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.

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.

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.

Somewhere beyond the orbit of Mars, under Jupiter's watchful eye, an asteroid rotates silently with a broadsword jammed through its iron ribs. Because this blade was crafted beyond Earth's atmosphere, its metal and that of its resting place are seamlessly conjoined; as such, separating their forms requires extraordinary degrees of both strength and finesse.

Instinctual fear is a turbulent cloud of contradictions occupying the deepest caves within the human brain. It has eight legs, yet is also legless; it is extraordinarily tall, yet is crushed by its own boundaries; it is forever surrounded, yet always alone.

The pararang’s body is wrought from an alloy of aluminum and neutronium, the latter of which grants it the strange gravity of a dying star. From the perspective of the person who attempts to throw it, it presses back against their palm with equal force, and never actually leaves their grip. This serves as an indication that it is working as expected.

For the alchemists of the Renaissance, it was a well established fact that mercury was to the metals as blood was to the body. Though the untrained knife would often bend or break while attempting to find untapped veins, a skilled practitioner could find a pulse within any ore, and draw forth a fountain of quicksilver with a single, well-placed incision. Every metal could be made to bleed this same lustrous ooze, from profane lead to sacred gold.

The fingerprints engraved into the dagger’s hilt are said to have belonged to Brutus himself. Tradition maintains that they were pressed into the bronze at the moment he first stabbed Caesar, and have remained there ever since. It is possible, however, that these whorls of patina predate even his ownership of the blade, though they certainly are his prints; after all, whosoever holds it always finds that its fingerprints match their own.

This ceremonial dagger features several unusual components: a pommel that springs open at the press of an opal button, a hollow hilt into which cartridges of liquid ammunition were once loaded, a trigger beneath its crossguard that looks more like it belongs on a firearm, and an opening near its point no wider than a ballpoint pen. Despite its shape, it was never intended to be used as an implement of death, though some would argue that the amount of life that persists after its use does not make it so different in nature.

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.

At first glance, the sword is coarse and battle-worn. It has the complexion of a ship’s anchor, gnarled and russet, with spatters of tarnish from ancient blood. A few patches of whorled gray suggest an origin in Damascus, but cruel entropy has claimed the rest of its surface. Its edges are battered and worn from ages of shattering helmets and bones alike.

Wild trumpets must be dried out before they can be safely played by a human mouth. The local tribes of Hyperborea's easternmost islands have mastered this process: they hang the bulbous creatures over a pyre of burning inkwood, whose smoke drains their bells of any lingering venom and stains their skins an obsidian shade. The instrument that results has a limited range, yet this is counterbalanced by its powerful timbre.

The captain’s wrist bore a living tattoo of a compass rose; as the icy waves tossed her vessel about, its ink contorted so that its longest petal would always point north. Its pigment conspired with the iron in her blood to reveal the world’s magnetic winds. It hadn’t yet proven useful on this journey, as the tramontana had been making itself obvious for weeks, yet she knew that it would soon become a necessity.

Some say that it was once a second moon. When viewed against the horizon, it’s easy to see why; the mountain is perfectly round when observed from any direction, and widest at its midsection. If positioned just right during dusk or dawn, its presence can cause the illusion of a total eclipse.

In Hyperborea’s northernmost mountains, there exists a sanctuary where comets come to roost. Here, natural philosophers have been able to observe some of their more avian characteristics up close: their bodies are covered from nucleus to tail in transparent feathers, and their parrot-like faces can be vaguely discerned underneath the icy mists that surrounds them. Their wings are extraordinary in span, yet are never unfurled during their travels through space, as there is no atmosphere against which to propel themselves.

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.

The gnomes of Hyperborea are neither born nor created; they enter our world by climbing out of their own shadows, and leave a few hours later when they inevitably tumble back down into them. At the bottom of each of these peculiar holes (sometimes over thirty miles in depth) is a pool of black lava of unknown origin. Some say that each such shadow is a window into a second underground, and that our planet hides multiple interiors beneath a single surface. Others claim that there is no such multitude of underworlds, and that the gnomes create a material debt by existing that eventually swallows their borrowed bodies whole.

The Atlas Pines of Northwestern Hyperborea received their name for a good reason. Their trunks possess greater girth than those of the sequoia trees, and their uppermost branches lock together into a thick lattice of arbor and needles strong enough to uphold ten-meter snowdrifts. These pearlescent dunes are all that can be seen from above, obscuring the entirely separate landscape that exists at their roots.

