“Did you really kill a dragon, Gran’ma?”
Hepsy had to hide a smile and scooped her youngest grandson into a hug. It was the end of his fifth birthday party and he had been running around waving the wooden sword his grandfather had made for him, pretending to kill imaginary monsters in the vegetable patch. Now the family sat at table eating a simple birthday meal. Hepsy and her husband, Poll, their middle son and his wife and five grandchildren ranging from mid-teens to the birthday boy.
“Who’s been telling you tales like that?” she asked.
“Was Da. He said you killed a dragon, you and Gran’da. Is it true?”
Something in his tone made her realise it was not just a question wanting a story. She released her grandson and caught her son’s eye. He swallowed the mouthful he was chewing and sat back in his chair.
“Word is there’s a dragon back on High Top. Been taking cows from Vasserdale and burned a farm to the ground. Shal willing, it won’t fly this way.”
“Dragons don’t just turn up places,” Poll said. “They have to be hatched and that takes a lot of magic. It means they will have a master.”
“Or a mistress,” Hepsy put in. “Is there any word of a dragon being seen on Prank’s Peak or Scale Height?”
Her son shrugged.
“Those places are the other side of the mountains. We don’t get word from there often. Was a minstrel up from Durmouth though. Seems there’s war over the Marches again. Hobs and trolls.”
“When I’m grown up I’m going to fight hobs and trolls.”
Hepsy mussed her grandson’s soft hair.
“That’s just what your da said at your age, and now look at him, the finest carpenter in Wyvernvale.”

After the family had gone, Hepsy went into her still room where she made potions and poultices, pickles and jams and pulled out the chest from beneath her work counter,  where she pushed it away over thirty years before. Opening the lid she took out the two pieces of her staff and fitted them together, murmuring some words as she did so.
Then she went out and stood in their small garden, shielding her eyes from the low sun to look towards the mountains. High Top could be seen piercing the sky with its needle spire of rock. What she could not see from below though was the steep path that wound up to the plateau from which the steeple of stone began. Nor could she see the cave mouth that led to the lair. But memory told her they were there. Memory and loss.
A sound made her turn.
“You gave me a promise you’d not be using that anymore,” Hepsy said, as Poll came out of the house, her gaze rested on the sword he held in one hand, it’s blade shimmering with a blue light so the runes etched into it stood out. Then she gave a little sigh. “But then I gave you a promise I’d not be using this.” She hefted the staff and small sparks shimmered like dust motes in the air around it. “Looks like we both done broke that vow. But the big question is, what should we be doing?”
“We knew it would happen again,” Poll said, his voice heavy with sorrow. He slid the sword home into the loop on his belt and the blue light faded. Hepsy noticed the buckle was three notches up from the mark showing where he used to wear it. It was not all that had changed since he last took up that sword. His hair then had been thick and black, now it left the top of his head uncovered and was thinning and grey. But then her hair had once been the colour of a wheatfield before the harvest and now was nearly as white as the melting snows.
“We knew,” she agreed. “But I’d not thought t’would be in our lifetime. I thought we’d won the right to have our peace. We’re too old to do it all again. Not now.”
Poll put his arm around her and held her close.
“If not us – then who? The children? The grandchildren?”
Now that was a thought too terrible to dwell upon and Hepsy shook her head. “No. But it’s a dreadful long walk up to High Top and my back and your knee…”
“My knee will bear my weight long enough for what we have to do,” he said gently. “Besides, we’ll take horses this time. Hue owes me for last winter still, he’ll let us have two of his hill ponies.”
Which was a comforting thought because it really was a parlous long way and a terrible steep climb up the mountains. She shivered slightly at the memory and Poll hugged her.
“Less of that, woman. You pack what we need and I’ll go see Hue. We can set out tomorrow with first light. We’ll have to try to find the others and that won’t be easy.”
Hepsy nodded and he released her, his gnarled hands gripping her, work-worn fingers for a moment as he did so.
“They might be dead,” she said. “Do you think we can do it without them?”
Poll drew in a deep breath and looked out towards the mountains, his gaze homing where hers had, to the needle of stone above High Top. “I don’t know, love. I think we need four of us to unlock the seals, but… Well, let’s put out that fire when we can see if it’s burning.”
He was right. Of course. Which left just one question in Hepsy’s burdened heart.
“What do we tell the children?”
For a moment she wondered if he had heard her. She hadn’t spoken loudly and his hearing was no longer so perfect. But then he looked down at her and smiled sadly.
“I think we should tell them nothing,” he said. “They wouldn’t understand.”

