Tesseract

Your visitor inhabits more than three dimensions. It exists in the room with you, but also in spaces you cannot perceive or reach. It arrived as if through some invisible door, expanding out of nowhere into your view. Occasionally parts or the whole will disappear back into that nowhere place and then re-emerge, sometimes in the same location as before, sometimes not.
Its form morphs and changes, suggesting glimpses of biological familiarity without ever quite looking whole. As if you are only ever seeing a three dimensional cross section of something your mind could never apprehend all at once. It has limbs, but it’s impossible to tell how many, or if that question even makes sense for this creature. At times you can see what looks like a head, but then the thing will shift without moving and there will be a different looking head in the same location. It is obviously trying to let you see as much of itself as possible.

From nowhere, it drops two hyperdice on the table between you. You were expecting this, you sigh. When at rest, the dice appear as small cubes with a different alien glyph on each face. What looks like a claw reaches out from the nonplace and manipulates a die. It twists the cube back and forth on the table. Moves it left and right, back and forward, lifts it up and puts it back down. Next the die and claw slide in and out of sight, shrinking into nothingness and expanding back into view.
The beast carefully rolls the die onto its different faces, flipping it ninety degrees each time and showing you all of the symbols. Then in a motion that is both eerily similar and totally incomprehensible, the die flips out and back into existence. It shrinks, and for a moment only the edge touching the table is visible, then expands out to full size again. But this time, every face has a different symbol than before. The beast continues to flip the hyperdie through all of its different cubes and display every face to you. After the eighth cube it finally flips back to the configuration you recognise as the first.

Satisfied that you understand, the hyperbeast begins the game. It rolls its die. The cube stutters in and out of view as it bounces across the table, spinning and tumbling in ways that cannot be possible. It comes to rest as a normal die would, except a bit smaller than it was before. You note the glyph on the top side and frown.
Your turn. The beast picks up the other die and places it deliberately in front of you.
You pick it up. It doesn’t feel unusual, just heavier than it looks. You look up toward the creature’s head. It approximates a nod. You throw. This time the die behaves normally, rolling and bouncing across the table without disappearing or changing faces.It stops, you both look, you sigh again.

The creature approches, it puts a claw around each of your shoulders and pulls you away. The room, your own body, and the universe turn inside out as you are dragged out of your native plane. You see alien landscapes morph hyperbolically through each other like some mind bending slide show as the beast carries you further and further from home. It gets harder to see as the sunlight shifts toward red, then past it. Soon it becomes hard to breathe. The light returns faintly as your captor comes to a stop. It puts you down gently and with your last gasp of consciousness you see another four hyperbeasts surround you. You collapse into a pile of bones, some are human, some are not.

Minstrel

A shock of curly red hair draws my attention
A welcoming face and kind eyes
But with a cheeky smile that hints at
Unpretentious wisdom and intelligence
One knee bent inwards with a foot on toe
Hands clasped playfully behind
She smiles and we pretend not to observe each other
All night she has played beautiful music
With skilled hands and inate talent
And I have listened, trying to hide my enchantment
She will never be mine
And I never hers
But in this moment we are one
In the silent assent of our love

Scarred and weary,

I fight for Love.
The love you might feel for that one special someone. What you feel for your family and friends. For the things in life you are passionate about. Even the love you have for your pets. But also the love of humanity.
Hate has always had an easy time recruiting soldiers and their tactics are simple but effective.
We never fight them on their terms because, well.. we’re lovers, not fighters. Besides, despite their beliefs, we love them too.
But we have our methods.
And we have our soldiers.
I have been born into a crucial time in this millennia long struggle. It’s my own bad luck that I drafted myself to the side that is currently losing.
Using the best weapons at my disposal, I still find it hard to fight against such defenses as hate currently has erected in the minds of the innocent. Perhaps I need to improve my marksmanship. I’m trying.
To show love to a stranger comes naturally to me, but this kind of behavior has become unacceptable. The propaganda of hate has made people mistrustful of those who show unbidden kindness.
It’s tiresome, but soldiers don’t volunteer because war is easy or enjoyable.
I’m anxious but hopeful about what I’m afraid is coming soon. A few times in our shared history, forces of hate have secured control over large areas. Their strategies necessitate a slow and protracted gaining of territory and resources over many years, small skirmishes where they push us back by degrees without drawing the attention of the innocents. But to seize control they need to take a risk. In their final move it always becomes obvious to everyone what they are doing and who is responsible. And it’s then that they are at their most vulnerable.
Pushed to our limits, hiding in what seems like the last trench we can fall back to, the lovers are tense. We feel the moment coming where we will need to strike. And if we miss our opportunity, all will be lost.
I’m no veteran. I would probably be more scared, but our strength comes from our unity. Our numbers are not to be underestimated nor our determination.
If you know a peaceful warrior and you believe in our cause but are unable to take up arms, I would ask only that you give us any supplies you can spare.
A kind word or deed, a smile, even an unexpected hug or kiss can bring even the most wounded and depleted fighter back to the front lines with steel eyed focus and commitment.
We have missed our chances too many times and lost too many parts of humanity to hate. We need to push them back, and soon. And we are going to need all the help we can get.

The Scream

For as long as she could remember, Enna had felt lonely. In a world where it seems nobody ever feels like they fit in, Enna felt like she was from another planet entirely. It was as if she saw things differently to everyone else. She would look at the same things, but think they were very different to what everybody said they were. She heard things too. Whispers, like voices hidden in the stirring of the wind. Enna learned not to talk to people about what she thought or the things she heard, it never ended well when she did. But she kept thinking and listening. After years of listening to the whispers, Enna thought she could almost understand what they were saying.  One day she walked to a public plaza, busy with hurried people. She took a deep breath and screamed louder than she had ever raised her voice before, three words which she thought meant: “I … LISTEN … HELP”. It seemed like nobody heard her. Even if she were yelling nonsense, surely she would have attracted some attention. Then Enna noticed a woman striding toward her through the crowd, glancing askance as if checking for danger. She slid fluidly between people who seemed oblivious to her purposeful action or even her existence. When she reached Enna she wordlessly grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled the girl several meters to the entry vestibule of a shop which was closed. “Hush, child!”, the lady hissed in the language of the wind, “There is a reason we whisper”. Wide eyed, all Enna could manage was to stutter “I’m sorry” in real words. The woman looked over her shoulder into the plaza then back into Enna’s eyes, and kissed her. When their lips met a white nova of pleasure erupted through every one of Enna’s senses. She opened her eyes. The lady was still there, but looked so much more beautiful than before. Her face was delicately angular; her skin free of any blemish or imperfection. Her eyes were dark orbs, not of blackness, but of nothingness, voids that let no light escape. Her clothes had changed too, she wore an elegant dress of black lace. And behind the woman Enna saw two wings rising out from behind her shoulders. Huge feathers, black like a raven’s. They rose a full meter above the woman’s head to where they folded down and back at a joint. She turned Enna toward the glass door of the shop. Enna saw in her own reflection that she too had the black wings, dark eyes and unfamiliar beauty. She could only stare. Amazed, confused, filled with joy and fear she stood for a moment regarding herself as the stranger looked out from their hiding place. She uttered a curse in the strange language and Enna turned. In the sky, wings spread as if diving from a great height, were two others. These two were different though. One male, one female, their wings were made of white dove feathers, their eyes were brilliant points of blinding light, like the surface of the sun. One was pointing down towards them and yelling something to the other. “We need to escape, follow me.” said the dark stranger, sounding panicked, then took three bounding steps into the plaza as she spread her wings and jumped into the sky.