After several delirious months spent wandering the Eastern Steppe, you’ve at last arrived at the Riphean Mountains. They hang from the cerulean sands of a diminishing sky above, jammed through cloudbanks by the strange tectonics of outer space. Two ancient cedars present their inverted trunks before you; their roots are planted somewhere in the mountains above. A curtain of black leaves hangs between them, untouched by any of the four winds. You drop your heavy satchel, collapse into the golden grasses, and laugh. 

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.” 

Hyperborean mountains are formed of pure hematite, with veins of naturally occurring steel sprawling throughout their interior. Some of the grandest peaks reach as far as the ionosphere, slicing the northern lights in two as they pass overhead. Their bodies resist climbers and prospectors as easily as they resist the wind, but erosion and entropy always find a way.

Few visitors can be found within the walls of the Red City, and among these few, there are none who dare set foot in its Burning District. There is very good reason for this, as its name might suggest; it is a place set aside for destruction to live, so that what remains of humanity’s works beyond might be spared.

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.

Around the peak of the Red City’s prosperity, a new dominant currency began to emerge. These coins, known as binari, were wrought from a soft, warm metal, and squirmed slightly when held in human hands. What was perhaps most curious about them was that they were classified not only by denomination, but also by sex. If male and female binari were left in the same purse overnight, more could usually be found when it was opened again in the morning.

The highway’s first head clings to the mountain’s northern face much like a remora clings to a shark. Its face is a mess of steel teeth that have been worn down over the centuries, drills and grindstones that process its host’s tectonic body into liquid stone. Rust and weathering have rendered this process imperfect, and waterfalls of wet concrete drool forth from its mandibles.

The tyrant’s skull is hammered from the same tin as his throne. His eyes are tired rhinestones through which no light passes, but there isn’t much to see in his concrete palace anyway. He cannot rise from the velvet cushions beneath him, for he is held in place by hundreds of thick wires, not to mention the bronze spear that’s been rammed through his battered chest.

The delivery man waits to descend onto the subway platform until its last train has departed for the night. This is a shrewd decision; many of his colleagues failed to take this precaution, and in turn, were dragged down into the world beneath the rails. He’s carrying precious cargo, after all: a backpack full of premium beverages ranging from black neon fizz to carbonated fire. Were he to perish on this errand, his ghost would be liable for the damages to company property, a debt which could take decades to repay.

There’s a crumbling mansion in the Red City that overlooks the marina with sixteen eyes of fractured glass. Although weary from old age, it watches for thieves with unwavering paranoia. It has known the taste of many who have sought its riches over the years, and expects that another will arrive any day now.

The Red City Philharmonic Orchestra disbanded centuries ago. As such, their instruments have grown restlessly out of tune and starved of human touch. The lights are still on in the old opera house where they await their musicians, but dead noise saturates the air to a point of near-total darkness. Cleaning robots have learned not to enter, and dust has cloaked most of the surfaces inside.

Old-fashioned petroleum no longer satisfies the refined palette of automobiles in the Red City. Having gained a taste for artisanal gasoline, they often refuse to be driven if not partaking of the highest quality of fuel. While their habits are expensive, they also seem to have significantly reduced rush hour traffic.

INGREDIENTS

1 Noh mask

1.5 gallons rooibos tea

7 specimens dried coral

1 pair caribou antlers

Around a century ago, through arts no longer practiced, a player piano was taken apart, then reassembled as an android. Her wires were formed into something like sinew, and the miles of perforated paper which once passed through her body were elegantly folded into an ever-churning brain. A few transplants from other instruments helped to complete her anatomy; an accordion split in two formed her lungs, and segments of brass channeled an animating wind through her limbs.

In the early days of building humanoid automatons, the ability to construct an intelligent brain ultimately proved beyond the skill of Renaissance inventors. For this reason, many of the earliest robots ever built were entirely headless. They were not, however, thoughtless.

I’ve fallen in love with the lady who lives on the seventh floor. I do not know her first name, though her last is written on the doorbell: “Geppetto.” I do not even know what she is, but this does not seem to be a barrier between us. I’ve begun something that I must see through, even if it costs me my humanity.

