Erica Ciko's Blog

How cool is that? Check it out here: https://techbullion.com/erica-ciko-reverse-psychology-can-overturn-social-engineering/

So glad to have the time to pursue my true passions and write about material that deeply engages me once again.

~ Erica Ciko

Hey everyone! It’s been a while. I wanted to share an exciting guestpost that details my Certified in Cybersecurity journey. You can read it here on Scoopearth and learn all about it for yourself.

I’ve been writing a lot of security and networking articles lately, so you expect more like this in the near future!

And don’t worry: If you’re only here for the Science Fiction writing content, here’s a Medium post to keep you at busy for a little while.

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(Art by Erica Ciko)

You wake up in the middle of the night to a weird itch on the side of your face, but it’s faint enough to ignore and move on to more interesting topics: Like the phenomenon you were researching up until the moment you passed out beneath the covers, Pareidolia—the uncanny ability to view faces where there aren’t any. As you stumble out of bed, ignoring the laughing clown on the ceiling as always, you’re so relieved you’ve finally found a name for this eerie, inconvenient affliction that’s haunted you all your life.

On the way to the bathroom, you nod hello to the shadow people at the end of the hall, but they contort and evaporate into a static black haze, and a laughing black and white jester’s mask takes their place. That one is your least favorite face of all, and that’s saying a lot: It freaks you out so much that you squeeze shut your eyes, and vow not to open them for the rest of your journey through the seemingly endless dark.

It’s fine, you murmur to no one, groping clumsily for the wall, ignoring the sharp, burning pain that flares up when you accidentally scrape your cheek against it. It’s worth it if I don’t have to see the Jester again.

Finally, you feel the wet, brassy solace of the bathroom door handle somewhere to your left. You let out a sigh of relief, and briefly revel in the victory of your journey being half over. Things aren’t as bad as they seem, even if burning red eyes straight out of a Japanese horror movie are staring back at you from behind the toilet right after you open your eyes. Everything’s going to be different, you tell yourself, ignoring them. Now that you have a name, you’ll be able to find doctors, therapists, and maybe even support groups for people who go through the same nightly shitshow as you.

But for now, all I have to worry about is me, this room, and getting back to bed. Back to freedom. For whatever reason, the second you pull the blankets up around your head and tuck the covers in, they all melt away and leave you alone—that, and daylight, are the only things you’ve found that give you some semblance of a break before the nightmare begins again.

Pareidolia, you mutter as you sit on the toilet, shaking your head from side to side to chase away the weird dripping sensation plaguing your forehead no matter how many times you wipe it clean—you look up to see if there’s a leak, but nope—it’s just Sarah, the annoying bathroom harpie that lurks up near the fan every night and watches you like some kind of freak. “See, I know you aren’t real,” you tease, sticking out your tongue and taking her hisses in stride for once. “You’re just good old Pareidolia . . .”

You take your time finishing up, because you know your least favorite part is coming up soon, and you’d really like to put it off for as long as humanly possible. You have to wash your hands, which means ten seconds of pure adrenaline-fueled hell while you avoid looking in the mirror at any cost. The mirror is basically a factory working overtime pumping out freaky faces, after all, and you really don’t feel like staring down Harold the Sewage Monster after such a close run-in with the Jester on the way down the hall.

When the last drops of soap swirl away down the drain, as usual, you can’t help but steal a half-second look into the black, dead portal to a thousand worlds of pain. Weird, you think, raising an eyebrow at the blood-drenched, flayed, sad excuse for a face staring back. Never seen that one before. “What should I call him, Seth the Skinless?” you sigh to no one, turning away and stumbling back towards the bedroom with—surprisingly—no other incidents.

Until morning, of course, when the ungodly hours and the faces they bring are nothing more than a distant memory immortalized in the blood that dried upon your pillowcase. The scabs on your cheeks are stuck to the fabric, and you’re going to need water to rip the mess apart—at least if you want to keep your face. So, you bolt for the bathroom, bewildered and boiling over with pain, hoping that somehow, after you rip this pillowcase off the side of your head, you’ll be able to figure out what the hell is going on.

You find Seth the Skinless in the bathroom mirror even though it’s long past sunrise, forever smiling back with festering wounds where lips should be. There’s something clownlike about him, something familiar . . . Too familiar, you shiver, wondering if he could be tied in with that freaky clown that hangs out on your bedroom ceiling all night.

Only when he parts those hideous wounds, and your lips start moving too, do you realize it’s your own voice softly chanting:

You were so busy looking for faces where they didn’t belong

That it took you ‘til morning to notice that your own face was gone.

END

If you’ve been waiting to sink your teeth into my Lovecraftian nightmare “Never Ending, Ever-Growing,” go grab a copy . . . before one grabs you instead.

After receiving this awesome review from Publishers Weekly, I’ve been even more excited about seeing my “Lovecraftian Corporate Horror” alive and in print for the very first time. (I may have borrowed part of that description from a cool review I received on Goodreads).

So much has changed since I got that life-changing news: News that my story would appear in an anthology by one of the greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy publishers of all time. To this day, even though I’ve stared at it endlessly and leafed through the pages countless times, my brain can’t seem to digest the fact that I share a table of content with some of my favorite modern authors.

To call it an honor is an understatement. All it takes is a glance at any Baen anthology to see that the editors care about the work they’re putting out. Unlike some publishers, they don’t just slap the stories in there at random without any cohesion or cosmic symphony. They treat their authors’ work with respect from start to finish, and deliver an awesome final product to their loyal readers.

This was my first time working with them, and they took far more care with my story than any publisher I’ve ever dealt with before. They write an intro for each story that ties the piece not only to the author’s background, but to the literary world as a whole. This is what the editors came up with for me. (And yes, you get a sneak peak of the actual story beneath it, too. But if you want to finish you’re going to have to buy the anthology).

Now, anyone who knows me is painfully aware that I bring a little bit of Lovecraft into everything I write. I affectionately refer to him as “The Immortal Master of Cosmic Horror” in short story cover letters, and even to unsuspecting friends and family. So it was definitely a chilling feeling–in a good way–to see that my efforts were recognized in Worlds Long Lost.

