So many aspects to every facet of life, the world. Like a fractal that starts with one thought and spreads outward connecting everything, everyone, everywhere, even though outside our perception. Find the connections and you have the keys to everything.

She swayed down the street, gazelle-like and teetering on her stilettos. Her makeup was immaculate.

Inspired by Kelly’s prompt, “horses in a field.”

“Have you ever seen anything like it before?” Chardra swung the beam of light at the grass, and it fell away in a sheet that smoked momentarily. An old woman sat next to her atop the hill. Graying blonde eyebrows rose in surprise, but her features remained otherwise impassive as she stared across the strange landscape. Snow drifted across sandy desert plains, and a rainbow-hued herd of horses appeared on the horizon.

She shook her head. “You say you took this from a man made of moonsilver?”

“Yes, and after he was dead, his body melted away into a sort of…sludge. And then it disappeared altogether. It was the strangest thing I think I’ve ever seen, Tressa.”

Inspired by Eddy’s prompt, “chasm leaping.”

“It’s incredible,” she breathed into the sky. The precipice dropped away into the distance below her toes.

Inspired by MCA Hogarth’s prompt, “fever-real.”

She had been ill, Tressa remembered, recalling in that distant, fuzzy sort of way you do halfway between dreaming and waking. The winds that blew in from the wylds had brought the Icewalker village ghostly voices and an ague that mysteriously affected only those with the Sight. She’d lain shaking from fever and chills for a week, but now found herself walking alone outside in the moonlight, expectation hanging in the air like the world holding its breath.

Inspired by Erin’s prompt, “Entropy.”

The dials rolled slowly under Starkov’s fingers, alternating static and dead air. It’d been two weeks with no contact. Shut away in their dimly-lit listening post, reports from HQ were the only indication that the outside world still existed at all. Manning his station had become reflexive: turn two degrees; stop; two degrees; static; pause; nothing; continue two degrees. Day after day, it’d become easy to convince himself that the enemy might be gone for good, but he kept his ear to the air. There was no telling when a signal might pop up again.

“Don’t go,” she said quietly, and the rain pounded away the tears, leaving trails of it’s own.

He took her face in his hands and kissed her softly, a bittersweet sensation prickling where his lips brushed the corner of her own. The best and worst kiss she had ever been given. Then he turned and walked away, and she could do nothing but stand in the puddles and watch his back fade into the storm.

Note: This is a cleaned up/edited “flash fiction” version of a dream. Effort has been made to stay as true to the dream itself as possible.

Just when I thought we would never be done with walking, the undergrowth cleared, and there, finally, terrifying, was the beast. It stood watching us as if it had been waiting all along for our arrival. Its red aura painted a wicked, pulsing light on the trees around it, their bark seeming to ripple and wither away in its glow…

I met Death on the way home from work last night. And why not? He was standing on the corner in the same place he always was. I walked right up and asked for a light. Same as always…