news from the Assistant

Posted on by hollyfrostgoldportpress

by Holly Frost

I am informed that Sarah is running off with Dan for a bit, and would like to challenge you all. First, a reminder: you and your children have about twelve hours and forty minutes or so to submit your stories to the Son of Silvercon writing competitions: https://sonofsilvercon.wordpress.com/writers-award/ and https://sonofsilvercon.wordpress.com/young-writers-award-entry/

Next, for the amusement of our hostess and each other, tell us what’s happening here? What is this? Why is this? Give us a blurb, or a flash fiction, or . . . something?

41 thoughts on “news from the Assistant”

  1. No stories.

    Running off with her husband? What is the world coming to? I mean really. Never would do that. ….

    Just every single time we could get away with it.

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  4. Like many a crash-landed aviator before him, Hank wondered if anyone friendly yet knew he was missing. How long until they would start searching? Would they come in time?

    Could he find food and water? His survival course, begrudgingly taken years ago, emphasized that shelter was the first need because it was weather that killed you long before hunger or thirst. Turning his back on the spectacular sight that hoteliers would drool to present to guests, Hank went in search of a dry cave and perhaps some driftwood.

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  5. “Huh. Don’t think I’ve ever saw the NightBat carry an Ego that big before. Wonder who’s it was?”. 

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  7. “So, how’s the weather?” He could hear the smile in her voice over the com.

    “Brisk,” he joked back. “Four degrees, wind from the east at about eight, gusts to fifteen. Air’s still a bit thin.”

    “Leading edge is hitting the upper atmosphere.” She was all business now.

    “I can see it starting to glow,” he confirmed. “Looks downright ominous. Like a giant chunk of Hell Itself falling out of the sky.”

    “It’s nothing but a cloud of snow and sand,” she reassured him. “Scans still show nothing bigger than a centimeter. Atmosphere’s thick enough to burn it all up before it hits the ground.”

    “I know. If it wasn’t safe, you wouldn’t have let me land.” He added, reflectively, “I just had to watch the last one from here.”

    The final pulverized comet, delivering its load of essential water to their new world. In a few days, after the area cooled down, they could start on thickening the atmosphere and seeding the barren ground with specialized bacteria and lichens. Decades from now, it would be breathable.

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  8. I don’t know why they called it the “World Tree”. It wasn’t. A tree, I mean. Trees are straight, with soft leafy scales up the trunks and fronds sprouting from the tops. The World Tree was stone, like the sky barely visible above the sunlit clouds, and the ground, and the great pillars, and the walls if you were hardy enough to reach them. The World Tree spread and twisted, like an upside-down lava-fall, and cradled a giant sphere of some bright stone in its cup.

    I’d never been there – the journey is too hazardous for someone my size – but some who had said that the World Tree stretches out above the Sun Sea – above the Sun itself, in fact. They also say that the Sea around the Sun boils, and flashes to steam where the waves lap against it.

    I’m not sure I believe them. About the World tree being above the Sun, I mean. The sphere the World Tree holds look so much bigger than the Sun, I think it must be much closer. If not. wouldn’t the stone of the world tree melt, being so close to the Sun? Wouldn’t that eventually drop the Sphere onto the Sun and crush it?

    Everyone gets angry when I say things like that. It’s not polite to the travelers. Which… I suppose is natural. They’ve been there, or so they say; I haven’t. They’ve definitely traveled farther than I.

    … I suppose I’ll just have to go and see for myself. When I’m a couple hands taller, and am better with a blade.

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  9. Salt water splattered Avale’s face, as though the splintered reality itself wept. Above, the dragon crashed through layer after layer of dimensional firmament, sending sparks and stars flying with its death throes.

    Words, breath, Time itself stopped, just long enough for Avale to wonder if this sunset, moonset, dragonset would be the first, the last, the eternal moment that the vast unfolding universe would ever have.

    Avale pulled back the shredding threads of sanity and braided them back together with the pragmatic thought that this would barely cause a ripple on the other end of the known universe. Out of all the billions of flocks of dragons that soared through the galaxies, surely some died occasionally.

    It was just rotten luck that this one happened to die here – and take out this planet with it.

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  10. pardon me if this posts twice… shenanigans and a mulligan occurred during sign-in…

    Salt water splattered Avale’s face, as though the splintered reality itself wept. Above, the dragon crashed through layer after layer of dimensional firmament, sending sparks and stars flying with its death throes.

    Words, breath, Time itself stopped, just long enough for Avale to wonder if this sunset, moonset, dragonset would be the first, the last, the eternal moment that the vast unfolding universe would ever have.

    Avale pulled back the shredding threads of sanity and braided them back together with the pragmatic thought that this would barely cause a ripple on the other end of the known universe. Out of all the billions of flocks of dragons that soared through the galaxies, surely some died occasionally.

    It was just rotten luck that this one happened to die here – and take out this planet with it.

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  12. I’ll never find my spaceship keys out here, I knew I should have paid the extra fifty bucks for the fob finder. The tow and pickup rates are going to kill me. Sigh.