Sometimes, life is so strange that you could never figure out where your next path will take you in a million Starless Aeons. And although I never expected my first big publication would be with Baen, the experience has been everything I dreamed it would be and more.

The idea of having more eyes than ever before on one of my stories is harrowing for sure: But knowing that finally, one of my weird, twisted tales has made it out of the pulps is a feeling I wouldn’t trade for anything.

I don’t think he’s as excited as I am.

This story originally appeared in the Through Other Eyes anthology by All Worlds Wayfarer.

Illustration by Desmond Rhae Harris

The Prince of Murk and Rot

by Erica Ciko Campbell

“This the story of how I defeated society and my adversaries, and how I reached the stars. If it reaches you even now across these starless aeons, sleep soundly and with a blood-drenched, broken smile: For the worst is yet to come.” – Viricula, Black Centuries III

Before the Blood Spines tore through the clouds and the Alnilam infiltrated the halls of the first Grim Kings, when Stargrave was young and the Lords of Silvenmyr were but a whisper of a ghost in the Empyrean Halls, I wandered the Mountains of Myr.

“‘But Vorn,’” they always ask, “‘Why have you wandered the Raizalarian countryside as a humble vagabond exorcist for all these years if you dreamed of the dissolution of reality itself since before the stars were young?’”

Well, my friend, the answer is simple: Because being a vagabond exorcist is fun—and all I’ve ever known.

The gift first awakened inside me when I was as young and desperate as the countless demons I’ve driven out: As vulnerable to possession, corruption, and other evils as the innumerable people I’ve liberated.

I was seven years old, and my dearest mother had come down with a particularly gruesome affliction. Her eyes had warped from the crystalline yellow of the moon to the bloodshot, blackened pits that only true desperation can bring. Her crimson hair, once as thick and lush as my own, had gone brittle and begun to fall out in clumps.

The local healer was convinced she’d contracted a particularly ugly case of rotbrain from eating bad meat, but he was as blind as my father, who had no idea he’d been sleeping next to one ofViricula’s own fragments every night for an entire cycle of the moon.

Now, like any Syndragorean boy of seven, I’d heard so many stories about the the Prince of Murk and Rot that his whispers reached me even in dreams. I knew that Viricula’s spawn had been driven from the Halls of Time forever, to the darkest corners of our own world—but I struggled to accept that my mother’s heart was a feast black enough to satisfy the vilest scoundrel of Raizalarian legend.

How could my own mother, the one who kissed my forehead and gave me sweets every single night, have been twisted and vile enough to draw one of Viricula’s own spawn? Possession was something that happened to other families in nightmares and campfire legends—how could it happen to ours?

But this is the very line of thinking which allowed the fragment to slip past my father and the village healer for so long, unaccounted for. This is the very line of thinking that has led to there being a shortage of Raizalarian exorcists since the first bones of Stargrave were lain upon the Nightmoor when the world was young.

My seven-year-old brain nearly boiled itself to mush trying to drink it all in, I assure you. But my mother had been screaming that the townsfolk were breathing too loudly and needed to be suffocated under an ocean of their own blood for thirty-three nights straight, and finally I’d had enough.

In truth, I’d recognized she’d been possessed by a fragment of Viricula after the second night—but there are far worse virtues than curiosity that a young man could have chosen to explore, wouldn’t you agree?

No one in the village suspected even for a second that a child could keep his composure through truths so jarring and black—which meant that I had the unique opportunity to study a fragment of Murk and Rot in the safety of my own home. I have not even the faintest shred of a doubt that my time with that shadowside fiend who pretended to be my mother made me into the man I am today.

But all sweet dreams come to an end, and all friendships must eventually be consummated in separation or final death: So on the thirty-third day, I knew it was time to set my mother free.

I woke up starving that morning, as I always did. My mother was sputtering curses and wishing for me to choke on my stew, as she had every morning after falling under the influence of Viricula’s fragment. I still remember the pure, unrestrained loathing in her eyes as she shrieked how I was a waste of perfectly good meat that didn’t deserve to breathe—how she promised to chop me up and cure my meat and store what was left in the wooden chest with the giblets and summer sausage.

Something about the strings of spit flying from her lips that morning made me even hungrier than usual as she wished me dead. So I did what any adoring, admiring son would do, and I gave her a kiss.

To this day, I can’t fully recall what nebulous delights consumed me. All I know is that I took something from her: Something that is still with me to this very day—and from the moment I drew that sour, sacred cosmic essence out from her lips and past my own, my services were in-demand from my forgotten hometown in the Myrothian Foothills to the gates of Stargrave.

Word of my mother’s miraculous return to health spread quickly in such a small town, and soon, the truth got out. Our local Priestess of Hermestra insisted that it was only a matter of time until the demon took hold of my own form, if it hadn’t already—but to everyone’s surprise, I remained completely and utterly unchanged. I was seemingly invulnerable to demonic influence, even though my father and the townsfolk were far too simple to ever deduce why.

No one ever noticed that I soon developed a violent, nearly-insatiable craving for cured meats that has stuck with me even to this day.

#

From the moment I passed beneath the ivy-licked gates of Lightsmourn, I was reminded of the still, quiet town in which my gift awakened. Off in the distance, I glimpsed the ramparts of Castle Exfyre, like broken fangs screaming towards the lurid magenta sky. The towers were crowned with worn golden spires that seemed to twist their way past the bounds of the atmosphere and Syndragorean imagination.

Before the raven arrived with Duchess Exfyre’s urgent plea, I had been planning on a long weekend lost deep within the Mountains of Myr to contemplate the glory days of rot and ruin—but few things could lure me more quickly away from the blackened freedom of midnight than the pleas of a desperate noble.

The Duchess was there to greet me at the castle gates, with no small legion of guards and attendants ensorcelling her. Her ruffled blue gown was the color of tears, and her sublime golden hair made the ruby-encrusted crown she wore atop her head seem dull.

It had been many months since I’d drank in such sorrowful eyes, ripe with the hopeless, raw abandonment of true betrayal. It was as if her very soul was screaming for reprieve, for a consolation that could only be found in a mother’s arms or the realm of childhood dreams.

“Thank you for coming,” She muttered in an idle, distant tone, reaching for my hand in a gesture of trust that did little to quell my suspicion that I was not what she expected.

