Martha.net

1. Sometimes he went deaf slowly, sounds fading away into gradual nothingness. Other times it was a sharp snap of silence the severed his connection to the world.

2. Peace, like war, is never a solid state; it twists and bends as the politicians fight back and forth across the long wooden tables. But out here, on the edges of the kingdoms where it comes down to imaginary lines drawn in the dirt, they’ve stopped caring. Crops still need tending, animals need feeding, and children need to be kept out of their neighbors orchards.

3. The aliens had wanted to be accommodating, taking human forms and features in order to put the world at ease– but the ambassadors quickly convinced them to refrain.

4. “We come in peace.” Jack was doing his best impression of a benevolent dictator while the small group behind him kept watch for any sudden movements.

“And heavily armed.” The spokesperson for the village looked unimpressed

“Sometimes peace isn’t mutual.”

5. There’s nothing quite like dying together to cement a relationship.

1. So this is how the world ends, with a sort of hiccup and the sound of someone making tea.

2. Life is rarely about the large choices, but the truth is it doesn’t have to be– mountains can be moved with spoons as well as bulldozers.

3. Dragons were as old as the bedrock, put in place when the world was first formed from the mists. Performing tasks understood only by the First Men and continuing on their slow methodical paths around the world.

4. “Think about it like this, if we don’t go we won’t die.”
“Okay, I really don’t think that’s as inspiring as you want it to be.”

5. The tree arcs out from the cliff, branches littered with tiny lavender flowers and wide waxy green leaves shaped like hands folded in prayer.

1. The city ends in a stumbling rush into the sea, as if the builders had been laying mortar as it fell. The rubble only adds to the illusion and she carefully picks her way among the artistically off-kilter houses, still half-expecting them to fall.

2. ‘Speak now or forever hold your peace’, is much more compelling when when someone is holding a gun to your head.

3. She’s never woken up before the sun before. A lifetime of sleeping in has left her unjaded to the stark beauty of the sunrise and she takes a moment to watch while Stephen packs the tents.

4. They refused to speak of it later, not because the words weren’t sincere, but because ‘normal’ life had no room for relationships built on terror.

5. Drip. Drip. Drip. Tiny, shiny drops of blood. Dance along the knife blade, quick-quick crimson shower. Dru watched the hypnotic roll of the droplets as they flowed along the steel, humming a cheerful and woefully inappropriate tune as Michael worked.

“Luv, have you ever even seen the Smurfs?” He asked.

1. They are Givers of the Last Gift, ghosts walking the battlefields robed in vibrant yellow. Yellow for the sun, and the warmth, and the flowers that spring from their footsteps. As many a man that prays this day for the white of the healers, prays for the touch of the yellow.

2. School changes you, forces you to adapt to the fact that Darwin’s Law is alive and well in suburbia.

3. Werewolves are myths and have always been myths, but people love to cling to what they know and our killer seemed determined to keep them happy.

4. The thing she missed the most from Earth was eggs. There were no birds here, no reptiles, not even a platypus to keep things interesting. Breakfast just didn’t seem the same, even if Eric had managed to find the local version of pancakes and bacon.

5. Space was vast. Really really vast. She squinted at the map, zoomed in, zoomed out, and sat back in the chair with a sigh.

“We’re lost?” Scot gave her a worried frown from under the console where he was still trying to rewire the aft landing controls.

“Nope, but it’ll take us a month to get in range to signal for help.”

There was a pause. “I think I’d prefer we were lost.”

1. She took her grandfather’s sword and went out in the world to seek her fortune. Two years later she came back home with a tinker’s wagon, a talking donkey for a husband and a burning desire to never ever seek fortunes again… So fortunes took to seeking her instead.

2. Silences are long and short, heavy and pregnant, empty and still. They creep into the places between words, between breaths, and multiply until you can’t breathe for drowning in them. Which is why I never stop talking, it’s the only way to stay safe…

3. “This is the part where things get messy,” he gave her a pointed look and she frowned, confused.
“What? Oh yeah, got it, that’s my bit.” Her grin was back, only this time it had way too many teeth.

