Eventually, it landed in the courtyard in front of my feet and looked up at me with those huge, redundant horrors it kept for eyes.
~*~
The fireflies were stupid, a pest. You could cut their heads off and they'd bumble around for days until they died of starvation. No matter how many times we shot at them, no matter how high we built the fences and pylons and no matter if we electrified the fences, covered them in barbs or razors or poison, they'd still come. They came, drawn out the jungle like a child to a box of matches. And when they found a way in, they came in swarms and laid siege to anywhere and everywhere.
And yet, I spent two days sitting in my courtyard and talking to one. Sometimes I thought she was the smarter, sometimes I thought I was. She darted around the motley with ferocity, landing on one branch only for long enough to bury her antenna in the bowl of one flower, its vast wings never ceasing, the constant roar of them deafening at first but then almost comforting. The sense of being watched by the tree was intense, as intense as drowning and dying at the bottom of the river. Why did the flowers change when the firefly touched them?
It was only because I was so tired, so empty, so dead on the inside that I stopped fighting. And that's when thoughts appeared in my conscious space that weren't mine. Half-formed ideas and strange combinations of memories and concepts and visions. I sat transfixed and terrified and gasped for air. I took a cold drink of water, a cold bath, a deep breath of cold mint incense to shock my system into reset, into being itself again. And then I went back outside. Slowly, carefully, I peeled away my defences and let the outside in, one minute step at a time.
~*~
It's strange, out in the jungle. I'm surrounded by alien thoughts and smells and a thousand thousand different things which are waiting to kill me or eat me or confuse and abandon me. Beneath my feet, I can't tell where the undergrowth stops and the dirt starts and I can't see the sky. I can't see anything apart from vague shapes in the crimson and green twilight. But I follow my little firefly as she darts from motley to motley. She doesn't need them, now she has me, but it's a habit and habits are hard to break.
A single firefly is stupid because it can't think. Its cognitive space is vast, but as empty as the silt flats. The Rorschach on their carapaces react and remember and allow a degree of thought. But you can't watch your own carapace and no matter how large a swarm gets, the thoughts never get too deep.
But the motleys can remember and react a dozen, a hundred different ways. The fireflies use them like humans use language, laying out their thoughts so they can be studied with a critical eye. A firefly will understand one thing two different ways, because the way in which the motley's flowers react to a specific combination of the rain, the dirt, and the air will only ever happen once. But my conscious space is to the motleys what a mountain is to a grain of sand.
The line between her and me is only memory. She's leading me into the jungle, deep into the jungle where the night is never broken and no human foot has ever fallen.
We can feel the glow from our shard, all consuming and spectacular. The Rorschach on our arm burns bright with the silhouette of a firefly and the only sound is the thump-thump-thump of rain on the canopy leaves.
We've left the city. We've left Gal, the creature who called it home. Her thoughts and experiences and memories are not ours. We're heading deep, deep into the jungle where no firefly has ever beaten the air with her wings before. We're disappearing into the night, my little firefly and I.
~*~end~*~
~*~*~
Enjoy this? There's more!
The Long Road Home, from Twenty or Less Press
Three days before hibernation and the corpse of the human ambassador Rembik is sent to investigate is as cold as the winter smothering Rheged.
“Find an answer,” Uncle tells him. “We’ve spent ten years building a relationship with the aliens, and you need to give them a damned good reason not to leave.”
But Rembik and his partner are social outcasts and his girlfriend appears to be in the middle of everything.
Maybe the reason the human’s ghost keeps following Rembik is that they’ve got more in common than either realized.
~*~
Journeys in the Winterlands, from Vagrants Among Ruins
“The world that we were living in was hanging by a thread. We could all see it. If it wasn’t this, then it would have been something else: war, famine, disease… Society could not sustain itself forever. Everything ends.”
Three writers. Three stories. The end of one world.
Nine years ago, the Earth struggled in the throes of an industrial revolution. Steam trains scythed across the countryside, and great aerostats drifted lazily across the skies. The cities swelled with factory-smoke and bilge-water while people thrived or starved in their streets.
On All Souls Day, that all changed. A great star fell into the sky, bringing a perpetual twilight that turned most of the population against each other–twisting men and women into the ferocious, sky-mad Affected. When the star finally disappeared the world froze. Now, Callista trudges across the icy wastes in search of her mentor: everyman-turned-folk-hero The Web of the North, who might just be the last frozen glimmer of hope that she has left.
Allegra Hawksmoor, John Reppion and Dylan Fox come together for an exercise in collective storytelling and world-building that will lead you into the ruins of factories submerged beneath the ice, probe the wrecks of burned-out airships, and provide a glimpse into the minds and deranged communities of the Affected and Unaffected that struggled to survive out in the snow.
Flip down the sky-guards on your goggles, and step into the Winterlands…
~*~*~
Find Dylan online:
Blog: https://www.dylanfox.net
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dylan.fox.167
or email:
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