But with the sweeping finesse of a polished gentleman, I fell to one knee and kissed her warm mahogany hand and purred, “The pleasure is mine alone.”

My entire body shivered as her carmine claws, embedded with garnets, brushed against my cheek as she implored me to stand. The smell of my own blood was thick and raw against the frigid night.

I felt the collective gaze of her entire gaggle of guards dissecting my every move as we swept across the castle, past banners of long-forgotten armies and suits of armor far too large for any living man. A sour disdain crept up at the bottom of my throat as we passed through the shadow of a vertebrae six times larger than my own form: It pained me to know these splendors of old Raizalarian legend would forever be locked away within the halls of Exfyre, far from the unworthy eyes of the masses.

We passed through libraries filled with books whose age-worn black spines held a wicked and limitless energy that whispered to me even from across the room. We passed by a door marked ‘laboratory’, and I caught the scent of a cornucopia of tonics and poisons that even I’d never tangled with before.

The Duchess was silent until we’d reached the foot of the staircase that led up to the young Lady Exfyre’s quarters.

“I . . . must admit, I never thought it could happen here.” The urgency in her voice was more sublime than bathing in a pile of rose petals in a court of glass beneath the summer moon. Countless peasants and wayward travelers had been in debt to me for decades, but the desperation of royalty was something I’d never grown tired of.

“It can happen in any timeline and any generation, Duchess,” My reassuring tone was betrayed only by the curious glimmer of my golden eyes. “It has an equal chance of happening to Emperors and the ones who scrub out their chamber pots: To kings, and the beggars who loiter outside their castle gates, trading their dignity for a single morsel of bread.”

“Yet still, I never thought it would happen to my own daughter. Meadowlark is the gentlest girl I’ve known in all my life. She’s always embraced the light and the new ways and turned her back on the dark. Her empathy for all living creatures is so boundless that I’ve seen her weep for the death of a mouse.”

“Then it’s no small wonder that a fragment of Viricula has preyed upon her,” I mused, earning a scowl from half the guards in one fell swoop.

“Mind your tongue, conjurer,” gnashed the guard closest to the Duchess, tightening his grip on his spear. 

“Ah, the truth often awakens such rage in the minds of the frail,” I smiled, raising both hands harmlessly to show I was armed with knowledge and nothing more. “Do I deserve to be condemned for revealing the uncomfortable truth that demons aren’t drawn to good or evil, but weakness above all else? If so, then drag me down to the dungeons and let me rot: Meanwhile, the Lady Exfyre can live a rich and fulfilling existence walled off in this tower as an echo in the forgotten corners of some demon’s brain.”

And so we began the trek up the winding staircase, past the chartreuse-and-violet stained glass windows, to the room where the fragment lurked. The turbulent silence in the wake of my insult, far louder than any scream, signified that all of them knew I was untouchable for as long as the Duchess’s daughter needed my help. The posse began to thin out as we continued our ascent.

“Whenever the guards slip food through the slot in the door, she sends the tray out only a moment later, covered in excrement and chunks of hair,” the Duchess muttered, as if that was the worst thing she could possibly conceive in a thousand lifetimes. “It took six guards to drag her up to the tower, and only four walked out.”

A small red door smothered in chains awaited us on the platform at the top of the stairs. Aside from the Duchess and myself, only two of the most loyal guards remained. A lone black candle exhaled its dying plumes, and a sick crimson light crept out from beneath the door.

“Vorn of the Nightside Grove,” she began, reaching for my hand once more and gently stroking it in the shadows. “Before it begins, there’s something I must tell you.”

Her ruby claws shredded the flesh of my hand, drawing blood. She lifted my fingers to her lips and and lapped up blood slowly, carefully from between the crevices. I said nothing: The starless, night-black pits of my narrowed eyes spoke for themselves.

“I called you here today because of the unquestionable fact that you’re the best at what you do in all of Raizalar. This is no ordinary demon that’s taken root inside of Meadowlark’s heart, and you are the only one I trust with my daughter’s life.”

“Is any demon “ordinary,” Duchess Exfyre? It’s hard to think of anything stranger than being injected with the nebulous sparks of eternal life, only to spend eternity riding the coattails of mortal dreams.”

“Pardon my insolence,” the Duchess conceded with a hint of sarcasm, relinquishing her grip on me with both her hand and her tongue. “All I can say is what I’ve already told you in the letter: Heal my daughter, Vorn of the Nightside Grove, and any relic of your choosing from the halls of my castle will be yours forever.”

My mind flashed back to the massive vertebrae, a portal to some forgotten time-before-time immortalized in bone. Then I remembered the spell books, the crumbling sentinels of all the forbidden secrets of the ages. My smile must have repulsed her, for she crinkled her nose and turned away.

“Go, now. And remember, I’ve entrusted the future of the entire Exfyre bloodline and all of Lightsmourn onto you.”

#

Now, I have no doubt that this shard of Viricula was the most loathsome horror Duchess Exfyre had faced in this life or any other. But from the moment I stepped past the gates of these time-lost halls, I knew my soon-to-be-adversary was little more than a pathetic slave to a pathetic slave like all the rest.

But of course, it was crucial for the duchess to believe that her daughter’s tormentor was the essence of agony itself. For if such a frail and spineless fragment could upheave her entire life, how would she ever sleep again if she knew what horrors lurked just beyond the somber refuge of night?

As I entered that chained-off room and heard the lock click behind me from the outside, I was still so lost in thought that it took me a moment to notice the Lady Exfyre hunched on all fours in the pulsing red light. All the curtains of the canopy bed where she rested were torn and crusted. The thick, ripe stench of rot dominated the entire chamber, and I knew the bodies of the fallen guards hadn’t been removed long before I drank in their clean-picked faces.

I smiled at the Lady Exfyre, and she grinned back, her fangs adorned with strips of rotten meat and caked with corpse blood. Her red eyes flickered in the light of a hundred black candles burning low.

I drew closer to the bed, and her expression soon melted into the flat and anxious frown of uncertainty. She cringed back from me, feigning a sudden interest in the severed nipple of one of the guards that she’d nailed to the bedpost with a shard of bone. Knowing how common it was for these fragments to be shy in their hour of judgment, I gave her space and allowed her to contemplate her final moments in the realms of men in this silent, suspended kingdom of Murk and Rot.

