Martha.net

1. They sound like songbirds, chirping and chortling as they stalk, and while the prey is distracted the pack strikes.

2. “Better sorry than safe,” he grinned. “Everyone should have regrets, no? So come, let us make you some memories.” Continue reading →

1. Another lifetime crumbled to dust beneath her fingertips as she forced years into the amulet until it burst.

2. In the olden days you could buy and sell a soul for silver, but the world waits for no demon and now I deal in iPads and prepaid calling cards. Continue reading →

1. There were no streams here, nor rivers or lakes or even ponds. The water they needed to survive was stored in the vegetation and he was still getting used to grabbing a cucumber when he wanted a drink.

2. Fish made poor mounts, since they never need to come up for air, but sperm whales were hardly an improvement. Continue reading →

1. ‘You should have known better’ is possibly the least helpful thing anyone can say. Ever. So I clamped my mouth shut and helped him load the fish into the truck.

2. Your brain likes patterns, that’s what it’s designed to do, only it sees patterns that aren’t there. It’ll try to help, try to filter out everything you’re seeing now into what it knows is ‘right.’ So never trust what you see, or what you hear unless someone else confirms it. Your partner’s not your babysitter, he’s your sanity. Now suit up– it’s time to earn our dinner. Continue reading →

(In honor of the The Great Blog Noblegarden Egg Hunt, this week’s prompts all revolve around eggs!)

1. She never meant to end up with geese, they were messy and loud and very good at keeping intruders (and friends!) at bay—but you don’t say no to golden eggs. Or silver ones, although the ducks were much more pleasant company.

2. Dyeing eggs was fun, dyeing siblings was even better and no amount of scoldings would ever erase the joyous memories of the look on Auntie’s face when she saw the lot of them. Continue reading →

1. There are different words for food that fills the belly and food that nourishes, but it takes the translators almost a week to understand their charges are slowly starving.

2. A small corps of trees rise out of the mound, dark brindled bark and rose colored leaves that look completely out of place upon the plains. It’s what happens when a dragon dies, she tells him, voice soft and tempered with respect.

3. Space is very forgiving to new pilots, there’s lots of nothing to run into and plenty of room to trip over your own thrusters. Still, they make sure to take the trainees at least three hours at warp from any planet or normal chartered path before they turn them loose.

4. There’s nothing on the wind to hint at the presence of a herd, so when the stampede crests the hill the hunting pack disintegrates into chaos.

5. “You didn’t ask if he was happy.” His aunt’s voice was sharp and clipped and made him feel decades younger than he was. He wondered when, or if, he’d ever grow out of that reaction.

1. There’s nothing quite so sublime as the taste of spring in the south field orchards. As soon as the fist-sized flowers unfurl the whole valley is steeped in scents so heavy you can’t taste your lunch. Which is good if you like spice pies and not so good if you don’t.

2. The fish leapt up and over the boat in a shimmery mass of silver scales. For a moment the school even blocked out the sun, desperate in their bid to escape the nets.

3. Building a keyboard interface that took thoughts and turned them into text seemed like a good idea… up until they hooked one up. An hour into testing they realized no one could get more than a few words out before what they were thinking and what they meant to write started wildly diverging.

4. Flight was easy, it was living underwater that pushed the anti-gravity fields to their limits.

5. The academy expects nothing less than perfection and the students are carefully selected to match that obsessive drive towards an unobtainable goal.

1. “You are a very odd sort of evil. Effective, but odd.”

2. The caves were hidden under the fury of the perpetual storm, a massive twist of winds that had eaten the valley down to the bedrock and kept the Convert vehicles at bay.

3. There are worse things to be than a wereparrot. Full moons meant there was a chance she’d chew on the curtains and cuss at the cat– thankfully a rampaging African Grey was more likely to annoy than terrify.

4. Imagination is a mercurial thing, prone to as many nightmares as daydreams– For every MacGyver she pulled off to save their lives, she could think of a hundred other ways things could go wrong. There’s a fine line between thinking outside the box and being paralyzed by agoraphobia.

5. In the low gravity air was easier to swim through than water, but Jill was still getting used to watching the fish float by.

1. There was one man still alive within the city’s crumbling ruins and he’d only come back to help her die.

2. The dragon was little more than an immense serpent, coiled round the castle walls in ropes of shimmering crimson and gold. Melody was rather put out at the lack of wings and claws, but if she was going to be a dragon slayer she supposed she shouldn’t confine herself to a single phenotype.

3. It only took the survivors a week to realize that birdsong was better at forecasting the weather than their battered instruments.

