Darkwinterthorn

You hurt yourself today To see if you still feel. The needle tears me too, But I will quickly heal. All your broken thoughts That I cannot repair, We'll blow away together, Fading into air. Whatever you become, My sweetest friend, I will be right here, With you 'til the end. You may let me down. I may fail you too. But we will try again, Because our love is true.

This blue-hearted bloom amid the snow Sits upon the mountain's side, And just from casual glance I know My heart will always here abide. The wind rips at her fragile petals, Threatening to tear her limb from limb. Yet I have a breastplate wrought of metal, And can shelter her within. Winter bites and snaps at me, But it may do whatever it will. While she is safe in my shield's lee, I will heed no earthly chill.

She would be little more than a passenger on this voyage, and yet it was the most amazing and exhilarating experience of her life.  It was also the most terrified she had felt since falling into her uncle's pond at seven years old, and she tried not to let it show as she walked down the agonisingly long footbridge to the airlock.  Even the sheer number of cameras capturing every detail of the moment, right down to the beads of sweat she was trying to keep from emerging from her pores - with little success - was unprecedented.  People would be watching reruns of this footage for decades, perhaps even centuries or more, from every angle and in

It was definitely getting wider, which had never happened before.  It now covered – or rather, negated – a patch of sky as wide as Lheyand's thumb held at arm's length.  At first it had seemed to move along with the motion of his eyes, as if it were a flaw in his vision; but now it remained stationary, yet somehow always visible.  Nobody else was reacting to it as they shuffled past him in the hot, stifling air of the city centre at rush hour.  Whether this was because he was imagining it, or because they were simply too blinkered in their own worlds to notice, it was impossible to tell. He had never been like them, even before the

He wasn't in the habit of carrying out the bidding of people who held knives to his throat, but this was something of a unique situation.  Whoever had accosted him in that alley knew, if nothing else, how to get his attention.  The mere mention of Opal, his home, had tightened his stomach and stolen the blood from his face.  The thought of settling the old scores was one that had never truly gone away, and now it was being dangled in front of him like a carrot on a stick.  And besides, hadn't he been feeling the familiar boredom again, pushing at his concentration and his drive, sapping his energy and driving him more and more often to the ba

She smiled down at him from the top of the building, and for a moment he hated her.  How could he not, after what he had been put through, unwilling and unknowing?  He knew well the arguments used to justify his violation and that of a thousand others like him, his friends and former comrades.  But the knowledge that you were there first, that you had been better than everyone else for the majority of a decade, that you helped develop the most revolutionary technology since hyperdrive, could never repair the damage done.  So he forgave himself the little pangs of disgust, and the bad taste left in his mouth by the new advertising campaign fro

It was the smile that gave him away.  Even the greenest recruit on the cosiest core-world assignment knew of General Heston's reputation, and the stories of punishments dealt out for the lightest offences chilled the blood of all who heard them.  Those stories were to pale in comparison to the tale of Private Vetch, which was destined to be a guaranteed conversation-stopper around every Unity Navy mess table from Hope IV to Adamant Station. It began one day in April.  Colonel Lupe would later recount in great and embellished detail the circumstances in which Vetch came to be a member of 423rd Gunners, but the facts of the matter were disappo

There was no doubt about it.  The latest find fit the pattern perfectly.  The chest plate was removed and nowhere to be seen; none of the victim's four limbs were attached any more, instead being arrayed in a diamond above the head; the head itself had been sheared in half, and the neural wiring pulled out to form a grim facsimile of a face in the limb-diamond above.  She didn't need to examine the cranial plate closely, as she already knew what she would find there: a Maker's Mark welded to the forehead, cleft in two along with the cranial plate itself.  It was illustrative of the one thing she could be certain of in this case: whatever was

Brecs was not a tall man by anybody's standards, but even he towered over the tiny wrinkled figure standing in the dark interior of the stone building.  The stories he had heard said that the Master was over one hundred and twenty years old; Brecs found himself reassessing his initial doubts on that score now that he was face to face with the man himself.  It had to be one of the more unusual contracts he had ever taken on, in terms of clientele at least - the exception being that one taxidermist club who still haunted his dreams.  But their money spent just like anyone else's, and they were offering an awful lot of it; just as well, as he wo