Fiction: Where the Minotaur (A Babylonian Medley Story)

Out of the books must you be judged, and out of the books have they been judging you. Have they judged you?

They have.

Out of books that are a pale, forged book of life. You remember the hearing of your crimes, even if the memory of them is sometimes faded in this place. You remember, and you remember knowing you were not a monster.

Story Notes: Land of Ten Thousand Faces

Notes to: Land of Ten Thousand Faces

And now we get to see things from the government's point of view. I think that this is as good a time as any to mention that I plan for Babylonian Medley to go on for a little longer. An astronomer, Damocles or one of his soldiers, the sorcerers, the nobles, and maybe the Peregrines and/or the Fourth Estate.

Land is a story about identities, and shedding them, and losing them. It's about prices paid.

Tizifone is Tisiphone, the Greek Fury.

Fiction: Land of Ten Thousand Faces

This story at Fictionpress.

See also: Absolutely Positive; Things Unsaid; Sixteen Hours

Also included this week:

A Story Across Years: Chapter nine. "Tradition, of course. I wonder when it started."

Land of Ten Thousand Faces

You are a Man Aside. A man aside from the mobs. A man aside from the concerns of the petty. A man aside from disorder, aside from destruction.

They call you the secret police. You know better, enough to understand how they can be right when they are so wrong.

You police the secrets. The dark corners, where fiends and malevolent stalk. There are demons in the world, you know, but there are men who would put them to shame. You are a man aside from such men.

Story Notes: Absolutely Positive

Notes to: Absolutely Positive

In keeping with the ambiguity of John's sex in Things Unsaid, I made sure to avoid any use of pronouns that would settle the matter one way or another. English really needs some good gender-neutral pronouns (and I'm not talking about words like "it" and "their").

I tried another way of setting flashbacks apart from the main flow of the story in Absolutely Positive. Indenting them worked better than italicizing would have, but it does make it a bit troublesome when I'm adapting the story to a format that doesn't support easy indenting (such as private messages to Beta readers who prefer to get the story as a PM or IM rather than an email).

Fiction: Absolutely Positive

This story at Fictionpress.

See also: Things Unsaid; Sixteen Hours

A Story Across Years: Chapter five. "Tradition, of course. I wonder when it started."

Secret Life: Chapters seven and eight. Sci-fi horror. "He is afraid. Afraid that he knows why he is here."

Sadcore warning. 

Babylonian Medley: Absolutely Positive

You made the lentil soup yourself. No-one can make it the way that you do. A dash of this and that. Humble ingredients that are spun together to make a meal fit for a noble. At least, you think so. Many nobles have disagreed with you on the matter.

Perhaps that is why they needed to die.

It isn't that you killed them for lacking in good culinary taste or simply disagreeing with you. But they couldn't appreciate the simple things. They couldn't see the refinement of humility or the grandeur therein. This had many different consequences. One of them was that they were unable to appreciate the best things in life. Another was that you have been been killing them whenever you could get away with it.

Story Notes: Things Unsaid

Notes to: Things Unsaid

To start with, the scriptural quotes, whether used straight or adapted, come from the American King James Version. Being a reader of the old timey version that's the one that I used in the first couple of drafts but someone mentioned that the occasional shift from modern English to King James was jarring. Luckily somebody else already went ahead and made an updated version so I didn't have to sacrifice either consistent tone or quoting from an actual translation of the Bible.

There are a lot of references in Things Unsaid. A lot of names dropped. Astronomers, Damocles, Zeno, the Fourth Estate, the precariat, peregrines, and more. Death of the author and all, yeah, but the best way to read it is as employing a Gene Wolf-style translation. Were you to speak with Damocles you would not hear of Babylon or the precariat, and you would learn that his name was not actually Damocles. But each word has a meaning behind it and simply giving the real thing wouldn't convey that meaning half as successfully. Things Unsaid is given its subtitle because it is a medley of concepts, disparate words brought together in order to pull on the reader's thoughts and feelings in certain ways. "Damocles" immediately summons up an image of the sword of Damocles, hanging over Babylon. "Precariat" tells more about that class of people than a whole paragraph of info-dumping could.

Fiction: Things Unsaid

See also:

Sixteen Hours

Babylonian Medley: Things Unsaid

The worst part about being alive, you think, is that you're dying the whole time.

You have seen other men vomit at the smell now assaulting you as you make your way through the clogged, winding streets of Babylon. Plague and famine are evident on the face of every body that you step past, whether dead or nearly so. Only the dogs and rats are well-fed these days, it seems. The stench alone is enough to make other men sick, but not you.