displayed, a loud thrum echoed through the lobby, and the power went out.
But as the terrible cacophony rang in his ears, and he watched the frightened teens, they didn’t seem like stardust. No, they were indisputably as alive and vital as he. Could he turn his back and allow them to die? His mother was scheming and analytical to a fault. Every contingency planned for, every I dotted and T crossed, and the mission raised on a pedestal above all else, above herself and above him. She could be like that and sleep soundly at night. But could he? Besides, they possessed phones. Maybe they were the allies he needed. The glass shattered.
Even so, that was not the worst of it. Somehow, bizarrely, it was the twin eyes, the only eyes for the tentacle mouths were eyeless, above the creature’s enormous gaping maw that were the worst. They were twin holes of nothingness, reflecting nothing, black as space-time without the dimmest glimmer of a solitary star or anything else. Those voids seemed to inhale his soul, gnaw at his sanity, to pull at some incorporeal but essential part of himself with the inevitability of black holes.
A mouth bit at a boy—oh, my god, it was Grady—nearly sinking its fangs into the back of his neck, but Mr. Rodriguez was beside him and slammed his shoulder into Grady. The boy pinballed sideways into the wall, the tentacle mouth missing him by inches. The grasping feeler quickly reset, striking with the quicksilver ferocity of a cornered viper. Glistening teeth sank into Mr. Rodriguez’s face, causing welters of blood, dragging him down and pulling toward more hissing and snapping maws. The chaperone might have screamed, but if so, his final vocalizations drowned in the din. At least, he did not die in vain: Grady escaped the questing tentacles for the elevator bay.
Next to Robbie, Lucas picked at the side of broccoli, having complained earlier that any greens not drenched in oyster sauce weren’t worth eating. As for Robbie, he leaned back in his chair, pleasantly full after eating the chicken fettuccine alfredo. The plate before him appeared nearly licked clean. He might have done so if he were at home—the creamy sauce was that good and such low-brow behavior had the added benefit of disgusting his little sister Sadie—but he didn’t dare do something so uncouth where the chaperones, or more importantly, Coach Lovac, might observe him.
“Science fiction stories reflect major issues that concern humanity.”
Evander maneuvered toward a narrow cleft on the cliffside when, once again, he slipped. For a moment, the world spun like a carousel—blue sky, vast ocean, dark cave, rushing waves—and flailed his arms, fearing he’d topple from the tight pathway to the churning water below. This time, he caught himself on the wall of the cave, instead of falling on his butt or worse into the water below. “Idiot,” he chided himself and absently chewed on his lower lip, a bad habit Mother always criticized him for, but was never able to break him of. “The drug must not be entirely worn off.”
Kyt leaps from the floor, the low artificial gravity allowing her to float nearly a quarter of the way up the curved wall. It looks like she’s about to crash into the wall, but instead she lands gently on all limbs, finding finger and toe holes between the innumerable screens.
“What’s that behind you, archmagus?” the airship captain says with a predatory glint in her maniacal eyes. “Is that Bria? Heh. The naughty faery girl?” Bria hisses. A heartbeat later, Titus stands on Bergman’s shoulders, hackles up, hissing. I step between Bergman and my family. “Leave Bria alone.”
The writing style is intelligent and completely immersive, and Rice knows just how to mix organic world-building with tech. —Readers’ Favorite
“I thought you were a survivor,” I say. “Why would a survivor consume faery blood?” Gore licks his upper lip, and a trickle of sweat runs down his forehead. “I’ve put all kinds of stuff in my body.”
Mauve and I cruise the oval hallway stopping at the door to our cabin, Berth 101 reads the placard half a foot above a rectangular key card reader. My pulse quickens at the sight of a black feline sitting pressed against the door. Even the sleeper stirs, perturbed. “Why is that here?” I point at the black cat staring at me with startling yellow eyes. Mauve bends down and gently pets the cat. “It’s only Titus.”
We leave the coffee shop, splitting into two groups. I make sure Joe is my travel buddy. We take a short walk down a narrow street that opens onto a square with the entrance to a temple on the far side. The temple entrance is massive, with a flaring tile roof. People go around the square, taking in the sites and snapping photos. There are even dwarf deer gathering around a group of school-age children wearing matching yellow hats overseen by young women. The deer eat biscuits out of the children’s hands.
In my peripheral vision, I glimpse the watery maelstrom we fall toward. A shipbreaking wave, as dark as night, highlighted with splintering whitecaps, rises. When that wrathful hand of Poseidon brushes my skin, I release the dragon, thrashing my body up and away from the watery barrow.
