Mark Antony Raines Blog

 

 The soil in the valley of Blackwood was a rich, greasy slate-grey, heavy with generations of rot and river silt. Nothing grew upon it quite right; the corn rose tall and thick-stalked, but the ears were often blighted with black, weeping smut, and the apples in the neglected orchard behind the main house hung heavy and red as drops of arterial blood, yet tasted of alum and old iron. At the bottom of the long slope, where the marshy ground began to heave and breathe mosquitoes in the summer heat, stood the pens. They were built of stout, blackened oak that had drunk thirty years of wet manure and sour slop. The fences were reinforced with rusted corrugated tin and braced with cedar posts that leaned drunkenly into the muck. And there they stayed, shifting like slow-moving hills of coarse bristle and mud: the pigs. They were not the pink, clean-eared yorkshires of the picture books. These were old-stock razors, crossed with wild boar that had wandered down from the timberline back w...

 The afternoon sun filtered through the old oak tree in the conservatory, casting a warm, golden lattice across the stone floor. Clara sat with her sketchpad open, though her pencil had remained still for the last twenty minutes. ​Across the room, Julian was carefully misting a row of blooming orchids, completely unaware of how the light caught the silver threads at his temples. He moved with a quiet, deliberate grace that Clara had come to adore over the past three years. ​Love, she often thought, was never loud or demanding. It was much like the fragile creature that occasionally drifted into their garden—something that could never be caught by force, only welcomed when it chose to land. ​As if summoned by the thought, a pale swallowtail butterfly fluttered through the open french doors, its satin wings catching flashes of amber and emerald in the sunlight. It danced over the terracotta pots before looping gracefully toward Julian. ​Julian froze, a gentle smile breaking across hi...

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 The copper tang of iron hung thick in the air, coating the back of Mina's throat with every ragged breath. Outside, the midday sun beat down indifferently on the suburban high school, but inside Room 204, the world had been reduced to a monochrome palette of stark white tile and deep, glistening crimson. Her desk—traditionally a sanctuary of neat binders and pastel highlighters—was slick with it. Her hands, small and trembling, were soaked to the wrists. Across the linoleum floor lay the ruined remnants of what used to be her peers. Just an hour ago, they had been laughing. Ethan, the star quarterback, had snatched her sketchbook from her hands, holding it high above his head while the rest of the circle jeered. They had mocked the pages filled with the stark, ink-heavy panels of Little Death—her favorite underground manga series known for its unflinching, hyper-violent body horror and grotesque mutations. "Freak," Ethan had sneered, flipping open a page depicting a tors...

 TITLE: THE REFLECTION OF RECKONING SERIES: TALES FROM THE IRON GATE CHARACTERS: THE KEEPER: Our host. Deep, gravelly voice. A hint of a sinister chuckle. ARTHUR VANCE: A wealthy, arrogant collector of antiques. ELIAS: An elderly, terrified shopkeeper. THE ECHO: A distorted, whispering version of Arthur. SOUND DESIGN: Heavy wind, creaking wood, a ticking grandfather clock, scraping metal, and a low, atmospheric cello score. [SCENE 1] [SFX: THE LOUD, RUSTY SCREECH OF A HEAVY IRON GATE SWINGING OPEN. THE WIND HOWLS.] [SFX: FOOTSTEPS ON GRAVEL, APPROACHING SLOWLY.] THE KEEPER: (Quietly, close to the mic) Good evening, traveler. Come in, out of the mist. You’ve found your way to the Iron Gate. Shhh… ignore the hounds in the distance. They only bark at the souls who try to leave. Tonight, we have a story of vanity. They say a man’s home is his castle… but sometimes, the things we bring into our castles have a mind of their own. We call tonight’s tale… "The Reflection of Reckoning....

 The silence of the void was not an absence of sound; it was a physical pressure, a heavy, velvet drapery that draped across the infinite shoulders of the cosmos. In this unlit theater of dead suns and newborn nebulae, drifting upon a current of pure kinetic memory, hung the Weaver. It had no name that could be shaped by lungs of flesh and bone. To the few ancient intelligence-complexes scattered across the outer rim of the Sagittarius Arm—minds that had long since abandoned physical form for matrices of cold glass—it was known only as The Query. It was a creature of geometry and intent, a being composed of shifting, iridescent ribbons of light that folded in upon themselves, defying the three dimensions of space to bleed effortlessly into the fourth. Its body was a tapestry of starlight, woven from the very fabric of the galaxies it tended. For epochs, the Weaver had functioned as a cosmic gardener. It pruned the dying branches of bloated red giants, coaxed the accretion disks of ...

