Matthew C. Davis's Blog

Swift turned away from the window, his face carved from stone for all that I could read him. Hack swung around to look at me and sagged. His mouth quivered and an eye twitched, and then he was coughing in wet, heaving racks that bent him double. I rushed over to him and he batted me away, sidling himself around to collapse into his recliner.
I stood back and waited until the fit subsided and Hack lay there for a while sucking in gulps of air with a hand clutching at his chest. That kind of thing had been happening more and more often. Hack wheezed and his eyes flickered from me to Swift. He was gulping in air, and I could see wet, red flecks in his beard around his mouth. He looked at me and frowned before turning back to Swift. “You tell him,” he said. “You tell him or I swear I’ll ruin you.”
I blinked.
“Swift,” I said and looked at him, “what is he going on about?”
Swift had, at some point, changed his clothes. He kept a few spare sets here for occasions where it was necessary, such as these, and he’d composed himself and even found a new pair of sunglasses to replace the ones that had been destroyed. In all it meant he’d become, yet again, unreadable. A blank stone wall for all the good it was. I could only tell he was looking at me because the force of his gaze was a palpable thing, and he was fairly cloaked in an aura of undulating power like I’d rarely felt off him.
He was exerting a prodigious amount of energy, and control, and I had to slide my vision across the Other Side to see that Swift had projected his will out to envelope the entire house in a swirling nimbus of white light. I could see patterns, countless fractals, moving through the energy and reinforcing it, the working itself a fractal layered countless times over itself.
Swift had created, near as I could tell, an impenetrable shield around my entire home.
“We will be safe in here,” he said, “for a time.”
“Get talking,” Hack rumbled from his chair.
“Quiet,” I snapped without turning away from Swift.
Swift waited a moment. The house was dead quiet. “The creature you saw is named Bloch,” he spoke in his usual measured tone, as if commenting on the weather, “and he is my brother.”
I wasn’t even sure how to comprehend that.
“A malakhim, I mean, messenger?” I asked, brow crunching together, brain whirling. “Like you?”
“Not like me.” Swift’s mouth twitched down a fraction. “Not anymore. Once, though, he did serve a higher order as a herald of endings, a harbinger of Creation’s finality.”
Hack made a sound somewhere between a wet cough and a laugh. “God’s murderer.”Swift continued before I could say anything. “The end comes to all things, as it must. And for eons Bloch served faithfully, until he didn’t. He became fascinated with endings, and then obsessed. The malakhim have few laws, but what few we have are adamantine, to so much as question them is to raise the wrath of all the hosts and invite annihilation - no malakhim may murder a human.”
“So what happened?”
“Something noticed the change in Bloch, and it made him an offer: serve it, and he would be given the power to defy the laws of the malakhim. How could he refuse?”
“What could possibly give something the power to resist the entire celestial host?” I gaped. My stomach had twisted into knots and there was a throbbing behind my eyes. I didn’t actually want to know the answer.
“The Sleeper.”
It was one of those rare moments in life that felt like it should have been accompanied by a dramatic musical score, drums and strings or something.
“No,” I said.
Swift cocked his head at me.
“No,” I said again, “that’s ridiculous.”

I never asked my parents for anything for Christmas. Not once. I mean, they got me stuff, the tree was usually piled high every year with gifts wrapped in exotic, shimmering paper from wild, foreign lands. One year I got a Vision Stone from Mu that let me actually see my dreams right in front of me, played out in a surreal, holographic projection. I still have the thing, somewhere.
But I never made a list, and I never asked them for anything.
How could I when the next time they went out the door could be the last time I ever saw them? Seeing them come back home was worth more than every Christmas morning. Grandpa would always tell me not to worry, that they would come back, that they always came back, that when the two of them were together there was nothing that could stop them. 
And looking at them together, my mom and my dad, I believed it. The fierce, raw power that flowed between them, born of their love, could defy Oblivion - and had, on more than one occasion.
But then they would go, and the fear would creep in. Grandpa would take me fishing, or we would go up north to watch the stone-people work the underground gardens. He would show me ancient, secret magics that had been passed down to him by his father, that he passed on to my father and would someday be handed down to me. But always there was the fear.
Weeks would go by, and sometimes months, but Grandpa was always right. Mom and dad always came back and there would be hugs and presents and stories, and for a little while the house was bright and warm and full of life. 
Until something happened and they had to go away again.
Unti something happened and they didn't come back.
Grandpa woke me up in the middle of the night and promised me everything would be fine, that he was going to bring my parents back home.
And two days later Hack showed up at the door, the sapphire light in his eyes dim.
"I'm sorry, boy," he said. 