The arcade burned down three years ago, along with the rest of the mall. Without cabinets and circuitry to support them, all that remained of the games within were their electric ghosts. They stood shoulder to shoulder, quivering beings of naked neon, waiting for the chance to be experienced once more.

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.

There are many devices which consume and digest coins in order to survive, and in turn, fulfill the desires of humanity. They have many different names: vending machines, claw machines, gumball machines, slot machines, jukeboxes, wishing wells, arcade cabinets, frontloaders, payphones, and so on and so forth. Each one exists in symbiosis with our species, finding a niche product or service that convinces us to manufacture more of its kind. There is an exception to this rule, however, for only one Baph-o-Mat was ever constructed.

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.

“The clawfoot bathtub,” this book begins, “is a distant cousin of the crockpot and cauldron. Although its natural habitat is typically found outside the kitchen, it demonstrates a particular susceptibility to culinary magic due to its shape and composition. Being quadrupedal and wrought from relatively flexible materials, bringing one to life is often one of the most basic lessons taught to apprentice deep chefs.”

For a handful of Canadian hunters, it was not enough to craft trophies from the bodies of their prey. A particular sporting lodge in Newfoundland developed a technique of stuffing animal skins with wooden bones and glass organs, allowing them to return to the wild. The primary agent of reanimation was an artificial blood formulated from, among other things, blackberry syrup, gunpowder, and crushed fireflies.

The art of building a properly functioning scarecrow is largely forgotten. Most that exist today are merely decoys, unable to hunt pheasants or play mandolins like their forerunners. Even so, every now and then, reports emerge of straw men wandering the land of their own accord.

Humans have their nerves, robots have their wires, and puppets have their strings. The last of these is the odd one out for two critical reasons: in addition to the lack of an animating force, puppets have the misfortune of their nervous systems existing outside their bodies. This nakedness prevents them from achieving true autonomy, as their motions must be granted to them by creatures of a higher order.

The flintlock brain is a primitive form of artificial intelligence loaded inside of an iron mannequin. Knots of jellied sawdust are formed around copper wires, which themselves are coated with black gunpowder. The hammer and frizzen of the firing mechanism rest between its two lobes, typically positioned so that they can remain exposed outside the android’s metal skull.

INGREDIENTS

1 Noh mask

1.5 gallons rooibos tea

7 specimens dried coral

1 pair caribou antlers

FIRST COURSE

paris-style tobacco gnocchi

wrapped in pan-seared dollar bills, glazed with jalapeño jam

The leather-bound cookbook contains three-hundred seventy-seven recipes, including instructions for preparing alligator skin, thickening petroleum into flan, and slow-cooking ingots of iron until they’re tender enough to swallow. Before all of this, however, the text begins with a set of initiatory instructions, required for the chef to “survive their own work.” These instructions are as follows:

appetizers

twice-baked eel skins with gruyere - $12

braised trilobite on soft seaweed crisps - $16

nudibranch tempura with lobster honey - $18

During the early 1990s, single-use magic wands began appearing in dollar stores throughout America. For the most part, these were simply hollow, black tubes of polystyrene filled with a light dusting of powdered aether. Each contained just enough mystical potency to help with a single household task, whether that be washing the dishes, grilling burgers, or cleaning stains from the carpet. No incantations or prior initiation were required; after a few seconds of vigorous shaking, the wand’s plastic tip would pop off, allowing the pressurized magic to escape as a jet of violet smoke.

During the first phase of manufacturing, jellybeans are perfectly transparent. In this preliminary state, they look like misplaced contact lenses, or raindrops that failed to burst on impact. These beans have no flavor of their own, yet contain the potential for all flavors; when bitten, there is only that familiar texture of a tender shell giving way, followed by that of semi-molten starch oozing apart.

STARTERS

$7.99 BEER-BATTERED INSECT MEDLEY - A mixture of hornets, fireflies, and grasshoppers, deep-fried in our signature pilsner batter, then glazed with charcoal salsa. Don’t forget to spit out the stingers.

$4.99 WEST TEXAS POPCORN - Cooked over an open flame the old-fashioned way, then tossed in thistle butter, dusted with rock salt, and finished with a drizzle of cactus blood.

$9.99 HUMMINGBIRD SKEWERS - Grilled whole on shish kebabs with peach slices, brussel sprouts, and artichoke hearts. Painted with a glaze of local petroleum, served burning.