4. No one knew why they called it the Singing Rocks– true, the wind did make noises as it wound through the honeycombs, but the screams and wails could hardly be called singing.

5. No one could out-Evil the Magnificent Missy McCormack on her best day and this was certainly not her best day.

1. The sun breaks through the clouds in fits and stutters. It’s not enough to dry their wings and lift them from the mud, but it’s too much light to keep pretending what their slogging through is merely dirt and rain.

2. The first betrayal hurts the most, but after that you settle in and learn to play the game.

3. It’s always night in Yndora.

4. “Death first!” Coupled with his trademark dramatic pose, the Hero’s battle-cry never failed to inspire terror in Evildoers everywhere.

Only this time his opponent frowned instead of fled.

“Actually, wouldn’t that be death last?” The Evil Overload pointed out. “Strictly speaking, you aren’t bound to do much else after that.” He was polite, if still irredeemably Evil.

“Well fine,” the Hero paused for a moment. “Death before dishonor then?”

“Fair enough.”

And they got back to fighting.

5. Blue was the color of oceans and skies, endless empty spaces devoid of life-that-spoke– spaces where Vemordin would never find them.

1. Dogs are good at keeping track of times of the day, but not so much with days of the week– which is where the problem started…

2. Hatching Day was actually more of a hatching week, with clutches starting to crack shell on the third new moon of the year and running well into the waning moon.

3. There were no WalMarts in space, but there Company ships that traced flattened parabolas across the sky. Restocking rockets met them along the way, pushed faster than flesh could bear and oblivious to anything in their path.

4. Wishes were heard and answered by the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee, with special attention given to fish related appeals.

5. Insanity was infectious, spreading from Hive to Hive in a fractal pattern of death.

1. Practical Applications of Impractical Daydreams : Room 407A, Seating is Limited so all Time Travelers must apply at least two weeks after the class has been given.

2. They never think to check the in-betweens –places neither wholly this side nor the other– because the tiny pockets aren’t big enough for even the smallest of Kingdoms to take hold.

3. Never look behind you– never look and you never have to see.

4. “The world ended yesterday.”

Steven looked up at the man across from him on the bus trying to figure out what had prompted the conversation.

“See?” The man flipped the newspaper around so Steven could make out the headlines. “Didn’t even notice it myself.”

Steven shrugged, “Probably just a prank. Head Office would have told us, I’m sure.”

“Suppose we’ll find out when we try and get in.”

5. My father’s eyes were brown and mine were green– wasn’t too hard to figure out why mother had been sent home after I was hatched.

1. Snip-snap went the bones, Nip-nash went the teeth, and bit by bit the Devouring Soul was eaten away by Misty Von Vine and her Amazing Technicolor Mice.

2. Magic and Alchemy are both unforgiving arts, combining the two almost guaranteed failure– something Professor Albion should have known.

3. The truth is, the internet does forget.

4. Where the tower had stood only a vast pool of molten rock remained. Slowly expanding over the centuries as the heat from the volcano channeled through Nibs enchanted hearthstone.

5. If anyone else had seen the unicorn, they weren’t admitting it. Patrick wasn’t about to go blurting it out either– preteen humans were vicious when they sensed weakness.

1. Turns out Reality has a shelf-life.

2. Money changes everything. It shouldn’t, but it does, and now he’s trapped behind the family legacy he thought he’d escaped.

3. Every spell drains his life away, replacing his memories with those of his split-soul.

4. When a djinn asks you to dance, the right answer is never ‘no.’

5. Empathic magic cared what you felt, Literal magic cared what you said.

1. At first Glenn thought they’d reached the river, but as they drew closer the glints and ripples turned into a seething mass of snakes.

2. Immortal minds can’t fit into mortal shells. Even though they cut themselves down, paring away their memories to fit the glass slipper of humanity, the cracks are already there.