Christmas was taken off the calendar after that.

Casting a gnarly eye at my desk, and the Libro Nihil where it lay upon the scarred old edifice, I began to wonder. When my psychotic great-grandfather returned, bent on global destruction, he had been brought back via the power of the Sleeper, a cosmic personification of entropy gone mad. It had wanted the Libro Nihil, for what I would rather not think about, but instead I had turned the power of the book on it. The book devoured Henry Grey and the power of the Sleeper that had been invested in him. Sometimes I would hold the book and concentrate, and every once in a while I would swear I could hear the voice of my great-grandfather whispering to me from beyond a vast gulf.
Which made me wonder what happened to the power of the Sleeper its own self.
Was it still in the book?
Could I use the book to access it, and amplify it, and turn it on my enemies like I’d done with the book itself on Swift’s doppelganger, the rogue malakhim? Thinking about it all was making my head swim. I staggered over to my desk and snatched up the book, stuffing it in my pocket and ignoring the pleasant warmness of it against my leg. I pulled my phone out of my bag, and a black permanent marker, and shoved them in my other pocket. Donning my coat and stuffing my feet into my boots I left the room and headed back downstairs.
I’d barely made it half way down when I could hear Hack screaming a near-incoherent barrage of expletives and curses at Swift. I must have missed something really good. Following the noise I ended up standing in the archway of the Der Haus’s museum wing, or what Rosa and the others tended to refer to as the living room.
It was a great big open space and every wall was lined with colossal, hand-carved wooden shelves and cabinets that stretched from floor to ceiling, the wood stained a warm, dark brown that sucked up the light and turned back a diffused glow, making everything look soft. The shelves were loaded down with books of every kind, from moldering grimoires to modern technical manuals, pulp paperbacks and everything in-between. The cabinets, their doors fronted by panes of glass so one could look in, were filled to brim with a curious collection of knick-knacks and artifacts, items collected mostly by my globe-hopping father in his reckless archeologist years - or so my mother used to tell me.
I’d added to the collection myself over the years, though my relics were quite a bit less esoteric than dear old dad’s. An obsidian ritual knife from the subterranean kingdom beneath Antarctica sat next to a scratched, plastic toy sheriff’s badge I’d kept after banishing a kinderfresser a couple towns over.
There was a battered sofa covered in blankets and throw pillows, and a handful of recliners scattered around at strange angles from each other. Light came from an incongruous chandelier that hung from the ceiling by a black, cold iron chain, its stems curling black metal ending in someone’s nightmare of a Tiffany lamp, the stained glass all done in hellish yellows and oranges that gave the room a curious tone. There was an ancient television set, the kind with a wire coat-hanger serving as an antennae, it sat on a milk crate in front of one of the recliners playing an old black and white horror movie with the sound off.
I frowned and swung my gaze over to where Swift stood, by one of the two windows in the room, a tall and narrow affair squeezed between all the shelving with its curtain pulled back. Swift was looking out onto the front yard, out towards the road, and for all intents and purposes looked utterly oblivious to Hack’s tirade.
The old man was standing by his recliner, the one with the TV, jabbing a finger as he barked. “I told you this was going to come back to bite you and now look at what’s happened.” Spittle rained in explosive bursts and Hack even managed to stomp his foot on the hardwood floor a couple times for emphasis.

“Told him what?” I asked, stepping into the room.

Wordforge 8-15-14

SONG: "The Mighty Rio Grande" by This Will Destroy You

THEME: Quiet Magic






Lungs burning and heart pounding he runs through the woods, the slim silhouettes of trees standing out as darker patches in the half-light of an obfuscated moon, but he knows those trees and the ground beneath his feet, each blade of grass, each leaf. Every branch that scores his bare chest and arms is a gift, a blessing of the forest.

