 art by chickpeamcb.tumblr.com You meet Death, as everyone does, on the last day of your life. It greets you at a crossroads, and that isn't a metaphor; you're at the junction of Mot Road and Suchart Street when it appears before you, looking exactly as you might imagine Death personified would look—hooded, faceless, bearing a scythe of smoke and endings, ominous and yet not threatening. Death is simply there. More there than anything else, in fact, making everything else feel ephemeral and unreal. Yourself included.
TIME TO GO, it says, or whatever the equivalent is for a meaning impressed on reality and filtered in such a way so that your mortal mind can comprehend. You grit your teeth and ground yourself against the summons already hooking into you, peeling your Self from your body with the delicacy of a web painstakingly unravelled, and you look Death right in its non-face. "No," you tell it, with such firmness that, for a moment, your "No" is more like NO — not words, but immutable fact. Death is, for a moment, taken aback. (Quite an achievement. Death has never been surprised before, having seen, quite literally, all.) NO? "No. There is still much I have to do, and I refuse to die until things are better, and that is a—" THREAT. The last word reverberates, beyond language or air or vibrations or anything on the physical plane, and Death-- Death wavers. Death has never wavered. Not in all of existence. You smile grimly, unhitch Death's demands from your mortal coil, and turn away from it. And it lets you go. And the world trembles, preemptive shivers. No one is ready for what is to come. But you are.
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 Photo by Matt Benson on Unsplash I recently went on a ten-day vacation to the Bahamas to visit my mom's side of the family and to escape the winter in Canada for a bit (the timing was excellent; we got slammed by two back-to-back snowstorms while I was gone). While walking around the Atlantis resort, which we'd visited for the day, we bumped into a mom and her toddler son, Romeo, whom we'd crossed paths with twice before.
I remarked to my mom and sister that it was funny how you could be somewhere with hundreds or thousands of strangers and yet spot the same unfamiliar-familiar faces over and over again. Laughingly, I wondered why I couldn't have had some repeat chance encounters with any hot guys...and it sparked an idea in me for a story.  Photo by Damian Kamp on Unsplash So far I've managed to hit 3 of my 2025 goals: update this site monthly (at minimum), write at least 100 words for LofM, and join a writing group. (Well, I sort of restarted an existing writing group, but I'm excited about it anyway).
As for LofM: I've so far written 3,800 words! Most of them new, too, instead of rewritten old words. I'm trying to zero-draft LofM again, with some changes to the plot and structure. I'm experimenting with an Arabian Nights-esque formatting where I write multiple short stories, all linked together into a larger narrative, and I'm enjoying it so far. Here's an excerpt:  Photo by Christopher Paul High on Unsplash Happy new year! I meant to write and post this in December, but procrastination snatched the time right out of my hands. That's ok; better late than never! As my mom recently reminded me, the Prophet (ﷺ) once said that even if the end of the world is quite literally happening, but you still have time to plant a seed, you should do so. Or, as one of my favourite quotes puts it: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. (The attribution of this proverb is not precisely known).
And now, because my memory is like Swiss cheese (full of holes), I thought it would be enlightening (for myself, mainly, though maybe you'll find it helpful too, dear reader) to take a look back at 2024, writing-wise.  So......I am shocked. Delighted. Bemused. And baffled. I wasn't feeling LofM's latest start (what else is new) and I could feel that the plot & premise was almost, but not quite, right....so i went scrolling through my hundreds of pages of drafts and snippets and scenes and-- I have some good stuff here! Ten years of working on this wip has left me with some fantastic fragments that I can cobble together and polish into something I'm really, really excited to write. I'm so glad I rarely deleted anything! I just now have to hunt through everything I have for what I want to try and patchwork into one single draft. But ah! this is so fun! and makes me feel so much better about the insidious voice in my head deriding me for having worked on this wip for 10+ years with nothing but pieces to show for it. The scene below is inspired by my trip to the Grand Mosque of Paris years ago (see above photo, which I took!) and also Canada’s lushness, which is always such a surprise every spring and summer after long, grey winters.
Magic runs bone deep in a host, and stays there after death. Bones left to family or friends in wills can be placed in new bodies, through sorcery or surgery, and work almost just as well. But this is something else entirely.
I handle the skull carefully, with gloves, as I usually do with relics. With enough exposure, even just through the skin, magic can be toxic. Not all magics mingle well with each other. It’s the top cause of death for surgeons in my field. This relic is a magnificent specimen. The skull is clearly ancient but quite intact, and white as the moon, and heavy as sorrow. I finish examining the teeth—each one diamond edged and radiating insatiable hunger—and glance up at my shadowy customer (or patient, as the case may be) enrobed in a dark cloak, not one inch of him visible but his gleaming eyes. Put a fresh enough human heart inside a brand new demon, you get a wonderfully confused sort of half-person. Black blooded and obedient, they make excellent hit men. You stare at the prince, trying to wrap your mind around his claim, even as the silver cords bite into your wrists and throat and thighs, binding you in place and burning, smoking, as they do.
No one told you the prince was a mage. Regardless, somehow, your own reconnaissance never revealed that he was, and recon is one of those things you excel at. Besides assassination, of course. And somehow you’ve failed on both accounts. How had he hid his powers? How had he caught you?  Synopsis The crown prince has been kidnapped by the djinn, and his mother will stop at nothing to find him and bring him home, even if it means marching into the realm of the Unseen on what everyone insists is a hopeless mission. He's gone, she is told. Grieve him, for he is as good as dead. If he is returned to you, he will not be the same child you knew.
But he isn't dead, and Queen Sirin refuses to accept his loss, refuses to grieve him, even if she is called mad for her insistence that he is alive, for her determination to rescue him. She cares not that no one has ever returned from such a venture. She's going to save her son or die trying. Enter Halah; the only person taken by the djinn who claims to have escaped them, rather than been returned. Only she can lead Queen Sirin and her cousin, Raoul, into the Unseen realm and guide them through the kingdom of the djinn...so when Sirin pleads for her help, she agrees. She can't abandon a child, even one she doesn't know. Even if it does mean returning to the last place in all the realms she ever wants to see again...  prompt via @deepwaterwritingprompts “I know,” I answer with a smile up at him. “Gran told me.”
That was before the world stopped spinning, of course. It had baffled scientists and everybody who knew—who thought they knew—how the world worked. The very stopping should have shattered everything. And then, by all rights, half the world should have roasted and the other half should have froze solid. There shouldn’t have been air, let alone anything else. But none of that happened. Sure, the days were now a year long, meaning everywhere got six months of daylight and six months of night, and that caused a huge upheaval of everything. Sure, a lotta people and things died before we all adjusted, or so Gran says. But other than that-- Well. The world stopped, but people didn’t. We went on. And now father and I, among many, many others, pull the tides in on a regular schedule, to keep things growing and shifting properly, and to rock the world enough to keep it well, same as you would a newborn baby, hungry for touch as much as milk. And when we pull in the tide and release it with our hooks, our bells ring sweetly, which pleases our tired moon and the creatures that live within it. They came out when the world stopped spinning, and best as anyone can tell, they’re the reason there’s any life still on Earth. All they ask is for music in return. Song is the new currency, instruments more valued than gold or even food ever was, bards, musicians, and singers the lifeblood of society everywhere, dancers made holy. We keep the Moon’s beings happy and entertained, and they keep us alive and well. Gran says there were a lot of wars and other terrible things, before the Great Stillness. There isn’t anymore. We keep going, with our bells and whistles and music for the heavens and the creatures who love it so. It’s not a bad new world, to be sure. |
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