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labyrinthof-fan-fiction · 3 years

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We Were Happy

Sam Wilson X Reader

Summary: Sam’s ex-fiancee is a member of the Falcon/Winter Soldier duo, fighting alongside them. It’s all good, until the events of TFATWS Episode 4. (this summary sucks, but my brain is so wiped from writing this)

A/N: This one is not for the faint of heart. I was listening to Taylor’s “We Were Happy” on my drive home today, and for some reason my brain immediately just went to Sam, I really can’t tell you why. I don’t own TFATWS, its characters, or “We Were Happy”

Warnings: Major Character Death, Blood, Graphic Depictions of Violence, Gore, Death, Violence, Funeral Scene, Swearing.

Word Count: 2,665

Sam was shaking, Karli had threatened Sarah and the boys. He wasn’t thinking straight. “She overstepped.”

“Sam, you can’t take her on alone.” You said, pulling on your combat jacket.

“I agree,” Bucky said, as you both chased him down the stairs and onto the street.

Violence begins after page break.

You knew you were walking into a fight, but you hadn’t expected John Walker and Lamar Hoskins to show up. You should have known they were tailing you. They always were. All hell broke loose, then you heard Lamar’s body hit the column next to you. You glanced down and knew he was gone. John ran and checked his pulse, but you knew he wasn’t going to find anything, then you saw his eyes turn black. You had seen that look before, “John, don’t.” You started, the Flag Smashers in the room shifted uneasily, then they started to run.

John snarled and chased one out the window. For a fleeting moment you glanced back at Sam, he was shaking his head. You closed your eyes and ran headfirst out of the window, your wings caught the breeze and you landed on your feet, chasing after the man clad in red, white, and blue.

He tripped the man he was following and threw him into the fountain, the shield raised above his head. You picked up your speed and slammed into the Flag Smasher, pushing him out of the way and putting yourself directly under the shield. A scream fell from your lips as the first blow landed on your chest. Your head fell to the side and you saw people gathering as John continued to deal blows to your body, cellphones filming.

“John.” You managed to say, but you looked up and saw the unhinged look in his eyes and you knew, this was your last fight. You glanced over and saw Sam run up with Bucky next to him, Bucky grabbed onto Sam’s shoulder. Tears fell from your eyes as you saw the panic rising in Sam’s eyes, you focused on him, just Sam. Maybe just staring into his eyes would be enough to save you.

Sam was frozen in place as he watched John deal the final blow to your chest, horror washed over him. Bucky’s grip on Sam loosened and he ran to your body on the steps. “No, no no,” He chanted as he fell to his knees at your side. He tried to not see the blood that was pooling under you, tried not to think about how bad it truly was.

“Sam.” You murmured weakly, reaching your hand for his. He clasped yours tightly.

“You stay with me, you hear me dammit? You’re not going anywhere.” He said through a clenched jaw, tears were falling down his face. His eyes traveled down to the wound from the shield and he saw the engagement ring hanging from your neck. He pressed his spare hand against the wound, trying to stop the blood.

“Couldn’t get rid of it.” You said before a cough shook your body.

“Baby, please.” He whispered, “Please hold on, we’ll get you to a hospital, they’ll save you.”

Your eyes closed as another cough ripped from your lips. “Sam,” You murmured. “I love you.”

His other hand moved through your hair to cradle your face. “I love you too, baby, so much. Hold on. Please, hold on.” He chanted, but he heard your breath growing weaker. He gently placed his forehead against yours, “Please, God, not this.”

Your eyes met his as you felt the rattle in your chest grow stronger. “Goodbye, Sam.” He watched as a small smile came across your lips and your eyes closed, he felt your hand grow slack in his.

“No, no, no!” He shouted through his tears as he pulled you close to him, resting your head against his chest as your final breath left your body. He could see the cellphones all pointed at him, he couldn’t take it. He cradled your body against his chest and found himself eye to eye with John as he stood.

“Sam….” John started, Sam’s eyes fell on your blood on the shield, he refused to meet the man’s eyes.

Sam gritted his teeth and clenched his jaw, he knew that this was not the time to say what he truly thought of the other man. Not here, not now. He expanded his wings and took off with your body, not saying a word to John.

Sarah helped him with planning the funeral, honestly she did most of the work. Choosing flowers, the casket, making arrangements with the church. He found himself on the dock, standing next to the family boat. He stared out on the water, remembering when you both had been children and played on the docks while your parents worked. He could hear your laughter. He was broken from his stupor by Sarah coming up next to him.

“Are you going to carry her?” She asked gently.

Sam met her eyes, “I…” He had spent the past few days trying not to think about your funeral. “Yes.”

Sarah placed her hand on his back, rubbing a circle, comforting him like she had when they were kids. She looked down and saw the engagement ring he was twirling in his fingers. “She held onto that for so long. She was convinced that you were coming back.”

Sam chuckled, “Then I came back and fucked everything up.”

Sarah sighed, “I don’t think you fucked it all up, you both had the past few weeks together.”

Sam looked over the water, “There’s so much I wish I had said. I wish I had done.” The sun started to sink beneath the horizon. “And now, I’m not sure where I go from here.”

“You don’t have to have a plan right now. No one expects you to have everything together, after what you just went through.”

Sam scoffed and stared out watching the sun fade beneath the tide, wishing that you were next to him. John had murdered you, in broad daylight, with the shield that Steve had chosen him for. And Sam rejected it, gave it to America, and America gave it to the man who ended your life. He knew the reasons he gave it up, at the time, they had been the right reasons. But now, all he wanted was to go back in time and force himself to keep it, let it rust in a corner of a barn for all he cared. If he would have kept his nose out of any of the Avengers business, you would still be here.

Tears were streaming down Sam’s face as he carried your casket to your final resting place. He had remained silent through the entire funeral, Bucky at his side. Bucky had given him space and he was grateful, but now he was grateful for his support. Sam watched as they lowered your casket in the ground, Taps began to call through the cemetery, the shots of the salute felt like they ripped through his heart. He remained silent as they finished, then a man walked up to him with a folded flag.

“I’m sorry for your loss.” He saluted, then placed the flag in Sam’s arms. Sam’s eyes fell on the small triangle that was meant to honor your memory, your service, then a sob broke through his lips. He felt his knees buckle and Bucky grabbed his elbow to hold him steady. The cemetery cleared and he was left with the flag cradled in his arms. Bucky removed his arm from his elbow and Sam’s legs gave out. Sam’s heart felt heavy as he sobbed at the pile of dirt that covered you, Bucky stood vigil with him until the sky turned to night and the stars sparkled against the black. Bucky accompanied him back to the house. Sam paused on the street, remembering the night he had proposed to you, right before you both had been sent to you assignments. The porch lights had illuminated the two of you, he put his hand in his pocket and thumbed at the ring. The two of you had been so happy in that moment, carefree kids, for just one moment.

A week later, Sam was alone in your apartment, he took in the sight of the kitchen, almost expecting you to step into it and chide him for standing there and doing nothing. He moved around the table and found an envelope with his name scrawled in your handwriting. It seemed so out of place in your kitchen, he thumbed at the edge, debating if he wanted to read it. What could you say? Did you know this mission would be your last? He sighed and opened the envelope, seeing multiple pages inside.

Sam,

If you’re reading this, I’ve gone and done something stupid. I don’t know if you’ll be the one to find it or if someone will pass it along to you. Maybe it will end up on a landfill somewhere, unopened and left to rot into the Earth. Either way, I’m going to assume you are reading this.

I’m sure you’re wondering, why a letter? We have technology, there is such thing as video recordings. Well, after the snap, I went to therapy. Yes, I know, hell froze over. But losing you, I dug myself into a hole and Sarah pulled me out, then left me on a therapist’s doorstep.

As a way to cope with loss she recommended that I write letters, to you, about you, put everything in writing. And I did, this won’t be the first one I wrote. I doubt you will find them, maybe you’ll be the one cleaning my apartment and you will find them. When I got the call to join you and Bucky I was surprised. Things between us hadn’t been the same since the blip, you barreled headfirst into work as an Avenger. Did I ever tell you how proud I am of you for becoming an Avenger? Baby, I am so proud of you. God, you’re amazing. I’m babbling, I know, but I’m probably dead, so let me get the last word in.

Remember when we were younger and we’d sit by the dock, watching the sunset over the boats. We hatched that scheme to buy back Dad’s farm, you’d have equal parts in the fishing business with Sarah, and we’d live out the rest of our days there. We were happy, weren’t we? I mean, on some level we had to be, I was going to marry you. You wanted to marry me. Then life got in the way.

I still wear the ring, on a chain around my neck, but it’s still on me. During the blip people told me not to hang onto it, he’s gone, find someone else and move on. But I couldn’t let go of you, not even when a crazy purple alien ripped you from existence. Because loving you was the happiest time of my life, I know you might not believe me, with how we left things that one night.

I don’t know how I’m going to die, I guess no one does, maybe you do, don’t the Avengers have the ability to time travel now? Ideally, I’m 99 and I’m sitting on Dad’s old porch, in the rocking chair next to you, watching that sun set behind the boats. We’d have lived a full life, had some kids, grandkids, kept the Wilson legacy alive. I’d like to think my last breath was taken, holding your hand the minute the sky changed to night. But I know, in our line of work, that’s not what happened. Don’t blame yourself, I expect that I knew what the consequences of my actions would be. I probably bet too much on luck. But that’s life, it’s a give and take, and eventually we all get the take end of the stick. Don’t turn to vengeance, I know you’re an Avenger, but don’t take that so literally. You are one of the best people on this planet, revenge would not be a good look on you, or Redwing.

The last thing I need you to know is that I never stopped loving you, I don’t think I will even in the afterlife, if there is such a thing, I’ll be waiting. I know I said harsh things that night, we both did, but that doesn’t mean I stopped loving you. I assume that I will end up in at least what is heaven, although thinking back to some of the things we did as kids, maybe not. But let’s say that I get to the pearly gates, know that I’ll be watching you, making sure you don’t meet me too early. Maybe I’ll see you in the clouds, but let’s not pull an Icarus, I don’t know if I’ll be able to save your ass. Do you think I could get my own pair of permanent wings?

One last thing, I know I’m longwinded, but c’mon, I’m dead, these are my last words. Remember when the circus came to town and we snuck in? Something I don’t think I ever told you is, that was the first day I realized I loved you. You wrapped your arms around my neck and pulled me in for a kiss. I don’t know what that kiss meant to you, but that kiss, when we were stupid teens, ruined me for anyone else. I wish I could have apologized to you, made amends. We both needed a break, to find ourselves, to remember who we were. The world changed so much after all those people snapping their fingers. Maybe if I was braver I have said these things to you before you read this, if not, I’m sorry. Sam Wilson, I love you and have always loved you. Even though we’ve been on hold, I always knew that we would make our way back.

I don’t want you to think that you have to hold a candle for me until the end of times. Find someone who cares about you, who loves you so much. Maybe move into Dad’s farm, and make a home with them. I probably haven’t told you yet, but I bought that old farm a year ago. It’s not in the best of shape, it needs some love. The deed is enclosed with this letter, along with my will. If you don’t want it, sell it, give it to Sarah and the boys, hell torch the place. But it’s yours, just like my heart.

Love you, forever and always.

Sam’s tears fell onto the pages, he moved them away and wiped his tears away. He’d be lying if he said that he moved on from you. You both had decided when he returned that taking a break would be a good plan, he was going to be focused on missions and you were trying to help others rebuild their lives. Then he asked you to help him with missions, with Bucky. It had almost felt like nothing had changed. It was great, until John got involved, until John killed you. His fingers tightened on the pages, wrinkling the edges. He sat down at your table, reading over the pages, looking at the deed in his hands. He had set the will on the table, keeping his eyes from it. The top corner that he could see had his name scrawled across it.

He glanced around the kitchen, and looked back at the letter, I’m so proud of you. “We were happy, baby. We were so happy.” He folded the letter, deed, and will and put them in the pocket of his jacket. He zipped the jacket and exited the building, Bucky was waiting outside, he raised his eyebrow at Sam. Sam simply tilted his head and the pair fell into step next to each other, walking the streets of your old town, intent on their next mission.

#sam wilson x reader #Sam Wilson Imagine #tfatws imagine #tfatws episode 4 spoilers #i don't know if i needed to tag that #oh well #violence #murder #blood #death #read the warnings #falcon imagine #i really don't know why my brain wanted to do this to Sam #need something fluffy for him now #god i'm so sorry #sam x reader #sam imagine #we were happy

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the-writings-of-kaos · 4 years

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Galactic crossing program pt 1

The Vicarious empire had been expanding for a large portion of their recent history, the collective government of their race founded a company made specifically to terraform and colonize planets with multiple colonies for the use of population dispersal and to expand horizons. Space agencies were almost exclusively mobile agencies, giant university ships, dragging trawler ship factories, and even the occasional asteroid miner and ship fabricator docks spaced through out the massive reach of space. And today, Galactic standard date 12/39/13098, I am setting out to explore the uncharted space!

———

“Welcome abound captain Freyith, it is an honour to make your aquaitance.”

The ship greeted its captain in Retah tongue, as Freyith came abourd.

Freyith: “Salutations to you aswell wing, would you please start up the FTL drive?”

W-I-N-G: “Of course, shall we make haste to the edge of mapped space?”

Freyith: “Yes please. Oh this is so exciting, imagine all the new species we could incounter.”

W-I-N-G: “Unlikly, the nearest area of unmapped space contains mostly rouge or unstable systems at the fringes of the galaxy.”