A hill approaches and he slows, cresting it carefully, slowing further and moving into a crouch as he nears the top and peeks out, face low to the rich, soft carpet of the earth and grass, and his heart flutters at what he sees atop the hill.

It's bald, clear of trees and grass, and flat as if the top had been sheared away to reveal the ancient stone bones of the hill, and sitting there in a tight circle around a crackling fire are three figures swaddled in heavy furs, their faces hidden behind the shadows of deep hoods. They sway with the breeze that sends the smoke from the fire to the sky in widening spirals, humming a strange melody.

The young man bites his lip, breath catching in his throat as the three stand and raise their arms over their heads, furs falling back to reveal slim, smooth, sun-browned limbs, hands outstretched and reaching for the sky as the clouds roll back and the moon smiles down, a sharp white crescent among a tapestry of jewels. The hum becomes a wordless song playing in the moonlight and the three begin moving around the fire, swaying and spinning, fur-cloaks dropping to reveal three maidens, their night-black hair swirling around them, the fire rising and sending their shadows mad across the hilltop as they dance and sing.

The clouds stop for a time and the maidens dance, their song growing, spreading out and wrapping around the heart of the young man who hides in the shadows, and in that moment it feels as if even the world stops its spinning and holds its breath, and the moon shines down to watch, and every tree in the forest listens.

Wordforge 8-14-14

SONG: "Eula" by Baroness

THEME: Terrible Truths





There are some parts of the Other Side where reality completely breaks down into a roiling, infinite cauldron of chaos, the raw stuff of Creation. And it's that mad, primordial ocean that stands between everything that is and everything that isn't -- on the other side of the Sea of Chaos looms Oblivion, the Nothing from which everything came. But one thing has to be made clear, and it cannot be stressed enough.

Oblivion is not empty.

There are things within the void. Monstrously ancient things that slumber, dreaming unknowable dreams that brave the eternal storm of the Sea of Chaos and infiltrate Creation.

Say what you want about the Others, they come in all shapes and sizes and makes and models, some are decent enough and some need to be put down. You could say the same about people. But those from Beyond? They seek only to spread their nihilism, to gnaw at roots, spread Oblivion. They long for the Nothing that preceded Creation and there is no reasoning with them, for their will is alien and unreasonable. The best anyone could ever hope for is to banish them back to the emptiness of the void.

One has to stop and wonder though, after taking the requisite time to dread the magnitude of the truth, what came before Oblivion? And more than that, what brought Creation out of the darkness? Was it the very darkness that sought to become something else and broke itself into That Which Is and That Which Is Not? The truth leads to the shadows of greater, more terrible truths.

I've never met a Beyonder, but I've heard stories, and everything I've heard scares the hell out of me. If they really are out there moving in the world they're a clever, insidious lot that keep to themselves and work through so many backchannels as to be invisible. Shadow masters behind the shadow masters? It's not that much of a stretch for a sufficiently paranoid mind.

And people wonder why I prefer to stay indoors.

Wordforge 8-13-14

SONG: "The Forsaking" by Fleshgod Apocalypse

THEME: Revelation





Bastion's hands fumble as they reach for the curtains. Muscles and nerves twitch and it takes a deep breath and a moment of concentration before the priest can convince his fingers to pull the cord and raise the curtains, and he flinches at the expectation of light.

But no light comes.

Sweat beads on the priest's brow as he looks at the sky beyond the window. It seems normal enough. Heavy, bruise-colored thunderheads cover the sky and envelope the world in their shadow, leaving everything in a watery twilight. Eyes searching, Bastion waits. Nothing moves.

"Might be about time to go see a doctor," he mumbles to himself.

And then the sky begins to fall.

It looks like rain at first, and for a while Bastion believes that is all it is, until he sees that the clouds are tumbling down, reminding him of twisters forming, but in multiple, jagged streaks reaching towards the earth that reveal a startling blue sky with cracks running through it as if it were made of glass. And the cracks grow as the darkness descends.

"What?" Bastion almost chokes on the word and one hand goes to his chest to clutch at his heart that has begun stuttering.