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  13. Pintain watched the sun set over the bay. It would have been a beautiful sight but for the Fragment. It half blocked the Gods’ Home and dominated the sky.

    Fifteen hundred years ago the ancient astronomers noted the explosion of their nearest planet. The Fragments drifted across the sky and many simply disappeared. But one gradually drew nearer.

    As they watched it approach, this Fragment at first seemed it would hit them. It orbited the sun erratically until after several centuries, it settled into a place between them and the great world that housed their gods.

    Many people thought it was a harbinger of doom and others a warning. Pintain just thought of it as a dangerous nuisance. It disturbed their sky and exhaled gases into the void. For now, it was settled into place. He was sure that would change some day.

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  14. Boris stood at the coast, clear for once, and watched in awe as the right antler of the Great Space Moose and the comet called the Flying Squirrel both rose into view along with the sunrise.

    ”Natasha was right. Moose and squirrel must die, or we all have bol’shaya problema.”

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  15. This wasn’t his wife’s normal CBG gummies, he must have grabbed the wrong package. The clerk had tossed some free samples in the sack when he picked up the normal order. Said the spouse would really like them with a smile and a wink as they returned the credit card.

    The last time he was in a predicament of this magnitude was twenty years before when encountering the girl with the full frontal Cthulhu ink at a convention. Apparently disappearing for two months with no recollection of how $400K showed up in his bank account was worth losing his dead-end job and resetting his personal life.

    But this was different somehow.

    At least his hip and knees didn’t hurt anymore.

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  17. Writing ideas are bouncing around in my head – and getting stuck in the allergy congestion. Sigh…

    But, wow! There are truly some excellent snippets here so far. Must remember to check later.

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  18. Corbin looked up in the sky, it had been fifteen years since he cast that first spell. Not knowing anything about magic or that he was indeed magical is what caused the problem. His little sister Lola had been pestering him endlessly that day. Even his mother had told her to stop. Still she persisted until he finally turned and told her to get off his planet. Now she floated up there is the sky with the western valley and mountains. He still hadn’t figured out how to get her and the valley down. Mother was needless to say still cross with him.

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  19. Every night the celestial bat swallowed the moon, following which, to all available instruments, it ceased to exist.

    Throughout history scientists had tried to prove that it was simply occluded, not gone. It simply was not reasonable that a moon should disappear.

    Objects passing in front of or behind the moon were easily discerned, but the moon itself was gone.

    It would reappear, apparently in a random orbit, within a short time of being swallowed, and continue on its way as if nothing had happened.

    Rumor said that if you stood at just the right spot on the shore of Mare Serenitatis as the sun descended, you would see something very different.

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  20. They missed.

    It was Sarah’s last sight, as the rays from the explosion designed to smash a 100 mile wide asteroid exploded just over the horizon. At least the asteroid will not kill her, the explosion shock wave will arrive a couple of minutes prior to the end of life on earth from the asteroid. Perhaps a few of her cells will make escape velocity and leave this planet, as world’s collide.

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  25. Tom had no idea who the black dragon was but he knew he had to thank that dragon for saving the earth from the rogue moon.

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  26. No one will believe this. No matter how well I document this world, the data I send and carry back, no one will believe what I’ve seen, heard here. These sights cannot be.

    And yet they are.

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  27. The moon and whatever else, that close? You know what that meant? Tasty waves, dude. Tasty waves.

    Dale stood on the shore and stared at the raging sea.

    “Damnit. I shoulda brought my board.”

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    1. Tom looked down at his com unit as the first waves crashed on the shore. He selected a good playlist from the ancient archives. He grabbed his board and started to run towards the surf, as the ‘Ventures Pipeline’ started to play. Good times among the stars he thought.

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  28. This build had definitely gone wrong. Toni pulled off her goggles and studied the lines of code on her primary monitor.

    Players might like cool weird moons in the skies of their fantasy and science fiction games, but there was still a limit, and this mess was way over the line. Even looking at the flat image on her secondary monitor made her stomach queasy, and the three-D effects of gaming goggles was downright vertigo-inducing.

    Now the question was whether to try to track down what had gone wrong, or just start over again. She did have access to multiple code libraries, so it might be wiser to try something else instead of spending hours or days trying to patch this one.

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  29. And as the sun set slowly over the cresting waves, I said good-bye to Eshhagoeth, former Eater of Worlds and the best friend I’d ever known.

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  31. It wasn’t often that you could stand on a world during planetary engineering. But the views were such that you always took the opportunity when you could.

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  32. The familiar and reassuring sight of the sun setting in the sea was torn asunder, parting to allow the thing to slip through the skein that separated the realities. She got a brief glimpse of what must have been the place they came from – and it looked as twisted as the thing itself.

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  33. Sam looked out across the ocean at the beautiful sunset… and saw that Froplnax had double-parked their combat moon on top of an Imperial battle construct.

    “For frack sakes!” he shouted into the communicator. “We’re going to get a frelling ticket, you nerf herder!”

    “Hey!” Froplnax bubbled back indignantly. “Who you callin’ scruffy, Hyuman Sam?! I’ll zorble your grox!”

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