[deleted]

Thank you so much! I’m so glad you enjoyed it so much.

Teenaged boy accidentally becomes the vessel of an ancient war goddess bent on re-establishing her long lost empire. Now he has to persuade his friends to become his first cultists.

I agree that would be amazing

Good work

It was good

I never liked candles at my friends’ birthday parties as a kid.
I always moved away from the table,
fearing that as they blew it out
the flame would only transfer rather than disappear
and I would find my face awake with heat.

In middle school I was still afraid,
but made myself out to be fascinated.
I centered my science projects around flame
and became comfortable using long lighters
though I still wouldn’t touch a match.

Somehow growing into adulthood it managed to flip
intrigued by fire
yet now avoiding water
High school nightmares followed middle school trauma
drowning as much a fear as revealing my own body
so I hide myself in layers,
count the places clothing covers
and in my anxiety and exhaustion
barely manage to shower.

I should not be weak to water.
It didn’t have to be this way.
So underneath all of this fear
underneath the thought spirals that suffocate
I nurture burning rage, declaring
it’s you who made me this way.

It might not really be, but who cares?
At least my childhood wouldn’t have been so trapped
at least my memories wouldn’t be a trap
that I fall into, time and time again
replaying your comments
replaying your movements
replaying what I had no control over
forced to experience
forced to do
and each family member I turned to for help
wouldn’t meet my eye.

So I hope you suffocate here,
as I flip this match between my fingers.
What happens to me next, I hardly care
but I can’t wait to watch your home be erased
to hear the wind howling over scorched earth
and say, quietly,
you did this to yourself.

Eerie! I like it

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fucking diabolical

This is EXCELLENT! So socially smart as a reflection for how society pigeonholes and generalizes people, wrapped in a fantastical narrative that’s fun to read. LOVED IT!!!

I decimated the land; razed its mountains to the ground, burned the very foundations of their culture. There was nothing, only ash in heaps like a black desert.

When my king sent men to salt the ground, I wept. I had fought so hard to liberate the countryside for my people, but my people would not be able to use it. Tears flooded the dips of the ashen dunes, muddled with the blood of 3 dozen soldier's heads skewered on pikes, encircling the area. Not even the buzzards dared to feast upon them.

In time, the ashes were disturbed by a new tribe of man. They woke from beneath the earth and drank from the rivers of my ire to quench their charred and parched throats. Then they inhaled life, the winds of change filling them with curiosity and adventure. They began to stand and to walk about the scarred landscape. They learned to speak with each other and together they cried, for theirs was a doomed fate.

Pitty imbedded itself in my heart, and sprouted a tree of fruit from which I had power to pluck. I gave it to them, and taught them to open it. They learned to eat of its flesh, and to propagate its seeds, so that their children might taste it one day too. The Ire Rivers, as they would be called by man, flourished with life. They knew bountiful harvest from soil laden with the nourishing silt of forgotten lives. They knew peace everlasting, protected by the daunting Pillars of Loyal Fallicy. The heads were now perrified in the wood of wreathes once placed upon them. They are now a ring of wide trees that bare the haunting look of fear the soldier's wore that dreadful day. Not even the bravest of raiders cross the threshold of their roots.

I watch them, playing, growing, dying. They live short lives, but filled with eternal joy. Nestled in their pocket of peace, they thrived as a society and advanced. The once harsh air was now enjoyed by many for its sweet floral fragrance, and the water once salty with tears was now fresh with life and ecosystems. My sword, once plunged into the ground in triumphant victory on a battlefield of fire and flesh, now stood tall in the center of their city. When threats would emerge, I would come down from the heavens to take up the blade in their defense. Dragons, liches, falling stars, all bested to protect them.

And they worship me as their god. They pray and make rituals, thinking I will hear them better. I hear them. I cannot give them what they ask, but for as long as my wits are sharp, and my hand unbound, I will ensure their livelyhood no matter the cost.

I expected it to be more difficult.

It was a solid plan, don't get me wrong, but I really thought it would need several upgrades and refinements before it worked. I was expecting that the first time would mostly be an inconvenience for him - for someone so famed for last-minute, death-defying escapes - and a learning experience for me. I thought I'd spend months, years, tinkering with the formula, finding better and more subtle ways to hide traps, before I finally brought him down.

But no! First time, total victory. I guess it's easy to get complacent when no one you normally grapple with is taking it seriously either. I guess it's easy to spend as little time on your own safety as you do thinking about collataral damage when you - genuinely - believe you're the 'next step of evolution'.

Total cost to me: $32.80, including shipping. Most of that went to high-tension braided fishing wire, the rest to the various screws and fixings I needed to hang it. $32.80's not a high price to pay to kill a demigod, especially not compared to the cost I'd paid so far for his continued existence.

I set it all up myself; it's easier to keep a secret between only one person, and most people - somehow - still think of heroes as a net benefit. I waited until night fell, and then snuck out to string my wire across the alleyway.

