When Narcissus gazed into the pond, and saw the wonder of the universe in the beauty of his own reflection, all meaning was drained from his physical flesh. At that exact moment of realization, he withered into nothingness, for his image had superseded his presence in reality. A single flower grew in his place, one which bore his name, and its own reflection served as its roots.
It came to pass that a single honeybee landed on this flower, and that honeybee's reflection landed on the flower's reflection. After gathering pollen from its perfect corona, the honeybee fluttered eastward, towards the night sky, and its mirror image fluttered westward, towards the setting sun. It was at this precise moment that these two worlds diverged for the first time.
Because of their compound eyes, insects are more accustomed to the plurality of truth than creatures of larger stature. For the honeybee, however, this plurality became much more apparent than normal. Every time it visited the Narcissus flower, more and more of its visual receptors began to display life in a different reality than the one it currently occupied. Lacking the intellect to understand such things, however, it simply continued its mission, bumbling about from flower to flower.
In this manner, a single honeybee managed to disrupt the integrity of the cosmos as a whole. After several such visits, more honeybees existed in reality’s mirror image than existed within reality itself. Some of these extraneous bees even managed to breed, resulting in permanent damage to the symmetry between worlds.
These days, there are beekeepers who take advantage of this anomalous behavior. If one such desynchronized bee is enclosed within a chamber of opposing mirrors, it can then form a complete hive alongside its own infinite reflections. Such a hive has no queen, resulting in something more of a honeybee republic. Without a monarch to serve, the colony behaves in a more egalitarian manner than nature typically allows, though such behavior can never last more than a single generation.
In order for this type of hive to be established, its volume must be completely enclosed from outside, so that no external light may enter. This is because reflections can only cross through the surface of a mirror while they are not externally observable. While the colorless honey that results of this process is a delicacy, it is impossible to know exactly how it is made. The bees are clearly gathering pollen from somewhere, though it is a place that human eyes will never see; peering inside never reveals more than a single, lonely insect bouncing against its walls.
Bees have little regard for human conceptions of geometry.
It is difficult to provide mirror hives with proper funerals.
When mirrors fall out of sync, bad things can happen.
As whiskey ages, there is always an amount that evaporates from within the barrel, referred to by those who produce it as "the angel's share." Despite the beverage’s association with sin, its manufacturing is one path by which mankind can barter with the heavens; a large enough tithe of fine Bourbon can bring with it returns of divine favor and forgiveness.
When Narcissus gazed into the pond, and saw the wonder of the universe in the beauty of his own reflection, all meaning was drained from his physical flesh. At that exact moment of realization, he withered into nothingness, for his image had superceded his presence in reality. A single flower grew in his place, one which bore his name, and its own reflection served as its roots.
Among scorpions, there exists a religion not of tradition, but rather, one of instinct. Though they lack the neurological sophistication required to comprehend such concepts as God or eternity, their genetic memory leaves just enough room to accommodate one curious ritual.
Phlebic White was originally marketed to the public as “the world’s first intelligent lubricant,” a slogan which holds to this day. Rather than passively facilitating motion in the same manner as oil or grease, this pearlescent substance does so actively. Every droplet of the fluid contains millions of individual, microscopic cells, which wobble, throb, and vibrate when exposed to heat. They learn from repetitive motion, as well as from interactions with one another, allowing them to become a churning milk of pressurized horsepower.
Every now and then, the owl in the bottle pretends to be solid. It presses its wandering eyes against the inner surface of the glass, watchful and eager, searching the room for prey beyond its reach. Eventually, the twin orbs tire of their vigil and swirl away, back into the pool of liquid feathers from which they emerged.
The imported jar is filled to its midpoint with a soft, transparent dust which, according to its label, is a form of “powdered water.” The printed instructions on its reverse are easy to follow:
1. Fill the container to just beneath its lid with liquid water.
2. Insert cork.
3. Shake vigorously for thirty seconds.
Old-fashioned radios produced sound by boiling liquid lightning. The distinctive drone that emerged, of churning static and leaping foam, came to be known as “white noise.” This term is said by some to be arbitrary in origin, though others believe it was derived from the color of the electric vapor that churned through the innards of these devices.
