A priest once gave me a gift in Aragon. He said it had belonged to a saint. That was a lie. Whatever power dwells in those dice does not answer to heaven. I have no expectation that this account will be believed, nor do I seek redemption by its writing. If absolution were mine to claim, I should have knelt at a confessional long before now. But the hands that hold this pen are soaked too deep in blood — not from war, which is honorable, but from a quieter, meaner kind of murder. The sort done with laughter, wine, and the clatter of dice on a mess-table. My name is Lucien Moreau, born in 1782 in Dijon, in the…

ICON Systems Group TL-07: Neural Language Analysis Internal memorandum #TL510513 1A Dr. Elin Saber [Routing: Office of Internal Ethics Oversight] To: IEO General Director Hevlen Please, read carefully. I do not know how long I can keep my thoughts straight, or if they are even mine anymore. As your office is already familiar with the work conducted within TL-07 and the broader ICON initiative, I will not restate our objectives here. Instead, I am writing to clarify my own role, as principal linguistic systems architect since ICON’s transition to unsupervised outputs, and to formally document concerns that I no longer believe fall within the scope of our existing ethical protocols. When we designed ICON, we told ourselves it was a…

I love the rain. I love how it seems to make everything feel… better. Smoother, somehow. Most people just enjoy the idea of rain. They like the sound it makes on the windowpane, or the cathartic feeling it gives. But it seems few actually enjoy the rain itself. But I’m different. I don’t love it just because I find it relaxing—which, don’t get me wrong, I do. But I’m not the type to absently daydream out of a window or bury myself in some book when the rain falls. No, I love to be in the rain. I love to be in the kind of rain that’s so suffocating you can’t see the woman sneak up behind you as you…

The terrible sense of Déjà vu swept over him as Billy threw him to the black top. He knew he had been here before as his tormentor mounted him pinning him to the ground. His shrill cries only caused Billy to grin sadistically as he threw the first punch that broke his nose. His piercing screams that had served in his childhood to force his daycare provider to attend to his needs served no purpose in the brutal, adolescent world of high school. Billy set into the beating that would haunt his dreams the rest of his adolescent and adult life. The brute laughed even louder at his feeble attempts to defend himself. He had always been scrawny, and it…

I laid in bed last night unable to sleep. I tossed and turned, for hours, trying to focus on falling asleep. My eyes closed and breathing slowly and deeply; Still, sleep never came. As I laid there, wrestling with the wake demon, searching endlessly for the sandman, I was frustrated with my inability to pass into the dreamland. After four long hours, I sat up in my bed, thinking about my son; Sad for what I had done, for what I had to do; for all that had happened. It was all just a blur now but still, it resonated sharply enough to have an effect on me. The memories were still fresh enough to haunt me. It was 1976,…

I don’t want to tell this story, I don’t want to tell it because I know no matter how much I warn people, somebody is bound to try it. I’m telling this story as a cautionary tale, if anyone ever finds instructions on how to play “The Subway Game” pretend you never saw it. I can’t state this enough. It all started on a summer afternoon. I was over at my friend’s house, we’ll call him Tim. This was around the early 2010s and me and Tim were browsing random forums, it was summer and we were both 15 at the time. We had just come home from the pool so we were cooling off in Tim’s room. Anyway, after…

“I’m going to Saturn,” Isaac said under his breath. I looked over towards his desk and jokingly said back, “You’re going there for summer break?” Isaac just stared downward scribbling something in his notebook, ignoring me, mumbling to himself. I sighed and moved back in my seat and stared at the clock. Only 10 minutes until we’re out of here and summer finally begins. Isaac and I weren’t exactly friends, at least not since we were kids, but we got along all right during the school year. We worked on some projects in class and sat together at lunch every so often. We’ve been talking a lot less in the past few months, though. Recently he’s been a lot more…

No word, uttered or inscribed, can claim that all they tell is true to the letter; in every slip and stutter of the human voice, every unspoken detail in fine print, a lie takes root and defiles the same soil that nourishes it, until it burgeons into a carnivorous parasite. Last summer, Rosenthal Manor snatched me away from my life with a bouquet of hopes and walled me into her cold, high corridors, where every step that falls on the marble floor, every voice whispered in its chambers, does so in the name of rules that no soul dared disobey for centuries. It all began a couple of months after I graduated from university, when I woke up to a…

“I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.” -Charles Bauldelaire I turned in horror at the tent as I watched The Rot transform, I could see something rising from the tent, pulling it apart as it emerged, like a butterfly from a chrysalis. I froze in place as it moved, every feature, every detail, the massive beast was so impossible, so broken, that all my body was screaming to do was run. The Rot had become a large, bulky creature, with a look of pure malice and hatred in its eyes as it looked towards me.…

Here they come, around the corner, sliding into the driveway in their family sedan. They’re back from the market, the father’s pockets no doubt lined with fresh 50s. The tires roll easily along the gravel, and I pray that lying somewhere in that collection of pebbles and stones is a glass shard, or a rock sharp enough to pierce the tires. My hopes are dashed as the car slows to a stop, the engine fading to silence. The youngest one, the boy, gets out and hurries to the front door. “No need to rush,” the father proclaims as he strolls outwards in a warm winter coat, his fingers escaping the clamp of the slammed car door behind him. Out comes…