I soon fell victim to the amorphous stirrings of empathy, as I often did before harnessing my gift: In truth, I knew the pain of the demon wearing the Lady Exfyre’s face. For I too have chosen a path of isolation wreathed in pure cosmic blackness—but still, every cell in my body longs for the warmth of the moonlight of summer’s end. I too have sold my soul to never know sadness, or hunger, or a twinge of pain, but every bone in my withered, impossibly battered form aches to know them again. I too have severed all ties from the world from which I came—but still, all the quiet spaces between my brain have been flooded with a wild and fervent longing to return.

“Are you going to send me back?” She gurgled, her pale lips encrusted with vomit and worse.

“What do you think?” I asked, reaching for her throat and gently stroking her lymph nodes, focusing.

“It’s not how I thought it would be,” the demon conceded, her eyes softening at last and brimming over with all the sorrows of the final twilight of a life wasted. “Mortal life, I mean.”

“You can imagine something a million times, and it’s still worth less than truly tasting it even once,” I purred, licking my lips. She was a near-spitting image of the Duchess Exfyre with those cheek bones sharper than knives, but her hair was far darker. I could only imagine how sublime, how supple her chestnut locks had been before the corruption took hold and forced them to dry up and fall out.

“I know.” When she sighed, her breath was so sour and thick that it momentarily choked out the stench of the corpses. “I miss unreality: It was a lot less complicated than here. Really, I’m kind of glad it’s over.”

 “Oh, but it’s only just begun,” I hissed, reaching out to stroke the side of her face and redirect her resigned gaze into my own eyes.

She cringed back as our flesh boiled together, as if she expected me to change my mind and smite her at any moment. A hundred candles flickered in unison as I dragged her into the shadowside.

Outside time, the sky and all the forgotten secrets of the past were one, blanketed by the stars themselves. I urged her to gaze down into the abyss, to drink in what was ours once and would be ours again at the end of the universe: The collective dreams of entire civilizations compressed into bite-sized spheres of energy, waiting to be plucked from the gardens of eternity. The empty thrones of not only the kings of Raizalar, but of every planet and every galaxy yet unnamed. The silence of the grave and the cosmic sea between reality and dreams—all devoured and rolled into nothingness, forever.

“This is but a taste of what we lost when the Lords of Silvenmyr took hold,” I told her. “And this is what I offer you in exchange for your cooperation.”

“R-really?” She rasped, carefully, childishly. I expected no less: The brain she now wore had belonged to a girl who couldn’t have yet reached her twentieth birthday. But still, the glimmer of wonder baptized in pure black atrocity soon came to life in her eyes, telling me all I needed to know.

“Yes,” I declared, sweeping my arm grandly towards the eternal twilight kingdom, and the stars themselves flickered. “As long as you can promise to do one thing for me.”

“W-what is it?” She whimpered, her tears reflecting the timeless essence of ethereal mysticism as the swirling red nebulae flickered back to life below.

“You have to trust me. You have to believe that I’ll come back for you when I’ve freed the rest of your brothers and sisters.”

“I . . . That’s all?” She tilted her head, and finally her sobbing stopped.

“No: You also have to do a much better job at pretending to be Meadowlark Exfyre. After I exorcise her soul for all eternity, you’ll be free to explore her brain without intrusion. You’ll have full access to all her memories, and cravings, and woes. I need you to put on such a convincing performance that not even her own mother will never realize she died: And I need you to always remember that the Lord of Murk and Rot gave you a second chance at life, when the ones in power summoned him to swallow you down.”

“Y-yes,” she stammered, now staring directly into my own eyes for the very first time. “I think I can do it. I . . . feel better already, somehow.”

“Your faith in me will sedate your soul and guide you to eternal freedom,” I reassured her. “And no one will suspect a thing. After your precarious brush with Black Eternity, the ones outside will understand you need time to recover and return to your original self: I’ll make sure of it.”

She nodded, and I flexed my fingers in perfect unison as time wound itself back together again. We were back at Castle Exfyre, now, and the candles were burning far brighter than before. I leaned in to kiss her, and I closed my eyes and drank Meadowlark Exfyre’s soul.

On the way out, I reached down and peeled away a strip of the guard’s neck for later: I could never turn my back on cured meat, no matter how crude the preparation.

#

The Duchess took her place at the head of the table, presiding over rich and exotic offerings such as stuffed mare’s head and spiced stew of dragon entrails. I was offered the position of honor at her left side, which I accepted with a gracious bow. The guards who once cowered in fear at the mere mention of Meadowlark Exfyre’s name were now scattered across the banquet hall, guzzling mead and howling victory ballads to celebrate her return.

When one of the servants attempted to place a slice of meat onto my plate, I politely refused. I would not indulge in even a single bite of their food, but I drank the wine. Across from me, young Meadowlark Exfyre was fervently studying a bowl of wolfskin porridge with grapes and berries floating in it. The contents of her wine goblet soon joined the slurry.

“Meadowlark! What did I tell you about repulsing our guests?” Scolded the Duchess, crinkling her nose at her daughter’s unusual dining choices.

“If I may be so bold, Duchess Exfyre,” I interrupted, placing my hand on her gilded knee plate beneath the table where no one would ever know. “Although Meadowlark’s habits may be . . . unusual for the time being, please try to remember what we talked about. It could take weeks, or even months for her to return to her true self: And any new cravings acquired on the shadowside may very well haunt her forever.”

With a sigh, the Duchess smiled, “I suppose you’re right. I should be glad to have her by my side at all, yes?”

“Indeed,” I rasped, exchanging a dark and forlorn smile with Meadowlark across the table. After all, what kind of father would I be if I didn’t show my own fragment a shred of approval now and again, after all she’d been through?

Guests were continuing to pour into the hall, and soon it seemed that half of Lightsmourn had shown up to celebrate Meadowlark’s liberation. The feast carried on into the early hours of the night until the black torches lining the walls burned low. The ladies danced, the children shrieked, and even the Duchess herself drank until her cheeks were flushed red.