I tell Dalia about the plan. Her face turns stormy at the mention of Gore and Jett. Like me, her history with both of them is fraught. “That isn’t good. They’ll both have their own agendas. You can’t trust them.” I sigh. “I know. Can we talk about something else? I have a feeling I’ll be rehashing all this for Haji.” “Promise me you won’t trust them, especially Jett.” “I promise.” I raise my pinky so Dalia can see it. “Pinky swear.” “Don’t break it,” Dalia says seriously, then fills me in on all the happenings at good old Cascadia Prep High School.
“I hate writing, I love having written.” — Dorothy Parker
Joe’s agonized scream stops me in my tracks. The terrible scent of burning skin joins the noisome stench permitting the air. Joe writhes as Gore presses one finger into the agent’s right cheek, twisting it back and forth like he’s putting out a cigarette. “Stay back!” Gore pulls Joe closer to him and withdraws the scorching digit. “Any more fight out of you, I’ll barbecue your entire face.”
Wind Reaver’s bridge offers a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view thanks to a circular wraparound window. Below are the Pacific’s azure waters beneath an overcast sky. Far to the east is a land mass obscured by haze. Even the intermingling golden and coppery radiance of Radcliffe’s and Mauve’s draconic forms can’t spoil the view.
The blaster shoots past my face so close my skin heats like I’m in the outdraft of an eight-hundred-degree oven. An insectoid looms near. It turns out that even Gore can’t miss at point-blank range. The plasma burns a circular hole straight through the insectoid, which teeters back and forth for a few seconds before collapsing next to me with smoke rising from its chest.
The guards start shooting again. Gore returns fire, but his aim is terrible, going well high and wide of any targets. The whine of the engines comes from directly overhead. The knifelike shuttle hovers about twenty feet off the ground in the tangerine mist. Kyt stands in a hatchway, holding a massive gatling gun in all four of her hands. A grunting sound comes from the gun and blue tracers erupt from the barrels.
From somewhere to the east comes a trumpeting bellow. Through the sleeting rain are a flash of gold and outstretched green wings. Dr. Radcliffe comes to summon us back to the airship.
"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop." — Confucius
On a dark and dreary evening on the 17th floor of the rain and wind-battered Marcus D. Bastion Government Building, Junior Auditor Antoinette Herrera sat in the glow of a touchscreen terminal alongside a hundred or so smartly uniformed Dream Service Agents. An agent or two might have been absent due to illness, family matters, or plain tardiness. They were civil servants held in the highest esteem and, as such, given a bit of leeway. Showing up a few minutes late for a shift wasn’t a capital offense—yet anyway—even if it was duly noted in performance reviews. After all, it required a special kind of person to peer into the minds of their fellow citizens in search of transgressive thoughts.
Even in the dim light, Frederick glimpsed the pus oozing sores and bloody fissures covering the exposed skin of both men. The disgust he felt was primal. Magic was a disease, and some animalistic part of him feared the sickness was catching. More than that, he’d seen what magicians could do on the battlefield. A person who didn’t fear magicians either had dragon dung for brains, or had never seen the aftermath of their wartime handywork. Gazing at the destruction around him, he knew of only three things that could cause such ruination: magic, war dragons, and Solarflame.
Mathias’s eyes seemed to soften some. When he spoke, the venom was gone from his voice. “I’m sorry, Rangthor. I’m sorry that I failed to teach you. I tried. Now, you must learn to overcome it on your own. I don’t have long to live. Your sister. I never thought she’d be the one to stab me. You maybe, but not her. Never her.” He shook his head and laughed before grimacing.
Goren squinted. He couldn’t see a damn thing, except for blue sky and fuzzy black clouds far in the distance. He reached for a leather case attached to his belt, next to the pouch containing his whetstone. The invisible hand holding him in the air resisted his movements. He cursed himself for not removing his spyglass while on the ground. Eventually, he withdrew the shiny metallic cylinder. A gift from Lord Sand, the spyglass was an artifact from before the Dark Days. He telescoped the device, transforming it from a hand in size to the length of his forearm, and brought it to his right eye. With his left eye shut, he scanned the sky where Mulley had pointed.
Ida dreamed she stood before her father in the shimmering Reflection Chamber. He stared at her, his face screwed up in a mask of astonishment and suffering. His hands clutched at his abdomen, where a dark blotch spread over his green tunic. Blood. His blood. The same blood staining the dagger she held. I didn’t mean to. The voice made me do it. The voice.
The Reflection Chamber was the most luminous space in the Mirror Palace. Carved and painted in the likeness of a golden dragon with green wings, the massive stone Dragon Throne stood out in stark contrast to the glowing room. The reflections of gathering dignitaries shimmered against the floor and the walls alike.
