You would not believe the number of times I had to rewrite this chapter from scratch...
There was a saying about frogs and boiling liquids. Something about how, if you raised the temperature slowly enough, the creatures never realised they were being cooked alive. Emily Piggot, Director of the PRT’...
2025-10-21 15:55:38 +0000 UTC View PostThe metal ring caught the operating theatre's harsh light, its crimson inset throwing bloody reflections across Rasa's fingers as he turned it over with methodical precision. Gold—or something remarkably similar to it—worked into a configuration his metallurgical expertise could not immediately catego...
2025-10-16 22:01:44 +0000 UTC View PostThe grief of the previous night had scoured him clean, leaving behind the cold, clear architecture of his training. Emotion was a chemical state, a hormonal tide. He had experienced it, processed it, and filed it. Now, survival was the only relevant computation.
He awoke before the false dawn, his i...
2025-10-15 20:24:51 +0000 UTC View PostThe room was a sterile box of beige walls and unremarkable furniture, a temporary accommodation that felt more like a holding cell. It was one of a dozen identical apartments in a secure downtown building, hastily repurposed for Protectorate members displaced by the recent… incident. Hers was on the th...
2025-10-14 23:09:25 +0000 UTC View PostHope was a strange, unfamiliar taste.
For the first time in what felt like years, Sabah woke up not to the distant sound of sirens, but to the gentle chirping of birds outside her dorm room window and the far-off sound of construction. The morning light that filtered through the blinds seem...
2025-10-12 13:35:48 +0000 UTC View PostThe first coherent thought was an inventory.
Pain was a language the body spoke, and his was fluent. Conquest listened to it now, a dull and distant monologue where, not long ago, there had been a raw, screaming chorus. Fractures had been set by the marrow itself, knitting with the slow, inexorable p...
2025-10-10 21:41:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Forgot about this. Had done it a while ago in anticipation of the eventual RR upload. Was working on the next chapter for TVFTOS and remembered I had it. Also, just noticed the typo. "Of" instead of "From". Will fix later. Don't want to get anymore distracted than I already have.
Edit: Couldn't help myself. Fixed.
2025-10-07 13:25:06 +0000 UTC View PostBye-bye, Canon. Your guiding hands would be dearly missed.
The needle was a beautiful, delicate thing. Bonesaw held it up to the weak light filtering through the grimy window of their borrowed cabin, admiring the way it caught the grey afternoon. It was one of her special ones, spun from...
2025-10-07 09:36:43 +0000 UTC View Post(Tattletale)
The headache was a familiar companion, a dull, persistent throb behind her eyes that had become the background noise to her life. Three days. It had been three solid days since Greg killed Leviathan, and Lisa hadn’t stopped working. While the others were scattered across th...
2025-10-06 23:33:42 +0000 UTC View PostThe wind was a constant companion at Storm’s End, a ceaseless moaning that seeped through the thick stone walls and rattled the iron-strapped shutters of his solar. It's air thick with the smell of damp salt and old beeswax, a wild, untamed scent that was wholly different from the perfumed air of the Red Ke...
2025-10-06 19:02:25 +0000 UTC View PostPeace folks. I am almost done with the remaining chapters of Arc 6 for Refrain. Decided to post this first since I had it half done.
The ink on the last charter was still wet, a dark stain on the vellum that smelled of gall and wine. Aemond blotted it with a fine dusting of sand, his movements precise...
2025-10-06 18:54:07 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys. Sorry I've been gone so long. Had some things to sort out; wasn't in the right headspace to do much on the internet. Also took some time to finish the Leviathan arc for Refrain. Still got two chapters left for this arc, but decided to post this early since they won't constitute a cliff-hanger in the middle of the ar...
2025-10-01 14:59:21 +0000 UTC View Post(Alexandria)
The silence in the aftermath of the battle was a heavy, suffocating thing, punctuated only by the distant wail of sirens and the groan of stressed metal. She stood in the hastily repurposed National Guard base miles from the heart of the battle—now the secondary stagi...
2025-10-01 14:18:43 +0000 UTC View Post(Martha Veder)
The rhythmic clatter of the pill dispenser was the metronome of Martha’s afternoon. It was a soothing, familiar sound. The sound of order, of precision, of problems being neatly solved and placed into small plastic bottles. In this sterile world of clean white counters, a...
2025-10-01 14:16:13 +0000 UTC View Post(Glory Girl)
The air atop the skyscraper was thick with a tension that felt heavier than the storm-choked clouds overhead. Below, the city had become a theatre of chaos, a sprawling stage for the brutal ballet between man and monster. From this height, the sounds of battle were a muted ro...
2025-10-01 14:13:50 +0000 UTC View Post(Hibana)
Two weeks ago.