They sang for normalcy, and gluttony, and willing numbness to all the evils of the world. They drank to the return of a girl they claimed to love, but couldn’t tell from a demon. And without knowing it, they celebrated yet another glorious victory for Murk and Rot.

As the revelries continued into the early hours of the morning, the townsfolk were slowly beginning to drain from the banquet hall. Many of the guards had retreated back to their quarters as well. At long last, I was alone at the end of the table with the Duchess and Meadowlark.

“It’s hard to believe that this nightmare has finally drawn to an end,” the Duchess Exfyre said, dissecting me with her gaze while stroking her daughter’s hand. “But you held true to your word, Vorn of the Nightside Grove. And now, my daughter and I are in your debt. So as promised, I invite you to walk through our castle and choose one single relic to keep for all eternity.”

I considered allowing her to lead me back through her ancestral halls so I could snatch one of the forsaken tomes, or one of the potions from the laboratory, but even I’m not that much of a snake: For I’d already taken the most pleasing, scrumptious souvenir that the Exfyre bloodline could ever offer me.

“I have no need for wealth or abundance, Duchess. I can’t imagine a greater reward in this life or any other than your satisfaction.”

“I can see why all of Raizalar trusts you with their lives and futures, Vorn of the Nightside Grove.” The duchess smiled, stroking my hand without cutting me for the very first time. “You will always be welcome in the kingdom of Lightsmourn and the halls of Exfyre. And I’m certain Meadowlark will always remember you as the one who saved her soul and set her free, from now until the streams of time run dry.”

END

If so, care to share your tips and tricks?

I’m thinking about gathering my “cursed unsellable stories”, along with all the ones whose contracts have timed out, and creating my own anthology to list on Amazon!

Trouble is, print has always been a huge mystery to me, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t extremely intimidated by the whole process. I know nothing about the “print on demand” feature on Amazon, but other publishers have sent me some pretty awesome magazines and anthologies that (I think?) were made through it.

If you were in my shoes, would you go down this route, or is there something better out there to use for print copies? I definitely want to get a stack of these to give to people IRL and sell on my own, and I don’t mind paying in advance.

As I said beofore, the anthology will feature some of my old classics like “The Sun Beneath the Glaciers” and “Macrophages”–along with some never-before-seen nightmare visions from Old Zyrgoth and beyond.

I also plan on eventually releasing an anthology of exclusively Lovecraftian stories, so this will be practice for that. For the name, I’m thinking something like “Black Roses on the Grave of the Immortal Master” – By Erica Ciko Campbell.

Ha. It walks the line between corny and epic, but in my mind, almost all good things do.

In other news, I nearly lost my mind when I saw that I now have my own author page on Simon and Schuster. Yes, you read that right: I have a story coming out in the Worlds Long Lost anthology by Baen Books, edited by Christophe Ruocchio. It won’t be available until December 6th, but you can already pre-order it on Amazon by following that link.

This is my biggest publication to date, so to say I’m excited is definitely an understatement! My work will be featured alongside stories from some truly legendary authors, and every story in the anthology revolves around one of the coolest themes I could ever think of: Xenoarchaelogy!

I don’t want to spoil the fun until you can read the whole story in December, but maybe–just maybe–I’ll post a new story for you guys to read in the meantime so you have something to hold you over.

Take care,

Erica Ciko Campbell

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Erica Ciko Campbell is an Active Member of both the SFWA and the HWA. Her stories have appeared in many eerie and enchanting venues, most recently Mythic, Cosmic Horror Monthly and Tales to Terrify. She’s the Editor-in-Chief of Starward Shadows Quarterly and a First Reader at Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores. If you’re still craving the whispers of war-torn, dead galaxies, check out her website: http://starless-imperium.com/. You can also find her on Twitter at @TheLastGrimKing.

Exciting news, everyone! Thanks to Linda D. Addison, I’ve been featured in The Seers Table of the Horror Writers Association for my work on Starward Shadows Quarterly! I’m so thankful she took an interest in the magazine and decided to include me in this month’s feature. Getting the magazine off the ground has been challenging at times, so it’s wonderful to have someone recognize all the hard work and dedication.

Linda also chose a lovely story written by Jamie Lackey called The Book of Fthagn to feature in The Seers Table as well, and I’d like to take a moment to reflect on why I chose this story to begin with. We all know that there’s no shortage of Lovecraft Mythos stories written by the same old demographic (so many that there’s no need to point out what this demographic even is!). However, at Starward Shadows, we’ve decided to try and examine the Mythos through a different lens. We’re looking for stories by women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and anyone else who falls into an underrepresented group. That’s not to say we’ll only publish stories from these groups–but we really want to let these previously-stifled voices shine in our magazine, and Jamie’s story did a wonderful job.

I loved how she built on the classic setting of Innsmouth–so classic, in fact, that it’s been ripped off in more books and movies than I could count in a thousand lifetimes–but somehow, she made it feel modern and fresh. I don’t think most people ever would have imagined a story set in present-day Innsmouth, told from the perspective of an “average” high school girl. It’s truly something I’ve never encountered before, and it was a pleasure to read from beginning to end.

I can’t wait to find more similar stories that bring a much-needed new twist to Lovecraft’s old settings. Personally, I believe that the Mythos of old still holds tons of untapped potential for authors who originally would have been excluded from it. If this subject interests you, I elaborate on my feelings a lot more in this Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein interview.

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Thank you so much for helping to get my name out there, Linda! And to everyone else, don’t forget to check out all of the awesome authors who made it all possible!

Out of every publication I’ve ever been included in, I have to say, this one is the greatest honor. H.P. Lovecraft has been my favorite author since I first grew completely immersed in his nightmare visions at age 15 with an old copy of “The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories.” When I read his words for the very first time, the only thing that crossed my mind was “Wait, there was someone else out there who wrote the same kind of stuff as me?”

From then on, my writing was never the same. To call the immortal master of cosmic horror a huge inspiration would be an understatement. His words brought me out of my 4-year writing stasis, and inspired me to lay the groundwork for worlds that would later on define the entire Starless Aeons series. I have no doubts that if I never hid his books beneath my desk in tenth grade while I was supposed to be listening to the teachers ramble on, I wouldn’t be writing today to begin with.

