[darth vader]

"the demon that you can swallow gives you its power."

- joseph campbell

1.	Dice	2.	Fireflies	3.	Blood	4.	Sea	5.	Glass
6.	Boil	7.	Machine	8.	Fantasy	9.	Dog	10.	Lust
11.	Titan	12.	Free	13	Electrify	14.	Regret	15.	Children
16.	City	17.	Waste	18.	Smile	19.	Shackles	20.	Lights
21.	Song	22.	Holiday	23	Villain	24.	Hero	25.	Fly
26.	Tease	27.	Touch	28.	Hide	29.	Night	30.	Naive
31.	Animal	32.	Hush	33.	Soon	34.	Still	35.	Friend
36.	Close	37.	Together	38.	Fight	39.	Mask	40.	Clean
41.	Stars	42.	Panic	43.	The End	44.	Text	45.	Return
46.	Magical girls	47.	Gundams	48.	Bishounen	49.	Tentacles	50.	Writer's Choice

[darth vader]

03. late novena

There had been many times in her father's house when Thalia crawled on her belly across the dusty kitchen floor and knelt at the foot of the empty cupboards and did not cry, but slammed her fist again and again against the wood until her knuckles were scraped raw and the skin split open. She licked the blood out of her own wound and it was the only excuse for food she would have until her father arrived home from his travels, always almost too late, and gave her money to go the store and bring back a cut of fatty meat to fry on the stove. But now Thalia can't remember the long hours preceding the moment when her father would place the dish of steak before her. Only the animal satisfaction of stuffing the meat into her mouth with both hands. Desire paints the past a warmer color. Her father's voice is softer in her memory, the knife's edge of his neglect blunted. She presses herself against the corner of the house. She's been watching this family for three days now, a luxurious amount of time afforded by the careless butcher who lives down the street. He tosses his scraps into the back alley for the dogs, and Thalia waits for evening to fall so she can scavenge the prime cuts for herself before the strays come running. She gnaws on the hunk in her hand, raw and tasteless, and watches the house. (She'll have a fever from the spoiled meat for nearly a week in a few months, drifting in and out of delirium and lying comatose on the streets of Sina. The events of those days will fall away from her:  a Military Police greenhorn planting his boot in the side of her ribs and yelling at her to stop clogging the path, a black-suited man stepping carefully around her, his heel catching the edge of a puddle and spraying her face with muddy water. She'll remember only the pain, a distant flame burning under her skin, and beyond that, the feeling that she was traveling steadily higher and higher, rising toward something unknowable, until the fever snaps abruptly in the middle of the sixth night and she jolts awake, heart pounding, to find another street rat rummaging through her tattered clothes for anything of value.)  A woman moves behind the window on the second floor, silhouetted against the light. These people and their house are equally trim and proper, Thalia has learned. The carefully painted blue shutters and clean white walls echo the etiquette of its inhabitants. They never venture downstairs once they've retired for the night, she's learned. The lantern behind the window is blown out, and Thalia remains still for another half hour, gaze fixed, until she's convinced herself that it's safe. The back door swings open easily beneath her touch. No one locks their doors in this part of Stohess District. They sleep sound at night. They know they're safe.  The joke's on them. Thalia knows no one is safe.  The bare stone of their kitchen is cool beneath her feet, and Thalia fumbles about in the darkness uncertainly. This room is larger than any in her father's house, and a few moments of delicate prodding reveal that there's no actual food kept here--only a hewn and polished oak table, as well as a banked fire pit and the pot and spit tucked inside it. Thalia doesn't have time to wander through the house looking for the larder or storeroom or wherever rich people keep their fancy dried meats and fruits. She digs through the ashes in the fire pit, biting back a hiss of pain when she uncovers the embers banked for tomorrow morning's meal. Inside those coals is her prize, though: a small clay dish she snatches out with greedy, shaking hands. Inside is the baked bread that was warming for breakfast, and she rips the soft crust apart, choking it down as fast as she can.  It tastes only like oats and grain. It tastes better than anything in her entire life. Thalia chews so sharply that she cuts the inside of her own mouth, but even the copper rush of blood can't dampen her hunger. She closes her eyes. If she tries hard enough, she can summon the image of her father's table, his plate set before her. If she tries hard enough, she is back in her father's house. He is sitting across the way from her, making a disgusted noise at the sight of her eating. She doesn't care; she wolfs it down regardless of his comments. I'm so glad you're home now, she thinks. I missed you terribly.