An alluvium of jade velvet can be seen swirling throughout the jar, occasionally catching a glimmer of sunlight. When shaken, the contents appear torn and tattered by the turbulence, yet eventually return to their stable, undifferentiated flow.
There are nine isotopes of elemental fire which can be found in nature, though only five of these are stable. Classical fire, the sort which lights candles and powers engines, consists on the atomic level of exactly eight protons, eight neutrons, and eight electrons. For this reason, it is often mistaken for oxygen during experiments in modern chemistry. Remove one neutron from this arrangement, and the resultant isotope is phlogiston, classical fire’s nearly indistinguishable cousin. Remove yet another neutron, however, and the result is a volatile substance known to natural philosophers as phlox borealis.
It has long been known that the molecular structure of diamond renders it extraordinarily durable. This hardness is actually twofold in nature, however; in addition to resisting external forces, it also prevents the eruption of a deep, internal pressure. When the cubical arrangement of atoms is disrupted, this can cause the release of a substance known as “diamond nectar.”
The black pear remains under extreme pressure after being plucked from its branch; before it can be eaten, it must be pierced with a knife, then allowed to bleed for three days. While the teeth and bones must eventually be removed as well, this drains the majority of the fruit’s venom, allowing those brave enough to consume its pulp directly a chance at survival.
Liquid flowers are the most delicate form of flora, believed by many to not even exist. They congeal from seeds cast into small bodies of water, then bubble to the surface as unstable jets of color and fragrance. Each spherical petal instantly bursts into vapor upon contact with the atmosphere, preventing these frail beings from surviving more than a few seconds in the wild.
A closer look at the fluid inside the jar reveals that it is, in fact, alive. Magnetic ants have formed a colony within, and are living in extremely dense quarters, crawling all over each other’s bodies. It is difficult to discern at a glance where their tunnels end and the insects begin.
Magnetic ink was an intriguing literary innovation, in that it allowed for books to be stored without the use of paper. Through liquid encoding, each cluster of molecules could remember the alphabet and sequence it belonged to previously, allowing the words to arrange themselves autonomously once splattered against a surface. Ultimately, this led to the phenomenon of storing books in jars as pools of undifferentiated ink, where they waited for surfaces upon which to imprint themselves.
The sands of the desert are sweet, for veins of dark sugar twist through its dunes. Down below, metamorphic layers of thick molasses crawl through cracks in ancient bedrock, condensed to ooze by the weight of the world above. In these porous spaces ruled by dust and germ, pools of primordial rum have formed under extreme pressure. It is a liquor that men and machines alike can drink, and it produces similar results in both.
Strange rivers of geothermal activity run beneath Hyperborea’s blue forests. The tender earth liquefies just below human body temperature, and becomes a warm, fluid stone that flows easily through the hands. The local terminology for this substance translates roughly to “world jelly.”
The jar of Kraken’s ink on the shelf appears slightly more transparent than the empty space that surrounds it. The glass itself seems to have no thickness, and along some parts of its surface, appears to not even exist at all. This is because unlike other species of squid whose ink absorbs light, the Kraken’s ink rejects light altogether, and spits it out slightly faster than the speed at which it entered.
When Narcissus gazed into the pond, and saw the wonder of the universe in the beauty of his own reflection, all meaning was drained from his physical flesh. At that exact moment of realization, he withered into nothingness, for his image had superceded his presence in reality. A single flower grew in his place, one which bore his name, and its own reflection served as its roots.
The waters of the River Lethe are said to wash clean the memories of the recently deceased. This process returns them to a tabula rasa state of mind, after which point their souls can migrate to new bodies. What is not clear from myth alone, however, is the mechanism by which the Lethe's waters perform this function. The living often assume that these memories simply dissolve into the imbibed fluid, as though they were merely salt.
In 1987, a cassette tape emerged which contained the last known recording of the Song of the Sirens. The origins of the tape are uncertain: it was found abandoned in a secure deposit box of a bank in Gibraltar by an officer in the British Navy. Though the box was registered in his name, he insisted that a number of artifacts discovered inside, including the tape, were not his own.