Lajos flew through a desolate landscape of ruinous buildings, weaving in between the towering detritus to escape their pursuers. Sol had yet to rise. For now, a befitting gloom hung over the crumbling city. Rangthor stared at the cityscape in both wonder and trepidation. Nowhere had he seen a city from before the Dark Days left so intact.
“Guards!” Frederick called. “No!” Declan screamed at nearly the same instant as Oliver raised his hands, pointing them toward the door. Green fire erupted from Oliver’s outstretched fingers just as the door slid open. Flames engulfed the guards as they fell to the floor, convulsing as the green fire crackled over their bodies,
“Lady Amber, stop!” Glancing over her shoulder, she found the guardians closing in. Desperate, she entered the next shop she came to, a bakery full of the scent of fresh breads, fruit filled tarts, and savory buns stuffed with diced meat and herbs. Amber spotted a winter mince pie on the counter, a spicy delight from her homeland in the North. Despite the desperate situation, her stomach rumbled. Whether from hunger or upset, she couldn’t be sure. A plump, broad featured woman gazed wide-eyed at her from behind the counter.
“If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
“You’re not listening to me! The Overlord is being kidnapped!” The older man smiled condescendingly. “Guardian Blake will head over to the Dragon Nest. Now, let’s get you to the palace.” The younger guardian nodded. “Have no fear, my lady. I will investigate.” Despite his words, Guardian Blake gave Amber a skeptical look that she found infuriating, before moving out onto the street and disappearing from sight. “Neither of you believe me,” Amber snapped.
. Sixteen years of gazing up through the observatory’s glass dome or telescope display to stare at that beautiful blue orb and pine for the sea, for the wind against her face, for the warmth of the sun, the earthy scent of the forest, and for animals both wild and domestic. Shelly reckoned having a dog, large or small, or something in between, would be the most wonderful experience, but the closest she came to a pet was observing mice in her mother’s lab. She was never allowed to touch the rodents. They were for science, not companionship.
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” –Albert Camus
“Divert full power to the vertical fans!” Bergman barks. “Get us above the storm.” “Yes, Captain.” There is a flash, followed by an earsplitting boom. Dr. Radcliffe and I stumble as the airship quakes so violently it feels like it will split apart. Bergman falls against the helm, and Titus tumbles from her shoulders with a yowl. The floor falls away, and I’m airborne with Radcliffe’s golem alongside me. The twinkling dragon, of course, is physically undisturbed by the calamity. Titus and several crew members not strapped into their chairs go flying. Even the crew properly strapped down are flung against their consuls.
“I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it.” Chinua Achebe
A better hold on the dragon would be around the upper chest and lower neck, constricting the airway and, more importantly, compressing the organ that produces combustible vapors. Still, the maneuver has the desired effect, the dragon pulling away in a riot of buffeting wings. I cinch my body tighter, knowing draconic bones will break before mine.
Startled, Sand released the lid that closed with a soft thump. Embarrassed to be caught off guard, he turned to his guest. A young woman, her hair disheveled like she’d just rose from a sound sleep. Boils and pus draining fissures covered her face and neck. Such an amateur. "Sonja," Sand said, greeting the witch. "Thank you for coming. I do apologize for waking you." He retrieved the box and strode to the bench. Outside, a bright flare blossomed, followed by a thunderous boom
Lightning flares, arcing between clouds and reflecting off Dr. Frederick Radcliffe’s golden scales. Next to Dr. Radcliffe’s dragon form, Mauve appears like a dragonet despite being fully grown. Where the copper dragon is long and lithe, he is longer and massive. His wingspan matches, maybe even surpasses, a jumbo jet’s. Being only half a skaag, I’m scrawny compared to Radcliffe and smaller than Mauve. But as the sparring sessions with the smaller dragon have proven not so diminutive, I can’t put up a good fight.
I grind my teeth. I’m such an idiot. A phase disruptor is a magically powered laser cannon with the unfortunate effect of immobilizing dragons while they ride the slipstream. The gunman doesn’t need to see Radcliffe’s draconic form to use the weapon. All the gunman has to do is point and shoot at the dragon’s humanoid golem. Think. God. The smell is so awful I can barely manage a single coherent thought.
Bullets plop into the blob with seemingly no effect. A stringy pink tentacle shoots from the mammoth pustule, wrapping around the head of a hapless magician. The man is lifted from the ground and pitched off the hillside. The other magicians fall back to avoid other questing tentacles that shoot from the blob. “That’s not…” Joe gapes at the bizarro battle. “I think it is,” I say. “We’ve found the skaag.”