4. They were a race that had been bred for war; self-selected winnowing that carved out whatever softness that remained. And when they reached the stars in search of divine conflict… they found no opponents worthy of a fight. So they went home again, confused, and tried to find a way to rig a fairer fight.

5. In the end the first spaceships were more flora than fauna, wide-leafed pods that caught the interstellar light and floated along it’s winds.

1. “But I don’t want to find a fairy godmother!” Stella complained as they handed her a traveling knapsack and a week’s worth of rations. “I just want to marry the Prince!”

2. It wasn’t until Sam bled out across the floor, but didn’t die that we realized the city was serious when she said she’d never let us go.

3. Hamlets love travelers because they bring the mail and uncommon skills. Villages love them because they bring rare goods and better gossip. Towns won’t even open the gates unless they have papers and Berri has never seen a city up close.

4. Oddly laughter was not a universal language and it pushed the translators’ limits to explain that Steven was just amused, not dying.

5. Normal horizons are made by the curve of the Earth and the haze from the atmosphere. But here there was no air to get in the way and the curve was so slight they could see as far as magnification would allow.

1. Space is mostly dark and mostly empty and once you left the solar system looking out the windows was as much fun as watching paint dry. Black paint. With glitter.

2. Developing super powers didn’t automatically lead to becoming a superhero (or a supervillain) and Jen wasn’t interested in wearing tights. Instead she picked up a Nursing degree and worked with patients too sick to use a normal X-ray machine…

3. There are some words that fall between the languages, so specific to the societies that birthed them that no translation is ever needed. Which is why Mary didn’t know when to duck.

4. “You have to storyboard your life,” said Denny waving half a sandwich at her notebook. “Lay it out, plots points, thematic bridges, gimme what’s going to be, not what is. There’s no use in fixing past plot holes, look forward or you’ll just fall into the next one.”

5. There are people who think their souls were born into the wrong body, that who they are in their head doesn’t fit who they are on the outside. I have the same sort of problem, only I know I wasn’t supposed to be here—because someone else already is.

1. Poetry is prose with all the wrong words taken out.

2. Death was no worse than the doctor’s office, just a boring wait with dreadful hold music until the Eversoul called your number and spat you back out into the world. But reincarnation wasn’t cheap and Mike was looking at two years in debtors prison until he could try again.

3. “There will always be someone worse off in life than you,” Patricia cut her off, “but that’s not the point. It’s not that your life isn’t bad because someone else’s is worse, it’s that it’s not that bad because you are being a drama queen and blowing this out of proportion.”

4. If anyone thought it was a dumb plan, they weren’t saying it and she squashed down the little voice that insisted they were just hoping she would die.

5. They found more cats (or cat-equivalents) on the worlds they visited than they did dogs. The universe was kind to small solo hunters that relied on wit and speed, which should have prepared them for the fact most other sentients lived in small family groups instead massive nations—but they were humans expecting to find humans, not sentients and it took them a while to recognize the difference.

1. “Hark! What light through yonder window breaks?”

“Tossing a lamp through a window is not Shakespeare”

“Artistic License!”

“No, that’s more like Artistic Misdemeanor.”

2. The quad was quieter than she expected. Even with the oppressive herd of students gone for the summer, the teachers kept their same quiet rounds like clockwork soldiers.

3. There is plenty of room in space for people who aren’t good at math. Cooking meals, running the on-ship banking, providing religious services—the non-engineering staff outnumbered the hard science degrees three to one, but those weren’t the jobs the Navy advertized.

4. Dragons were grumpy hostile creatures, which was to be expected of any critter harboring a permanent case of heartburn.

5. Upon sober reflection, it really wasn’t that funny. Most things done at 3am whilst insanely drunk with your school chums rarely hold up to scrutiny afterwords, but this (they all agreed) was a new level of stupid.

1. “Most of the time when people say can’t, they mean won’t.” She gave him a measured glare.

2. The giant hare rousted itself from its nest with a chuckling grunt, stretching like a cat and showing off incisors the length of Yuem’s forearm. Wiam had met hares before, but never so close and never without his brother’s protection.

3. There’s a difference between frugal and being poor, but she learned quickly not to try correcting assumptions.

4. Ships talk because humans need them to, between the stars lies a vast silence and we’ve never done well with being alone.

5. “No one wants to die, that’s not the point,” she snapped, “it’s that they don’t want you to die. Do you understand? They’re all down there waiting to see what you do so they can react, like ants building living walls to protect the queen—- so stop telling me this isn’t about you. ”

1. Behind the trembling twig-like fingers hid a face unlike any she’d seen before.

2. Normally shelter came first, then fire, then food—but they’d settled for two out of three for one too many days and even the strongest of them was starting to fade. She’d get in trouble for using her magic, but meat was more important than acceptance.