3. The moon is never full the nights my Mother’s demon haunts me.

4. She’d never thought of it as hoarding, after all wasn’t she taking good care of them? Protecting them from suffering? So maybe she might have kept one or two more princesses around than necessity demanded… but she was a dragon, it was tradition!

5. In the real world there is no ‘Fool Me Twice’…

1. “There are some fights in life that can’t be won, kid; he didn’t bring a gun to a knife fight, he brought a 50 cal. Just let it go.”

2. The sun rose over the eastern mountain range, a pale glimmer behind the curtain of clouds. Rain was a horrible omen for royal births, but the dragons were tired of waiting.

3. “It was only a dollar a stem last week!” She snapped, waving the bunch of limp herbs at the shopkeep. “What the hell?”

“It’s almost Valentine’s Day, what’d you expect?” He nodded at the throng of would-be potion makers who had flooded the market in search of ingredients to catch the perfect spouse… and to make antidotes, just in case.

4. He wants to rule the world, abet through corporate monopolies and company towns rather than dictatorships, but it amounts to the same thing.

5. It’s easier to collect them than she had anticipated; they watch their children closely, but their teenagers…

1. It’s stormy without being dark, one of those spastic showers with bright beams of sunshine dancing between the raindrops.

2. They really aren’t shy about the fact they think the easiest way to save the world is to kill everyone that falls under their definition of Evil.

3. When she’d said the right music could make you fly, he hadn’t thought she meant it literally.

4. If the house had meant anything to him, he didn’t show it. She looked up, out over the charred mess of the town and tried not to think about how many of them had managed to make it out alive.

5. The dogs, being dogs, were much more interested in rolling in the wonderful stink coming off the dead critter than they were trying to figure out what had happened.

1. Belle was never sure if grape popsicles tasted like magic or if magic tasted like grape popsicles.

2. There was something just downright depressing about having to take out the trash the morning after saving the world. But tide and garbage trucks wait for no man and summoning circles tend to stink if you don’t clean them up asap.

3. “This is where you make up some stupid excuse to leave early and stop returning my calls.” Tod leaned back in the chair with a sigh.

4. The problem with vampire fights is that watching one is akin to following a summer blockbuster with crappy camera work — it’s all movement, too fast and too flashy to follow.

5. “Has it occurred to anyone that this is really bad idea?”

1. The clouds seal off the sky, a grim undulating wall of gray that thwarts her attempts to chart their course. By the fifth day she can only answer ‘at sea’ when the prince asks where they are.

2. Superstition holds that cats walk closest to the spirit world, but even here, where the barriers are thinnest, superstition is all that they can claim. Mice, on the other hand…

3. It’s easier not to try– and the days turn to weeks turn to months and it isn’t until some well-meaning coworker murmurs condolences that he realizes a year has passed.

4. They’d tried creating magical companion animals once, as a way of expanding their mana pools. Melding human and animal into a coherent whole… Their students’ students still whisper tales of the disastrous results centuries later.

5. The downside to waking from cryogenic slumber into a futuristic world is that no one knows how anything works. Kate glared unhappily at her current handler who was honestly confused as to why her charge kept asking such strange questions. If a hovercar worked, why did it matter how?

1. Nothing says ‘I love you’ quite like destroying a national monument, but on the whole she was beginning to regret dating someone who’s superpowers focused on expansion instead of compression… diamonds might be cheesy, but at least they were portable.

2. Old age wasn’t anything to look forward to– at least before scientists perfected Artificial Reincarnation(tm).

3. Being alone isn’t the same thing as being lonely, but over the centuries he’s gotten tired of explaining the difference. So now when mortals look at him with condescending pity when he tells them who and what he is, he just pretends to suffer and everyone’s happy.