Jellied piano keys. raspberry jam, sesame seed. $9. - black keys only - $3.

Deep-fried dragonflies. tempura batter, quicksilver crema, mirror honey. $11.

Tree frog poppers. whole poison dart frogs, tempura batter, unstable habanero isotopes. $11.

Long pork sliders. pickled radish, black onion, hemlock vinaigrette. $10.

He let her pick the appetizers on their second date, and in turn, she ordered the peach pit fondue.

“I love this place. They only use peaches with bottomless pits here,” she explained. “Birds that peck into them in the wild often lose their beaks, if not their entire heads. It takes a chef with real skill to craft them into something that humans can safely swallow.”

“Wait! Doesn’t that hurt your hands? At all?”

She pays her date no mind, however, and continues unscrewing the light bulb from its socket in the lamp hanging over their table. It eventually comes loose, but never loses power; the glow continues as she balances it between her long fingers. “I learned this trick back in college,” is her only explanation. She then taps it against the edge of her plate like a hardboiled egg, forming a loose webwork of cracks along its shell.

My apprentices have arrived with thirteen jars of pineapple jelly, and one by one, they pour them into the cauldron. Tonight, I’m teaching them a recipe that I learned while temporarily dead, during which time I worked in the underworld’s highly competitive seafood scene. The golden ooze begins to bubble as saltwater and black rum are added, combining into a thick, honeyed lava. I dip my sword into the concoction and stir it gently, watching wounds form and heal along the surface of the mixture.

“The clawfoot bathtub,” this book begins, “is a distant cousin of the crockpot and cauldron. Although its natural habitat is typically found outside the kitchen, it demonstrates a particular susceptibility to culinary magic due to its shape and composition. Being quadrupedal and wrought from relatively flexible materials, bringing one to life is often one of the most basic lessons taught to apprentice deep chefs.”

The discerning chef of the deep kitchen carries a revolver on their person at all times. There’s no telling what might emerge from the Black Oven if its door has been left open for too long, but for those who thrive in such a high-stakes environment, the recipes for gourmet bullets are just as familiar as formulas for cocktails are to bartenders. Hundreds of variants have been developed, and several of the most coveted are detailed herein.

Most who throw rainbow filets onto a skillet for the first time are surprised to discover how much they sizzle. They are not lean, and store numerous tender hues in their belly in addition to those outwardly displayed. It is not advisable to gaze directly into the pan while cooking is ongoing, as many of these colors are too volatile for the human eye to process, and may cause damage to the optical nerve.

The dustrider’s mother was mantis-blooded, and for this reason, he never knew his father. He never felt comfortable using swords in combat, for they always felt like a severed limb, something missing from his person. He had long scars along his forearms from where a surgeon had removed razor-like protrusions from his wrists as a child, the only outward signs of his heritage. His reflexes could not be carved out, however, and proved to be without match.

Many years ago, dustrider oracles began receiving messages from flowers deep within the Earth. They bloomed in places much deeper than sunlight or rainwater could reach, where their fronds and perfumes would never be experienced by living things. Their roots grew in all directions, as did their petals, forming explosions of color unseen. Because of their peculiar habitat, their pollen had no air through which to propagate; as such, they evolved a method of broadcasting it as a form of organic radiation.

A careful look at the dustrider’s rifle reveals that it was once the body of a dragonfly. Its tail has been hollowed into a long barrel, and its mandibles are now the trigger of a complex firing mechanism. Discs have been carved from its transparent wings and arranged in parallel to serve a scope’s function. As it slides off his shoulder, the thick knots of its former exoskeleton are firm in his hands.

A marble statue of an angel hovered over the lagoon, with no physical connection to the Earth below. Water poured forth from an amphora in her motionless hands, spilling endlessly down. “From this point, the potentiality of all creation spills forth. New species of microscopic life come into being and disappear in moments. Only a fraction of a fraction can survive, but every few centuries, one endures, and begins to spread through the waters of the world.”

The Fountain of Youth. And in fucking Florida, no less.

“This limousine is endlessly long. Were you to reach the front, you would be at the end of space and beginning of time.”

“But there is a driver?”

