Vertigo

BY MISFIRE ANON

Ten.

The snowflakes burst into the room violently, their legions blurring the sharp corners of upturned tables and broken chairs. They advanced, wave upon wave, chasing the emptiness from the air.

Nihlus kicked away the papers littering the floor—or tried to, anyway. They fluttered with the snow, somehow found their peace in the turbulence, and eventually settled back at the beckoning of gravity. The ones that have been reduced to ashes, on the other hand, added pale shades of grey to the white swarms. Occasionally, a spark would put forth its orange light, to be smothered a moment later by its frozen comrades-in-arms.

The building swayed slightly in the high-altitude gusts. The Spectre smiled. A challenge gladly taken. Visibility was less than ideal. A rather common occurrence, in this line of work. A fellow agent, with his rifle already set up; barrel protruding a mere few millimetres from the jagged edge of broken glass.

Now that, that might be a problem.

Theseus

BY MISFIRE ANON

Shepard is beginning to see the appeal of using a large star to light a room—where you can see the entire top half of a blue giant, and you need highly expensive windowpanes just to block out the part of the EM spectrum that’s hazardous to your health. It’s like having a waterfall in your garden, or piranhas in your fish tank. Unnecessary, but certainly helps with the mood. The Illusive Man’s fancy backdrop may or may not be a fake—in all likelihood, it is, but this is real. Hers is real. She grins, and then realises she has no reason to.

The Withering

BY MISFIRE ANON

It was her first time shopping in over two years. She gazed at her surroundings with huge, round eyes, taking in the golden arches hung with blue and lavender drapery; the sun-dappled walkway, hewn from stone by skilled machines. What she didn’t pay attention to were the shops. Their storefronts were modest and tasteful, neon streaks of light tracing out elegant glyphs, just barely visible under the foliage of the ornamental trees lining the plaza. But weren’t enough, apparently, to draw her eyes away from the small, glittering birds that darted overhead.

The Other Beginning

BY MISFIRE ANON

The rules of convergence

The answer to your question is yes. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I want to start at the beginning. The other beginning.

His parting gestures were still heavy on my mind a week after the dedication ceremony. I don’t know how long he stayed there that night, only that he wasn’t there at dawn. I berated myself, then, for not staying with him. I still do.

So I wrote him a letter much like what I’m writing now. Well, not exactly. But the frankness was the same. I told him that I’d noticed the seal of approval for his leave application. I asked if he was fine when I knew he wasn’t. I asked if he wanted to have a talk, maybe a friendly match; I could certainly arrange it at the base.

He said yes. As in, that one word. Yes.

The Nest

BY MISFIRE ANON

Children are playing in the courtyard. The architecture of the quadrangle lifts their voices to the sixth storey and beyond. Urban birdsong.

It is a beautiful evening, one of the last of the year. The almanac told him so in the morning. A fitting time to hold an assembly. The weather was mild from noon to late afternoon, with an occasional cloud or cool mountain breeze dropping by to make sure that the atmosphere was not too stifling for heavy robes.

The sky seems loftier above his head, like the autumn skies of poem and song.

The Downpour

BY MISFIRE ANON

Saren looks up from the equilateral triangle he’s been scratching into the ground.

“It’s going to rain,” he says.

Oh, you have no idea how hard. Saren’s seen rain, but never from a sky like this.

“Do they hurry up if it’s going to rain?”

“Nah, I don’t think so. Look, there’s a schedule right there. They’re not going to show up for at least fifteen minutes.” Desolas tucks his chin in, thinking hard about why that might be so. “One must’ve just left,” he deduces.

“We came out too early, then.”

“We’re fine. It’s actually quite nice out.”