The whine of the powered dolly echoed down the concrete hallway, reverberating dully through the padded structure of the warehouse—his. Greg’s, Greg’s, Greg’s, Greg’s. She mouthed the word like a prayer as she watched her babies—c...
2025-10-01 14:11:09 +0000 UTC View Post(Armsmaster)
The wind was vicious this high up, shrieking and tearing at the edge of his helmet, droplets of cold rain striking the faceplate in rapid succession. The rooftop air was thick with ozone and the promise of violence. Rain, driven by a wind that tasted of salt and distant catastrophe...
2025-10-01 14:06:47 +0000 UTC View Post(Skitter)
Fluorescent lights flickering in the high ceiling. The low buzz of forced air from vents humming faintly in the background. Rows of plastic chairs, a handful of security booths, the silent, hulking forms of bulletproof glass and dull steel doors with card readers set into the walls. 2025-10-01 14:03:22 +0000 UTC View Post
I adjusted my visor again. Third time in five minutes. The workshop's familiar ozone-and-metal smell should have helped, but my nerves weren't having it.
(Kid Win)
I adjusted my visor again. Third time in five minutes. The workshop's familiar ozone-and-metal smell should have helped...
2025-10-01 13:59:15 +0000 UTC View PostMercifully outside the smog-choked confines of Brockton Bay, the estate sprawled across thirty acres of manicured New England countryside, all rolling hills, manicured lawns and artfully placed copses of trees. A winding driveway hid the gate from the house, and the house, in turn, hid its occupants from the road.
The Medhall building was a monument to a dead empire. Emily felt the ghost of Kaiser in the ostentatious lobby, in the gaudy red-and-yellow crown logo etched into the marble floor, and in the sterile, echoing silence. It was a place built on crime, laundered money, and supremacist ideology, now reduced to a neutral, hollow sp...
2025-10-01 13:54:09 +0000 UTC View Posttick-tock.
tick-tock.
3:47 PM said the small table clock. The phone on her desk buzzed once.
Not her civilian line, not Alexandria’s, but the secure one, the one that meant the call was neither optional nor convenient. Rebecca closed the file she had been p...
2025-08-25 02:58:26 +0000 UTC View Post
After getting his ass handed to him by Plot Armour and Deus Ex Machina—and spontaneously isekai'ing as a result—Conquest took the L, dusted himself off, and decided Earth BET looked like the perfect place for some soul-searching and good old-fashioned Viltrumite therapy.
Pain.
The memory surfa...
2025-08-25 02:56:40 +0000 UTC View PostShe had a drone at a legal altitude above the PRT ENE building, logging traffic patterns and correlating license plates against a database.
She had a drone at a legal altitude above the PRT ENE building, logging traffic patterns and correlating license plates against a database. She had a l...
2025-08-25 02:48:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Cosy chaos meets cape noir as a Japanese salarywoman, her overprotective dragon maid, and the perpetually peckish Kanna stumble headlong onto the cape scene of Brockton Bay—a hard-edged hero city where paperwork bites, villains circle, and getting home means righting a few local wrongs.
Morning slid i...
2025-08-25 02:44:39 +0000 UTC View PostThey ran until the sun lowered itself, the sky shading to bronze and then mauve. Heat became a leaching chill. In the high thin air, sound
They ran until the sun lowered itself, the sky shading to bronze and then mauve. Heat became a leaching chill. In the high thin air, sound did not carry; their ...
2025-08-25 02:25:44 +0000 UTC View PostHis thoughts moved with the sluggish precision of machinery long unused, each synapse firing with deliberate care.
The first data arrived through his senses in an ordered sequence: A rhythm. A body moving under him—no, carrying him—his own weight slung in the crook of another’s arm. Each footfa...
2025-08-25 02:24:35 +0000 UTC View PostThis was partially rewritten and separated from the Prologue. Refer to the prologue for more details.
Consciousness returned not as a sunrise, but as the flicker of a faulty lumen. A dull, throbbing heat. A tongue like cured leather.
He was in the desert.
The thought ...
2025-08-16 00:01:37 +0000 UTC View PostThe hum of the garage door was a grinding, weary sound, a fitting end to a day spent wrestling with a hydra of bureaucratic inefficiency and
The hum of the garage door was a grinding, weary sound, a fitting end to a day spent wrestling with a hydra of bureaucratic inefficiency and pol...
2025-08-14 00:12:45 +0000 UTC View PostThe community center had the smell of floor wax, weak coffee, wilting floral arrangements, and the cloying sweetness of store-bought pastry.
“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero”
—PAUL ATREIDES, DUNE
The...
2025-08-14 00:11:32 +0000 UTC View Post