 The room smelled of floor wax, crushed carnations, and the unmistakable, flat dryness of air that had passed through too many aluminum ducts. It was three in the morning—that dead-water hour when the hospital seemed to contract, the corridor lights buzzing faintly behind wire-reinforced glass, the rubber soles of a nurse’s clogs squeaking three turns away down the linoleum labyrinth like a distant mouse. Julian didn’t look at the monitor. He knew the rhythm of it. The machine was letting out a drone of beeps—a flat, electronic counting that had nothing to do with time as he’d known it for the past forty-eight hours, and everything to do with the stubborn machinery of Clara’s lungs trying to find a door that wouldn’t open. He sat by her just so he could lay his hands on her one last time. Her hand was on the white quilt, palm up, fingers curled slightly like a fern frond that had stopped unfolding before the rain. It didn't look like Clara’s hand. Clara’s hands had been perpetually...

 The bay gelding’s left ear twitched back, catching the dry rattle of a dead tumbleweed scraping against a sun-bleached wagon wheel. To my left, the sign for The Broken Spade hung by a single rusted hinge, groaning in the hot wind like a hanged man swinging from a cottonwood branch. I didn’t need to look up at the second-story window of the dry-goods store to know the curtain was twitching. I could feel it. That familiar, cold little prickle at the base of my neck that had kept me breathing through thirty-four winters of lead-spitting malice. Clint. They always knew the name before they knew the man. I’d spent the last twenty miles coaxing the bay across the alkali flats of New Mexico, dreaming of nothing grander than a cup of chicory coffee that didn’t taste like boiled saddle leather and a three-legged dog to share the porch with. But trouble—quiet, greasy, persistent trouble—followed me around like the smell of a skunked hound. I never went looking for it. It just had a way of r...

 Chapter One: The Great Wi-Fi Disconnect Arthur Pendelton adjusted his ascot, winced, and immediately regretted it. The starch was aggressive. It felt less like clothing and more like a tactical defense system designed to deter hugs. "Right," Arthur muttered to his reflection. "Breathe in, suck in the gut, and try to remember that Bluetooth hasn’t been invented yet." He stood before a massive, heavily gilded cheval glass in a room that smelled distinctly of damp wool, beeswax, and coal smoke. The wallpaper featured an intricate pattern of maroon peonies that looked like they were plotting to strangle him in his sleep. Arthur raised his right hand and tapped his wrist. Tap, tap. Nothing happened. No subtle haptic buzz. No glowing OLED display flashing: Heart Rate: 135 bpm (Panicking). "Bloody useless," he sighed. Twenty minutes ago, or perhaps three days ago—time had gone completely wobbly after the particle accelerator tour at CERN—Arthur had been a twenty...

 Chapter One: The Great Cumulus Breakroom The clouds over the Seventh Tier of Eternity were unusually compliant that Tuesday. Normally, they churned with the majestic, terrifying weight of divine providence, but today they had been neatly fluffed into a sprawling sectional sofa complete with matching ottomans woven from stray starlight. Archangel Michael, Commander of the Heavenly Host, wearer of the Breastplate of Righteousness, and wielder of a flaming sword that could cleave tectonic plates, was currently using said flaming sword to toast a crumpet. "A little more amber on the edges, Mike," murmured Raphael, leaning back against a bolster of concentrated serenity. He was holding a delicate bone-china teacup that had no business existing in a realm of pure spirit, yet possessed a charming little painted blue tit on the side. "If you char the crust again, Gabriel’s going to start crying about the sacred geometry of butter absorption." "I am not crying," G...

 The blood dripped from the protruding, ivory-long fangs as the Victorian-dressed figure stood in front of the long mirror, which offered no reflection back. Lord Julian Vance raised a gloved hand, his fingers tracing the cold expanse of the mercury-backed glass. He pressed his palm against the ornate, carved mahogany frame, searching—as he had every midnight for the past two centuries—for the faintest ghost of his own visage. There was nothing. Only the dim, amber glow of the parlor’s twin wall-sconces refracted through the dust motes dancing in the dead air, illuminating a stark emptiness. He lowered his hand, the crimson drop falling from his canine to strike the Persian rug with a soft, wet tock. "Vanity," Julian murmured, his voice like dry autumn leaves scraping across flagstones. "The curse that keeps us tethered to the vanity of form, yet robs us of the only proof that we exist." He turned away from the mocking glass, his heavy velvet coat swishing about his...