Metaphorosis September 2017

By Wendy Thompson, B. Morris Allen, Laura E. Price and 3 more

Beautifully written speculative fiction from Metaphorosis magazine.
All the stories from the month, plus author biographies, interviews, and story origins.

Table of Contents

• A Conversion of Crows – B. Morris Allen
• The Lost Languages of Exiles – Laura E. Price
• Renewal – Michael Gardner
• What the Darkness Is – Simon Kewin
• Radical Abundance – Angie Lathrop

Cover art by Wendy Thompson.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Metaphorosis Publishing
• Release date: Jun 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781640760882

Book preview

Metaphorosis

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September 2017

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edited by

B. Morris Allen

ISSN: 2573-136X (online)

ISBN: 978-1-64076-088-2(e-book)

Metaphorosis

Neskowin

Table of Contents

Metaphorosis

September

A Conversion of Crows

B. Morris Allen

The Lost Languages of Exiles

Laura E. Price

Renewal

Michael Gardner

What The Darkness Is

Simon Kewin

Radical Abundance

Angie Lathrop

Metaphorosis Publishing

Copyright

September 2017

A Conversion of Crows — B. Morris Allen

The Lost Languages of Exiles — Laura E. Price<

Renewal — Michael Gardner

What the Darkness Is — Simon Kewin

Radical Abundance — Angie Lathrop

A Conversion of Crows

B. Morris Allen

It moved forward in a crawl, jagged angles flowing over soil and stone alike, dawn shaping shadow and sun into beaks and talons that moved relentless toward her boot and over it. With a touch of her finger, the fern curled in on itself, withdrawing crags and fangs into a soft ribbon of green and grey whose silhouette curled round her foot like a friendly snake.

Sawtooth, my ass, she murmured. You could cut something like I could break a Bactrin spell. She stroked the fern with a gentle hand to take the sting out of her words. Around her, the shadows of trees stretched dark fingers down the slope toward the west and the sea.

Kared let go the fern, watched it shake its dew onto her last wax tablet. The tablet was almost full, its hard surface carved with as many tiny notes as she could contrive with a pointy piece of rock.

Time to buy a new stylus, she said, as she always did, as if, in this decaying age, what still called itself a town could boast enough literates to justify a trade in writing implements for careless researchers. Down the slope, beyond the cliff, a wave crashed and then slithered away. Like hope, like dreams.

Like breakfast, she said, and gathered up her tools before creaking to her feet. Chewy toasted mushrooms and crunchy, earthy root-nodes. Maybe soggy, toasted nodes and chewy, earthy mushrooms for variety.

Maybe some solid results for variety, she muttered. The marking stone in her left hand felt as cool as ever, putting the lie to the ancient Bactrin magic she knew was there. That had to be there.

It’s there, she told the stone, putting it back in the soft bag around her neck. It’s there, or I’ll be a factor’s sub-clerk. Literally. You wouldn’t like that, would you? The stone made no answer, seemingly content in being one of two pieces of Bactrin magic she had that still worked. There weren’t many around. Not much of anything worked anymore. She’d had the stone from her father – the only functioning artifact the man had ever found in his decades as an antiquarian and junk seller. It’ll find magic, he’d told her. Never fails. Keep it close. And unlike her father, it had never failed her.

Her other charm was a heat-trap, a swirl of driftwood the shape of a curved hand that gathered warmth during the day, and released it to cook her mushrooms at dawn. Or root-nodes. It worked only within a half-day’s walk or so of a Bactrin site – about her present distance from town. So there must be other sites close by. She’d traded more for it than she cared to think about, just to have a piece of functional magic to give meaning to her quest.

Some day, you’ll answer me, she told the silent marking stone as she headed back up slope to a flattish spot shaded by pines. Above the trees, a dark bird barked at the rising sun.

Laugh all you want. It’s worked before. In the city, when she’d convinced three wealthy patrons to fund this ludicrous expedition. When she’d argued that patterns of leaf growth could form a visual indicator of Bactrin ritual sites. That she’d establish a baseline with her marking stone, defining fine gradations of warmth that corresponded to the footprints of magic, and to the density of fern pinnae.

And the depth of bullshit they grow on. Out here, on the rocky coast, where Bactrin sites were said to be as common as slugs, her stone hadn’t warmed once, and her funds had grown as thin as her results. Likely her patrons didn’t care; for all she knew, she was no more than a conversation piece. In these days, discussion of research was worth far more than the thing itself.