Luneland: Now hiring full-time and part-time cast members. Residence and accommodations onsite. Contact Grace Delacroix in the back office. The poster depicted a beautiful crystalline tower with a dragon clinging to the side, in the center of a medieval village where families in modern clothing walking around. On the horizon were rollercoasters and flat rides – drop tower, pirate ship, star flier – but none were as high as the tower. It looked like a summer job opportunity sent from heaven, but God, I was nervous. I kept looking at the poster in my hands as I waited in front of a door marked “Employees Only”, on the back side of one of the buildings. This poster was my way…

A gray SUV stopped by a white house in the countryside. The garden was a bit overgrown; the grass and trees were starting to claim more land than they had been permitted. Five people came down from the car and looked around. ‘This place looks nice.’ Said a tall blond girl with green eyes while taking a deep breath. ‘Yeah, it’s a nice place. Grandpa loved this: fresh air, the forest extends for ten kilometers, and there is a river down the hill; we used to bathe there as kids. A dark and tall man in his thirties said as he looked towards the forest with a nostalgic face and a little smile. ‘Sorry to ruin the moment, Kendric, but…

I would like to start this story by saying that Ray was great. A perfect gentleman and consummate professional. He didn’t send a single untoward word or glance in my direction the entire time we were together. Even when things got scary, he put my safety first. And in spite of everything that happened to us, we’re already talking about working together again. I just want to lead with that, because I know that as soon as I start to tell my story – tell you that I’m an amateur female model who did a nude photoshoot with a male photographer twice my age in an isolated location in the countryside – most of the people reading this are going…

Leonard pushed his face firmly into the crease of his elbow as another scathing blast of frigid air blew through the valley. The snow piled up at his feet while he stumbled up a small incline, struggling to keep his balance, the biting cold permeating his winter jacket. Shivering, he turned, baring his back to the icy downpour and staring across the barren fields of white before him. At the very crest of the blizzard, a single tent was cartwheeling, leaving a trail of tiny dents as each of its jagged ends hit the ground. He prayed no-one was inside as he watched it disappear from sight, disintegrating to torn scraps of material. Tracing the tent’s path, he spotted a…

I used to work security at a vehicle safety testing facility – a crash test facility, really – just outside of Gothenburg in Sweden. The place has been around for a long time, and many of the most popular models around here have been tested at this facility. The purpose of security in this context was mostly to keep trespassers out and ensure that doors were locked and alarms primed. There were three of us on the security team; Jakob had the day shift while Micke and I handled the night shift. I was 24 years old at the time, Jakob was around the same age and Micke was in his 50’s. I never actually got to know Jakob very…

“Ladies. Gentlemen. Revenants to whom these distinctions have long since succumbed to the natural processes of putrefaction. I stand before you today with indisputable proof that Earth is ruled not by Man but by Nameless Things that dwell far beneath our serene and sunlit surface world. Yes, you all heard me correctly; Hollow Earth is as real as the Bavarian Illuminati. A vast, sprawling labyrinth of tunnels and chasms forged not from geological forces but rather by the antediluvian behemoths of the Deep Biome themselves! Do not fool yourselves, my friends! We live in blissful ignorance of Chthonic terrors galivanting with impunity beneath our very feet! An entire ultraterrestrial ecosystem which predates the last common ancestor of all surface life,…

1st Serving The light of the late evening filtered through my bedroom window; motes of dust danced in the rays of dying sunlight. My body feels wrong. It somehow feels heavy and light at the same time. I keep trying to lift myself out of bed but can’t find the strength. Has this happened before? No of course, not…right? I shouldn’t have eaten at that diner; I knew that gravy looked and smelled weird. I must be paying the price for eating that slop. Then I felt it, something was coming up. I tried to will myself up, I needed to get to the toilet. But my body wouldn’t move no matter what I did. I strained my neck as…

I was 13 when I first tried to kill myself. The orphaned son of a dead drug dealer and an incarcerated illiterate, I grew up knowing nothing but neglect and abuse. I was on my third foster home in nine months when I first tried. Wolfing down a handful of Tylenol, I had no idea what I was doing.  I survived this attempt, but only after spending 72 hours in a locked psychiatric facility. A locked psychiatric facility that was about as therapeutic as a supermax prison. But after three days of being force fed antipsychotics and raw-raw bullshit, I was released and kicked to the curb with little more than some cool new grippy socks. I would go on to repeat this process…

“THIS SHOW IS A JOKE!” As the latest person walked off the stage in a rage, throwing the papers up in the air as he stormed for the exit. I had just disproved his claim that he was telepathic, calling him out for trying to force a page open with his mind-. Just to see him try and flap his hands at the page, hoping it would blow over. This was my life, interviewing people that claimed they had “Extraordinary powers” then I would try to prove they were false. When I first started I was full of enthusiasm, this was my big break.. This was just a stepping stone to a bigger gig but five years later- I was …

It’s hard to purposefully forget something. The more you try not to think about it, the more you think about it. And the more you think about it, the more you obsess over it. You try to keep it tucked away in the back of your mind, but now the back of your mind is the only place you visit. You become engulfed with it, with the idea of forgetting. This happened to me, and now, it’s ruined my life. This all started around 10 years ago, when I started to dig though some of my old stuff. It was my Junior year of high school, and my parents wanted me to help my grandparents clean up their attic. I…