Freyith: “ohh...”

The young Retah slumped down in her helm nest with disappointment, was this really all her space days would be? Jumping from system to system to scout out uninhabitable planet after planet.

W-I-N-G: “Do not fret captain, it is much more safe to see unique planetiod formations rather then potentially hostile and savage life forms. And what’s more if something did truely survive in this area of space, it would be the closest thing to a walking crieyutt.”

Freyith shuddered at that blatantly poor attempt at humour, the walkers of crieyutt were nothing but an old story told to fledglings to make them grow a sense of danger. No creature would actually survive if they were so violent, the laws of the galaxy themselves say so.

Freyith: “Sure sure wing, I ain’t got this reachers license for nothing. Let’s go have some ventures, shall we?”

W-I-N-G: “Commencing space jump in three, two, one.”

Freyith was thrown back in her nest, she laughed with amazement as the lights of stars glimered past in lines of bright white, blue, yellow, reds, greens, and a rare few purple dashes just before the Feathered festival ship dropped out of FTL space.

Freyith giggled and laughed until her sense returned and she was able to sit up once more.

Freyith: “Wing, system report.”

W-I-N-G: “It would appear that we have dropped approximately sixteen yip lengths from a large red dwarf star, celestial body count of 7 comprised of 4 asteroid bodies. Shall we move towards the furthest planetoid?”

Freyith: “Affirmative, let’s see what this system has in the ways of inhabitability.”

The small ship flew into orbit of the third planet.

W-I-N-G: “Readings indicate small surface pockets, of electrolized metal. Likely caused by the exceedingly dense atmospheric conditions, as well as atmospheric friction. Surprisingly this planets core is very hot, suggesting that there is some form of mineral gas in the atmosphere preventing the planet from cooling down. There also appears to be a record 78 orbiting bodies of natural origin, scans suggest that most of them are solid state hydrogen oxide.”

Freyith: “This planet has perfect conditions for terraformation, with all that electrolized metal it would be more than easy to make this into an active food world. And all those hydrogen oxide asteroids could serve as water for millennia!”

W-I-N-G: “Deep scans suggest that there is some sort of... burrowing lifeform on the planet.”

Freyith gasped with excitement, then paused, and began to feel curiousity.

Freyith: “Wait, if the deep scans picked it up, how large would it be?”

W-I-N-G: “Deep scans say it is around, 60-90 Vep (15-20 meters squared) in size.”

Freyith: “Search for possible locations for new life, if something that big is here, surely there is something habitable here.”

W-I-N-G: “Negitive, the life form was very close to the surface. It may be a rapid magmetic convulsion pressure. We should scout the rest of the system, before setting foot with such a thing on the planet.”

Freyith: “ugh fine, but as soon as we are done we are going back to see it.”

The ship cruised along

W-I-N-G: “Planet 2 contains heavy amounts of solid state nitrogen deposits. No atmosphere, scans suggest a strong abundance of sodium meteors in the asteroid rings around the planet.”

Freyith: “Fun, next.”

W-I-N-G: “please refrain from not documenting these planets captain.”

Freyith: “Right sorry, it’s just like the orbital bodies back home. It’s nothing interesting.”

The ship moved along, as the captain had a fight with the ship ai.

W-I-N-G: “Planet number 1 seems to have dense- captain, we have an impact warning in 6 wop. Get up, we need to document this!”

Freyith: “Who in the burning blunder is out here?”

W-I-N-G quickly moved the ship out of the way, then further out of the way as another impact warning played out.

Freyith sat with baited breath in front of the vid screens, as the odd six sided object came hurdling through space. It flew by the ship with a multitude of other objects of the same shape, as all of the swarm of them ignited a bright yellow fire at their bottoms and flung towards the third planet.

Freyith: “Wing follow them to the planet, and I won’t say I told you so.”

W-I-N-G hurled the ship back to the third planet, as they watched the odd ships rain down into the dense atmosphere and crash straight into the under ground tunnels the life form had made.

Freyith: “Wing What is happening?”

W-I-N-G: “It does not compute, there doesn’t seem to be a obvious reason as to why this is happening.”

With astonishment Freyith watched as the planets atmosphere began to clear and thin out, as the odd ships flew through it. The odd shapes having been switched out for the megnitised surface deposits, as the metal was pulled out of the atmosphere and placed in a visible pile.

Freyith: “Wing, land us planet side. As close to that massive deposit as you can.”

The ship did as commanded and flew down to the surface, putting on a atmosuit Freyith hopped out the airlock to look around. The pile of metal was amazing, the small grains of black dust stuck to the magnetic deposits was absurd as more of the odd ships flew over head.

A loud howl like noise suddenly erupted behind her, before she turned rapidly to face the new foe. A small adorable creature stood just a little ways away, it wore no pressure suit, it wore no atmosuit, all it wore was a small patch of fur atop its head and synthetic garments.

The sense of fear and sense adoration were so much, she had no idea what to do. Run back to the ship, or stand her ground to meet the small cute creature.

It began to walk towards her, its clumsy looking bipedal stride mixed with the frail looking limbs made her want to help it towards her as if it was helpless living on a world that was in the dooms day of all doomsday not a few moments ago.

It stood next to her, and outstretched its stumpy grasping appendage towards her. She didn’t quite know what to do, so she reciprocated the gesture. The small creature took her grasping in its and shook them up and down before letting go, and gesturing back to where it came.

Freyith was shocked with how calm the creature was, and the virtually no aggression seemed to be good indicator. Ignoring wing yelling in her ear she followed the small clumsy creature over the flat land, past large metal structures taking atmosphere in and changing it before releasing it out the top. The small creature lead her towards what Wing had thought was the large life form diggin close to the surface, but in actuality it seemed to be a surface miner. What it was mining for was unknown, the small creature gestured that she went inside the living quarters inside the large miner.

She peered inside for any form of threat, all that was inside was a small rectangular nest. On one side a surface with various food items was spread out, and on the other was some sort of sleeping set up. And down a set of platforms was the pilots helm. The small creature followed behind her and went over to the food surface, it opened a compartment from the supporting wall and removed what looked like... meat! The creature was preparing food for her and it!

Just as she was enveloped with curiosity over the small creatures actions, it suddenly placed a metallic bowl with a special handle over top a circle built into the food item surface. It placed the dehydrated meat onto it before adding liquid water, it sizzled as the new smell of cooked meat wafted through the small nest.

The creature paused to looked back at her, and she noticed the two small forward facing eyes. So it was some sort of predator, hmm, yet it appeared completely docilen if not friendly. She looked around the nest a saw photographs embedded in viewing compartments, placed throughout the nest. One had a picture of the creature with another of its kind, and a small predator of a different species sitting in front of them. It looked rather shaggy the smaller thing, big dopey golden coloured ears with a small red live stock collar around its neck. As she puzzled over the picture, the creature grabbed back her attention. It had cut the meat with a sharp metallic utensil, and had placed the two portions on small platters. Only on its platter was some form of stalky green plant matter, and on hers a small bowl of seeds. So they were omnivores, that’s new. Most species they encountered only ate one form of food, and left the other in peace or to be used some other way. This creature seemed to eat both, and likely based off the act of peperation she was showed they ate a multitude of different foods.

The creature was using a different set of metallic utensils to eat as it sat down on one of two circular soft platforms around a surface. She sat down on the empty soft platform, and was handed her own set of utensils. Not wanting to be rude she tried them, it wasn’t a bad way to eat if not a bit safer then the regular. This way she didn’t have anything stuck in her beak, and she didn’t have to wait between bites for her food to properly settle.

The meat was delicious, some how this creatures people had a way of preparing food that made it taste better and more easily digestible. Once she finished she looked at the stalky green plant matter the creature had taken, it picked up one with its stumpy graspers and chewed it between its back jaw bones.

It was finishing the last one before it looked at the small bowl of seeds it had set out for her, it looked concerned. She wasn’t an omnivore, so she had left them alone. She pushed her finished platter towards the creature, hoping it would understand. To her surprise the creature picked up the bowl and simple swallowed all the seeds in one go, so they had multiple ways of eating, interesting.

The creature put the dirtied platters and bowl in a different compartment then they had come, maybe that was a to be cleaned compartment. The creature led her to one of the embedded viewing compartment. She recognized it as some sort of map, as the creature set it on the eating surface. It gestures to her, then to itself before gesturing at the end of a line segment on the map.

So that’s where they were, she gestured to the large circle on the map. The creature brought up a data pad and after tapping on it a few times, it showed her a collection of photos. First was a picture of the large metallic deposits landing on the surface and attracting the black dust, next was the odd shaped ships picking them up and flying them around and clearing up the atmosphere, next was a picture of the creature coming out from a buried shealter and taking down the shell of it to reveal the miner, next was a picture of the map with a swath of multiple line segments leading to the large circle she had originally gestured to.

So this was some sort of terraforming process, so this creatures race had come from an as of yet undiscovered species! And they were capable of terraforming like this? Unbelievable. She held her breath as she examined all the started lines and the few lines on the map that had come to the circle, there were hundreds of these creatures on this planet. Only hundreds, that’s so little for this massive task.

She paused and held her hand up hoping to pause the creature ramblings

Freyith: “Wing are you seeing this?”

W-I-N-G: “Yes!!! We found a deathworlder species and you are in its den, and you are vastly unprepared to face a deathworlder!!!”

Freyith: “I think I’m going to travel with them until they get to the redevue point them have shown me on their map.”

W-I-N-G: “Are you crazy!?! Have you gone savage!?! What if they eat you? What if it takes a few hepta?”

Freyith: “Thats fine, at least I can learn about them. Fly the ship over here so I can load up supplies and other sorts.”

W-I-N-G: “Does the deathworlder know you are doing this?”

Freyith paused as she looked back to the deathworlder, with its adorable patch of fur and its stumpy and clumsy looking limbs. She gesture to what she thought was a resting around, then to herself. The creature tapped on the data pad again as another surface folded out above the first one, the soft material there aswell. The creature then gestured to her and the top sleeping pad.

Freyith: “they seem happy to take me.”

Authors note:

Hey everyone, I know I still have a series on the bench but I’m going to start this one while I work on the final piece. As always thanks to my fellow authors, prompters, and commenters for the inspiration for this piece. Hope you enjoyed, have a good one.

#humans are space australians #humans are space orcs #humans are weird #humans are adorable #humans are space oddities #galactic crossing program

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thedreadpirateglitterbeard · 6 years

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Corona Park Jams, By Andrew L. Foster. Creative Non-Fiction, 2017

For Your Entertainment, feel free to analyze, make remarks, ignore, enjoy, or otherwise. roughly 1600 words. about a 10 minute read.

Reflected sunrays pierce slightly bloodshot eyes after a night of libations with friends from out of town. The 1995 Buick LeSabre rattled as though it had bricks for engines. My head ached as if I had bricks for brains. The car would have its 21st birthday soon if it hadn’t had its big day already. That was reason enough for us to celebrate. Last night was the celebration of the Buicks birthday and the squeal of its belts was the hangover to the pounding in my mind. We also had friends in from out of town, we can celebrate over anything.

As if Puebloans needed a pretense to party. I allowed myself to be absorbed into the cushy carpeted seats that were tanned a light grey from years of Pueblo desert sunshine. A smile crept across my face and that lonesome sun smiled right back at me. I appreciated the historic boom district appeal contrasted with the “we never recovered from the Great Depression,” patina. Even the quintessential Pueblo dish of a cheeseburger covered in Green Chile known as a “Slopper” was weird mixed with cool. It’s the kind of college town where the community college does better than the university but they both aren’t that great. The rivalry is strong. The feeling of family is stronger. Puebloan’s need little reason to come together but create lots of reasons anyway.

This stop light always catches me. Emilio leaned into the steering wheel, elbow cocked into the open mouth of the driver’s window as the breaks pressed us to a stop. One hand clutched the wheel, fingers tapping the rhythm to a Circle Jerks jam, the other hand connected to his resting elbow brought a smoking cigarette to his open mouth. We were all in our cups last night, but we were “on one” and stocking up for more no-excuse-necessary partying. The green light cleared our passage and Emilio sought after parking.

The Pantry is a Seinfeld-esque dinner, though maybe less cliché, which is a wonderful place to fill the old tum-tum. Abriendo Street hosts a series of Roman revival structures, one or two-story buildings connected business fronts with inset window wells that lead to doorways, pulling walker-bys into shops to search for doo-dads in antique shops with no particular end in mind. We pulled up Michigan St. and parked the bucket in front of Tony and Joe’s Pizzeria. The tree-lined streets are triple wide in the Aberdeen district thanks to General Palmer calling this neighborhood home for many years. His old manse was farther up from the shops, at the first corner. A quick walk to the drugstore that has been there as long as the Corona Park and Bessemer districts, near a century. Autumn trees, gold and green leaves shimmer. The air carries the aroma of old money. We walked to the corner and found The Pantry.

Emilio represents the profile of friendships that have enhanced my life. He is unique. His Style is the more independent and classic profile of punk that could be likened to the clash, early on—before they stopped making music with pretense. No need for spikes or studs, just a simple rejection of the common standard. Emo has tackled deep self-reflection and made pertinent life changes that mirror the development of his personal philosophy. This largely consists of him choosing to be a pescatarian—a bit of a contradiction if you ask me, but I let it slide because I eat everything and have no place to talk. I hold him in high regard because he has introduced me to many Pueblo intellectuals whom I have learned and taught with too great satisfaction. Life’s zest can often be found in good company, good food, and good conversation.