Wordforge 8-12-14

SONG: "Every Planet we Reach is Dead" by The Gorillaz

THEME: Onward




The end of the world didn’t arrive, it awoke.
It happened on a Sunday early in the morning as the sun was dragging itself lazily into the sky, preparing to take the journey it had taken since the beginning of forever. Father Bastion sat at his desk in his tiny apartment behind St. Jude’s Church, the shades drawn and letting in only the feeblest, watery fingers of light from outside to play across the faded, floral wallpaper as the aging priest cradled his head in his hands, kneading his temples with blunt, calloused fingers. The fingers of a man who had seen a lifetime of work, a lifetime of hardship met with faith and perseverance in emulation of his chosen lord and savior.
Passages and parables warred with an insistent migraine. They’d been more frequent of late, staggering in their ferocity, in the way they would obliterate the world and reduce it to white hot pain trapped inside of his skull. He could tell this would be a bad one. He questioned chasing a few pills with a slug or three of scouring whiskey...weakness was so tempting. A shaky sigh rattles its way out as one hand falls away from his head and lands atop the open bible on the desk before him, rasping against the worn, thin pages. He flinches at the contact. A spike of pain lances between his eyes and he shoves the book away.
“A bit of mercy would be fine, lord.” The words are strained, almost strangled, as he pushes himself up out of his chair and wobbles, finding his feet. He looks at the little cot shoved up into the corner of the room and winces, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth as thoughts of whiskey war with snippets of poetry and the words of saints. “Downward. Downward to darkness.”
Beside the bed in the sparingly furnished room is a small, battered dresser inside which all of Father Bastion’s worldly possessions are contained. The top draw grinds open on rusted rails as he sways before it, pain raising a wall of white noise that strangles out all other thoughts but those of oblivion. Lying on a cushion of linens and undergarments rests a flask, the plain gunmetal finish polished by years and years of use and care and loving, desperate hands. Those hands reach for it, palms already sweating, nerves prickling. The cap is flicked away in a practiced, careless motion as it is raised to lips that all but twitch in anticipation.
And a mere heart beat before the precious, burning amber liquid can splash into his waiting mouth, reality collapses in upon itself.
A shattering roar of thunder splits the world in half, ripping the floor out from under Father Bastion’s feet and jarring the walls. An explosion of colorless light tears through his skull as he hits the ground and the sound becomes his whole world. It goes on for an eternity, the death throes of the universe. It is only when he chokes and convulses, throat gone raw from screaming, that Bastion realizes the sound has ended. That he has been screaming, and screaming for quite a while if the coppery taste of blood in the back of his throat was any sign. Everything was dark. No light crept around the shades and only static filled his ears, the ocean-like hiss of absolute silence. He was lying on the ground, curled in around himself and clutching at his knees. Something wet was on his face. Tears.
It didn’t seem wise to move just yet, so he didn’t.
The echo, the thought, the memory of that sound was everything. There was a hideous realization that the world had changed, that brought with it a terrifying question.
“God?” The priest asks as he lays upon the ground, gasping and clutching at himself. “Where are you now?”
Only silence.
He spreads his arms out, across the rough carpet of his room, stretching old muscles and aching joints. What if...it wasn’t some horrific, existential catastrophe? Something more personal, but no less final. 
Maybe something in his brain had finally gone and blown. Maybe...
No.
With no small amount of struggling and grunting, Bastion pushes himself first into a sitting position, his head swimming all the while, and then precariously, slowly, he stands. The room tilts. His arms reach out, swinging through darkness lest he crash into his desk or bed. One hand brushes briefly against something wispy, there and gone in a heartbeat. He gasps and freezes. “What?” The whisper is harsh, a ragged, ugly thing in the darkness.
Nothing.

One foot forward, cautiously. Another. He moves step by fearful step forward, until his hip thumps into the edge of what can only be his desk. Hands reach out to skim across it and run over the familiar shape of his bible. He clutches at the book, brings it to hold tightly against his chest where he can feel his heart thudding erratically, stuttering like a frightened thing in a cage. Slow breaths. A deliberate, desperate attempt at enforcing calm, as he turns his head towards the window and the light beyond. 