The next day they were up before the dawn and Hespy fed the chickens a final time and explained to them that Hue’s wife had promised to come feed them in her absence. That done she went inside and searched deep in her clothes chest. It was still there. At the bottom. She looked at the long robe with its split skirt and fingered the heavy fabric, embroidered with gold and silver symbols with regret. She would no more fit that any more than she would the wedding dress she had given to her eldest daughter. Instead, she chose her most practical clothes and a pair of Poll’s old breeches and decided that maybe looking the part wasn’t so important anymore. She put her hair into a braid and studied the weather-worn face that looked back at her critically from the small hand mirror.
“Still as beautiful as ever,” Poll told her and for a moment his face and hers were captured in the same glass. This mirror never lied and it showed him as he was, which was always a reassurance.
“You and your silver tongue.” She laughed, slipping the mirror into the pouch at her belt where she had already secured some of her most potent potions. You never knew, after all.
They rode out under cloudy skies without a backwards glance.
The countryside swept down from their village to where the River Wyvern wove its way along the bottom of the vale. It was the picture of peace and rustic harmony, with cottages and houses dotting the landscape, roofs tiled with the blue flecked slate from local quarries and walls built from the dark grey rock brought down from the mountains. 
The mountains themselves lurked like ominous misshapen giants, stretching fingers or lifting shoulders towards the sky. From the gentle slopes of the vale, they rose to bleak and desolate heights.
The two barrel-shaped hill-ponies seemed happy enough to set a smart pace. Poll had managed to find his old dragonhide targe which he looped over his back and Hepsy was pleased to see the gemstone set in the pommel of his dagger was not glowing. Maybe things were not so desperate as they thought? Maybe it was all rumour and no truth? Maybe…

E.M. Swift-Hook

The artwork was inspired by a description in this piece and is by Ian Bristow. You can view the creation of it here and enjoy the music he composed that the story also inspired, perhaps whilst reading…

Missus D. Precious
Wishes her tresses
Went with her dresses
So grand.

She never impresses
As her hair transgresses
Coalesces in messes
Unplanned.

Missus D. Precious
Addresses her tresses
Cuts and represses
By hand.

Each gown that caresses
The bald Missus Precious
Is now matched by head-dresses
and bands.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Jane Jago’s strange sci-fi is being presented by Tall Tale TV

When Cargo Freighter Zulu/973 found it, the sleek little flitter was floating aimlessly in space, sort of halfway between the mining belt at Beta#32 and the transport station that orbited Jupiter II. It was much more elegant and aerodynamic looking than the ugly cargo hauler that nudged it with an armoured loading claw. The claw poked a bit more firmly and it drifted, with no more sense of direction than any of the other bits of space junk the traders had amassed on their journey.
    “Seems dead.” Captain Clearwater remarked to nobody in particular. “Let’s have a look then.”
    His communications officer turned the cargo hauler’s docking camera to face the wreck. She seemed to be in going on for perfect condition – clean and shiny and with some sort of earthside oriental script scrawled across her slightly flared bow.
    “Get Leah up here.”
    Somebody scrambled. Clearwater wasn’t a man to be kept waiting. Leah Su arrived promptly. She was as poised and unruffled as ever, but her bulky escort was red-faced and sweating. 
    “Su reporting for duty, sir.”
    “You’re the nearest thing to a linguist we have hereabouts. Can you read the writing on that ship?”
    “More or less, sir. It says something like ‘sea of stars’. Very roughly. I guess it is the name of the vessel.”
    “Probably is. Can you see an identifier?”
    “No sir.”
    “Me neither. And I reckon that makes it fair game. Whatever spoilt rich boy lost his toy out here, I’m thinking finders keepers. Even if nobody has put a bounty on her, she should fetch a few bob for salvage. I’m going over to have a look. Take the con Su.”
    Clearwater may have been greedy and even unprincipled, but he wasn’t fool enough to go and inspect a possible salvage vessel on his own. He gathered up a sizeable force, and broke out the blasters. 
    In the end, there were a dozen space stevedores, wearing their exoskeleton work suits, in the airlock, along with the captain, his first officer and the ship’s metallurgist. The inside door sealed and they put on their helmets before Su began pumping out the air. It took a good ten minutes before it was safe to open the big doors into the blackness of space.
    As the doors slowly slid back into their pockets in the hull, Clearwater straddled a jet scoot and headed for the flitter. First officer Ganges clutched the sissy bar behind his captain’s ample backside, and the rest formed a chain behind Ganges clipped together by lanyards attached to their tool belts. It wasn’t the most comfortable way to travel. But it wasted the least energy and Christopher Clearwater abhorred waste. Particularly if he was paying for whatever was being wasted.

You can hear the rest of the story at Tall Tale TV

To celebrate our third birthday at the beginning of July, the Working Title Blog held a drabble writing competition.

