Fantasy

I started in on fantasy as a kid, kicking things off with the Lord of the Rings though I barely understood it, moving into David Gemmell whose `Druss the Legend` and `Jerusalem Man` are still my favorite fantasy characters. I gulped down Gemmell until I ran out, then moved onto David Eddings, Terry Pratchett, and the Dragonlance books. These days I don`t read much of it, though works by Neil Gaiman, snippets of China Mieville, and oddball fantasies like `House of Leaves` and `The Raw Shark Texts` still make it through.

I write weird fantasy, often mad, with not a single elf or dwarf to be seen.

Alegria’s Hair	Sky Painter

The first time Tarragon Ray saw the giant Alegria, he was a baby. He was lying in his father’s arms, staring goggle-eyed up at the clouds and the big blue sky. He could hear the comforting crack of his father’s whip, and the low braying of their humpback pony as it strained against its hauliers. He could feel the joggle of their Sheckler’s wagon over the ramshackle red dust road, and the gentle motion of his father around him.”She’s a big girl,” said his father, but Tarragon didn’t understand. He saw his father’s face leaning over him, smiling, and he smiled back. “They say, when she dances, the earth quakes for miles around.” Tarragon made googling noises. Then he saw Alegria. He saw her hand, batting and patting at the whuffs of cloud in the sky. He thought it was his father’s hand, but when he reached out to touch it, he couldn’t. So he watched it. He watched it balling up clouds, shaping them into elephants, stringing them across the sky. Image from here.	The Sky Painter lived on the mountain and painted the sky. He painted it blue for blue skies, and white and grey for clouds. At night he painted it black, with white for all the stars. When the sun rose he dashed its arcing yellow lines across the heavens, and as it sank he brushed it orange and gold over the horizon. He knew he had to paint the sky. If he didn’t paint the sky, who would? Nobody would. He knew that. So he stayed, and he painted the sky. He lived on the mountaintop alone. Sometimes it was cold, and all he had were his brushes and some rags left from his once bright raiment. He had been a king once, somewhere. He had a crown, now cast to the floor and grown through with grass and creeping ivy. Juniper bushes grew up around his feet and between his toes. He never moved. He only painted the sky. And he was lonely. Image from here.

Emhoola’s Gibbet	Mandragora’s Laws

Emhoola peddled magic. He sold it by the cartload, and everywhere he went it was bought with self-deceiving gusto. He sold it in cheap brass compasses that no longer worked, in the shriveled corpses of pack donkeys whose heads lolled flea-bitten against the sales-rack strappings of his wagon, in straw dolls and dried frogs and mosquito paste and all variety of herbs and medicinal fungi. He was a collector of all things collectible, and he purveyed these wares with a rag and bone man`s pitch few could resist.	It was a bright spring morning when Mandragora came upon the sweet little cottage with the two dead bodies hanging from its eaves. “What’s all this then?” he asked his skulls, rattling out behind him on their 100 leather tethers. “Looks like a violation,” they called, bobbing and jostling to see. “A clear violation. Bodies from the eaves, what else could that be?” Image from here.

Tanglewood	Flatland

On the southernmost fringe of the tanglewood forest beyond the kingdoms of men, in the midst of a purgatorial wasteland blighted with perpetual winter and savaged by endless storms, there stands an inn where the battle-lines between sanity and madness meet. Here, where soul-consuming demons walk freely as men, where nightmares parade their garish hues like common whores of the street, where only the boldest or the most benighted seek to tread, our story is enacted. Image from here.	At the center of Flatland there was a tall sky-scraper, thirty stories high. In the skyscraper were many offices, filled with workers who spent their days typing at their ledgers, recording the business of Flatland that they could see out of their windows. After their work was finished every day, they left the skyscraper and went to their homes. They lived in houses and farms spread around the town- the only town in Flatland. Flatland was not very big. Perhaps as big as six football fields.

Sagasu’s Life	The Mistman

Sagasu was watching the child in the corner. The corner was dark, and the child was dark. Its mouth was open, always.Sagasu was grinding butterfly’s wings. He was mixing them with chalk dust and melted ox fat. He used a pestle and mortar and he ground them so the smell of ivory burning filled the air, and he clicked his teeth and sometimes he spat into the paste. He shaved a hammer and dropped the fine iron filings into the mixtures. He poured them out into a dimpled tray of eight metal cups, each as big as an egg, and then he set them in the oven, and then he waited. Image from here.	There was a village in the mountains at the top of the world that was always shrouded in mist. Its name was Ballahee, and in it lived a small community of people, good people, who tended to their crops on the mountainsides, and looked after their sheep and their hardy goats, and helped each other through the cold and cruel winters. The villagers had many problems, such as the cold winters, and the wolves in the scrub-woods, but by far their biggest problem was the mist. Image from here.