The antlion is unique among modern animalia in that its evolution resulted not from a mutation within its genetic code, but rather, within the spelling of its name. Sometime during the legendary translation of the Septuagint from Hebrew into Greek for Ptolemy II, an old Hebrew variant of 'lion' used in the Book of Job was warped into the bizarre word 'myrmecoleon,' a portmanteau of the terms for 'ant' and 'lion.'

"Before paper was easy to come by, scrolls and books would be rinsed of their ink so that their pages could be reused when the original copies no longer had an audience.” A dash of lampblack bitters left a squid trail through his whiskey and vermouth. "Even after their removal, however, the molecules of ink would continue to cluster in a similar geometric manner. Because of this, most of the information was retained in the ink itself long after it had been wrung from the text.

Geogaddi, Boards of Canada’s sophomore album, was engineered so as to last for exactly sixty-six minutes and six seconds. Their fixation on the repetition sixes is clear throughout its content, right down to the title of track sixteen: “The Devil is in the Details.” Even the cover art is composed entirely of six-sided figures, a seemingly endless kaleidonoid procession of hexagons within hexagons. When the LP suddenly emerged in 2002, it debuted at a collection of six churches worldwide, in a ritual of unknown intent.

The average seashell found along a shoreline is fixed at the same frequency as the body of water that birthed it. When held to the ear, the same, steady undulation of waves can be heard, sliding in and out of time. For this reason, they make excellent souvenirs for tourists, providing instant access to memories of better climes.

Meanwhile, the spiraling apex of a black conch’s shell can be twisted in several places like a radio’s dial. The larger the mussel, the more precision that can be attained while tuning its abandoned hermitage.

Among alligators and crocodiles alike, there exist elders who remember the flavor of mammoth's blood, and even some whose gnarled backs bear scars from the fire of an asteroid's impact. Their kind have persisted for untold millions of years, long enough for evolution to nest their brains within our own like matryoshka dolls.

The human body is not a mere brain-driven machine of nerve and bone. Every subsection of its anatomy is an independent ecosystem of organisms (or organism-like structures), each with their own motivations and metabolisms. Though much of this zoology occurs beneath a veil of skin, it is still a phenomenon that can be seen with the naked eye. When one looks upward into cloudless daylight, they just might see the spectral outlines of lifeforms known as lucigens.

In the lands east of the Ural Mountains, there is said to have once grown a plant whose fruit was a fully-grown lamb fastened to the soil by its umbilical stem. To some, this beast was known as the borometz, and to others, as the Yeduah. It survived by grazing on the grasses surrounding its roots, though it could never wander beyond its own tether to the earth below. Any separation from this stem would result in its immediate death.

"From what you've described to me, it sounds like your brain is undergoing rapid shifts in chirality." The doctor's eyes were focused on his tablet. “Like you’re suddenly trading places with the other side of the mirror, yes?“

“Yeah, that’s one way to put it. But what could cause something like that?"

Kissing was invented in the city of Thusk, a seaport with thousands of citizens, yet only one dentist. Her services were scarcely needed, for the civic biologists had rendered most of her profession obsolete.

I wanted to believe the tales of Polybius, the arcade game that drove its own players to madness. It was the perfect urban legend, for the details of its telling reinforced its own state of unverifiable limbo. Any and all cabinets which may or may not have once existed were seized by the powers that be, leaving an empty-handed public to speculate about whether or not they’d ever actually been there to begin with.

There are two separate sources of gravity competing for control of the city of Hyperboleon. These operate perpendicularly to one another, drawing objects towards two separate grounds whose horizons meet at a right angle.

“Hey, you! Your eyes are untied.”

Decades have passed since she first uttered those words to me. We were in Kindergarten then, yet she spoke them with such certainty that, even as an adult, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she had meant something by them. Whenever I’d ask her to explain what she meant, however, she’d just smile and laugh at me, as though it were obvious. What was it, I wondered, that she could see, yet I could not?

Together, they gazed into the galaxy of colorful orbs behind the glass. “Every gumball dreams of growing up to become a planet,” the goddess told him. “They are child worlds, waiting to be adopted by a sun; but, as you might imagine, almost none among them will survive long enough to see their dreams come true.”

An irregular grid of clouds formed in the evening sky, simultaneously violet and orange.

“They’re killing us,” she told me. “The jets are spewing cancer out of their tails.”