As it is our third birthday competition we have three Honourable Mentions. This one is from Rob Edwards.

Tea-time arrived without resolution. Glares became words; jostling escalated into pushing. Eventually, justicemen escorted them before wise King Volodon.

He studied the source of contention. “Whose cake is this?”

“Mine, my lord,” declared Mrs Drizzle.

“Not hers. I baked tirelessly all day,” countered Victoria.

“Using produce stolen from our farm,” her nemesis spluttered. “Changing ownership requires more than applying heat!”

Royal consideration mulled both sides carefully. “We must simply divide yon dessert, bisecting with sharpened sword.”

Miss Sponge nodded, yet goodwife Lemon cried in horror.

“True passion reveals perfect justice! Bring forth a second cake. Bestow it upon that virtuous farmer”

It was quiet in the garden and Leonore sunk to her knees, grateful for solitude and silence. As the sun dipped below the horizon a cool, white moon illuminated the jasmine that crept up the side of the garage. The heady scent filled the air, and a cloud of tiny white moths gathered among the star-like flowers.
Suddenly almost unbearably weary, Leonore lay back in the cool grass. Tears pricked behind her eyelids as a cold weight settled on her shoulders. She sat up and hugged her knees to her chest, feeling the cooling air against her hot cheeks.
How long she sat in silence she didn’t know, and then she heard a voice.
“Alone and sad? Why so?”
Her eyes snapped open, but she could see nobody.
She heard a chuckle.
“You will only see me if you close your eyes.”
She obeyed and found herself looking into a pair of golden orbs with vertical reptilian pupils. She concentrated and slowly, slowly a face assembled itself around the eyes.
“Are you a dragon?”
“I am whatever you want me to be…”
Leonore found herself laughing.
“That’s a politician’s answer if ever I heard one.”
The dragon smiled dragonishly and blew a breath into her face. She smelled menthe and cinnamon and something hot and exciting.
“Oh. I can smell you.”
“Of course you can. Now you can open your eyes.”
The dragon sat beside her. His iridescent scales seemed to gather the moonlight and reflect it back in a myriad of shifting colours. She looked at him for a very long moment.
“But I don’t believe in dragons.”
“Of course you do. You wouldn’t be able to see me if not.”
“What do you mean?”
He showed his teeth in what looked like genuine amusement.
“It’s elemental my dear, it is only belief that makes dragons visible. Unbelievers can never see us.”
“Never?”
“Not ever. If an unbeliever was sitting next to you he or she would neither be able to see nor hear me.”
Leonore remained unconvinced, but was pleased by the company anyway.
“What is your name?”
“I am R’u’uth. And you are L’e’onore.”
Leonore tried both names, rolling them around on her tongue as if to taste them. Finding them pleasing she laughed delightedly.
R’u’uth laughed too.
“That’s better. You don’t sound sad any more.”
“I don’t feel sad.”
“Good. But now you need to sleep.”
“Sleep. If only I could.”
The dragon breathed on her and she felt the benison of his presence.
“Lean on me and you shall sleep.”
She frowned but found herself drawn towards the shining presence as iron is drawn to a magnet. Before she knew she had even moved, her back was resting against the dragon’s smooth spicy-smelling skin. Even as she would have protested, her eyelids drooped and she drifted gently into slumber.

She awoke early in the morning with the rising sun in her eyes. For a moment she didn’t know where she was or how she got there. She stretched and heard a chuckle. She turned and spread her hands against R’u’uth’s smooth warm scales.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
He blew a breath on her and spread his shining leathery wings.
“Until later.”

Jane Jago

Pearls of wisdom from an octogenarian who’s seen it all…

Do not refer to me as an ‘elderly lady’

In the surgery of a doctor who looked to be about fourteen years old – okay, I may have been being uncooperative because he called for reinforcements.

Says to the occupant of the next room: “I have an elderly lady here refusing blood pressure medication.”

I couldn’t resist: “I can hear you. And I ain’t no lady.”

I don’t guess I’ll be seeing that doctor again. 