3. The unfamiliar desert air is dry and cold, and after a lengthy debate the siege force of giant salamanders is split off from the army and sent south to find another entryway.

4. ‘Not far’ is an arbitrary thing, some folks mean minutes and others mean days, and she’s learned not to depend upon anything that doesn’t come with GPS coordinates.

5. “There’s nothing extraordinary about them, save their color.” He said dismissively. “We’re breeding for fleet minds, strong bodies—- not good luck charms. These are war dogs not house pets, try and remember that next time.”

1. Dehydration is a horrible way to die, but teetering on the edge of dying of thirst is a worse way to live.

2. There are no horizons here, at least not the kind he’s used to. No trees, no mountains, not even the hint of a building to mar the uninterrupted line between the grass and the sky.

It’s decidedly unnerving.

3. Time runs faster here than it does at home, but there’s an art to looking busy and it’s one of the first things my fellow recruits pass on. A nasty head cold is the second.

4. “And another thing–”

“No,” he cut her off sharply. “There will be no more ‘things’. I’m sick and tired of you thinking you have right to criticize my life. You aren’t my mother, hell you aren’t even a tenth of the woman my mother was, so just shut up.”

5. Banishing ducks wasn’t really part of her repertoire; when people summoned her it was normally for demons not waterfowl.

1. Spaceships were giant sterile things, even crammed to the gills with refugees—hard vacuum solves a host of ills and even bedbugs need to breathe.

2. He was a man by night and a cat by day, when all common sense pointed to the curse having the opposite effect.

3. During the long summer afternoons the flowers extended petals as long as a man’s hand, soaking in the sunlight like rain. They curled in upon themselves at dusk and in the coldest deep of the night they glowed, feeding on the hoarded warmth.

4. We look back on our youth as the golden years, but all the younger generations can see is all the things we didn’t have. Happiness didn’t always run on batteries…

5. Tiny mice, no larger than her thumb, poured across the decks in a wave with the cursing cat only a few whiskers behind.

1. Morning comes much too quickly for comfort, the skies tumbling from deep purple to a clear bright blue as the twin-suns burn the cloud cover away.

2. Just because they knew the risk doesn’t make failure any easier to bear and We’re sorry for your loss echoes hollowly along the empty corridors behind her. They’ll be sorry the next time too, and the next, for as many empty condolences as it takes until she reaches their goal.

3. The hard part about telling stories is figuring out where they begin and end, because there are always ‘and then what’s and ‘but before that’s to wrestle with.

4. “Stop!” He shouted— and then ran smack into his target as the thief complied.

They went down in a tangle of legs and fancy necklaces and came up again with a fair bit of cursing, loose pearls, and undignified scrambles for weaponry.

5. Bert is the best kind of alien: humanoid, non-threatening, with a sunny personality and an endless curiosity about his hosts. For the first week everyone fights over the chance to show him around, but after that the novelty wears off– there’s only so many way to answer ‘but why is that funny/sad/insulting/relevant?’ before they start defaulting to ‘just Google it.’

1. Dancing has always been the best way to raise the dead, but most cemeteries frown on raves.

2. ‘Because’ was never an honest answer, but Virginia quickly found that most people resented anyone pointing out their oversights. Thankfully those few that didn’t mind were often more than happy to continue the conversation, even if they gave her odd looks when they thought she wasn’t looking.

3. Most habitable planets have more ants than elephants, newly terraformed life seems to thrive best in the smaller scales.

4. Their world has narrowed to what lies within the massive crater. The walls are slick black rock that resists any efforts they make to scale it; a massive midnight wall that tops every horizon and looms, omnipresent over the crash survivors.

5. She’s amazed to find there’s ice to be had in the summer desert, even at the merchants’ exorbitant costs. It’s harvested from long metal water beds left out in the heart of the bitter winters and stored in caves carved deep into the bedrock.

1. Fake gold nuggets aren’t as easy to make as she thought and her first few attempts attract too much attention. She learns from those mistakes and recalibrates the fabricator to produce less valuable, but less alarming currency.

2. Night falls abruptly as they take the first few steps down the path into the valley. The edge of the cliffs slice across the sunset in a sharp black line pitching the lead riders into darkness.

3. ‘Easy come, easy go’ has a way of turning into just ‘easy go’ and it doesn’t take long until they’re broke, but happy.

4. Animals were always nicer than humans, at least to Terry, and he found himself daydreaming of otters stopping in to buy overcoats… But when the store’s door-chime rang, he got Mrs. Wilson and her triplets instead.