Emilio paid for the half-dozen potatoes, egg, and cheese breakfast burritos. Exiting the maze of The Pantry’s tight corridors, I gave a shout out to a classmate I recognized, Anthony. He is both homeless, employed, and a student in the lowest rent city in Colorado. Anthony gave a friendly smile and went back to bussing tables. We had an ancient civilizations class together, his presentation on the ancient Assyrian warrior caste was excellent and marked him in my mind as brilliant, yet his condition remained troubled. He only came to class 1 out of 3 sessions a week. I suspect this wasn’t due to a lack of heart.

It was ten am and the hot September Sunday was well underway. Emo and I sauntered back towards the whip both donning colorized wayfarer sunglasses, like Millennial Blues Brothers, sent on a mission from God to feed our hungry and hungover friends breakfast. Next stop this morning was Hercules Liquor Store, Agent Orange’s “Bored of You” had the energy flowing through us and the breakfast burrito’s smelled like a cure to disgrace. Emilio reeled the clunker away from The Pantry and the general’s old castle and back into Abriendo’s light Sunday traffic.

Herc’s was just another couple blocks up the way on Colorado Avenue. This drag shared a wine and coffee breakfast bar on the corner, next to the Local 1607 Millwright’s office so the metal works could catch a shiner before meetings with the union. Hercules Liquor and the Historic Firehouse Museum shared an alley. Occasionally I would see familiar faces from the firefighter school working in the museum as I went into Herc’s for an evening brew. They always carried themselves with purpose as I slinked by with little pride. Emilio cut a wide U-turn and pulled us into the alley to park behind the spirits house.

This, a small cramped store was absolutely flush with plenty of beer to choose from and an excellent selection of liquor and wine. Mike and his brother ran the store together, owned by their mother who is suffering from late-stage dementia. Despite this, the boys are always smiling and chatty when they see Emilio and I come in. They like us because we drink like their late Slovakian grandpa. Campari and grappa are two of the commonly stocked items at Herc’s we can’t find elsewhere. Because the brothers are 2nd generation Americans, they still have close ties to their Italian and Slovakian family. They have cousins who live on the Island of Crete where the sculptor Pygmalion’s statue Galatea was granted life by Aphrodite because she was moved by his passionate love for the female statue he created. Just so, the Cretian Grappa Mike sold us was the type of spirit that could awaken marble statues. Grappa is what is left after wine grapes are stomped upon. It tastes vaguely like wine, but primarily like pure alcohol. It does the trick. We left the store flush with cheap beer, cheap whiskey, and a bottle of Grappa which may have been cheap or expensive, but we had yet to find another bottle in town to compare price.

As we parked on the too-narrow street in front of the house, Benjamin wore Adidas classics that had looked as though they had been walked on their whole life. His wiry chair leaned precariously back against the stucco wall while his foot pressed against the ever-loosening banister which enclosed the porch. He had a cigarette in one hand while the other cradled an iPhone near his eyeballs. A three-day beard and unruly bed head alluded to Bens Sunday dishevelment. Benji is a Vancouver Canuck. His mother passed several years prior, not long after Emilio lost his father. The two, and their larger group attended St. Mary’s Catholic for primary school and the bonds shared between my two friends were far deeper than I could estimate being a new inductee to an exclusive group.

Before Emilio and I could walk up the concrete steps Ben was laughing and explain the problems that Trotskian economic theory faced after the Bolshevik Revolution and argued that the Soviets picked the wrong guy in Lenin. I smiled and nodded as if I knew anything about Trotskian political theory. Ben was always expansive in conversation and I admired him deeply for it. The first time Emilio introduced us, my misgiving and mistrust of new people was rendered mute next to the backyard fire pit and eager talking points Ben insisted on sharing with me.

I remember that night, he would hardly let anyone say a word as he often does. I interrupted him as he spoke with conviction on the need to rid the world of paper currency to be replaced with a social exchange program in line with “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” I asked him if he always commanded the conversation and if he ever let anyone else speak. I was instantly mortified at my manners but everyone sitting around the fire began to laugh. Ben’s other half said, “No, this is how he always is.” Ben quitted down a bit and we all shared the conversation. We all picked songs on an iPad adorned in a case printed with an ancient world map and took turns playing obscure music while passing the bottle of cheap around. The grainy taste of the whiskey mixed with the fire smoke's aroma, both gently burning our throats. This was the standard weekend for most of two years, good company seasoning our slowly aging lives within the old, worn town that rested in the fading shadows of old wealth.

As the Sunday star dipped below the horizon, we looked out towards La Vida Pass and the Sangre De Cristo mountains. The buzz we shared reached deeply into the earth and for a moment it seemed like all of us were supposed to find each other, as though no matter how big the universe became this moment would persist as both the flash of a meteorite and the timeless life of a lonely sun. As if we needed more reason for us to celebrate.

#creative #nonfiction #writing #short story #authors on tumblr #spilled ink #life #friends

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secretsandhushedwhispers · 6 years

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Unknown Magic || II

He fell asleep that night with a purpose and a mission. While his usual dreams would have him journeying and exploring the Fade, he was eager to see what the hosts of the Anchor were going through in their dreams. He was more curious about one of them in particular but it was in his best interests to see to both of them.

Though in his eagerness he had forgotten he could only truly see one of the hosts in the Fade: the mage.

It was not difficult for him to find sleep in the comfort of Haven-- much easier than many others. He drifted off and found himself in a place of darkness. The darkness was like a warm hug to him, homey and welcoming.

Solas’s own mind began to shape the Fade that lingered around him to a place much like the Arlathan. The buildings were extravagant and some even appeared to be floating. They were modular like fractals. Clean cut, sleek and so large that it seemed impossible for a feat for any normal being. Of course, his kind were not normal, oh no. But his kind were nearly extinct, endangered by his own mislead mind. He tried not to think about it as he stepped carefully through the terrain, hands folded behind his back.

For a while, all he did was search. The other elf he was looking for was nowhere to be found. Perhaps his mind wasn’t open enough? Reminiscing in things that no longer existed? Solas tried to focus on the task at hand.

He noticed that after walking for a little bit longer, the area around him began to change into something he wasn’t expecting. The grand buildings he once knew were being formed into ruins like they are today. They were being overgrown by vines and covered by dirt and grass. As he continued, the ruins were gone altogether. The green grass grew taller and turned yellow instead. The dirt grew brighter, turning into sand. As he looked back, his dream of Arlathan was gone. This was no longer his area in the Fade.

Either his Marked friend was nearby or perhaps this was the work of a spirit. He was not sure.

Solas explored this new area calmly. The sand was warm on the surface but when his toes dug in deeper, it was cool and satisfying to the touch. A thought crossed his mind that maybe in his quest of purpose, maybe he would find a spirit of Purpose lurking nearby.

The water on the shores now began to sound gently, rolling and lapping the beach sands. Solas noticed as he looked out to the ocean on his left, there was nothing. The horizon stretched forever and the water acted like a mirror to the sky. To his right was a mildly dense forest, starting out with palm trees and fresh grass.

Finally there was a sign of life. A voice, echoing and creeping about. It was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It sounded like a child. “Why are you here? In this domain?” A spirit called, genuinely curious. “Not many are welcome here. Why are you so different?”

Solas wasn’t sure what kind of spirit it could’ve been. Though it didn’t truly matter as long as he kept an open mind. “I will tell you; but please, show yourself to me first.”

A shadow loomed from the forest with no source creating it. It had two points that acted like the ears of a dog. Two red triangular eyes looked angrily up towards the sky. Then appeared a toothy grin of sharp teeth. “This is me. Now answer my questions.”

“I am searching for someone who has not awakened in our world. Could you help me find them?” He approached the spirit.

The spirit’s eyes squinted. Its large shadowy form shrunk into a small circle in front of the elf. The shadow then emerged from the ground. It didn’t look like anything in particular. It stood on two legs and had a triangular head with two spikes pointing back. It’s body was a pure black.

“You are not like others who have come before,” the spirit noted. “What do you want with the master of this domain?”

“I want to see if he is okay. I have questions for him and I can’t ask him in the waking world.”

The spirit hummed, it sounded like garbled static. “He does not like strangers.” Then a huff. The spirit makes a movement that is so fast, all Solas can see is a black blur. The spirit looks to the forest in thought. “I shall lead you.”

The spirit zips ahead to the edge of the forest where it stops and waits for Solas to follow. Just as he nears, it zips away again. Solas makes light conversation as they walk.

“What nature of spirit are you? I am curious.”

“You should know that, Fade Walker. If you do not know, perhaps you don’t belong here.”

Solas took disappointment for a moment. He thought about what he said and what it might relate to. The spirit was not so dense to be a spirit of Command. It asked many questions before about why. That could make him a rare spirit of Purpose. It reminded him of his own friend of Wisdom.

“It seems you do know.”

“Yes, I had to put some thought into it.”

“Then you should become fast friends with my friend of the stars.”

“Friend of the stars?”

“The one you seek.”

Through the forest they went, a straight and simple walk. In what appeared to be the center of the island was a grove. There was a cabin set up there and plenty of sunbathed stones to take a warm rest on. A fire was lit with a pot over it. Logs surrounded it with an elf sitting on one.

The spirit of Purpose zipped to the sitting elf. He raised his hand and pat the spirit on the head. The spirit hummed again.

#Unknown Magic #kosmo hc #purpose #vince writes #kosmo

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theladyvoid · 4 years

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Worldbuilding III

Empress Wind Walker of the Witch Empire of Akashmiran is his Antithesis. Which is something I picked up from "Transformers: Beast Machines" Witches vs. Transhumans Magic vs. Technology Eventually, Turok, through progressive Cyberization, gives up all of his Humanity and ends up as a Robot Laborer in a Factory with no doors or windows named "Claw:Mechos". That Robot gains Enlightenment as an Artificial Human, and becomes a Machine God named "Claw of Turok". His catch phrase of "Beware all Dark Wisdom" becomes "I am my Dark Wisdom"

New Akashmiran, after being Rebuilt by the Magical Renaissance, became an interesting place to live. The Revival of Akashmiran, after its near-total obliteration by Fire Walker, took 30 years to rebuild. In that time, Wind Walker was both loved and hated for freeing and destroying Old Akashmiran. The Empire may have been destroyed, but Old Akashmiran Magic was still something so strong and old that its people were protected. However, before the fascist powers could again become a threat, they were shut down by those that followed their new Empress. Empress Wind Walker built an Army of Followers, and was both loved for her kind heart, and feared because she wiped out the Old Empire in a lapse of Sanity when she became Fire Walker for only a small moment.

Empress Wind Walker formed the Elemental Tribes of Hurricanus, Dijnni, Gnorrum, and Undinae. Commanding the Immense Combined Magic of these 4 Tribes, she reforged the Solar System of Akashmiran, with a Star surrounded by four planets, one for each tribe to colonize, populate and develop. This all took place within 30 years. The Magic of Old and New Akashmiran had a difference that was not unnoticed by the Wizard Coin, Apprentice to Jinn-Lir. Jinn-Lir and Mathias Mindblade had argued once over the method used to create Coin from Artifacts of Domminna, and how such methods were savage and cruel compared to new methods of empowering people.

Old Akashmiran was a Fascist Empire and its Magic was terrible and horrific. Death was kind compared to what an Initiate to that Magic would go through in attaining it. The result was a hardened Mage of Terrible Power that could render the very Fabric of Reality asunder, and rewrite Physical Laws with Martial Arts. Punches had the force of Supernovas. People were created from dust and trash by...other people. The new ways were based on Civility and Humanity, as well as respecting the Metaverse itself. It was less powerful as a result, but everyone in the Metaverse was better off for it. The Lady Void and Circle Oaennar stepped in to aid the budding Empress in her Magical Renaissance. Two powerful allies that reduced the time of rebuilding from 3000 years to a mere 30.

Wind Walker, slowly building a life in Loporia, is hiding her feelings, but not very well. There is depth and progression to her falling out with Mathias. A little at first, but with time, it gets more noticeable, to him, and to the others around her. Resentment from being left alone on Cerrus builds. She has not forgiven him. What he did was wrong, and she tries to justify it, but the pain builds, and her power reacts along with that pain. Wind Walker sometimes sees a process called "Containment" where criminals, terrorists, and the extremely mentally ill are sealed away.

This is something that also progressively bothers her. Feeling trapped by a place she wants to call home, but can't, and empathizing with the sealed ones. When she finally can't take it anymore and explodes her rage and magic at Mathias, the statement "Contain Her!" is an emotional moment that had built to that scene, and she screams in a wave of force that pushes everyone away from her before she flies off into the sky, consumed with anger, sadness, heartbreak, and the savage red magic driving her to let everything go. "I CANNOT BE CONTAINED!!!!!" This is why she runs away to Old Akashmiran to truly find herself. What she finds there is horrible. Out of the Frying Pan, and into the Fire.

In Legends of Wind, there is an ongoing theme of Family Solidarity and Betrayal. Take House Mindblade for example. The Story starts with Earthstone Mindblade as the Family Patriarch, with his 3 Children: Mathias, Razus, and Windchime. Windchime was the first betrayer and left the family, causing Razus to be exiled for causing it when he was not responsible. A scapegoat was needed, and he was "The Bad Kid". Razus founded House Razorblade, and Windchime appeared as a Drift Citizen when the three siblings were already Elderly. Mathias, keeping true to his House, remained a Mindblade, and had two children: "Maximus and Monique".