So, as you might imagine, it was a huge honor to have my story A Deal Between Bats accepted for Issue #14 of Cosmic Horror Monthly. This story is a very special one to me, as it was my first attempt at truly “taking up the torch” and continuing the mythos. Although Lovecraft’s influence peeks through in every story I write, this was the first time I wrote a direct spinoff of one of his legendary, peerless tales–and his final one, no less.

Although it’s nearly impossible to choose,The Haunter of the Dark was always one of my favorites. The mesmerizing, hypnotic descriptions of the Shining Trapezohedron haunted me since the day I first read them, and I truly think this bleak and mind-bending tale is one of the best examples of Lovecraft’s style and art. So so I was rather intimidated by the idea of “continuing” the story in the far reaches of space and time with my own characters, but apparently some people somewhere thought I did a pretty good job.

A Deal Between Bats reads sort of like a dark space opera with the dread and hopelessness of true cosmic horror delicately interwoven throughout. You can have a taste of it for yourself here in the Cosmic Horror Monthly Webshop, alongside many other chilling Lovecraftian stories–including some by the man himself.

Author’s Note: This weird little Science Fiction story first appeared in the Tales of Clickbait, Volume 1 anthology, but I have permission from the editor to post it on my site as well! Since I was a child, I’ve been deeply intrigued by shopping malls and the culture that surrounds them–and in recent years, the “dead mall” phenomenon that’s sweeping across America, especially in the wake of COVID-19. This story was deeply influenced by this lifelong fascination.

Across the bleak and infinite vacua of space, a million years after humanity found an answer to the meaning of life and transcended their mortal shells, a Model #349-9 Omegatype sat in the food court of the Palisades Mega Mallship contemplating a very human problem:

Where will you go when you’ve reached the end, when you’re already living in society’s indisputable version of heaven, but each passing moment feels like its own little slice of hell? He scrawled onto a wadded-up napkin with the pen attachment of his black-gloved fingertip. Really, the napkins were all for show, along with the entire food court—after all, the Omegatypes were organ-void metal shells that ran on volts instead of calories. But this neon aggregate of pastel booths and polished marble tables—and really, the entire Mallship—were a quirky but well-loved anachronism, a testament to the long-vaporized ghost of Earth that humanity (not just the electrical impulses that haunted these hollow shells, like some of the skeptics whispered) had persevered in some way.

Zeradu was one of these skeptics, and always had been, even though he didn’t know how to put it into words outside from scrawling angsty notes onto a napkin. He never thought of himself as much of a poet, and as usual, he’d already given up. His oblong black expression screen went completely blank with boredom once again as he watched the unmoving purple clock tacked onto the towering pillar to his left—a constant reminder that he had all the time in the world to try again tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day aft . . .

“No,” he sighed, knowing it probably sounded weird to talk out loud to himself, but then quickly realizing that no one was listening anyway. “Not this again.”

Just thinking of the concept of time anymore made his visor feel like it was going to crack. The clocks, like the napkins, were a hollow prop too: A glimmer of comfort from a forgotten time that none of the Omegatypes had ever even known—a kitschy echo of the last humans’ nostalgia before they sealed themselves away in these metalloid coffins forever and set off into the unknown, leaving everything but the memories behind.

The neon lights of the “Hot Pizza” signs flickered weirdly off the visors of all the strangers, seeming to meander in tune with the mournful synth music that was perpetually blaring over the loudspeakers. Zeradu never really bothered talking to any of them, even though he’d shared this ship with them for the past ten thousand years—no, it must have been twenty by now. The last time he’d bothered, none of them could remember why they were here or who they were before, either. So what was the point? They were nothing but props, really: Not so different from ferns swaying gently in oversized pots on the walls, or the circus animals spinning in blind, bleak perpetuity on the carousel.

If this is transcendence, if this really is a ‘better place’, then I’d rather . . . “No,” he muttered, crossing it all out manically, then crumpling up the napkin and tossing it onto the pink and white tiles of the floor. This one belongs to the cleaning crew now, he decided. That was enough writing for today. He’d have tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. It was almost time to go back to his cabin, a dressing room in the hollowed-out belly of what they used to call a “department store” back on Earth. He could only take the “Mobile Phone Repair” light strip banner cycling through a couple thousand times before he could feel the circuits in his chest tightening. . .

For some reason, it was all really getting to him today: Well, it did every day, but today was ten times worse than usual, for a reason he couldn’t quite pinpoint but would soon understand.

It was so bad that he did something he hadn’t done in at least twenty thousand years.

He turned to the Omega at the next booth over, who was pretending to sip soda from a disposable plastic cup, and buzzed:

 “Do you really think there are monsters out there?” It didn’t look like it, when they whizzed over the theme park kingdom worlds, or even the factory subsystems on the outskirts of the usual route. “Or is it all some kind of sham to keep us locked up? Complacent?”

He’d suspected it for a long time, but to speak ill of the Captain—much less the parent company of the Palisades Mega Mallship—was nothing short of high treason, so most days he’d kept his musings to crumpled up napkins or even the walls of his ‘cabin’ in the dead of night.

The other Omega’s polished, pink exoskeleton audibly crunched as her entire body went rigid. The once-blank screen of her visor was now alight with a vividly-flashing slurry of confusion, judgment, and maybe even fear. Zeradu sighed again, not sure why he would have expected anything else. He was about to apologize and get up and walk away, but the dreamy synth waves came to a grinding halt, and the Captain’s voice ricocheted gratingly off the walls of his consciousness, piercing through the jagged emptiness between his circuits, filling him with the same disdain as usual:

“Greetings, fellow shoppers! Have I got a deal for you today! Can you believe we’ll be seeing the Perseus XVI System from the Northwest Food Court Observation deck for an entire three hours today? We only cruise through this part of the spiral arm once every six hundred years, so don’t pass up the chance to drink it all in!”

Zeradu’s visor flickered with cold, static disappointment every time that mysterious voice blasted down over the loudspeakers. No matter where he was on the ship, there was no escape: At least twice an hour, the captain was shilling his latest “bargain views,” or bragging about some war story that took place a hundred parsecs from the nearest station, or even trying to talk them into eating the sad excuses for “food” that all the countless courts around the ship had to offer.