5. Cats are no more mystical than dogs, they’ve just got better press.

1. “‘Never bind a demon you can’t kill alone’,” his missing eye burnt red against in the darkness as he recited the Second Rule, “you forget such simple things, my master.”

2. The temperature swings are nearly unbearable, the heat during the day traps them in hastily built dens and the cold at night cuts to the bone. If they can’t find the tunnel entrance tomorrow there’s a chance none of them will make it back.

3. Sky People can’t help but fly, the drive to touch the clouds sings in their blood. By glider and balloon, by plane and by bird, they fling themselves towards the stars every chance they get—if some of them fall, it’s a small price to pay to claim their heritage.

4. Four people leave the forest, pacing out the cardinal directions: North to the lands of ice and winter; East to the coasts of the rising sun and deep salt seas; West to the rolling hills that no man has returned from crossing; and South to the swamps that nibble away at the land, each year consuming five handspans of good solid earth.

5. The city sings them to sleep with the sounds of a life they’d both forgotten in the mists.

1. He couldn’t blame them for thinking the cliffs were the end of the world, those brave enough to look over the edge saw only smooth glassy rock and clouds.

2. The worst part was it looked like a normal tree. Sitting alone on the grassland’s horizon there was nothing to measure it against and it looked to be no more than an hour away. It was only after a week on the trail, when it hadn’t changed at all, that his mind started to grasp its immensity.

3. Getting fired was oddly anticlimactic; he packed his things into the proffered box with a detached confusion. He’d been here seven years, almost a year’s worth of Monday’s spent dreading the return of the workweek. And now he wouldn’t be here ever again. He paused when the desk was clear, taking in the idea that he was finally free.

4. After the third week, she stopped worrying about where they were. Specific location was a foreign concept to their local guides, who led the way by the strength of the current and the warmth of the waves. They were ‘in the middling sea’ and not ‘in the southern current’, anything more was unnecessary.

5. “Don’t leave me,” she grabbed his hand, searching for any scrap of hesitation, “please.”

1. Yin is all that stands between them and the light and already his form is fading at the edges. “RUN!”

2. Winter on the sands is bitterly cold and the air’s too dry for clouds, much less snow. Still, if he squints with the sun at just the right angle, the dunes almost look like home.

3. “Stop following me!” She turned, walking backwards to glare at him.

“I’m not, I’m following the road.” He pointedly kept his gaze on the horizon.

4. Hundreds of lifetimes have been spent tweaking and retweaking the timelines until everything comes into position in one blinding flash– and the ability to invent time travel is meticulously wiped out of existence.

5. The tea is bitter, over-steeped, and slightly singed, but Carl accepts it gracefully and Mimi beams.

1. Once Upon a Time goes forwards as well as back, some fairy tales just haven’t happened yet…

2. The South’s only trees are tiny stunted things carefully tended by royalty and nurtured through the sicknesses that strangles less pampered groves. They’ve build their cities of brick and bones– nothing here is made of wood, save the emperor’s throne.

When the first explorers from the North emerge from the deserts are quickly slaughtered for their wagons.

3. The sky’s slides into infinity as you look up and out. Light years to light centuries to light millennium, and still the stars roll on.

4. Cats made poor conversationalists because they were only ever concerned with themselves. They were the center of their universe, even when other cats were involved, and they trended more towards Twitter than Blogging.

5. No one is sure when ‘What If’ was replaced with ‘How Soon’, but willing suspension of disbelief gradually gave way to an everyday expectation of the impossible. Spaceships and laser guns, communicators and translators, bit by bit reality consumed science fiction until the new advances were no longer new, just slightly delayed confirmations of the truth.

1. He hasn’t gotten used to the loss of his wings, so many habits are still ingrained beyond conscious thought, but pain’s a swift teacher and he’s learning not to jump.

2. They’ve dressed for the weather, but the storm is still unnerving. Rain comes down as fine mist, blown into kaleidoscopic eddies by the winds and casting rainbows everywhere they look.

3. “If I wanted your opinion, I would have given it to you,” she snapped.

“I’m a learning AI,” the computer objected, “you can’t help but give them to me.” It paused. “And it’s still a stupid idea.”

4. Soft whispers of sound are all she leaves behind, even in the still of the evening mists. It’s the third night, the last chance for them to break spells, and she has won her freedom– almost.

A figure stands beside her boat, blocking the way.

“Seriously Mom? WTF?”

5. Getting dressed used to be easy, but the new holographic avatars have an infinite wardrobe to choose from… one that’s constantly updated. She flipped through the Recent Uploads from her favorite designers and muttered unkind things about the inventor of virtual soirees.