The Hoover Dam is said to be filled with human bones. So the story goes, during its construction, workers who fell into the structure’s wet concrete were left inside, as those in charge believed that the cost and risk of retrieving their bodies would be too great. For those who believe this tale, the dam doubles as a colossal tombstone for those buried within.

Imagine, for a moment, a broadcast of the original Twilight Zone where Rod Serling never appears. In such an episode, the characters within are forced to contend with a reality that, without warning, is subjected to the influence of a “fifth dimension,” where the laws of humanity lose all meaning. After being assailed by this anomaly for roughly half an hour, its influence fades away, and the world continues rotating onward.

The captain’s wrist bore a living tattoo of a compass rose; as the icy waves tossed her vessel about, its ink contorted so that its longest petal would always point north. Its pigment conspired with the iron in her blood to reveal the world’s magnetic winds. It hadn’t yet proven useful on this journey, as the tramontana had been making itself obvious for weeks, yet she knew that it would soon become a necessity.

The coyote awoke one morning to find that his roadrunner was gone.

He’d disappeared, beyond the asymptotic horizon which outlined their desert, that unreachable boundary between two nowheres. Together, as predator and prey, they’d followed the same highway westward for thousands of miles, always encroaching on that same horizon, yet finding no end to the repetition of sagebrush and sand.

“The ASCII standard begins with a set of control characters,” she explained. “If you type the last of these on a modern computer, an invisible character is added, one that usually doesn’t do anything. It’s a relic from another time called the ‘delete’ character, number 127. These days, programmers sometimes use it as a placeholder, but for the most part, it’s obsolete.”

The human mind does not actually move forward through time; it is far more accurate to say that it sinks through it. The passage of time is a constant, ambient force like gravity, rather than a willful motion. When one closes their eyes and attempts to resist it, there is no traction or grip to be found that might stall the inevitable descent.

Objects wrought from wood occasionally remember being alive. The circuits of their quiet minds can be seen in the contours of the grain, sleepily churning through memories. No matter how deeply carved, sawn, milled, or polished, there is always an aspect of the original arbor that endures. What remains is no longer alive, of course, but it is more than capable of haunting.

Gremlins are known to live in the engines of airplanes, the spindles of hard drives, and the pipes of boiler rooms. No space within human industry has ever proven hostile enough to prevent their occupation, making them some of the hardiest lifeforms on this planet. Furthermore, they are notoriously difficult to capture, or even to spot; their presence is only ever known in hindsight, evidenced by chewed-through wires, rust-addled screws, and corrupted data.

Some mathematicians go so far as to call their work the language of God. In their hubris, they refuse to admit that they write in a language that is very human: one with its own idioms, clichés, and platitudes. In order to prove supposed mathematical truth, they routinely employ the same handful of phrases and arguments, yet are startled when these phrases and arguments are echoed back to them in the same language that they began with.

“At first, we thought that our fortunes had changed,” his journal begins. “We saw what we thought was a whale breaching when a jet of vapor erupted from the waters along our ship’s port side. As we readied our harpoons, however, we found that the geyser seemed to have no source but the surface of the ocean itself. One of the other sailors exclaimed that it must have been a ‘mirror whale,’ meaning that both sides of its blowhole were on the outside of its body. As such, there was nothing for us to see or kill.”

There exists an incantation which, if uttered properly, can duplicate the mind and body of whosoever dares to utter it. There exists another, similar in nature, which allows one’s own reflection to be drawn out of any mirror. Lastly, there is one which causes a perfect opposite of the self to appear in juxtaposition with the original, causing both to immediately cease to exist.

As it turns out, all three of these incantations can be learned by parrots.

The end of the world is neither exactly a time or a place; rather, it is a four-dimensional surface, curved and chaotic, which courts the path of the planet on its journey through space-time. Were one to visualize it using only three dimensions, it would seem almost ribbon-like, a black helix of fluttering death. Asteroids entangled by this dark fabric are certain to be drawn into the Earth’s gravitational pull.

During the first phase of manufacturing, jellybeans are perfectly transparent. In this preliminary state, they look like misplaced contact lenses, or raindrops that failed to burst on impact. These beans have no flavor of their own, yet contain the potential for all flavors; when bitten, there is only that familiar texture of a tender shell giving way, followed by that of semi-molten starch oozing apart.