Maximus had a falling out with his Father and founded House Lightstorm, while Monique was fed up with being a Princess, and fell prey to the Deep Magic and the Puzzle Dimension. Mathias's Wife, Sentura of House Flowingboone took his surname when they married, and became Sentura Mindblade. Mathias and Maximus went on a journey of discovery together and re-established their bonds, causing Maximus to become Maximus Mindblade, heir to the Throne of Loporia. Razus was driven even further into insanity by the discovery of his sister's betrayal and became "Zandal" The Mad God. A Quasi-Sentient Planet-sized Lightning Storm on a Permanent Loop of Anguished Laughter moving randomly at high speed through the Metaverse as a kind of Natural Calamity.

Wind Walker felt abandoned by Mathias who had been her teacher since they were young. She started a life in Loporia, but could not get over her broken bond and gained a bitterness towards him that almost caused a War as she took the Throne of New Akashmiran. It was in New Akashmiran that she found her Mother, Horizon Walker, and they went through a similar journey of discovery that Mathias and Maximus had gone through. Wind Walker and her Husband Lynxblade had three Children: Zephyr Walker, Spiral Walker, and The Prophet of Blades. Lynxblade's only son was on the path to gaining the same madness as Razus, but was guided back to sanity by the guidance of Grand Magus Orbius.

Lynxblade took his wife's surname and became Lynxblade Walker, as his defection from Loporia to marry Wind Walker cut ties with his old family, of which he had little use for anyway. Windchime of Drift was just as much of a Calamity as Zandal, but with full Cognisance, Sanity, and Aware Intent. Her Faction of the Drift wanted to consume the Metaverse and turn everyone into a Mindless Robot. Turok of House Rhygear stood in Opposition to her, as his faction desired to use Machine Augmentations to increase Humanity instead of automating it away into an emotionless void. Windchime founded House Skyblade, to mock her old house, and is one of the antagonists of the story.

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christabellanikolai · 7 years

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The Untitled: Chapter 11

The search for survivors at Eastwatch is one and Gendry and Arya grow closer.

Also available on [Wattpad] [AO3]

<-Previous Chapter

They had spread out; the dead were somehow getting smarter. That was all Jon could think about as he flew among the clouds with Daenerys. They both sat on the back of Drogon but it wasn't the fact that he was currently doing what was thought to be the impossible that had Jon on his toes. It was the fact that as he flew he only found a small group of the dead scattered among the woods of The Gift. Seeing one of the Walkers mounted on horseback he un-sheathed another arrow, it’s tip made of Dragonglass and took aim. The Walker turned toward Jon just in time to meet the arrow between his eyes. He fell from his horse, his party of Wights falling with him. Once they were down and the area was clear, Daenerys gave Drogon the order and the area were engulfed in yellow flame.

They continued to follow this routine as they made their way to Eastwatch. Jon remembering what he had learned while beyond the wall. Once these small pockets were destroyed Daenerys would order Daenerys to set the area ablaze. This wasn't how it was supposed to be though, never had Jon the Army of the Dead fight like this, broken apart and separated from one another. Jon could already sense that something drastic was waiting for them somewhere.

Even before they approached Eastwatch Jon could tell the destruction was massive. The line of ice he should have been seeing on the horizon was gone. When they arrived Jon saw the castle had crumbled, the towers lay crumbled in the fallen portions of the wall. Bodies of the Free Folk and Night's Watch also lay among its ruins. Some had been deformed beyond recognition from the fall.

Once Drogon had landed Jon immediately gave orders to gather and burn the bodies of the fallen. As some of the men began to gather the bodies, Jon ordered Sam and others to begin a search of what few structures remained of the castle, in search of any possible survivors.

“Do you think there are any?” asked Daenerys as the two made their way over to inspect one of the large openings in the wall.

“I think we have a better chance of being invited to tea with Cersei then finding anyone alive here.” Said Jon running his hand up a large chunk of ice. Somehow it felt as if it was both burning and freezing his gloved hand.

“I am sorry.” She said as she took his hand in hers. Jon shook his head before heading through the gap. He didn’t want to think about what could have happened in Tormund’s or Beric’s last moments.

“This is the reality we have to get used to.” Said Jon “The Long Night is here.”

"We should set out to see if any more are coming this way." Said Daenerys not wanting to dwell on this topic any longer. “Burn them where they stand.”

“We will, once I confirm everyone has arrived at their posts.” Said Jon moving along what was left on the wall. “How in seven hells did this happen?” he asked as he picked up bits and pieces of ice.

“Dark magic I suppose.” Said Daenerys. She remembered learning of how things like this could be done during her time in Qarth. “It’s the only way something like this could have crumbled.” As she picked up a chunk of ice she noticed her hand was shaking, whether it was from the cold or fear she could not tell. Once he arrived back on the other side of the wall Jon found Arya digging among some of the ruins of the castle. “You should be resting at one of the camps.” He told her.

“You should be too.” She said as she climbed down from the top of the hill. “Yet we are both here, so now what?”

"We wait to see if there are any survivors before heading back out there," Jon said pointing toward The Gift. “There is still a lot more area to cover.”

“Any word from Castle Black?”

“Aye, no sightings of the dead so far but Edd promises they are ready if they do try and come through.”

“How do you prepare for something like this?” Arya motioned toward what was left standing of Eastwatch. Jon didn’t have an answer.

“Your Grace!” said Gendry in a hurry as he ran toward them. "Come quickly they found Tormund and Beric. Sam says they might still be alive!”

Jon, Gendry, and Arya ran toward the west side of the castle. Some of the structure was still left standing but Jon could tell it wasn’t safe to enter. “Stay here.” He ordered Arya before heading inside with Gendry. “Sam!” he shouted. “Where are you?”

“Up here Jon!” Sam said peaking his head down through an opening by the staircase. "They are both alive Jon but we need to get them someplace warm before they die of hypothermia."

“You and Arya go and make sure a large fire is set up near the tents," Jon told Gendry. “Also collect any extra furs you can find. Take them from the dead if you have to.”

As Gendry left Jon headed up the stairwell where he found Sam hunched over a collapsed wall. Two Winterfell soldiers were busy carefully removing rubble and ice away from Tormund and Beric. Both were unconscious and had obviously broken limbs. "Sam, can you save them?"

“It will be tough.” Said Sam carefully removing debris from them. “But I will do everything I can.”

It took about 20 men to remove Tormund and Beric safely from the rubble. A tent was set up outside to warm them and ‘stabilize’ them as Jon had heard Sam say. Once that was complete Jon had ordered a carriage to be used to transport both to Castle Black, where recovery would be safer. With no other survivors found at Eastwatch, Sam traveled with them.

“This isn’t going to work, you know," Jaime said as he rode alongside Brienne. Once Jon had freed him he had set out with her to possibly convince troops to ride North. “These men serve the crown, not a commander.”

“You do not know that.” Said Brienne

“The King in the North does understand that we don’t actually have 20,000 men to spare? We barely have enough to man Kings Landing. When I left she was preparing to hire that many from the Second Sons of Essos.”

“Whatever you can manage will help us.” Said Brienne

“Also I am sure Cersei has put a bounty on my head. I did commit treason." Said Jaime, cutting Brienne off. "I am quite sure that the first camp we come upon I will be met with an arrow through the heart. Our heads will be on spikes in Kings Landing before Nightfall."

“Shut up!” said Brienne pointing toward the road ahead. The sound of another rider was approaching. Before Jaime could say anything more an arrow flew past his head. He ducked as another one came toward him. “I told you!” he said to Brienne as he commanded his horse to ride fast forward toward the onslaught, his sword now in hand.

“You fucking cunt!” was all Jaime heard as another arrow flew by him. He stalled his horse, immediately recognizing the voice that belonged to Bronn. "You think you are just going to leave without giving me what I am owed?"

“Bronn for fuck's sake, you almost killed me." shouted Jaime.

“Aye, and now I am going to actually kill you.” Said Bronn approaching with his sword drawn. He took a swing at Jaime, who countered with own sword. The two began to circle one another, swords clashing against one another. “You leave me in Kings Landing to deal with your bitch of a sister so you can ride North and what, fuck your big woman one last time before we all freeze to death?”

“That is enough!” shouted Brienne pointing her sword toward Bronn’s throat. “We don’t have time for this! Now drop your weapons or you will not live to receive your castle.”

Bronn dropped his sword, raising his hands in surrender though not without a smirk toward Brienne. “Ser Jaime tie this man.” She ordered.

“Now that is quite unnecessary.” Said Bronn “Unless… is this some type of kink of yours?”

“You attacked us.” Said Brienne "Why should I not believe that you will not ride back to Kings Landing and inform Cersei of where we are?”

“Because Cersei isn't the one who owes me a fucking castle!" he yelled toward Jaime, who began circling a rope around his chest. "Are you really doing this? Need I remind you I am a Knight.”

“So you don’t want to be paid then?” asked Jaime as he tied the final knot. Bronn gave a huff before rolling his eyes. Jaime took hold of the slack before returning to his own horse, pulling Bronn’s with them as they resumed their ride.

Returning to The Gift was harsh, the winds picked up it and the air grew colder. Arya assumed the sudden drop in temperature meant it was now the evening. She couldn’t be sure since the sun had not returned this far North in weeks. Lifting her head to the sky she sought out the moon, though that had been blocked by gray storm clouds days ago. No stars, no sun, no moon, only the never-ending darkness of the Long Night.

“Hoping to make a wish?” she heard Gendry say behind her, he sat next to her at the fire, warming his hands.

“On what? The stars are all gone.” She said with an eye-roll.

“A dragon perhaps?” he joked.

“And where have the dragons gone?” asked Arya looking back toward the camp. Many of these small camps had been set up around the Gift and across as search parties were sent out to find the Night King and castles were evacuated.

“I believe the King and Daenerys went out to supervise the evacuations, also to see how Castle Black was holding up.” Said Gendry placing a small rabbit on a stick before poking it into the fire.

“I can’t get used to it, you know.” Said Arya

“Seeing your brother as King?” asked Gendry “I will tell you he isn’t like any King I have ever seen or met.”

“How many Kings have you seen or met?” asked Arya reaching for the rabbit and taking a bite. She had been starving since leaving Eastwatch, though she figured she should once again get used to the feeling.

“Well there was my uncle, Stannis, he was cold yet strong. He tried to kill me for blood magic.” Said Gendry taking the rabbit from her. “Then there was my Father, Robert Baratheon. He was brave, yet un-kind. He also tried to kill me.”

“Joffery tried to have you killed, well Cersei really.” Said Arya correcting him. “Your Father was dead before then.”

“Of course, and Joffery was a ruthless coward. His Grace is different from all of them. He is kind, strong, and brave. When I first met him I didn’t feel as if I was even speaking to a King, just two bastards reminiscing.” Both of them laughed, Arya agreeing that despite everything Jon was still the same kind and loving person who had left for the Wall 7 years ago.

“He is also the only King that hasn’t tried to kill me.” Gendry laughed again placing a hand Arya’s knee. She looked down at the gesture. This was something she saw Lords do to their ladies while in Winterfell and Kings Landing, she had even seen Jon do it to Daenerys a few times. She didn’t think it would ever happen to her and was unsure how to respond. Gendry seemed to notice as well and quickly removed his hand. “Well yet…”

“Yes yet.” Said Arya turning to face away from Gendry, taking small nervous bites off a chunk or rabbit. She was thankful that Gendry did seem to stray on the subject.

“It’s too bad…” she heard him say. “That if we all survive this, that he pledged his support to Daenerys.”

“Why?” she asked, though she had a feeling what he was going to say.

“Well, I think the Seven Kingdoms could use someone like him." He said. "Honestly, don't you think he is deserving of the Iron Throne?"

She wanted to tell him, she could tell him. Out of everyone loyal to Jon, he would understand the most. He too had to hide who he truly was from the rest of the world. If she told him then maybe he could even help Jon come to accept who he really was. She remembered to promise she and the rest of her family had made Jon. She remembered Jon telling her of how those once close to him had betrayed him in the past. She would never be one of those people. “If you only knew.”

Gendry wanted to ask what she had meant but their conversation was interrupted but the sound of shuffling footsteps, followed by a high-pitched grotesque growling sound in the distance. He rose to his feet, immediately recognizing that sound to be a wight. He grabbed his hammer and stood back to back with Arya who held out one of her Dragonglass swords.

A screech rang out through the air as the wight charged for Arya, she swung at it, taking it’s right-arm clean off. The wight continued to move reaching for her head using its left arm. She ducked and Gendry turned to swing his hammer, smashing the wight in the jaw. As the wight stumbled, Arya was able to slash at the remains with the dagger she had received from Bran. Once it made contact the Wight slumped un-moving to the ground.

“Help me bring the body to the fire.” Said Gendry, dropping his hammer and lifting the wight’s body by it’s deformed shoulders. Arya took it by its feet and the two of them carried the body to the fire.

“What if there are more around here?” asked Arya as they tossed the body into the fire.

“We have to hurry and wake the rest of the camp.” Said Gendry. The two of them made their way quickly to the end to the camp. Gendry reaching for the horn, blow throwing 3 times alerting those in the surrounding areas that wights had been found.

Next Chapter -->

#game of thrones #game of thrones fanfic #game of thrones fanfiction #jonerys #jonerys fanfic #jonerys fanfiction #jon snow #daenerys targaryen

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pirate-empress-story · 6 years

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Chapter 1 Part 2

Ocean spray cooled Elizabeth’s face when she finally stepped out of her cabin, her hand ached from all the paperwork she had been forging. That was the one downside to doing semi-legitimate jobs.