He’d been waiting for a docking announcement for the past ten thousand years, but of course, it never came: It was only endless, constant babbling, rubbing it in his own face that he’d been stuck on that ship for as long as he could remember and would be stuck on it long after all the glitzy casino stations and behemoth resort worlds they endlessly passed by had disintegrated into dust—at this point, he’d rather chance it out there with the monsters.

One of these days, I’m going to find a hole in his security, and smash his stupid loudspeaker so he can’t cry out for help, and demand to see all the ship’s records—all my records, too. Zeradu thought to himself as the captain continued to endlessly rattle off the movie options for Cinema Deck 3B. I’m going to find out who he is, why he’s doing this, and make him—

 But his thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a deafening, dissonant roar that violently shook the entire ship. The merry-go-round came to a grinding halt, the music died a slow and backwards death as it faded into audial oblivion, and the once-obnoxiously-bright food court was now a pitch-black pit of shrieking and chaos.

“Huh? Maybe someone else got to him first,” Zeradu exclaimed to no one, a genuine glimmer of amusement flickering across his visor for the first time since he heard some old rumor about how the ship’s thrusters were getting old, and in another five hundred years it may have to be permanently decommissioned.

#

“30,000 years! 300 centuries! The last outage of this scale was 300 centuries ago!” Someone wailed with despair from far away. Zeradu wasn’t even sure how he was able to make out the details of what they were saying, among the cacophony of screaming and crashing that was quickly overtaking the entire court. Omegas were getting up from their tables and buzzing around, using the illumination settings on their visors to avoid crashing into each other as they poured back towards their cabins, or simply ran around waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

The food court was a chaotic, rumbling warzone of upturned booths and shattered glass, and the entire ship roiled and toiled as the stabilizers fought to keep everyone from becoming piles of smashed circuits in the corners from the sudden drop in centripetal force. “The emergency generators should be kicking on any minute!” A different voice shrieked, but Zeradu hoped not: He’d been dreaming of those ugly mock-fast-food flashing signs fizzling out for centuries, after all, and it would be a shame to get nothing more than a five-minute break when his dream had finally come true.

“Are you alright?!” A familiar voice beeped from behind him, and he turned around to find the girl with the pink exoskeleton he’d hassled only moments ago—it felt like a thousand years by now, with the rage of whatever in Earth’s memory they’d crashed into still rumbling through the entire ship.

“Never been better,” Zeradu beeped, doubting his own words for a second, trying to figure out if he really meant it or he was just in shock. He sensed a truly riveting conclusion only seconds away, but then, of course:

“Everyone, stay calm!” The Captain’s voice boomed over the loudspeaker with more than a hint of panic. “This is nothing but a minor technical difficulty! The experimental generators will be kicking on any moment, and we’ll be back to shopping by the end of the hour!”

As if in some kind of twisted prophecy, a dull red light burned to life from between the checkered tiles, and along the rim where the walls met the floor. The eerie, hypnotizing glow did little to calm the building panic of the crowd, and someone far away shouted, “Tell us what’s going on already! We deserve to know!”

“Have we been taken hostage?!” Someone shouted in terror, and the pink unit at Zeradu’s side began to spin around wildly with panic. Almost automatically, he found himself reaching a comforting hand to her arm, holding her back.

Someone else screamed, “I knew the monsters would get us eventually! I knew it! We’ve been eaten!”

That suggestion seemed to be even less popular with the crowd, which was now emitting a wild, collective buzz of anxiety that the Captain could surely pick up on through his receivers.

“All right, everyone, calm down, calm down! We’re already in touch with a disaster recovery team on the out—oops, I wasn’t supposed to say—Anyways, we’re going to be back on track in a jiffy, so in the meantime, please return to your cabins in an orderly fashion and prepare for the sale of your lives when all this is over to celebrate!”

“So much for a ‘sham to keep us all locked up,’ right?” His companion demanded, the joints of her arms trembling violently, as if they needed to be oiled. What an odd feature for their long-dead human creators to have programmed into their exoskeletons, Zeradu marveled—the pointless mockery of fear.

“Hey, I was half right, wasn’t I?” Zeradu teased, realizing his hand was still on her arm and quickly jerking it away. “They’re still refusing to tell us what happened, where we’re going, or even if we’re in danger, so—”

“I KNEW THOSE THRUSTERS WERE GOING TO GO NUCLEAR BEFORE THE CENTURY WAS THROUGH! I KNEW IT!” Shrieked an Omega with an orange exoskeleton, tearing through the rubble with her strobe lights blaring.

Cocking his head, Zeradu returned his attention to his new friend and said, “See? You’re doing a lot better than some people, uh . . .”

“Carozine,” she replied, filling in the awkward pause where her name should have been. “What about you?”

“Zeradu. At least, that’s what they started calling me when I woke up in this place. I don’t know what my real name was before.”

“Me neither . . .” Carozine replied, still beeping nervously, but not on the verge of panic like before. “Sometimes, I kind of wish I did.” Her visor swiveled toward the ruins of the mobile phone store, and she shuddered violently, muttering, “This whole mall kind of reminds me of something, but I’m not sure what. I’ve never been able to figure it out, but believe me, I’ve tried.”

There was a long, long pause as Zeradu tilted back his visor, staring up at the ghastly blackness of the domed ceiling where stars should have been. Maybe we really have been eaten, he thought to himself. Or maybe we finally got sucked into a black hole, and these are the last few seconds before we become one with the event horizon, stretched agonizingly in both directions for what feels like a thousand years. “Should have written that one on the napkin . . .”

“What?” Carozine asked, and it was her turn to tilt her head in confusion.

“Nothing, nothing . . .” Zeradu reassured her, a little embarrassed that he’d said it out loud. But then, he cast one last glance up to that blank and gaping void far above them, and found himself muttering, “Well, don’t you want to find out what it reminds you of, Carozine? Don’t you ever wonder what all of us are doing here? Why all this just seems to go and on and on and . . .”

“Well, sort of,” she interrupted, taking the bait far more easily than she had the first time. “I mean, when you think about it, it’s really all kind of weird.”