4. They’ll build the new world on the ashes of the old– more literally than was pleasant, but they had to make concrete from something…

5. If anyone asks, they’ll just say they found it when they were looking for the ruins. The locals aren’t as familiar with the old technology and chances are good none of them can tell alien tech from human tech anymore…

1. “We’ll go on grand adventures!” the shimmering Plot Bunny promised. “We’ll save the world and bring a thousand years of peace! We’ll kill the evil dragons and rescue princesses! We’ll solve ancient riddles and find buried treasure! It will be such fun!”

The Writer was not impressed.

2. The worst part about being told that you’re the only one who can complete a task that will most likely kill you, is realizing that the person telling you this is a) still an insufferable jackass and b) right.

3. Cooking stew has a certain calm to it, which might be why it was served eight times out of ten when the army was on the march. The scent of the cookfires permeated the camps all day, and it never tasted the same twice since they cooks relied on the hunting and gathering parties for supplies.

4. She could never tell if anyone really believed he was coming back, or if they had simply fallen into the habit of of belief– expecting without questioning that one day they’d open the door as they did every day at noon and this time he’d be on the other side, waiting to come home.

5. This would normally be where the story ends, if this were a story; the world has been saved, the prince has found his bride, and there’s nothing left to do. Only this isn’t a story and the loose ends that are left belong to people that aren’t the prince, or the dragon, or the little goose girl.

1. The news had said pieces of the wreck were scattered on impact, but she hadn’t really grasped the fact that she’d be finding parts of the plane in her fields for years afterwords.

2. One of the more disturbing things about being told the aliens you’d found were roughly as intelligent as pigs, was discovering just how intelligent pigs were…

3. Wishes were supposed to be used for important things– like money or love or happiness or even revenge. You weren’t supposed to use them on stupid things like male pattern baldness or heartburn or the fact that you kept forgetting if you’d left the oven on or not.

4. It was odd what you missed, in a galaxy far far away. He stood in a forest of things that weren’t quite trees in a season that wasn’t quite fall, and tried to remember the smell of the pines.

5. The time to start worrying is when the little voice in your head switches from ‘somebody do something!’ to ‘if I hit him hard enough, he might drop the gun’…

1. The river was wide, but not deep, which meant the caravan could cross easily– at least for values of ‘easily’ that included spending half the day reconfiguring the wagons to barges and back again.

2. The vines had woven themselves throughout the fence and hissed in annoyance as she unwound them from their conquered territory.

3. Patience wasn’t something she had much of, it had been a long year and too many things had gone wrong to suffer fools quietly– Even if she knew the only reason for the mistakes was the same bone-dead weariness they all suffered.

4. Thunderstorms clustered around the mountain where they hid, gnawing at the rocks with acid rains and electrical fury.

5. Loose lips did more than just sink ships, so when a leak was made more than just the speaker paid the price. Secrets are only secret if you keep them with the dead…

1. It always rained in the morning, soft and slow as if the ever-present clouds were shaking off the night.

2. There were no such things as Evil Wizards, not anymore. Susan had found that there were very few limits on what a god could do, even one who’d won her godhood by deeds instead of birth.

3. The air was thick with smoke, coating every breath with the taste of charred pine and scorched moss. The forest might be too wet to burn, but the invading army was still giving it the old college try.

4. Heather was the kind of dog that children dream of having; a fierce protector to ward off nightmares, a ruthless champion to mete out their revenge, someone to love them no matter what they asked of her… but Heather wasn’t real.

5. The soup was little more than flavored water, but there were few ways to make two rabbits feed eight people and damned if he was going to let any of them go hungry tonight.

1. He would save the world or die trying– even if the world was already lost.

2. Of all the things I could remember from that day, it’s the scent of crushed grass that burns brightest in my memories.

3. Some days are meant for bowls of warm soup, nestling in a cocoon of blankets, and pouring what’s left of your flu-strangled brain into a good book.

4. Lie to everyone but yourself, it’s those lies that make everything else real…

5. Sleep is the heartbeats between nightmares.

1. Fate is just as often kind as unkind, but tragic endings make for better press.

2. A writer’s job is never done– which is why, at some point, the editor has to duct tape them to the chair and take away the pen.

