Shiv MacFarlane
Bio
I write because I live.
Stories (11/0)
Printhammer
I took a deep breath, and blew it out in a frustrated sigh that I hoped would take with it some of the smoke that clogged me up inside. I could feel it everywhere, sticking inside me like tar, making my eyes itch, making my chest ache, but as anyone around me could tell you, there was no actual smoke to be had: it was all a fabrication of my mind, an excuse, they said, not to make any real effort.
By Shiv MacFarlane2 years ago in Fiction
An Acorn Set In Flame
Many sagas had been sung of the arrangement of the universe, the ways that it began, the ways that it may end, and the different stories it would tell before it fell back into the nothing from which it had spawned. There were songs of frozen Niflheim, the Primal Realm of Order, and stood across the Ginnungagap—a void which had no bottom, no end, and no purpose save to swallow that which would be unmade within its belly—from burning Muspelheim, itself the Primal Realm of Chaos. Bridging the gap, flourishing in the mingled magic between them, the roots of Yggdrasil, the World Tree twisted with mysterious power, and bore the fruits of the other Realms.
By Shiv MacFarlane3 years ago in Fiction
Forbidden Knowledge
A layer of mud caked on Tchakat’s skin, masking his scent and keeping the biting bugs from his back. Applied correctly it would cling as long as it did not dry, protecting him like armour. This second skin was a strategy of the Oranen—who though they had evolved a thick, waxy layer of flesh—were still plagued by flies that swarmed above the layer of oily water in which Oranen hunted. Jota swarms often worked together in search of succulent meat to feed their young, and unfortunate bodies in which to implant them. Usually, they were content to get the woody-fleshed bottom feeders, more plant than beast, but if they happened on one of Tchakat’s kind, the horrific scars and infestations left behind would as likely kill the poor host as render them pariahs to potential mates.
By Shiv MacFarlane3 years ago in Fiction
So It Came To Be
Pardat sighed as he leaned over the body laying in the growing field of white around them. This had been his wife, Fadwa, who stood beside him since the first light of time. She had been an Archangel, a being of radiance and power, as Pardat himself was a Titan, an archetype of Reality through whom the principles of creation flowed. Together they had walked side by side, footfalls leaving imprints in the fabric of Reality to make realms which would become as dreams, and dreams which would birth stories for those who had created them.
By Shiv MacFarlane3 years ago in Fiction
Marigold
At the far edges of the void, far from most living eyes, leviathans—behemothian creatures from the darkest abysses, and made of the clay from broken worlds—swim through seas of lost starlight. In the seamless bowels at the iron roots of broken mountains, serpents studded with thousands of lidless, sightless eyes coil through warrens carved by their insatiable maws, leaving only obsidian, thrumming with power in their wake. In the vaults of a necropolis forgotten by the souls of its makers, an ocean pours out of a jar that flows, eternal, from a plane of endless water, brimming with life and magic of every kind. Endless are the places in which life thrives, and a scant few of them are the simple fields and valleys in which surface civilizations thrive. While the surface-centric mind might stoop to believing that the machines of Reality had been hewn for them, life is unstoppable, varied, and wonderous, and touches every corner of the universe in equal measure.
By Shiv MacFarlane3 years ago in Fiction
Paulie Oxenfree
The sound of the lock echoed within the darkened hallway of the small apartment, the uncomfortable crack of a rough solution to a simple problem. It had been protesting as the person on the other side inelegantly tooled the tumblers into position until the lock gave up its fight and forfeited to the more persistent opponent. Despite years of experience and practice convincing his logical mind that it was an essentially consequence free exercise, this part always made him uncomfortable: stepping, uninvited, into the darkness of someone else’s home always triggered a nervousness in his belly that was a thrilling as it was nauseating. He wasn’t supposed to be here, and there was something enthralling about that.
By Shiv MacFarlane3 years ago in Fiction
Macaria
Kelly Daorcy steepled cold fingers over steaming tea, sitting in front of a coffee shop on 39th street. It was September, and the summer had been hot, but August had waned quickly, pulling colour from the few leaves downtown had to offer. Home, for her, had always been more upstate, the acres and acres of trees and the winding country roads being rich with the change of the seasons, but here in the city, one hardly noticed the world turning, save that it got colder.
By Shiv MacFarlane3 years ago in Fiction
Sunshine on the Grass
Jessop leaned against the frame of a bay door, looking out over the place he called home. For as far as the eye could see, dappled shadows of broken sunlight formed ink-blot mosaics of light and dark across rustling golden grasses. It was mid-afternoon; though the sky was cloudless, the broken hulks of old space stations and ships, which had once been the center of government on Terra Poales Poaceae, drifted across the sky mottling the sunshine, bruising the scenery and making it, in a way, unrecognizable as it tarnished the golden grasses with formless shadow. Heaving off the door, Jessop turned away from the big empty world, and marched back into the barn. Caught in a thin sunbeam cast through one of the loft windows that seemed to leech colour from the scene, two men were taking turns, drinking and digging a deep hole.
By Shiv MacFarlane3 years ago in Fiction
I Dreamt of Her In Passing
Beneath the skin of the world, behind the eyes of mankind, and under the spell of sleep, the realms of Dream were changing, and under their mercurial, starless skies, the Keepers brooded on the future. There was a cataclysm on the horizon, like a restless Dream at the edge of waking, and in the shadowland where Nightmares brewed, something wrong was stirring.
By Shiv MacFarlane3 years ago in Fiction
Augmented Reality
It takes a special sort of optimism to bring children into the world, particularly in times of trouble. The more educated you are, the more you know about the world at large and the forces crashing around it like icebergs speckled with political lice, the more daunting it is to try and project for the future. My parents started with me and my siblings in the early 1980’s, so they didn’t have the Internet to feed them a constant flow of doom and contrast, but since both of them had had parents with military and intelligence backgrounds reaching back to the second world war, they had enough to go on to know that the world at large was neither safe, nor sound, and that interesting times were ahead.
By Shiv MacFarlane3 years ago in Futurism
Through Cracks in the Sidewalk
October is not a friendly month to be outside. Not, at least, in the city. Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you that sitting on cold concrete is not a pleasant thing to do, but any normal person doesn’t do it for all that long: to really understand the cold you have to be sitting behind a little sign that sums your existence up with pleading black sharpie on the inside of a liquor box. You needed your spine up against the unyielding, spiritless rock, and your tailbone parked uncomfortably on a fold in your jeans, trying to find some variety in the numbness that a thin nylon sleeping bag won’t provide. The real cold doesn’t kick in until you don’t have an option to get away from it, and it takes on that broody, seductive whisper telling you that it’s here for you now, that it will hold you while you fall asleep if you let it, and if you wake up, it will be there waiting.
By Shiv MacFarlane3 years ago in Motivation