The suitcase orbited baggage claim for three hours before someone finally claimed it. Of course, it hadn’t actually been his to begin with, but he was the sort of thief with eyes for the things that happened to steal themselves. Its label told him that it was meant to have arrived in LaGuardia (LGA) from Athens (ATH), yet here it was in Miami (MIA), scattered among the domestic arrivals.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, several gigantic teeth were found mellified in a pit of ancient lobster honey. A team of paleontologists cleaned away the sea-green ooze, which, by their account, had gone undisturbed for at least five-hundred thousand years. Initial reports suggested that they belonged to an unknown creature which died while attempting to swallow an entire lobster hive at once.
The compound eyes of a fly grant it the ability to see the world in front of it split into possibilities. For this reason, it is difficult to swat a fly with a hand that it can readily see, as it can then simply leap forward into a permutation of reality in which it survives. Though it witnesses its own death in several lenses of its eyes, by sacrificing those possible futures, the insect is able to prolong its own life.
“I’ll have a glass of ambrosia,” the stranger requested.
“Yeah? What kind?” asked the bartender.
“The original recipe.”
“Do you know how many drinks have that name?”
“The original recipe. Do I need to spell it out for you?”
Marble statues only remain still from a human perspective. From their own, they crawl forth from mountains in their infancy, who raise them like mothers with their volcanic milk. Despite being wrought from stone, they find their own skin to be soft, and it rises and falls as they breathe.
They exist along a separate axis of time, one that hosts its own songs, empires, and gods. When they die in our world, they crumble to dust; in theirs, they bleed black lava.
The minotaur only killed a handful of victims during his storied career, and did so with little effort; between each swing of his hammer and goring by his horn, seven years of silence would pass. He spent those lonesome months oscillating between dreams and meditation, lost in the winding corridors of his brain.
He withdraws her bones one-by-one from the living flames, violet-hot from the forge. With each blow of his hammer, he discovers yet another intricacy of his lover’s interior. He measures out the breadth of her collarbone, the space between her radius and ulna, and the diameter of each individual vertebrae. It pains him that he cannot reach down and touch them; at least, not yet. He leaves out the two bottom-most ribs on the left hand side, a reminder of her distance from life’s original creator.
A young prince arrives at the ruins of Las Vegas with an elephant gun in his hands. The new Sphinx is waiting for him at the gates, unsurprised by his arrival, although perhaps a bit amused. Her hydraulics begin groaning loudly. She rises onto all four paws, and her fiber optic mane glimmers to life with rings of artificial color. Then, she speaks. “Coloradan Royalty, out here? To what do I owe the pleasure?”
It takes quite a bit of paperwork to extradite a criminal from the afterlife. Because she died without a federal grave license, however, officials were able to arrange for serial bank robber Daisy Cormorant’s arrest after a single round of negotiations with the gods. She had purchased a luxury condo in the underworld using an assumed name, and had also drastically altered her appearance by tanning in the light of the planet’s core; regardless, a combination of dental records and tax audits led to her capture.
Benthica is the underworld’s most prestigious seafood restaurant. It is located on the opposite side of the planet’s surface from the Marianas Trench, and is constructed from bricks of black water that have crystallized from the sheer pressure of the ocean’s depths. Strange, luminous creatures can be seen swimming through walls that are otherwise solid for everyone else present. Among them is the nameless child of Hades and Charybdis, who is prophesied to someday be the death of Poseidon.
Hadean architecture requires efficient use of vertical space in order to properly house the planet’s hundred billion deceased. Although the dead have nearly as much space in which to dwell as the living (as they reside all throughout the Earth’s hollow interior), it is impossible for their population to ever decrease. In order to prevent a crisis, the most industrious of the dead have gathered to solve this problem that the gods have otherwise neglected.
To aid in slaying Medusa, the gods offered Perseus a helm that granted him invisibility, as well as a shield with a mirrored surface. So the legend goes, he was able to use the former to obtain the element of surprise, and the latter to face her without meeting her petrifying gaze.
Of course, that’s only half the story.