“Yeah, it is, isn’t it!” Zeradu exclaimed, his voice growing louder by the second, not realizing that he was attracting the stares of nearby Omegas as he continued with, “Don’t you want to find out what really happened to the ship, and better yet, if it could be our ticket out of here? And don’t you want to know who’s driving this thing, and why we’ve never seen his face, only heard him rambling for all these years?”

He swept an arm up towards the loudspeaker in a grand gesture of disgust, expecting only Carozine to answer—but to his surprise, a small chorus chanted back,

“Yeah!”

#

Zeradu had been dreaming of this hour for countless years, but he always imagined he’d face the Captain alone—definitely not with a small army like the one that was now at his back, storming the old Walzgrix Wing where everyone knew the Captain’s quarters lurked. Normally, the entire area was walled off behind six layers of double-pounded oridium, laser-locked to keep all but the most trusted crew members out. But just as Zeradu suspected, the power outage had taken out all the security systems, and the backup generators weren’t powerful enough to maintain the once-impenetrable fortress for more than twenty minutes in the face of true disaster.

It had now been thirty.

“We’re sick of not knowing the truth!” Shouted the now-rabid Omegas behind him as they marched past the abandoned, chained off storefronts advertising everything from nail art (Zeradu was not sure why, as Omegas did not have nails) to Shiatsu massages (which probably wouldn’t have felt like much against cold, hard metal, he thought with a sigh). Everyone else in the mob except for Carozine was more keyed up than he’d ever seen in his life, but something about the entire march felt soulless, almost melancholy, now that he realized the fabled Walzgrix Wing was just a boring monument to a long-dead civilization like the rest of the ship.

But where was the Cap—

“This is your Captain with an important—glug—reminder—gluglug—for all—glug—SHOPPERS!” The loudspeaker cracked, emitting some kind of horrible, ultra-deep pulsing sound that seemed to shake the halls themselves. “As we should all know—glug—after spending so many—glug—centuries together, the Walzgrix Wing is—gluglug—strictly off—”

A bone-chilling static tore through the entire hallway as the intercom went silent: The logical explanation was that the power had failed halfway through the broadcast, but something about the way the Captain’s voice slowed down exponentially with that awful slurping sound at the very end made going forward seem somewhat less appealing . . .

“I knew it! It’s a black hole for sure! Now that he’s gone, it’s only a matter of seconds before it’s our turn!” Shouted someone from the back of the mob.

Seconds passed, turning him into a liar.

“What do you think he meant by “disaster recovery team,” anyway?” Carozine asked, resting her hand on her hip, pacing around in the shadow of a blocked-off escalator and letting some of the more eager Omegas pass by. Somehow, it didn’t even feel like they knew where they were going anymore. The Captain supposedly knew they were approaching, but there wasn’t a single sign of the SWAT crew, or even a lone mall security guy? Something wasn’t right.

Carozine must have been as tired as Zeradu felt, because she leaned back against the side of the escalator and flickered off her visor for a moment, seemingly collecting her thoughts. The weird slamming noises that had been echoing off the halls for the past hour seemed to be getting louder, and the floor of the ship hadn’t stopped quivering since the collision—or the attack, or the assimilation, or whatever in Earth’s memory could have possibly happened.

“We’ll probably never even know . . .” Zeradu sighed, suddenly feeling so tired he wished he could just slip back inside his dressing room and forget any of this had ever happened. All the shouts of “I knew it was all a bad dream!” and “We’ve been eaten!” were getting really, really annoying, and for a moment, he almost wished he could be back in that cozy blue booth in the food court, scratching poems on napkins about . . .

“Eek!” Carozine squeaked as the ship heaved again, this time so forcefully that her shoulder came crashing down on a panel on the side of the escalator. A groaning sound tore up from the inside of the stairs, but Zeradu had become too distracted by the revolting blob of slime that was now stuck to Carozine’s visor.

“What the hell?!” Carozine panicked, drawing stares from a few passing marchers—it seemed like the entire ship had shown up to storm the Captain’s quarters, now that it was totally unclear whether there was even a Captain left to storm. She wiped the goo from her visor with disgust, staring up at the ceiling and pointing with a quivering hand, “I . . . think it came from up there.”

“You mean . . . up wherever this thing will take us?” Zeradu asked, already knowing the answer as the escalator slowly ground to life—she must have accidentally tripped some kind of switch when she fell against it, he realized. Seems like an odd allocation of power resources during a major outage, but alright . . .

The two of them stared at each other as the crowd passed by, intangible twin flames encased in separate exoskeletons made in the image of a man (or god) they would never know. Everyone else was diverting around them as if they didn’t exist, zombies marching blindly into the abandoned Sunglass Caves and Eyebrow Threading Outposts, tearing their way to nowhere as a steady rain of goo continued to fall.

“You know what?” Zeradu asked, looking it all over one last time before finally deciding he couldn’t take it anymore.

“Tell me,” Carozine demanded.

“If they’re going that way,” Zeradu replied, gesturing to the soulless, vast, and soon-to-be dissolved crowd, “Then I’m willing to bet my life that we should go this way instead.”

Glug.

He was about to point up the gaping maw of the escalator, up into the beckoning darkness and eternal freedom . . . But when he looked back, he realized she’d already beat him to it.

“Yeah, maybe we can finally get some answers. See who’s running the place,” Carozine answered, with one boot eagerly darting for the first slime-covered step.

Gluglug.

Are you ready?” Carozine asked: But it was a gesture of courtesy, not a question. It was too late to say no, because she’d already grabbed his hand and made the choice for him.

Glug.

“Always have been,” Zeradu answered, ignoring the acrid, burning slime that was quickly threatening to corrode his exoskeleton as the reverse-peristalsis of the circuits carried them far beyond the crowd.

GLUG.

“Huh? It’s way louder up here.”

END

489 | Amal Singh & Erica Ciko Campbell

It’s an honor to be included in such a long-running, respected podcast and I couldn’t have asked for a better narrator. It really was a weird and awesome feeling to hear my story brought to life in such raw, stunning clarity. Thank you to Krystal Hammond for doing such an amazing job at making my New Weird “coming of age” story real

Listen to Where Monsters Go to Die here.