There was a general bustle on deck as the small crew made themselves busy. The captain glanced about the small ship, noting each person carefully. Thelly was finishing taking barrels down to the depths of the ship. Elizabeth’s brother John was securing ropes to the main mast. Cale was helping the minotaur. Standing just in front of her, a Scaronyd was at the helm. A human wearing robes was climbing the ropes clumsily at John’s behest.

A deep resonate male voice suddenly announced Elizabeth’s presence on deck. Cale had stopped his work, as did everyone else, the handful of eyes were on her now. A smile slowly spread onto the young captain’s face. Her hand went to her throat, where a deep grey glass teardrop pendant hung on a similarly grey ribbon that wrapped loosely around the woman’s neck. The necklace burst, an impossibly thick ring of water vapor took its place. Windlessly the vapor exploded out, covering the entire ship in a mild fog.

Elizabeth’s smile deepened into a broad grin when humanoid figures of thick fog materialized next to each crew member. The new crew members started when the fog-men began taking over their jobs.

“Magic, it does wonders doesn’t it?” The captain joked lightly.

“I think the fog can keep our heading for a moment, the sun is going down so the fog shouldn’t burn off in the sun. I’d like to talk to all of you.” The woman stepped down the few steps to the main deck. “There are some faces here I’ve never seen before, I’ll introduce myself. I am Captain Elizabeth Argall, as we are not a Realm ship, I would prefer if you would call me Captain, Eliz, or Argall. I’m not big on formality, we aren’t a big enough crew for me to give a shit about that.” She paced before the small gathering of crew. “My first mate is Johnathan Argall, Cale is our quartermaster, Thelly Whisperhooves is our… Cannoneer, I suppose. And who are the other two of you.”

“I am Hampshire Feenix, I am from the island of Stars, I was hired on by Mr. Cale as a helmsman.” The Scaronyd stepped forward, his dark green skin was dulled in the damp air. His eyes were large and stark red; the hair that sprouted from his leathery reptilian skin was wiry and black, un styled and laying in a natural mohawk.

“Mr. Feenix, what kind of experience do you have?”

“I was the navigator for my father’s war fleet. It was not large, but we did have a few successful campaigns.”

“Why join my ship?”

“The only people giving The Realm any hell is the Pirate Emperor and his pirates,” they gestured around themselves, “and the Sand Nomads. I’m not too fond of sand, so I looked for work aboard a pirate vessel.”

Elizabeth eyed him with her uncovered blue eye. “I see, Welcome aboard the Fallen Angel Mr. Feenix.” She turned her eye onto the other man. He was tall and wore a dark colored robe that hunt to his knees that covered simple clothes. His skin was pale, his hair dark and unkempt, and his eyes glistened a dark grey color. His face was a boyish shape, yet he wore a refined look on it. Had Elizabeth lead a different life, she would have sought for his romantic attentions.

“My name is Jason Bradwyr. I was hired as a deck hand.” The young man said, his voice was deeper than his face would suggest.

“Is there anything that makes you special?” The captain asked, raising a critical eyebrow. He must be the mage Whisper was worried about. She thought quietly to herself.

“I graduated top of my class at Shirahm University of Magical arts and Alchemical Studies.” Something flashed in the captain’s eyes as Jason spoke. “I figured I could blow wind in your sails and the like.”

“What brings such a highly educated fellow to our ship?” Accompanied a few murmurs from the other crew members.

“I had heard that what we learn in our university isn’t real magic; that the mages on ships that taught themselves use truer magic than us learned men who simply memorize circles, sigils, and the names of spirits.”

After a moment of silence Elizabeth speaks again, “Mr. Bradwyr, your university is supported by King Tellamus the third, ruler of the realm of united peoples; an alumni, I’ve heard.” Elizabeth paced slowly, each step echoing in the fog. “I hope you understand that by boarding my ship, and announcing your experience, you’ve sowed doubt in me; while simultaneously spitting in the face of your school and the realm. That takes balls.” After a final cursory glance she turned her back on him.

The fog imploded around the captain’s neck, creating the necklace that hung there previously. The crew was dismissed.

The first job a new crew does together is always stressful, until everyone has been paid there is an uneasiness felt by all. People want to know where they fit in with a group of people, especially if you are going to be stuck on a small ship for the foreseeable future with them. This could be felt in Eliz’s crew. It didn’t help that there was already tension between existing crew mates. Whisper was unhappy with Cale for hiring a mage that she knew nothing about, and John was eager to get the job for Mr. Leifson finished.

John was Eliz’s older brother. He went off to a school to learn proper magic among other things before joining the Pirate Emperor’s armada. He didn’t last long with the Pirate Emperor, so he returned home to help his sister with her new ship. He had the same brown hair and blue eyes that she did, but he was more immense in his size. He came up nearly to Whisper’s shoulder, and was nearly as muscular.

Cale, the quartermaster, was old for a pirate; his peppered hair was wiry and thinning, and his wrinkles created a facial expression that was nearly unreadable. His eyes were the strange part about him though. White orbs like watered milk are sunken in his skull. He was not blind, but he did not see like other people. He can see the soul of an object or creature, he can see the truth and the lies.

Whisper had served on the same ship as Eliz years ago, each of them have a tattoo on their shoulder blades labeling them as one-time crew members of the Branded Banshees. Whisper Bonded with Eliz and vowed to serve under her when she’d announced that she was going to captain her own ship.

These three, at least, knew where they were, for them it was just a matter of getting into rhythm with the other crew members. For Eliz, this first job was a nightmare.

After several days of sailing Eliz stood in her quarters, looking at the plotted course. They would go dangerously close to a Sea Witch’s domain. She bit her lip, looking at the smooth durable pressed paper before her. Her eye scanned the lightly frayed edges, some of the colors of the map had faded, pulling out and dulling some details.

The captain jumped when her door was opened abruptly. It was John, a mixture of excitement and fear in his eyes. “Eliz, there’s a realm ship on the horizon, it looks like a Man-o-War.”

“Fuck, already?”

The long-armed helmsman was standing stoically at the helm. He glanced back at his captain and scanned the horizon with his dark eyes.

“Of course, the wind isn’t behind us, the current won’t be helping much either.” Eliz cursed under her breath. She pulled a telescope from her pocket and scanned the horizon. Three large white masts broke the fuzzy line between sea and sky. “Okay, we are going to try to beat it to the drop-off point.” The captain’s voice quaked with insecurity, she knew that ship was going to be faster than hers.

Several tense hours later Elizabeth began readying cannons, watching the realm ship float closer. The sun began to fall when she declared battle stations.

Feenix coughed, a polite way to ask for his captain’s attention. When she turned he smiled warily and softly spoke, “Captain, I think that I have observed something interesting that could be of use.”

“Go ahead,”

“Thank you. It seems that as we get closer to the area controlled by the sea witch, the Realm ship alters its pursuit. It seems they will be reluctant to go into her waters.” The dark-skinned man paused a moment, looking like he had something extra to add, but decided against it.

“They have good reason to be reluctant. Sea witches typically demand a gift if you pass through their territory.” Eliz bit her lip, furrowing her brow.

BOOM

The sound of a single cannon firing from not too far away brought new life to the crew.

“It was a warning shot, I’d say it is harmless, but I doubt he cares much about our safety.” Eliz called out to her crew.

More shots went off, the booms echoing over the empty ocean. Eliz looked through her telescope again, “EMS Yespur” was carved and painted in faux gold filigree over the side of the boat. She scanned the top deck, a man in the bright red uniform of the Realm stood with a telescope to his eye looking in her direction.

“Feenix, aim us for the Sea Witch’s domain.” Elizabeth said over her shoulder, her hair stood on end. A flash of green at the bow of the Man-O-War caught her attention. “They’ve got a fucking mage.”

The Flying Angel lurched as the helmsman changed course, plunging the ship into waters protected by a sea witch. Another volley of cannon blasts boomed, the sound of splintering wood was more prevalent than anything. Elizabeth’s ship continued forward, a blast of fire shot from Jason’s hand, searing the side of the Realm boat, making the paint of the ship’s name curl and crack.

“No, you idiot, now they know we have a mage!” Eliz lurched forward tackling Jason; pinning him to the damp deck. A thunderous boom forced the Flying Angel to lurch again. For ten minutes the Realm ship sent volleys, some of the cannonballs hitting Eliz’s ship, others missing drastically.

Jason’s face went white when the cannon fire stopped and the current beneath the ship changed. Even a land walker like him could feel the change, and an articulated mage like him could feel the raw magical power that they suddenly entered. They were in HER territory now.

Elizabeth FINALLY hoisted herself off of the idiot university mage and looked up at the Realm ship. They’d backed off, but they had stopped shooting. “what the fuck?” Elizabeth liften her spyglass to her eye and looked toward the red speck on the deck “What… the… fuck… The fucking Bastards. THE FUCKING BASTARDS, Oh, of COURSE.” She passed the glass to Jason who’d finally gotten up, “Look at this shit, Fucking look. They were trying to send us INTO THE FUCKING WITCHES WATERS.” Elizabeth was yelling, her fist came down on the banister next to the helm as she walked briskly up to Feenix. The wood splintered under her fist.

“Eliz, calm down.” John spoke softly.

“Calm… Calm down? CALM DOWN? I am calm! Can’t you see? Fuck.” Elizabeth glared at the ship that now hung at the edge of the Sea Witch’s territory, where the ocean nearly imperceptibly changed shade. “If I wasn’t on a fucking run I’d show that smug fuck a piece of my mind.”

Elizabeth took a deep breath, a deep deep breath. “Jason, use your fancy schooling to put this boat back together. Feenix, put us on a more direct route to our destination, Whisper, go down under and grab one of the barrels, she’ll be sending someone to collect her offering sooner rather than later. John, Cale, you two get this ship going as fast as possible.” Glumly the captain trudged down the steps to the underbelly of the ship.

The sky darkened before the crew heard claws scraping the underside of the ship. Elizabeth kicked a barrel off the side of the ship, it began to sink instandly before movement below the water brought it away.

At this point Elizabeth would have turned around and said, “Well, that should be it, let’s keep going”. After which she would have gone back to her cabin and rested.

But that didn’t happen, instead Elizabeth turned from the side of the ship and said, “Well, Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” Sploosh.

The water wasn’t cold, it wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t cold. Their hands weren’t as rough as she thought they would have been. They weren’t being rough with her either. A light came from a seashell one of them wore. Elizabeth looked at their scales, their rough-looking pale green skin and their large, bulbous black eyes. Her heart beat hard in her chest, if she weren’t drowning she would have thought it was pure sexual attraction. But it wasn’t attraction, it was death. Were they leaning in? She felt water move around her face before she succumbed to the cold darkness of unconsciousness.

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#web series #Pirate Empress #beck greyhawke #Ch1 #Elizabeth #eliz #john #thelly Whisperhooves #whisper #Feenix #cale #jason #bradwyr #pirates #magic #story

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junker-town · 5 years

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Emma Meesseman was always the Mystics’ secret weapon

Emma Meesseman is helping lead the Mystics in the WNBA playoffs.

The Mystics big used her unique skill set to break the Aces, then shut down the Sun the old-fashioned way.

Six weeks ago, the Washington Mystics faced the closest thing to a crisis they experienced in this joyous 2019 title season. Kristi Toliver, the cool veteran point guard of their high-powered attack, was out with a right knee injury. Wing Aerial Powers, a breakout performer soaking up minutes in Toliver’s absence, reinjured her left glute. With the playoffs on the horizon, Washington had only three healthy rotation players to spread across three perimeter positions: Natasha Cloud, Ariel Atkins, and the inexperienced Shatori Walker-Kimbrough.

Before an Aug. 31 game in Dallas, coach Mike Thibault chose an unconventional method to solve his dilemma. Instead of using perimeter players to fill the vacant perimeter minutes, he put big Emma Meesseman in the starting lineup, creating a jumbo frontcourt with MVP Elena Delle Donne and starting center LaToya Sanders.

As it turns out, that moment ended up saving the Mystics’ season. Without Emma Meesseman, the Mystics are not WNBA champions.

First, Washington advanced past the formidable Las Vegas Aces in the WNBA semifinals in four games because Meesseman cracked every defensive plan the Aces tried. She followed up a 27-point Game 1 by pouring in 30 points in Game 2, helping Washington overcome Vegas’ tenacious defense on Delle Donne and relentless pace-pushing the other way. She helped her team close out the series in Game 4 by scoring 22 points and knocking down several clutch shots late.

Then, when the chips were down in a winner-take-all Game 5 of the WNBA Finals, Meesseman rallied the Mystics from a seven-point deficit the old-fashioned way: by going one-on-one against whoever checked her and scoring at will. She finished with 22 points on 13 shots, with 16 of those points coming after she checked in for the final time midway through the third quarter. She was the series MVP and absolutely deserved the honor.

CLUTCH! @EmmaMeesseman fades away absorbing the contact for the hoop and harm! : ESPN2 #WNBAFinals pic.twitter.com/iNAo2TJRtQ

— WNBA (@WNBA) October 11, 2019

Contrary to her work against Las Vegas (more on that below), Meesseman’s success against Connecticut wasn’t all that subtle. In the Mystics’ Game 3 victory, she pick-and-popped Sun center Jonquel Jones to death, taking advantage of her lack of foot speed. Nothing terribly elaborate about that.

youtube

In Game 5, she pulled the Mystics over the finish line in a way anyone can understand: by patiently roasting whoever checked her one-on-one. Most impressively, she used a series of pirouettes to kiss this shot off the glass against Connecticut’s Morgan Tuck.