But I was cross. The term elderly lady is both patronising and pejorative. Had he said cackling crone I’d have laughed. And I might even have taken his fucking tablets. As it was. I walked 

Being a wizard in a world where magic wasn’t supposed to exist wasn’t easy. His studies took all his time and left little for earning the money he needed to support himself. So home for Brandon Grey was a rented bedsit on the second floor of a converted suburban house. He was very tired having been up since dawn to practice a new incantation and then an afternoon stint as an Uber driver had tested his goodwill to humanity to its limit.
“Mr. Grey?”
Brandon hesitated between steps and resisted the impulse to swear. Instead, as he turned, his face was already wallpapered with a polite smile.
“Mrs. Howard!” His tone made of the name an answer to her question.
Mrs. Howard was his landlady. She lived on the ground floor. A big-boned thirty-something divorcee with a pack of rude children and a permanent short temper. From the open door behind her he could hear sounds of youthful discontent.
“It’s mine!”
“Gerroff me!” Then an ear-piercing shriek of protest.
“Mum – Shane’s taken the controller again!”
Despite the title being given three distinct syllables of intonation, ‘Mum’ seemed not to hear.
“You put out your rubbish Mr. Grey? It’s bin day tomorrow.”
Brandon maintained the smile and broadened it.
“I’ll do that as soon as I have got myself in,” he assured her. 
“Great and can you wheel the bin ‘round the front when you’re done?”
His smile still fixed Brandon assented. But his thoughts were traitors to the smile. He was getting fed up of being used as an odd-job man for the Howards. Seemed not a day went by and he was asked to do one job or another. Another yell of protest from behind Mrs. Howard decided him.
“But you know, your Shane is a big lad now. He could do with that kind of responsibility. Why don’t you get him to do it?”
As he spoke he added a small push of willpower. But Mrs. Howard had seen off two husbands and the bailiffs. She stared back nonplussed.
“I don’t think so. It is a heavy job.”
Brandon held her gaze and tried harder. No words were spoken. For a moment the woman looked perplexed, then her expression cleared. She half turned her head towards the open door and called out.
“Shane, you stop playing that video game and go do the rubbish!”
“But mum you said you’d get the poxy old lodger to do it!”
It was a red rag to a bull and Brandon was forgotten as she stormed back into the lower apartment yelling loudly and apparently adding to the chaos rather than resolving it in any measure at all.
Allowing himself a moment of satisfaction, Brandon opened his front door, dropped his jacket on the couch and made a coffee.

E.M. Swift-Hook

You’re new, did Sals hire you – the manager?

Thought so.

Me?

Oh, I’m always here, propping up the bar. Ain’t that the lie now? It’s propping me, of course.

Used to be two of us, Johnny and me, til Johnny missed one too many protection payments. They didn’t mean to kill him, just beat him up a bit. But his heart…

‘Course was years ago, now it’s just me. Me and my drinkie, here.

None of your business if I’ve had too many.

What’d’ya mean haven’t I a home to go to?

I’m home already. I own this damn bar.

E.M. Swift-Hook

“A people who move not through space-time, but through the limitless dimensions which lie outside and between time and space.”

Fun.

Playing with impossibilities, as the concept bounced within, [^] modulated the parameters one chose to create new variations. Liberally hiving energy through the Concept’s limitations, perceiving the expansion patterns and wondering where the limits might expire. One’s engagement intensity peaked as a promising parabola extruded through multiple frequencies, tiering their continuity in a brilliantly original manner, so an alternative hierarchy of perceived order shimmered into reality.

Delight.

[^] released the unfinished concept and harmonized oneself with this new perception, strimming the drifts of ungainly chaos from the extreme boundaries one had created until the whole seemed honed to a viable core, budding into a new authenticity.

>>that seems to be very unstable, my kin{0ne}, you might try at least anchoring it in some known tier, offer some link to actuality. If not, you know it is gone<<

The harmonization broke unexpectedly through the strain of focus in which [^] held the Concept and the whole wavered, releasing tendrils of minor tiered realities that slipped away diminishing the whole. [^] surveyed the remains with brief regret. No matter. One could play afresh. One snapped the energy away and the concept ceased.

[+] exuded regret.

>>that was beautiful, you could still replicate it and strive to stabilize the dimensionality. maybe make it less extreme. you are so much for always pushing the limits<<

Amusement.

>>that is where the beauty lies, [+] , spiraling up out, on and over the edge of possibility<<

The start of the story Wondrous Strange by E.M. Swift-Hook a Fortunes Fools story from the Scifi Roundtable‘s The Quantum Soul anthology.

Pearls of wisdom from an octogenarian who’s seen it all…

Weird Cutlery

Open your cutlery drawer and stare inside. Is there any weird stuff? Obviously I’m not interested in why you keep your vibrator in there.

No what I’m on about is ‘specialised’ cutlery. 

Do you have? 

Soup spoons

Tiny weeny mustard spoons

Steak knives

Fish knives and forks

Sporks

Chopsticks

Electric carving knife 

If you can answer yes to any of the above I have one question. Why?

I have managed to eat food for the better part of ninety years without resorting to weirdness. Why the fuck can’t you? All you need is a knife, fork, and spoon. And don’t get me started on chopsticks