It's not a well-trafficked alley. The streets on either side are nicer to walk along, and - given the state of the concrete and the broken bottles - it's actually less efficient to cut through it than to go round. The only reason you'd ever really take it in a hurry would be if you were the sort of person who prided themselves on always taking the most efficient route between any two points - no matter what or who was in your way - and you happened to be in exactly the right place at the right time.

I've watched a thousand videos of him a thousand times. He was really very predictable: stimulus led immediately to response. No matter what else was going on, if he heard the right trigger sound - maniacal laughter, the tread of a killbot, the whine of a recharging laser - he was off in a split second.

He tookk the simplest possible route between point A and point B that doesn't involve literally going through a wall, every time. Super-speed, not invulnerability, you see. So an alley he happened to be walking past at that exact moment? You knew he'd head down it. Likewise a plateglass window, a hot dog stand, a woman doing her shopping: if he was quick enough and it was small enough to shoulder aside or charge through, he went for it.

So what if the window breaks? So what if she falls, and hits her head? He's off saving the city, chasing down some mutant doctor with plans to briefly kidnap the mayor. So what if insurance won't pay out, or she dies on a street corner because the emergency services don't interfere in 'hero activity'? So what if people lose everything while he's posing for action shots with his opponent?

I stood at one end of the alley. Only a few yards - not that he would remember - from where it all happened. I shouted, with as much theatricality as I could muster, the name of his 'nemesis'. They belong to the same golf club.

At the other end of the alley, he heard me. Abandoned his date outside the same cheap restaurant he took them all to. Took off like lightning, like a cheetah, like someone so much faster than a normal person he'd forgotten that they still mattered. The wire took him in the throat.

It was anti-climactic. As I said, no death-defying escape, no snappy one-liner. It didn't kill him, but it stopped him dead, and pain wasn't something he'd ever had to get used to. He just lay there, wheezing, hands clutched to his throat, but he didn't do anything to help himself. Pathetic.

She'd not had his advantages. Smaller, weaker - 'mundane', they call it. But she fought in a way he didn't - held her shattered skull together, crawled towards help that arrived two hours too late. 'Heroic' is the word they use to describe him.

I wasn't sure what to do. Remember, I hadn't really expected this to work - this was a fact-finding mission, nothing more. But as he lay there, sobbing for air, it seemed foolish not to take advantage of the opportunity.

A brick, in the end. Not a ray gun, or a force blast, or a super-powered punch. Not, I imagine, the way he planned to go, if he was even capable of contemplating meaningful defeat. Her name was the last word he heard, though I'm not sure how many of the wet, heavy thuds he remained conscious for.

Obviously they caught me - we wouldn't be talking otherwise. With their tech, and their psychics, escape was never on the cards. I didn't put up a fight, though it occurred to me, given how easily he'd gone down, that I might have made a decent go of one. But no - the system's rotten, for sure, but my personal grievance is done. Let others, when they realise how tarnished those shiny supers are, take up the fight.

I'm content to sit here. To spend most of my time in solitary, as I've done ever since she died. To ignore the constant requests from reporters for interviews, the endless speculation as to motive. Was I brainwashed? Am I a new model of killbot, indistinguishable from a human? Perhaps a secret, forgotten supervillain? I don't care if they speculate, assign me a name, a costume, imagined elaborate crimes and a rivalry stretching back decades. It doesn't matter.

People tell you - it's a cliché at this point - that revenge isn't worth it. That it doesn't fill the emptiness, that the pain doesn't fade. I'm sure that's true. But what I did there - in that dark alley with a bloodstained brick - was at least as much justice as revenge, and justice, let me tell you, is a balm for the soul.

The Unseeing Thing

In 1923 my grandfather passed away, and left me his estate. The influenza outbreak of a few years earlier had made me his only living relative, and left us both miserable. Before he died he sent me a series of cryptic notes about a wolf at the top of the stairs.

He was not ripped to shreds. He lost his mind and died out on the estate in his nightclothes. Of course I do not mean to disparage his character; it was 1923. It had been a strange and testing ten years for both of us. He was left alone in a large house, and had buried his wife and offspring and I'd buried my siblings and parents. My father's funeral was the last time we saw each other.

He tended to ramble about an unseeing black canid, that would perch upon the stairs. He said he could feel its gaze upon him, constantly judging him, and that it found him unworthy and lacking. This was not superstition. His mind had broken. When he was found frozen solid in a field, his dog was next to him, trying to keep him warm. He had not been torn to shreds, or consumed in any way.

The simple creature he had loved so, had loved him so. This blind dog could see only him, while he saw things no eyes could detect. A man in control of himself is not found frozen solid in his nightclothes. A man in control of himself does not jump at every noise and scare himself to death at the sight of a dog's cataracts in the dark.