Emma Meesseman has @JohnWall & @RealDealBeal23 on their feet! #WNBAFinals pic.twitter.com/0bkm9SAN2K

— NBA TV (@NBATV) October 11, 2019

Meesseman is a unique player in a unique situation. A slick-shooting one-time All-Star and featured Mystics building block, she had to adjust her game to accommodate Delle Donne, a superstar that plays her position. As the Mystics fine-tuned their record-breaking system around their new franchise player, Meesseman sat out the 2018 WNBA season after six years of playing nearly non-stop basketball that included helping her native Belgium overachieve in critical international tournaments. Without her, Sanders’ defensive prowess and blue-collar offensive game became the a perfect compliments to Delle Donne’s electric scoring.

Reintegrating Meesseman has been a minor nuisance all year. Delle Donne is the star and Sanders’ skill set is too important to sit for long stretches, yet it’s a waste of Meesseman’s talent to contain her in a 20-minute bench role. Thibault occasionally used the jumbo lineup featuring all three bigs within games this year, if only to squeeze in more Meesseman minutes. But with his perimeter rotation threatened by injury, Thibault took the chance to get Meesseman on the floor more by starting her.

That decision was especially crucial against Las Vegas. During the series, the Aces focused their attention on slowing Delle Donne and anticipating the Mystics’ dynamic ball movement. They toggled between man-to-man, zone, and mixtures of the two, and even started switching all screens in Game 2. Off-ball defenders aggressively helped in the lane, hoping to beat the Mystics to the extra pass they love. The idea was to disrupt the Mystics’ flow by confusing them.

Yet that didn’t actually happened, and Meesseman was the reason. No matter what they did, the Aces couldn’t account for her. None of their bigs were able to step out and contest her sweet jump shot.

When they tried to rush out to contain that stroke, Meesseman drove around them. Watch how she attacked at the exact moment A’ja Wilson lunges her left leg out, which set up a Sanders jumper.

Meesseman’s skill set challenged the Aces, but her off-ball movement really confounded them. She was always moving into open space, no matter where it was or when it actually presented itself. Because she never stood still, it was impossible to get a beeline on what she planned to do. As soon as her defender turned their head to account for another threat, she cut away from them for layups or open threes.

That movement gave her a leg up even if the initial cut didn’t bear fruit. Without actually sprinting, she ran the Aces ragged.

Meesseman’s the kind of player that succeeds in what’s known as a “wicked” learning environment, a term initially coined by economist Robin Hogarth in his 2001 book Educating Intuition. In it, Hogarth suggested that wicked learning environments are “characterized by faulty feedback that can be misleading as a result of, among other things, delays, random disturbances, absence, and other confounding factors.” This is in contrast to “kind” environments, where feedback is clear enough for people to easily adjust their behavior.

In psychological terms, the Aces and Sun used defensive strategy designed to create a “wicked” learning environment. By mixing up defensive coverages, packing the lane, and pre-rotating to anticipate the Mystics’ ball movement, the Aces and Sun, in their own specific way, created random disturbances that they hope leads to misleading feedback. This approach operates on the sensible theory that the Mystics players, like most high-level pros, succeed because they’ve mastered kind feedback loops. They’ve been drilled so precisely on common in-game situations that the Aces and Sun couldn’t just defend one way and hope they can out-execute them.

That’s why Meesseman was proved to be a wrench in their plans. She does not operate in common patterns that can be thrown off. Instead, she succeeds by adapting a simple philosophy — keep the ball and herself moving into open space, no matter where — to any situation — unless she realizes the only solution is to go one-on-one.

It’s how she was able to seamlessly adjust her screen angle to stop Kayla McBride from going under, then dart into open space when Wilson stepped up to contain the ball.

It’s how she intuitively understood that a simple step to the left was all that was needed to get Wilson to open up a driving lane, given the Aces’ obvious goal of swarming Delle Donne in the post.

It was enough to understand exactly how to account for the Aces’ late adjustment in Game 2 to switch every screen. This is the one strategy I was been waiting to see against the Mystics all season. If done right, it could have baited the Mystics into going one-on-one to attack mismatches instead of continuing to move the ball side to side.

But even that didn’t work, largely because Meesseman found ways to catch the Aces off-balanced mid-switch. On this play, she circled behind Delle Donne, all to set up a spin move back to the middle when Dearica Hamby jumped out to switch.

Later on, Meesseman delivered the ultimate off-ball checkmate sequence to the switch-everything strategy. After setting an off-ball flare screen to get the slower Liz Cambage onto her, Meesseman tried driving to the hoop.

Cambage held up nicely, forcing Meesseman to kick the ball out to Cloud in the corner. Cloud’s drive was cut off, but Meesseman noticed that Cambage stayed in the paint instead of following her back out to the perimeter. As Cloud recycled the offense, Meesseman pointed to Delle Donne to cut through, but not directly to the hoop.

Why? Because Meesseman realized that if the Aces were sticking to their switch-everything scheme, it’d be Delle Donne’s defender in Hamby, and not Cambage, that would be tasked with closing out to the perimeter. If Delle Donne cut straight to the hoop, the Aces would just have Cambage pick her up. Instead, Delle Donne cut right in front of Hamby, and that gave Meesseman this clean look for three.

In essence, Meesseman had Delle Donne set a screen not on Cambage, the defender currently guarding her, but on Hamby, the player that was going to guard her after the anticipated switch. She used her intuition to snuff out the Aces’ attempt to confuse her. That’s thriving in a wicked environment.

So, too, was the way she took Connecticut’s tough, physical Game 5 defense and went straight at them for the kill. In contrast to the Aces, Connecticut’s defensive strategy was more physical than elaborate. The Sun had their own ace in the hole in Courtney Williams, who kept mucking up Washington’s spacing by helping off Natasha Cloud and Ariel Atkins.

Ultimately, the best solution to Connecticut’s off-ball work was to give the ball to Meesseman and let her take her defender one-on-one. When push came to shove, not even Jones could move her feet to deal with Meesseman attacking off the dribble.

PLAYOFF EMMA CAN'T BE TAMED pic.twitter.com/4rsnTD0Wa9

— Washington Mystics (@WashMystics) October 11, 2019

️ ️ PLAYOFF EMMA BE TAMED pic.twitter.com/rzVtvjbTt8

— Washington Mystics (@WashMystics) October 11, 2019

Without Meesseman’s work in the semifinals, the Mystics’ well-oiled offensive machine would be paralyzed by indecision from the Aces’ clever defensive tricks. Without her work in the Finals, the Sun’s success in forcing Washington into one-on-one basketball would’ve resulted in defeat. Two different series, two very different ways of succeeding. She really was the missing element in putting Washington over the top.

Ultimately, she and the Mystics gave the wicked Aces and Sun a taste of their own medicine.

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romantic-anti-hero-blog · 6 years

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The sounds of automatic weapons and piercing alien snaps echoed through the air from the city. Purple shooting stars streaked across the night sky in tight formations of three, curving and swooping in the direction of the battles.

Neighbors and pedestrians took to the yellow illuminated streets under twin irregularly circular moons, shouting and hollering to each other. “Steve, you alright?” “Yeah, are the kids safe?” A dog walker approached the group. “What happened?” “Did everyone see that white flash?” “Hey what’s going on?” Someone shushed the crowd. “Listen - gunfire toward downtown!” “The moon! There’s two of ‘em!” Everyone looked up. “Jesus Christ, look at where we are!” “Look! Look at those silver buildings!” someone yelled, pointing to the epic alien landscape spanning - what an hour ago was - the northeast. “No, oh my God, this isn’t happening!” “This can’t be real!”

Greta from across the street broke from the chaotic gathering and jogged over to the Kerouacs. She looked tired, not unlike everyone else. Her cheeks ran with tears. “Chuck, Ruth, you and the kids alright?” she asked.

“Yeah, we’re okay,” Ruth said.

“And you? And Mike?” Chuck asked.

Greta choked on an inhale, holding back more crying. She cleared her throat. “Uh, I was on a call with my sister while Mike was a few blocks down- helping the Barrys load their car for an evacuation - when that flash happened.” And fresh tears ran down her face.

“Oh my God,” Chuck said.

Ruth closed the distance between her and Greta, and took her by the shoulder. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Greta.”

Greta couldn’t hold it all back and let out a single yelp.

“He’s okay, he’s still there,” Ruth said.

Greta nodded. She wiped her eyes and regained composure, then took a deep breath. “Yeah- yeah, I know,” she said.

“Stick with us for now,” Chuck said. “We’re all going to have to look after each other.” Greta nodded.

Kate stepped forward, said, “And you’ve seen…”, and waved toward the mountainous vista behind them.

“I.. saw it from my window inside,” Greta said. She took a few steps toward the rim, stopped. “I’m still having a difficult time believing my eyes.” She looked out across the view.

So was Dan. He was fixed on the purple spots of light, swerving and swooping through the sky above downtown. They were tiny ships, he knew; tiny fighters. He found himself waiting for one of the groups of three to turn toward them. North by Northwest flashed by in his mind. No, Dunkirk. Then, any number of napalm scenes from a Vietnam War movie. He was counting the seconds.

“We were just discussing next steps,” Chuck said. Greta stayed staring out, taking a moment to soak everything in before returning to the dire state of things.

“Obviously we’re not on Earth anymore,” Ruth said and crossed her arms, massaged her neck with both hands. “The panic is still wearing off from that.”

“We can’t be in any danger,” Chuck said. “Not in any serious danger. Not if we’re still alive.”

Ruth raised an eyebrow. “You hear that gunfire?” she asked. “Chuck, you really don’t think we’re in any danger at all?”

“If they wanted to kill us, they would have already,” Chuck said. “That’s what I’m thinking.

“So they want our cities? Or they want us to be alive?” Kate asked.

Chuck shrugged. “That white flash we saw before we conked out - it could’ve been an explosion. It could’ve been an atomic blast, or it could’ve been a bio or a chemical weapon. But we’re awake, we’re alive, and we’re here,” he said, waving his arms up at the twin moons.

Ruth thought for a moment. “That does make some sense,” she said.

“Then they’re going to come for us,” Kate said. Ruth and Chuck turned to her. Kate continued. “If they didn’t kill us already, then it’s only a matter of time before they’re dealing with us alive.”

In the distance in the opposite direction Greta spied four or five flickers of bluish light growing in the distance. Each one was a ship- no three. Two small and one large, all of them rocketed forward. Greta turned to the group-

“They’re coming right now,” Ruth said. She could feel it, somewhere deep within her.

Greta paused for a split second. “Yeah, that aways,” she said, motioning in the direction.

Chuck and Kate spun their heads to the northeast horizon and saw them headed straight for them. Shiny light bronze-like ships. From the angles they were closing in at, the ships would all reach the neighborhood’s metal rim at intervals of maybe a hundred feet apart.

Greta stayed on Ruth for a moment. “How did you know?” she asked.

“They’re coming. Six of them.” Dan had counted to 21 before two of the groups of fighters swirling around downtown broke off, began speeding toward them. “They’re coming straight at us!”

Everyone turned their heads the other way, spied the growing purple glows of the alien fighters in the sky.

The crowd of neighbors took notice, and began erupting into chaos. “What are they?” “This isn’t happening!” “Everyone get inside!” And everyone started for the nearest shelter they could find.

Before anyone could get far, the two smaller ships of each bronze group whipped through the air above them and began firing on the six other ships. A dogfight began several hundred feet above, six black purple-glowing fighters against ten bronze blue-glowing ones, each side lobbing bright orange energy bolts at the other. High-pitched pangs ripped through the air with each weapon discharge.

Then one of the large bronze ships was upon them, swooped down and breaked until it was parallel with the long metal rim surrounding the neighborhood - it nearly touched the rim at a foot away; It parked right there with hundreds of sheer drop underneath. Two wide doors on the ship’s side opened up, like interlocked fingers pulling free on either side. The doors revealed a small green-tone humanoid.

It was short, stocky, and had arms that reached down to the ground when standing straight up. Piercing red eyes, and what looked like flaps in place of teeth in its mouth. It was clad in intricate hexagonal patterns on dark blue armor plates - beneath the body shielding, it had on brown cloth or leathery material. In its left arm it held a long grey musket-looking weapon. Around its neck was a dark grey collar, lit up with a black speaker that generated words in a low tone.

“Quickly! They are coming!” and it pointed a finger to the oncoming purple alien fighters. It waved toward itself. “Get in! As many as you can!”

Everyone stared at large ship in shock a moment. Inside it could take maybe thirty people. No one knew quite what to do or who to listen to.

An explosion above. A bronze fighter had been shot out of the sky. Everyone looked up at the spectacle - some screamed in terror.

The green creature shouted again. “I have no time to explain, but you are in grave danger, humans!”

Muscles twitched. Blood pumped. Fight or flight.

Another explosion high above. Six against eight.

The green creature outstretched its open right hand, shouted, “Come with me if you want to live!”

One of the black purple-glowing fighters spun upside-down and tilted down for the large parked bronze ship, opened fire. Low pings and pangs erupted where the ship’s shield bubble refracted and dispersed the incoming bolts of energy. The fighter, continuing its swooping motion, kept firing, and the ground about the neighborhood shook where hot plasma met pavement. One orange bolt hit the ground near a dogwalker and exploded, atomising the man and dog into dust.

That was it. Everyone rushed toward the ship.

“Kids, go! Go!” Chuck yelled, and pushed Ruth ahead of him as they all began running.

“Into the ship!” Ruth told Dan and Kate.

