Iron Aria

Merc Rustad

The mountain dreams pain. Cold iron vibrates purple-blue deep in the stone, while tongues made from rot and rust bite and gnaw and hunger ever deeper.

The dam, buried like a tooth in the mountain’s narrow gums, holds back the great burgundy ocean. Otherwise it would pour into the Agate Pass Valley and swallow up the mining town at the mountain’s toes.

From an owl’s eye, the dam is almost as big as the mountain, built five hundred human-years ago. The infesting tongues burrow in from the sea, sent by angry water-memories. The sea cannot see its children in the lakes far beyond the dam. So it sends corrosion into the mountain, into the infinitesimal pores of the dam.

The mountain is being devoured from the inside and it screams. (Continue Reading…)

Desperation was the worst thing you could bring to the Emporium, but there was nowhere else to go. The Emporium was the only place that would have what I was looking for. It always had what I was looking for. So I brought my desperation with me, like an albatross around my neck, like a black spot.

You could get it all at the Emporium. But not for money; Mr. Handlesropes didn’t operate that way. Sometimes, one of the art addicts who dealt in the alley would come in and offer huge sums of stolen cash for one of his items — a piece of cured human skin bearing a rare tattoo, or the shell of a dodo egg hand-painted by a prisoner on the day before his execution — but Mr. Handlesropes would just laugh.

(Continue Reading…)