LAIKA OF GS!

[darth vader]

19. parable of the cannibal

The military police are not an incredibly uncommon sight in the underground city. When the officers grow tired of their every day drinking and gambling they drive the newer recruits into the tunnels to flush out the street rats like hunters driving birds from a bush.  They only ever catch the very young and the very elderly. Old women with crooked backs and worn shawls and no sons to carry them on their backs down the paths. Scared boys with scuffed palms, still half-dazed by their crisp uniforms and mechanical walk, forgetting to run until it's already too late. Usually one of the officers drags whomever they catch into the center of the group and they club them with the butt of their rifles and laugh for a bit until they grow tired of their sport and march back out of the tunnels, but today-- Today they have a different kind of prey, a new kind of game. And it's her own fault for being caught. It's her own fault, because when the handful of police marched down and everyone else scattered, Thalia lingered and watched them with a seething hatred from behind an arch. She's quicker than them, and knows this place, these twists and turns, and she watches them, lax with that knowledge and her confidence, and when one of them spots her, raising his voice, she turns on her heel to sprint, and one of the recruits does something they've never done before. Years later, Thalia will be recounting this story to someone she loves, sprawled carelessly among the sheets, and she'll roll onto her stomach to show him the mark on her shoulder. If you look at it from the right angle, she drawls, it almost looks like a flower in bloom. That's not true. It looks like what it is: a knot of scar tissue, high on her right shoulder. And she can show him the scar, but there's no way to explain how, at the very moment it happened, she felt no pain. Only the abrupt feeling that she had been pushed forward into a new momentum--and then her legs buckled underneath her and the world twisted sideways when she collapsed.  She tried to put her arm up to break her fall and found she could not, crashing heavily into the ground. There was something pooling under her, and she wondered vaguely if perhaps they were flooding the tunnels. She searched inside of herself for some kind of surprise at that idea, the callousness of it, some denial that it could be carried out, and did not find it. She believed with her whole heart that these people were capable of it. There were footsteps, and then a shadow over her. The recruit who had raised his rifle and put a neat hole in Thalia's shoulder with one liquid motion nudged her ribs with his foot until she lifted her head up to face him. It had hardly been an effort for him. The military police, after all, was composed of the elite.  "Like hunting foxes at home," he said. "Easier, even. The foxes were smarter." There was an answering laugh from someone she couldn't see. He kept blurring in and out of her vision. Was he moving? Why couldn't she focus on him?  He bent down to grasp her face with one gloved hand and Thalia thrashed out of his grip, ignoring the white-hot lance of pain that was finally beginning to bloom down her arm.  "Feisty," he remarked, and drew his hand back when she tried to snap at it. "You ever tried breaking one of them?" A murmur. An answer. She was drifting. She wanted to go to sleep. Even the pressure began to press down on her shoulder wasn't enough to rouse her.  "--a fine game--" "--take bets on how long--" In her dream, she's walking along the streets of Sina. The way is completely clear. As she heads deeper and deeper into the heart of the city, she doesn't see a single person, but Thalia knows in her heart that she's drawing closer and closer to the Inner District.  "I'm going to make them beg," she says to the empty air. "And nothing they say is going to be good enough." There's no answer except the hum of the wind. The Wall rising silent and distant in behind everything. In the sky, there's not even a cloud.  When Thalia wakes, she's in the back of a wagon with her hands shackled in front of her. It's raining slightly, and when she flexes her shoulder tentatively, she can feel the crack of dried blood where no one bothered to wash her wound clean. She looks to the side and sees the woods rolling by, gray and impassive. It's the first time she's ever seen a forest.

LAIKA OF GS!