“Quickly!” Greta shouted,

Dan scooped up his and Kate’s backpacks from where they lay on the ground, and grabbed hands with his sister.

The small black fighter swung back up and quickly looped around in a counterclockwise circle. When it lined back up, it fired at the charging crowd of civilians. Sidewalk and street blasted up into the air as bolts hit the ground rhythmically like dominos falling atop each other. Screams and shouts as bodies caught in the fire or the explosions of ground kicking up caught pieces of rock and shrapnel. An energy bolt caught someone in the abdomen, which burst apart in every direction. An arm cleaved above the elbow went flying. The fighter pulled up and began circling around for another pass.

Dan felt his body pressed against the ground. He shook dirt off his head where the ground had erupted nearby. A moment slower and his left leg would’ve been gone. Dan heard another explosion above, looked up. Six against seven.

He looked about for the others.

A few more people running to the ship. Eight neighbors died instantly, their corpses spread about in the craters now lining the street. Explosion: six against six. Dan looked back and saw his dad get up from the ground way behind him: Chuck had a bloody scratch down his cheek, but was alright - had been blown back a number of feet. Kate had gone flying to Dan’s right at the moment of the blast behind them, and was moaning on the ground from the hard landing, clutching at her leg. Ruth lay on her back to Dan’s left. Her right arm and leg had disappeared.

Dan held his breath. No no no no no no no, his brain buzzed, loudly at first before fading away.

“Ruth!” Chuck shouted. “No! Ruth!” He got up and began to charge toward her.

Then Dan had his arms wrapped around Ruth and was pulling her to the large bronze ship. “I’ve got her!” Dan yelled. “Help Kate!” Dan saw a moment of hesitation in his father’s eyes at the sight of Ruth. Then clarity, as Chuck turned and ran to Kate.

Dan worked like a machine. The alien fighter went by again, strafing the ground with bolts of orange rippling energy. More ground explosions, none of them closeby. He wasn’t thinking but his body was moving. Legs marching backwards, arms pulled tight against his mother’s chest. Focus and shock shut his ears from Ruth’s screaming, but he did feel her flailing body become lighter. Dan looked up to see the green-toned creature had dropped his weapon and gotten out to help, was carrying Ruth from the other end.

Dan and the creature stepped into the ship and set Ruth down gently between a group of people. “Please,” Dan said urgently. “Please help me.” Many of the ship’s new passengers stood about not knowing what to do. Some of them clutched at their own injuries. Greta crouched down and began to help Dan with fashioning tourniquets for Ruth’s injuries.

Inside, the ship was less shiny than the exterior, but similarly coloured - all made of industrial looking metals like nothing on earth. Toward the ship’s front, three small steps led up to the pilot’s cockpit, where two other green creatures sat at blue glowing holographic control panels. One of the pilots shouted, “Karak, shields at 32 percent!” The other pilot spoke, “We cannot take much more!”

An explosion high in the sky. Then another. Six against four. Two of the black alien ships swooped down to fire on the bronze carrier ship; the ship rumbled from the energy impacts.

“Go! Go now!” the green creature shouted to the pilots, and the ship began to veer off from its hovering position along the metal rim.

Dan felt the ship moving, and turned to see his dad holding Kate in his arms, growing further and further away. Chuck was limping toward the bronze carrier ship - shouting for them to “Stop!” and “Wait!” - but slowed his gait, then eventually stopped and stared at the fleeing ship, realizing he was too late. The finger-like door on the ship’s side zipped closed from either side.

Dan spun to the green creature next to him, grabbed it by the breastplate, and pulled it close. “You need to go back! My dad and sister are still down there!”

“We cannot take much more damage to this ship,” the creature spoke. “We need to leave while we can.”

Dan violently pulled it closer. “No, you have to go back! You don’t understand! You don’t-”

“If we stay put a moment longer, then all of these people will die!” the creature said. “And you. And her,” it said, and pointed to Ruth.

Dan turned and looked Ruth up and down. Shock was taking hold of her. She was no longer wailing with pain, nor was she quietly sobbing. She looked to be slipping into unconsciousness. Two neighbors had joined Greta; the three of them were warning Ruth not to fall asleep.

Dan looked at an empty spot on the ground next to him, Where dad and Kate should be.

Then he looked back and stared into the green creatures eyes. “Then please help save my mom.”

The creature nodded and put a hand against Dan’s shoulder. “I promise, we will.”

The bronze carrier ship made a curve for back where it came from, and the other four joined it, along with the remaining four bronze fighters. Evading enemy fire, the ships plugged in their wormhole generator coordinates, and with bright white snaps of light, they were gone.

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jaeame-blog · 7 years

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Bonneval fit and well: Murray Baker | Caulfield Cup

Michael Walker has been suspended for 10 meetings on a careless riding charge aboard his Caulfield Guineas-winning mount Mighty Boss. Bonneval is the $5.50 Caulfield Cup favourite ahead of Humidor at $7, Amelies Star and Johannes Vermeer on $8, with Admire Deus the other runner under. Punters converged on Melbourne's Caulfield Racecourse in their thousands on Saturday for the The Ladbrokes Caulfield Guineas Day. The Archie Alexander-trained stayer earned a ballot-free exemption into next week's Group One Caulfield Cup with his win.

Bonneval went into the day as the clear pick for next week's Caulfield Cup, but she failed to fire in the Caulfield Stakes, finishing sixth, with former Cup favourite Hartnell also failing to fire, being six lengths from the winner. Seven-year-old Fast 'N' Rocking has snapped a two-year absence from the winner's circle in the Listed Weekend Hussler Stakes at Caulfield. Chad Schofield readied himself with a winning treble at Sha Tin on Saturday for his entry to the Melbourne racing carnival next weekend on David Hayes-trained Caulfield Cup chance Harlem.The local race track is nice and green and the Deniliquin Racing Club has taken a record number of marquee package bookings, pointing to a massive Caulfield Cup race day in Deniliquin next weekend. Lord Fandango has booked a berth in the Caulfield Cup with victory in the Herbert Power Stakes at Caulfield.

New Zealand horse Jon Snow was third, another 2-1/2 lengths away, after racing on the pace while Caulfield Cup favourite Bonneval settled back in the field before working home between runners for sixth. From a Caulfield Cup and Melbourne Cup point of view, the obvious horse to follow from the Caulfield programme is Johannes Vermeer.Glen Boss received a 10-meeting suspension stemming from his handling of Riven Light in the race. Bonneval pulled up with lacerations and lameness in her near foreleg following Saturday's Group One Ladbrokes Stakes but connections are confident she'll take her place in the Caulfield Cup.

#Caulfield Cup

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filmdaguardare · 7 years

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In 1993 David Bowie compiled a double CD for friends. Titled All Saints it combined instrumentals from Low and "Heroes" with more contemporary tracks and signalled the singer's rediscovery of the electronic sounds that revolutionised his music in 1977. Delving deep into All Saints, Jon Savage examines the impact of Bowie's sonic revolution on post-punk, electronica and, in the end, Bowie himself.

1993 was a fantastic year for electronic music. Six years after Steve 'Silk' Hurley's Jack Your Body - the UK's first house Number 1 - the pure energy of house and techno had diversified into more than just a series of artificially stimulated genres: it had become a whole new sound world that had very little to do with what had gone before, and that meant rock. Despite the best efforts of Suede and Nirvana that year, electronica sounded like the future.

Passing from the irresistible Euro cheese of 2 Unlimited's No Limit - Number 1 in February - to Acen's brutal classic Window In The Sky - collected on the early junglist compilation Hard Leaders III: Enter The Darkside, there were several releases by Richard ]ames/Aphex Twin, including Polygon Window's Surfing On Sine Waves; Richie Hawtin's first album on Warp, Dimension Intrusion as F.U.S.E., Underworld's Rez, Sabres Of Paradise's Smokebelch II and the R&S compilation In Order To Dance 4 - brilliant records all.

1993 was also the year that David Bowie rediscovered his mojo, It had been a decade since Let's Dance - the rock/R&B fusion that launched him into the global mainstream for the first time. The subsequent years saw Bowie blindsided by that somewhat unexpected success: after two poor studio albums (Tonight and Never Let Me Down), an attempt to recapture his rock roots with Tin Machine had been unsuccessful - despite a couple of good songs. So what to do next?"

"A way through the labyrinth was offered by the past: going forward by going back. During 1991, Rykodisc undertook a comprehensive reissue programme of all the albums between 1967's David Bowie and 1980's Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), trailed in 1989 by the successful 3-CD compilation Sound + Vision. The cumulative effect of these fifteen records - including the electronic highpoints, Low and "Heroes" - reaffirmed Bowie's status as modernist and innovator.

Released in April 1993, Black Tie White Noise was Bowie's first solo album for six years. It contains what would, with variations, become his basic template for the next decade: mature, almost crooning vocals; iconic covers, in this case Cream's I Feel Free and The Walker Brothers' Nite Flights; an interest in black dance rhythms (assisted here by Nile Rodgers); and futuristic ideas integrated within a full, enveloping sound. It went to Number 1.

Bowie has always been a synthesist of contemporary modes: unlike many rock stars, he actually likes music. His commercial renaissance in 1993 coincided with a greater receptivity to the world around him and a corresponding reassessment of his achievements. Pallas Athena is a string-drenched baggy shuffle, while the title track, Black Tie White Noise, matches a lyric about the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles with a guest vocal from New Jack Swing singer Al B. Sure!

That November, Nirvana plugged Bowie right into the heart of contemporary rock music with their version of The Man Who Sold The World on MTV Unplugged. A month later, Bowie released his second album of 1993, The Buddha Of Suburbia, an album of all new, subtly electronic material - inspired by his soundtrack work on the BBC Film of Hanif Kureishi's novel, set in their shared south London locale of Bromley - a forgotten gem in his catalogue.

Right from the opening track, which collages the riff from Space Oddity and the chorus from All The Madmen, The Buddha Of Suburbia plugs Bowie back into his avant-garde past. This was deliberate: as Bowie wrote in the linernotes, "My personal brief for this collection was to marry my present way of writing and playing with the stockpile of residue from the 1970s." That meant a list of inspirations that included free association lyrics, Brücke-Museum, Kraftwerk, Eno and Neu!

As if to celebrate the continued influence of Eno on his "working forms", Bowie put together his third release of the year: a double CD compilation called All Saints, produced in an edition of a hundred and fifty and handed out to friends. This was an explicit homage to electronica: mixing all the instrumentals from Low and "Heroes" with stray outtakes like Abdulmajid and All Saints, as well as relevant material from Black Tie White Noise and The Buddha Of Suburbia.

The result is surprisingly homogeneous: sixteen years of material collaged into a flowing whole, with the The Buddha Of Suburbia material, The Mysteries and Ian Fish UK Heir, among the strongest. Which prompts a few questions. If Low and "Heroes" represent Bowie's highpoint of formal inspiration, then how did he get there? Why did they sound so good in the context of their time, and what has their influence been - not just on his own music - but electronica in general? Did that future happen?

It all began, appropriately enough, in science fiction. During the mid to late summer of 1975, Bowie was in New Mexico and other southern locations, filming Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth. His central role required him to play the part of Thomas Jerome Newton, an extraterrestrial visitor on a quest to find water for his dying planet. Newton is charming, cold, and totally emotionless: as Bowie later admitted, he hardly had to act because that's how he felt at the time.

Space travel and aliens have been a constant theme in Bowie's songs, from Space Oddity through Life On Mars?, Ashes To Ashes and Hello Spaceboy. The possibility of other worlds - and the transformation achieved by leaving this one - is a sure-re way of abstracting from any problems that one has on this Earth. Bowie had always felt apart, and much of his work - for instance, his first masterpiece, 1966's The London Boys - centres around the themes of being in or out, between belonging and not belonging.

His first big hit, 1969's Space Oddity, was a trip to nowhere, in the short term. Bowie achieved fusion in his second phase of chart success: he understood and identified with his new audience, a mixture of weirdos, gays, urban stylists and teenyboppers. But superstardom and artistic restlessness drove him into new, uncharted areas: as he continued his sequence of hyper-speed transformations in 1974 and 1975 - from Aladdin Sane to Diamond Dogs and Young Americans - he became more and more remote.

In summer 1975 he was coked-out and fame blitzed. But The Man Who Fell To Earth offered a lifeline. Saturated in science fiction, becoming the alien, Bowie was able to project forward, into his future, into the future - out of a barren, bleak and occasionally terrifying present. (At the time he was living in Los Angeles, beset by demons, imagined or otherwise, and involved in a sequence of paralysing business disputes).

The first sign of this change was all over his next album. Recorded in autumn 1973, Station To Station was a compelling mixture of abstracted disco and contemporary crooning. TVC 15 set to a vicious funk rhythm the famous scene in The Man Who Fell To Earth, where Newton, rendered incapable by alcohol, goggles at a wall of TV sets: "I give my complete attention to a very good friend of mine / He's quadrophonic / He's a / He's got more channels/ So hologramic / Oh my TVC 15."

The title track was a ten-minute tour de force, with as many twists and turns as a 1967 single or a prog epic, that charted a spiritual journey from the darkside ("Here I am / Dredging the ocean / Lost in my circle") to some kind of possibility that life could continue. Whether consciously or not, Bowie was visualising his own escape: "The European canon is here." Here also are the first traces of modern German music: the motorik rhythms, the panoramic sweep of the train sounds.