Back at camp, the inevitable slugs had crawled all over her stores-bag, but only a few had gotten in to spread their trails over already-slimy planks of mushroom, cut from tree trunks just the night before.

You’re like students, she said, scraping them gently off into the leaf mold. Crawling all over someone else’s work for flavor, instead of doing your own. Which had nothing to do with that disastrous interview at what passed for a university. Nothing at all.

And you, she said, flicking a large yellow slug out of her heat-trap, you’re just suicidal. She rubbed away some of the slime, then bowed to the heat-trap, set it back in its little hollow of pebbles, and made a ritual pass. A comforting heat flowed out of it, and she quickly reached for her long skewer-twigs and poked them through the mushrooms. Heat was scarce in this rainforest, and not to be wasted.

While the mushrooms cooked, she dipped her last two root-nodes in a pail of water to clear the slug slime off. Browned by exposure and light, the two-day old nodes were unappetizing, and their surfaces felt mushy. Beggars can’t… They didn’t smell good, either. …eat sludge, she said, digging out a knife and paring away the soft outer layer of the nodes. There you go, slugs, she said, throwing the trimmings as far as she could down slope. Don’t say I didn’t share.

She couldn’t eat sludge. She wasn’t that hungry – yet. Crow, though. That was starting to look a lot more palatable.

A gust of wind overhead triggered a squawk and a flutter of wings.

Metaphorically, she called to whatever was up there, turning a mushroom whose skewer was starting to blacken. Don’t be disgusting. She took a bite of node, prodded a mushroom sceptically. Breakfast was bad enough already.

As dawn crept reluctantly up through the branches of pine and hemlock and cast its rosy glow on leaf mold and worm-castings, Kared inventoried supplies. Food, she said, none. Easy enough to find, if you count nodes and fungus as food. With her latest meal settling uneasy in her belly, she’d begun to have doubts. Water, more than anyone could ever want. Mostly in the form of damp, in her sleeping roll, her socks, her clammy undershirt. Sometimes in the form of rain that passed right through her lean-to and straight into her bones. Results, five tablets full, all negative. Five weeks of searching, five weeks of failure. Bactrin sites, none. Not one. Which ought really to count as a result of its own.

Not one, she frowned. Not one. She turned the idea over in her head. Not one sign of ancient Bactria, in a region known for Bactrin ruins, a region posited as one of the possible origins of the long-gone Bactrin empire. Not one flicker of Bactrin magic in a landscape littered with its symbols and traces. And slugs.

A lot of slugs, in fact. Tiny brown-striped ones, big yellow ones, mottled-black medium ones. All with frilly edges and slimy, creamy-pale foot-mouths. Crawling over everything in sight. Could any landscape possibly support so many slugs? What did they eat, anyway, with their endlessly walking mouths always in motion? A thrill of excitement slithered up her spine. Could there be something here? Could the key lie not in ferns, but in slugs? The gastropodian empire of Bactria, undiscovered until one woman, one brave, slightly damp woman, opened her mind to the possible, and saw what lay all around her?

She peered out against the rising eastern sun, the dark western slope down to the sea, the pines all around, listened to the caw of crows, or maybe ravens, or rooks. Big black birds, anyway. Lots of them. More than the landscape could support. She let her chin sink back onto the cold of her sweater. Unless they ate slugs, of course. No wonder they sounded so angry. Lots of trees, too. They gave something for the crows to perch on. Plenty of ferns, for that matter, densely leaved or sparsely. All undoubtedly quite natural. Very pleasing to the Bactrin psyche.

That can be my result, she mumbled. Ancient Bactrin mages, practitioners of magic, progenitors of progress – fans of slugs, trees, and big black birds. And wet, she sighed, as wind or bird shifted an evergreen above her, and a drip ran down her neck.

Not quite the ‘easy way to find new Bactrin sites’ method she’d promised her patrons, of course. And why didn’t it work? It should. It really should, she told a passing slug. He (She? It? How did slugs reproduce?) cocked a bendy tentacle at her, but didn’t pause in his headlong race to a nearby tree.

The marking stone grew warm in the presence of Bactrin magic. It did work. She’d tested it every week at ritual sites all over that moldy little coastal town where she transcribed her notes to paper (and dried her clothes, and bathed in warm water).

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