Wordforge 8-11-14

SONG: "White Waking" by Les Rallizes Denudes

THEME: Strange Realms



There's no such thing as time at the fringes, the ragged, seething border marches between the tapestry of Creation and the great, unknowable Other beyond it. There's barely even any kind of concrete, calcified reality. Everything shifts and changes the second you look away, sometimes even while you're watching it. A crystal whale explodes into a thousand-thousand moths with starlight in their wings.

The horizon stretches off and merges with the smear of infinity on the horizon, roiling chaos forever in its epileptic dance. Countless worlds are born and blink out of existence in the time between breaths.

The Cartel calls that mad, tumultuous cauldron their home, and it is only their skill at crafting the raw quantic ether itself that allows them mastery over the hostile conditions at the uttermost edges of existence. They build their cathedrals and factories in spaces between God's breathing, Imaginos-cloaks spreading out as they sail upon the celestial membranes, blazing light that is not light in their wake, singing along with the harmony of the quantic strings, and it is within that song the Cartel witness the sprawl of everything, and orchestrates the flow of beginnings and endings.

Wordforge 8-9-14

SONG: "The Day the World Went Away" by Nine Inch Nails

THEME: Loss




"Monsters like you don't get happy endings, Hurlitz."

Tommy the Fish waggled his pistol in my face as he spoke, like some sick conductor's rod, the barrel gaping at me like the mouth of hell. He was smiling that stupid smile of his, doped up to the gills, glass-marble eyes rolling around in their socks, unable to fix on anything too long before the junk sent his nerves twitching again.

"Yeah, Tommy," I mumbled around busted lips, "what about monsters like you?"

The barrel of the pistol - a stupidly oversized revolver - cracked into the side of my head, red and white stars flared up in front of my eyes. Tommy laughed. His pack of trash giggled behind me. I could hear them shuffling around, whispering. They were nervous. They didn't think the chains were enough to hold me, and they were right. But it wasn't the chains that kept me from peeling off Tommy's face and beating the rest of them to death with my bare hands.

It was the girl in the corner. The one with the tear-filled eyes who hadn't looked away from me the entire time, even when Tommy and the boys piled in with fists and pipes and boots. She was still in her pajamas, a huge old flannel shirt that fit her like a sack, hair the color of honey tangled from sleep. And standing right behind her, one grimy hand on her shoulder holding her to the spot, pistol pushed against the back of her head, was one of Tommy's boys, leering all the while.

I looked away from Tommy and to the mook with the pistol. "You're going to be the first," I said.

He smiled, lips twitching, and I smiled back. Maybe it was the shark teeth, maybe it was the bloody, busted face, but something about it made the guy take a few steps back, pulling the girl with him.

"You ain't doing nothing, not till the boss gets here." Tommy sneered. With his gun so close I could smell the cordite, see the dirt under his thumbnail where it played back and forth over the hammer. "Thought you had nothing to lose, didn't you?"

Some of the boys laughed.

I could take him apart a dozen different ways in the span of a half dozen heartbeats. But I didn't dare.

"We all got something to lose, Tommy, you big idiot." I stared past him. Through him. Looked at the girl, my little light. She held my eyes.

It would be okay. It would.

Dear god let it be okay.

Out in the country on the side of the road and at the edge of a dirt field sits a tired, faded little cross. Someone put it in the ground in remembrance of a life cut short. It's a cheap affair, sticks painted white and tied with red cloth, a pile of dried flowers at its base, and a dark smear across it that might once have been a name but that the world and time had wiped away.

Who put it there doesn't matter, and who put it was put in the ground for is long gone, and though it is a small and unremarkable thing it catches the eye of everyone who passes by. Some of them don't think much of it, a curious distraction and then they're gone, but some see and they carry it with them. The little cross plants itself within a mind and for however long it's there one can't help but think of those they've lost, the ones they miss, a dozen stories flit by in stuttering black and white made livid and bright by bursts of color - the thousand sunset shades of love and hate and joy and more. 
It doesn't matter who put the cross in the ground, or why. What matters is why a person would carry it with them when they pass by.