The idea of a physical journey was stimulated by the most successful German record to date, Kraftwerk's Autobahn - the title track of which aimed to capture the feeling of driving along the German A roads without speed limits. You hear the car starting, a horn toots, and then you're off into a repetitive, hypnotic twenty-two-minute journey that reflects the different, phasing perspectives of travelling fast as well as the boredom of motorway driving.

As important as the idea of simulating shifts through time and space was Kraftwerk's use of synthesizers to express a melodic sensibility that, at various points, suggested distance, loss, cosiness and large horizons. The two wordless versions of Kometenmelodie, on the album's second side, are saturated in deep, warm analogue synth sounds. This was a futuristic, self-generated, distinct European sensibility that had very little American or English influence.

An edited single of Autobahn went to Number 11 in the UK charts in June 1975. The Kosmische Musik was going overground in 1974/5 just as it hit an artistic peak, with records by Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream (Phaedra and Ricochet), Cluster (Zuckerzeit), Harmonia (Muzik Von Harmonia), Can (Soon Over Babaluma), Neu! (Neu! 75), and Faust, whose Faust IV began with an earth-shaking drone that satirised the flip name given to the genre by British journalists - Krautrock.

This was a music born out of a national rupture: Germany's post-war devastation and reconstruction. As Kraftwerk's Ralf Hütter told this writer in 1991: "When we started it was like, shock, silence. Where do we stand? Nothing. The classical music being nineteenth century, but in the twentieth century: nothing. We had no father figures, no continuous tradition of entertainment. Through the '50s and '60s, everything was Americanised, directed towards consumer behaviour.

"We were part of this '68 movement, where suddenly there were possibilities: we performed at happenings and art situations. Then we founded our Kling Klang studio. German word for sound is 'klang', 'kling' is the verb. Phonetics, establishing the sound, we added more electronics. You had performances from Cologne Radio, Stockhausen, and something new was in the air, with electronic sounds, tape machines. We were a younger generation, we came up with different textures."

With a cover that used a still taken from The Man Who Fell To Earth, Station To Station was released in January 1976, followed a couple of months later by the film: a double whammy that kept Bowie at the forefront of popular culture. In February, Bowie began the sixty-four-date Station To Station tour - for many fans, his peak as a performer - which, after forty or so dates in the US, visited Germany in April. He liked it so much that, in late summer 1976, he moved to Berlin with Iggy Pop in tow.

In the late '70s, Berlin was a schizophrenic city, brutally divided in two by the heavily policed wall that separated the two warring super-power systems of the day - Cold War zoning in excelsis. Totally surrounded by the communist Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the Western side was an oasis of capitalist values, half depressed and half manically liberated. (For two contrasting views, see the contemporary Berlin films Taxi Zum Klo and Christiane F..

Berlin had come back from nothing. It allowed Bowie anonymity, a safe enough haven within which to reconstitute himself and an environment that matched his own psychological state. It also had layers of history that went back beyond the Cold War and World War II: always visually stimulated, Bowie was fascinated by the Brücke-Museum, an institution dedicated to the often stark Work of the first expressionists, the 'Brücke', or Bridge, who celebrated spontaneity and raw emotion.

It also allowed Bowie to immerse himself further in German music: that year he met Edgar Froese, Giorgio Moroder, and Kraftwerk - who would write about it in 1977's Trans-Europe Express: "From station to station / Back to Dusseldorf city / Meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie." This was the melting pot that would go into the four key 1977 albums that Bowie began recording that summer: first Iggy Pop's The Idiot, then his next, begun in France and finished at the Hansa Tonstudio ("By the wall") in Berlin.

Low was a major surprise when it came out in early 1977 but it's a perfect record - conceptually and emotionally. Adorned with a treated cover still from The Man Who Fell To Earth, it's split into two halves: a first side of seven tracks - two instrumentals and ve songs clipped brutally short - and a second of almost wordless, hypnotic instrumentals. The entire album is drenched in electronics, used to evoke a variety of emotions - not the least of which is a strange serenity: the curious comfort in near-total withdrawal.

The record fades in on Speed Of Life, a theme that tied into one of the preoccupations of punk; as Bowie stated in 1977, "People simply can't cope with the rate of change in this world. It's all far too fast." This instrumental matches a ferocious Dennis Davis snare drum sound - achieved by Tony Visconti's Eventide Harmonizer, which fed back a dying echo to the drummer as he played - with synthesizer textures that were at once harsh and melodic, uplifting and decaying.

These were provided by Brian Eno, Bowie's principal collaborator, who was already saturated in German music. During the sessions for Low, he recorded with Harmonia, while his 1975 album, Another Green World, had been partly inspired by Cluster's Zuckerzeit, an album of playful, sugary but relentless synthesizer instrumentals, and the oscillation between recognisable, if slightly swerved pop songs and ambient instrumentals were what Bowie was aiming to achieve.

The five songs on Low's first side are almost randomly edited, formally unconventional - the vocal on the hit, Sound And Vision, doesn't come in for a minute and a half - and almost autistically uncommunicative. Normally profligate with words and storylines, Bowie here offers fragments from unpleasant scenarios that thrust themselves up into the consciousness (Always Crashing In The Same Car, Breaking Glass) or almost desperate attempts at connection (Be My Wife).

The excitement of the record's formal innovations - the successful integration of a new electronic sound with pop/rock music: just listen to the popping synth in What In The World - contrast with a mood that is shut down, cocooned. This feeling of remoteness is deepened by the four instrumentals that begin with Warszawa. Mixing minimalism with random elements, like the discarded Vibraphone found in the studio, they remain shape-shifting pulses of great clarity and beauty.

Low might have alienated the Americans, but it reached Number 2 in the UK: at the same time, Sound And Vision was a UK Top 3 single. While not of punk, it seemed to share a similar mood: the clipped feel, the acceleration, the traumatised emotions - on the surface at least. It was quickly followed by another album, this time totally recorded at the Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin: "Heroes". Although sharing the same split format as Low, this was a very different beast.

The first thing that you notice is that the songs are longer. There are synthesizers and randomness - like the flat interjection on Joe The Lion: "It's Monday" - but the feeling is generally more expansive, as though Bowie has begun to open up to the world again. The sound is fuller, and reaches a peak on the justly celebrated title track, inspired by two lovers meeting under the Berlin Wall, which, with a totally committed, if not desperate vocal, celebrates the uncertain possibility that love can transcend geopolitics.

The second side is like a waking dream. The Kraftwerk homage V-2 Schneider begins with a downward sweep - like a jet, or a rocket terror weapon, levelling out - before hitting a heavy motorik groove as relentless as anything on Neu! 75. Sense Of Doubt leaves a descending, four-note theme hanging in atmospherics and synthesizer washes: you can hear the dripping rain and feel the physical and mental as psychology matches environment.

Moss Garden takes from Edgar Froese's Epsilon In Malaysian Pale in mood - that lush, exotic soundscape - and in its repeating synth whorls. Bowie added a deep, machine-like hum that travels across the channels, and an improvisation played on a koto: the Japanese stringed instrument. The final instrumental, Neuköln, features Bowie's saxophone in a strangulated, highly Expressionist evocation of a drab Berlin district then mainly populated by Turkish immigrants.

These four tracks are the high point of Bowie's career, his point of furthest formal and expressive outreach: sound paintings that have all the complexity and power of a feature film, they take you there, right into their emotional and physical landscape. Just as much as the purely instrumental albums that Brian Eno would release over the next few years, they represent the beginnings of ambient music, certainly in the form that would become popular in the early 1990s.

The impact of Low and "Heroes" was immediate. Both albums were signposts to the young musicians who would come to the fore in 1978 and 1979, after punk's fury had dissipated: among them were Gary Numan, whose super-alienated chart-topper, Are 'Friends' Electric, welded TVC 15 with Speed Of Life, and Joy Division, originally called Warsaw after the opening instrumental on side two of Low, who took that album's distinctive drum sound, mixed with a lot of Can, into their vision of rock and electronics.

The influence went even further. Berlin and bleak Mitteleurope became a pop trope in the late '70s, with the cold wave of The Human League, Ultravox's Vienna and Joy Division's haunted Komakino, written after a visit to the city. The Mobiles went kitsch with the melodramatic Drowning In Berlin, while Spandau Ballet, the breakthrough group of the new romantics (true children of Bowie all), took their name from the district to the west of the city.

Part of this was just pop faddishness, but Low and "Heroes" had, by the end of 1977, offered a way out of punk's stylistic cul-de-sac. Electronics had been a definite no-no for punks - "Moog synthe-si-zer" Joe Strummer had sneered on London Weekend Television in November 1976 - but they returned with a vengeance after Donna Summer's I Feel Love and Space's Magic Fly, with great 1978 singles by The Normal, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League, plus key albums by Suicide and Kraftwerk.

Punk had been the future, but that was quickly superseded by real-time, political events. In the polarising atmosphere of late 1977 and early 1978, it was all too easy to feel shot by both sides. As they had to David Bowie, electronics offered a way of side-stepping impossible demands, while their association with various physical and psychological states - movement late in the night through the city, withdrawal and isolation - were attractive to alienated youth.

In many ways, it was the return of psychedelia, only darker in keeping with the mood of the time. The counter-intuitive analogue synth sound was key: it was deep enough to create an environment and bleak enough to evoke estrangement, while at the same time enveloping the listener in a warm bath of ambience, that "sensurround sound" that would be explored further by The Human League (The Dignity Of Labour Parts 1-4), Joy Division (Atmosphere, The Eternal) and PiL (Radio 4).

Like his post-punk acolytes, Bowie too kept coming back to these albums in the later '70s and early '80s. In 1978, he played Warszawa and Sense Of Doubt on the long Isolar II tour, later collected on the Stage live album. Both also cropped up, together with V-2 Schneider and "Heroes"/Helden on the soundtrack of Christiane F., a stark but overlong depiction of teenage heroin addicts at the central Berlin station that became one of the most popular German films ever.

But apart from Crystal Japan, a Japanese B-side, Bowie retreated from pure electronica thereafter. By the time that he returned with Let's Dance in 1983, the spores he had helped to cast to the wind were beginning to bear fruit in the most unexpected way, as the late '70s white synthetic sound was taken up by black Americans, most notably in rap and techno tracks by Cybotron - 1981's Alleys Of Your Mind and 1984's Techno City - and Afrika Bambaataa And Soulsonic Force on 1983's Planet Rock.

While Bowie busied himself in the mainstream, dance culture proliferated into a myriad forms, assisted by the onset of digital and sampling technology. With such an eclectic, voracious and fast-moving culture, it was hardly surprising that it began to loop back to the analogue late '70s. Just as Low and "Heroes" reappeared on CD in 1991, with several extra tracks, the first products of ambient's second wave were being released: Aphex Twin's Didgeridoo and Biosphere's classic Microgravity.

Reconnecting with his electronic past gave Bowie a burst of energy that has taken him through the '90s and, in fact, the rest of his career to date. During 1992, the year that Philip Glass put out the Low Symphony, he reunited with Brian Eno - on "synthesizers, treatments, and strategies" - for the ambitious 1.Outside. Released in 1995, this was a return to the dystopian landscape of Diamond Dogs with added pre-millennial tension and extra technological weirdness.

The fourteen songs on 1.Outside stretch time and form. Random reappears in the cut-up lyrics, while the constant 4/4 of house phases in-and-out of funk and baggy beats, in the segues Bowie's voice is varispeeded through time and space: one minute he's a fourteen-year-old girl, another a forty-six-year-old "Tyrannical Futurist". The album's big hit, Hello Spaceboy, has hints of Rebel Rebel and Space Oddity. By this stage, in his late forties, Bowie could look back at his catalogue and his obsessions, and still move forward.

The motion was even more extreme on 1997's direct, uptempo and intense Earthling, in which Bowie mixed heavily sampled often squeezed into squalling riffs, as on the opener Little Wonder, with self-generated drum'n'bass rhythms that co-existed with rave patterns (Dead Man Walking). With hints of The Prodigy and Underworld, this was Bowie's most dance-friendly album, adding remixes by Moby, Danny Saber, Nine Inch Nails, and Junior Vasquez.

Both 1.Outside and Earthling made the UK Top 10, as did the more eclectic and uptempo Hours..., from 1999. Two years later, Bowie finally released All Saints as a single disc: dropping the Black Tie White Noise tracks and South Horizon from The Buddha Of Suburbia, and adding Crystal Japan and Brilliant Adventure from Hours.... The result is eminently playable, Bowie's purest, most elemental electronic album.

The extraordinary thing about 2001's All Saints is how well it all hangs together, with nine tracks from 1977 flowing easily in and out of the material from the 1990s, the most recent being the brief, but beautiful Brilliant Adventure. The Mysteries could have segued straight into the second side of "Heroes", and Moss Garden into The Buddha Of Suburbia. That continuity is not a result of standing still, but of being able to retain a love of sound, the wish to move forward.

The long loop of All Saints, from 1977 to 1993 and, finally, 2001, takes Bowie near the close of his musical career to date. In 2002 he released Heathen, an excellent record with tinges of sadness and mortality alongside a surprising cover of Neil Young's I've Been Waiting For You. The next year there was Reality and since then there has been nothing. In a strange way All Saints feels like a closing of the circle: a celebration of an extraordinary breakthrough that remained an inspiration and a talisman.

Just as the prophecies of The Man Who Fell To Earth have come to pass - that bank of TV screens, all showing different channels: if only someone could have told us how boring that would become - then the startling futurism of Low and "Heroes" has been borne out by the events of the last thirty-five years. A radical departure then, seemingly out of their time, they continue to exist in their own world, but they also remain signposts to a future that came to pass.

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