I've not had any more problems with one generation than any other, really — you all suck.

Now … leave me be … I’ve got stuff to do ¹ 😜

ANGELS ON STREET CORNERS

I see an angel with words for wings.
He’s standing on the corner, blank faced, with a beggar’s bowl,
seeking emotions from passersby. I give him what I can spare.
The words that make up his wings are mostly obscured,
unspeakable, or in languages unknown to me, but I make out a
few:

Lost.
Alone.
Left behind.

It’s just as the plaque above the doors to the Silent Church
reads:
“She is gone. But Her Legacy remains.”

I make my way back home to Fartown, where all the dangerous
spells live.

Uvaris, my elderbrin friend, stands in front of my crooked little
house, waiting. He’s wearing a face today that reminds me of a
stern eagle. His hair is white and slick. He’s taller than he was
yesterday. He lets his new shape say all he needs to say. I don’t
spoil his message with words. He follows me inside.
The filth inside suggests that the spirits that haunt my house
haven’t kept up their end of our bargain. They were supposed to
clean up this mess. I’ll take some time to cast a vengeance spell or two later. I can’t let them get away with this small transgression, or they’ll take control of the place again before I know it.

Uvaris and I share some dinner and while away the evening
sharing stories of impaled gods and regretful demons.
The next morning, I’m on my way back to work, through one of
the ruined sections of the city, where the wards failed in the War.
Crouched on a street corner, I see an angel with wings for words.
They flutter out, white feathers fluttering when she opens her
mouth.
I think for a moment to chase after one, but, of course, I just
keep walking.

MIRRORS

Mirrors are a virus.

We think they are simple tools, but the secret truth is far more
sinister. They multiply when we’re not looking—it’s all about
looking, you see. They’re mirrors. Newly born mirrors seep into
our homes, workplaces, and even temples and graveyards. Look
away and there’s suddenly a mirror in a room where there wasn’t
before, and we don’t even notice. It’s a virus. It spreads.
If every bit of the world is reflected in mirrors at once,
everything inverts. The world on the other side of the mirror
becomes real, and we become the reflection.

It’s an invasion, I tell you. It is a secret, told to me by a very
well-informed truespider. She heard it from a Maker who lived
in a little house in the country next to a burbling, tick-tocking
stream of clocks. Every hour upon the hour, the chimes from the
river were so loud that someone standing upon the banks could
not hear anything else. But she wasn’t on the bank; she was in his
house, spinning a web in the corner. She had promised him that
she would not drink the fluid in his eyes while he slept, and so the
Maker agreed to let her stay.

She once asked the Maker what his greatest creation was to
date.

“When I was a young man,” he told her without hesitation,
“I looked for God. And I found him.”

After a pause, he continued.
“I took what I found, and I made him into a gun. Being both
a Maker and a younger fellow at the time, it made sense. But
that god-gun was soon stolen from me by a demonic bureaucrat
called The Enemy of Sleep. Since that time, I have steered clear of
weapons and war. Like begets like, as they say.”

But more to the point, on another occasion the spider idly
complimented the Maker on a beautiful mirror with a silver frame
that hung on the wall. She had assumed that he, being a Maker,
had fashioned it himself.

“What?” the old man said with a start and looked around. “I
don’t have any mirrors here.”

But he most certainly did, and this clearly alarmed him. “I’ve
not been vigilant,” he said, cursing. And with that, he took a
hammer from his kit and smashed every mirror in the house. He
swept the pieces outside, into the river.

The spider asked the Maker why he had done that, and
moreover why he had greeted each mirror he found in the house that day with surprise and horror. He explained the dread secret to
her.

Not long after, the man vanished. One minute he was there,
working at his bench, and then, when the spider wasn’t looking,
he wasn’t.

Because with mirrors, it’s all about looking.
Never stop looking.

APOSTATE

Anestra had given up on the orders of magic altogether and
thus was labeled Apostate. She embraced the term and made
it her own. Thanks to a few glamours she discovered, the word
“Apostate” now floated above her head in glowing letters. It
followed wherever she went. Exactly as she wanted it.

Anestra wore a sinsuit made of wrath and a bit of envy. A candle
of numina burned upon her shoulder. Long brown dreadlocks
cascaded around her face and down her back, but a minor charm
kept them from the dangers of the candle flame.

When Anestra went to the library-temple of Rhol, most of the
other vislae there avoided her. Apostates were unpalatable enough for library priests, but one who embraced the outcast nature? One couldn’t be seen with such a person.

Anestra spent her time in the library poring over some of the
more obscure tomes of demonic lore. When she had read every
book and scroll on the topic the god had to offer, she left to
consult with the Forty Apodictic Faces of Wisdom in the Garden
of Oflim.

Mages and sorcerers across Satyrine began to wonder, what
does Anestra seek? What knowledge is she after?
She confided in no one. She inquired with no one who would
share her secrets. And she continued her search.

Eventually, one day, after a keyfall, where keys of all shapes and
sizes rain down from the heavens, she found a key. Not just a key,
but a so-called wicked key that can open anything. They are not,
as it turns out, as rare as some would have you believe.

Using this key, she unlocked the door of a library far more
ancient than that of Rhol, the Left-Handed God. So ancient,
in fact, that it no longer existed. And within this long-gone
storehouse of knowledge, Anestra found what she was looking
for: the secret name of a demon so obscure and so lost that no one living or dead remembered it.

So, with this knowledge, she conjured this demon—not to
command it, or interrogate it, or for any such conventional
sorcery. No, Anestra turned her back on such things. She
summoned this ancient being out of the Dark to gaze into its eyes,
for she knew its pupils shone with a color otherwise unknown,
anywhere.

And with that, she took the next step down a path that would
lead her, alone, to the Labyrinth. Exactly according to her plan.

—
¹ Things to see, people to read ²

² You may ask me about them: I may not necessarily supply an immediately satisfying answer — wings for words, words for wings, untrustworthy mirrors and supernumerary keys.