3. It would be lying to say a hush fell over the forest because the sharp sudden silence is anything but ‘hush’.

4. Fast Food drive-through is a lot like Russian roulette, most of the time you’ve got a pretty good chance of getting what you ordered more or less in the condition you anticipated, but every so often you end up with a bag with two fish sandwiches, some neon green carbonated soda, and no fries.

5. I’m a wave upon the ocean/I’m a cloud upon the sky/A tree lost in the forest/though my memories are lies…

1. Griffins were unpredictable creatures, more bird than cat in their reactions. Which meant the best you could hope for was that they decided you were just another bird, and treated you as such. You haven’t lived until you’ve been preened affectionately by something the size of a horse.

2. When you know you’re going to die, how long do you keep trying to live?

3. There is something to be said for doing nothing; long lazy summer days where you sit back, relax, and soak in the fact that yes, you are allowed to just be.

4. “Lights! Action! Camera!” He waved his arms dramatically at the life-sized T-Rex, while she rolled her eyes and smiled in embarrassment at the bemused tourists that parted around them like migrating caribou.

5. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results might be crazy, but seriously, how else do you learn a skill?

1. When you spent most of your time bouncing between dimensions, it helps to be self-employed; portals to other realities in the midst of traditional workplaces tend to produce more police reports than paychecks.

2. There are some things that can’t be undone, not with all the time and money in the world. As she looked over the shattered pieces, she realized this might be one of them.

3. In school tests started with a class bell and ended with a ‘pencils down’, outside of school things weren’t so well defined…

4. “I swear, if you start one more sentence with ‘but we’re never going to use this in real life’ I’ll–”
“But we aren’t!” the student whined, “That’s what the computers are for!”
“And if the computers break?”
“Then the computer guy will fix them!”
“And if there’s no computer guy there?”
“Then, seriously, this class is the LAST thing I’m going to be thinking of!”

5. “Are you ready for this?” He held her banner at the ready, but she could see the worry in his eyes. For the first time since she known him, the concern seemed genuine. She’d saved the world, and now it was time to pay the price.

1. She had made them, so she unmade them. Peeling skin from flesh, flesh from bone, she stripped them down to nothingness in a heartbeat.

2. Mankind was sort of like army ants, throwing themselves en mass against obstacles until they overcame them. So it really should have come as no surprise when the rest of the galaxy panicked and started throwing up as many obstacles as they could, in the hopes we’d finally run out of bodies to throw.

3. Stubborn doesn’t begin to describe Benjamin.

4. “I wish for a thousand wishes!”
“Okay.”
“Wait, that actually works?”
“Why not? I’m immortal, I’ve got time.” The genie gave her a long look. “But no wishing for immortality yourself or the deal’s off.”

5. …and then there were penguins!

1. In space, things very rarely settle for going ‘a little bit’ wrong.

2. The trip was plagued with constant rain, from drizzles to downpours and back without a smidge of blue sky in-between.

3. Life might be greener on the other side of the fence, but Chuck had learned a thing or two about being green from Kermit.

4. In most parts of the country the going price for a goat was easily two pigs and a rabbit, but Little Darlington was actually the goat producing capital of the lower fourteen kingdoms and Dorrin was going to be lucky if he could get more than three guinea pigs and a bag of turnips.

5. On the whole, death rays really weren’t that convenient. It’s sort of hard to gloat meaningfully as your master plan comes to fruition when you don’t have an audience.

1. It’s odd how life is rarely about those big important choices, but hinges on the small stupid choices you didn’t even realize were choices until it was too late.

2. History 131 was much more interesting when your teacher was an Immortal.

3. Watch enough movies and you think fantasy worlds are full of horse-equivalents and pseudo-dragons, when in fact the most common recognizable critters are rats.

4. “Think of it as practice for saving the world!”

5. Sometimes I think life is defined by the distance between what you want and what you need.