It does bother me though that this dog, this blind dog, can make eye contact with me. She'd been old and blind since I was young. She was always with him, and I can remember feeding her twigs and dried leaves as an infant.

This is when a cold chill goes down my spine. I was born in 1891. As I put down my pen and journal, I am filled with a sense of dread. When I look behind me there will be the unseeing thing, looking for eye contact. I can feel its gaze on me, boring into me, this thing that should not be. I wonder if I should pretend to go to bed, and suddenly I know how my grandfather died.

E: You said "Lovecraft" and I've been dreaming of a blind dog that died a long time ago, and a spooky old house.

Thanks, this is only my second time writing one of these. Criticism welcome.

Pulp Cthulhu in a nutshell

Thanks so much! The part 2 request always feels like the highest compliment here lol. That being said I think I’m leaving this one here. If I were to continue it I think I’d want to rewrite part 1 a bit and turn it into a full length short story but it’s just not quite worth the trouble I’m afraid. x_x

Welcome to the Prompt! All top-level comments must be a story or poem. Reply here for other comments.

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Welcome to the Prompt! All top-level comments must be a story or poem. Reply here for other comments.

Reminders:

>* No AI-generated reponses 🤖 >* Stories 100 words+. Poems 30+ but include "[Poem]" >* Responses don't have to fulfill every detail >* [RF] and [SP] for stricter titles >* Be civil in any feedback and follow the rules

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He rolled up to the table with his morning coffee, intent to farm the rows of his mind. Such poor aging soil for the once-beautiful moments captured on film in stacks before him.

His hand shook as he slowly lifted another photo, trying to focus. The fashion familiar, the fraternal bonds fond, but the faces -- the faces --

He cursed the faulty memory he tried to furbish. Each photo newly marked and added to that stack sickened him. Failure wasn’t fatal, but forgetting was painful -- once intimates filling his life with joy now reduced to half-remembered, barely readable names.

Why was time so cruel? One day he might forget this exercise, forget what he had forgotten -- would he find peace then? For now he pressed his face into the crook of his elbow, his glasses sliding off, and wept for the memories that died too early on the vine.

(Word count: 146. Please let me know what you like/dislike about the post. Thank you in advance for your time and attention. Other works can also be found linked in r/atcroft_wordcraft.)

to have and to hate

tw:contains questionable ethics

“Are you sure you want to do this?” the farm owner asked, brandishing a tool—a screwdriver of a fashion—in a newly-furbished arm.

“I need those eyeballs, Jon. These faulty ones they gave me aren’t worth the money I spent on them.”

“Still having those dreams, are you?”

“I’m plagued by the memory echoes. I get locked in them for what feels like hours. Forgetting is painful,” she cried.

The man patted her on the arm. “That’s the difficulty with fresh-dead things.”

“I tried, so hard.”

The cryo farm was filled with foragers searching for parts. She waited for his direction.

“I have a few people here that have been brain-dead for a long time. Their parts will cost a lot more but I’m sure we can come to an arrangement,” he said, cocking his head to the side.

She didn’t hesitate before transferring a million credits to him.

“I see you were serious,” Jon muttered, shaking his head at the ease with which she dropped the money.

“I am desperate,” she whispered.

“I know, my sweet. I know.”

He gave her the tablet to read over her file, an almost fraternal softness to his eyes. She would believe it if she didn’t know his true nature.

“Failure to assimilate this part will not be fatal?” she asked.

“No, it’s not fatal.”

“I’m ready,” she whispered, with a determined nod.

wc:229

Fire

There's a fire in my heart.
Where it sits and writhes and burns.
And I tire and I tumble from the venom that it spurns.
Does the world I interact with see me kindly or with hate? Would they rescue me, or watch me as they leave me to my fate? Could I stand up to the bullies and the terrors in the night? And how do I discover if these dogs will bark or bite?

There's a fire in my brain.
When I'm tired and depleted.
So I wonder and I ponder of the ways that I am treated.
And do I so deserve this? Should I find a clever quip? Fight back or scare it off —force the narrative to flip? In my favor or against, do I really care at all? Is the likelihood of victory still worth it if I fall?

There's a fire in my stomach.
And I'd rather it was not.
It feels queasy and uneasy and discordant in that spot.
Should I even bother then, to investigate this state? Would it let me turn the tables or already be too late? Can I force it, can I chase it, from the darkness of this pit? Can I stomp and scream and holler, or erase it with some wit?

There's a fire in my eyes.
And here it feels okay.
I will use it and peruse it just a little if I may.
Let me find the clever meanings. Will they answer, will they fuel? Will they understand my gesture or decide me to be cruel? Can I keep them dancing maybe, to the rhythm of this beat? Let me coax them ever gently, to their imminent defeat.

*************

WC: 284

Edits: formatting and the likes

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Now I’m imagining this is a Metal Gear with its own sentience, long after the fall of organized civilization.

It's not my best but... Criticism? What should I focus on improving most, for future references?