The human mind takes up fifteen terabytes of space on average, and accommodating the soul requires for an additional twelve to be available. When compressed into a single unit, however, the complete, disembodied self can be expressed as a mere eighteen terabytes: smaller than the sum of its parts, yet no longer separable into individual segments. This conversion of being, popularly known as the Styx Process, can be performed in under twenty-four hours, as long as the deceased’s tombstone features a sufficiently efficient central processor.

The android awoke with the sort of headache that only androids ever come to know: that anvil-strike reverberation that resounds throughout an orange-hot skull. It brought with it a sense of being molten, a tension between the factory that came before and the scrapyard yet to come. He knew that he’d felt such a thing before, though he couldn’t remember when. He lamented the fact that there were no painkillers available for his kind.

This far out in the wilderness, the gods could no longer hear her prayers; even if they could, the roaming charges would be immense. She’d thought about bringing a radio with her and relaying her messages back to someone who could pray on her behalf, but getting away from all that noise was one of the main reasons why she left to begin with. She had grown tired of her altar pestering her to download premium gods, as well as of the dull, smokeless scent of autocandles.

“GAME OVER.” Those eight capital letters scrolled across her field of vision in alarm-clock red, confirming her death in another world. Riley collapsed backwards onto the bed behind her, exasperated and soaked in sweat, hands still curled in futility around a non-existent sword. She’d been in-game for eight hours straight, not even stopping for food or water, yet all her efforts had all gone to waste. Somewhere, a pack of wolves was reducing her other self to a pile of crimson polygons, and there was nothing that she could do to stop them.

My father was a hologram, yet my mother was fully human; she didn’t have a virtual bone in her body. I am unclear of the process by which I was made flesh. All I know is that at some point after he left, I emerged from one of her eyes as a ray of living crimson.

The sea rolls back to reveal that the tides have not entirely receded; thick cubes of saltwater remain in place, with independent waves traveling along their sixfold faces. They look like aquariums that forgot to put on their glass in the morning. Fish that jump out through one surface are dragged downward by the gravity of another, trapping them inside indefinitely.

    She’s going to wear all six of her faces tonight, and needs something that’ll pull them together. The cloud that emerges from her little black bottle isn’t exactly a vapor. Thousands of tiny knots in space-time erupt from its nozzle, clinging to her skin and bending the light around her wrists. No physical matter is involved in the formula; it’s all a trick of subjective geometry. At this point it is nothing more than the empty fragrance of a hypercube: a hollow presence which the nostrils can experience, yet cannot understand.

She finds it waiting for her in a south side alleyway near the potion factory, digging its electric tendrils into the remains of an abandoned strip mall. In another city they might have called it graffiti, but the tags found elsewhere don’t squirm when touched with bare hands. Not many people can get their hands on aerosol data, let alone twist it into something algorithmic with their wrists.

At first glance, the old Space Invaders cabinet looks as though it has eaten its last quarter. Though it remains plugged into the wall, its monitor has gone black; however, the color is just a few shades too dark to fool an expert. The thief presses his right palm against the screen’s center, then taps its corners with a metal pick in his left hand, checking for resonance. He feels the signature hum, revealing that the machine is in fact still alive. Perhaps this arcade isn’t as abandoned as it seems.

Android bodies also decompose upon death, leaving behind transparent bones. Although most of their kind choose to live on as holograms afterward, some prefer the streamlined feeling of simply being a skeleton, or even just a skull.  While it is not difficult for a human to stop thinking, it is impossible for an android to do so until their batteries are removed by the coroner. As such, the peace this offers them is welcome.

The pacmancer gazes into the arcade cabinet’s screen and sees his own death; someday, it will be hollowed of its digital components and repurposed as his sarcophagus. He watches the little phosphene phantoms dart about and sees something familiar in their wandering eyes. Perhaps he even knew them while they were alive. The shared border between the spiritual and virtual realms is thinner than either possess with the physical. That’s what makes the ritual work.

In the Violet City, a creation myth is told that involves not just the beginning of time, but also its end. The world begins as worlds often do, with the gods overthrowing the titans who built it and establishing their dominion over man and nature alike. The story abruptly jumps forward billions of years, however, to the inevitable feud between them that destroys all things. It is at this point that we encounter the remix goddess, who rises out of the ocean of white noise that their war left behind.

The first thing that you notice as you enter the club is the presence of hundreds of fireflies with blacklight tails, all signaling in synchronicity with a source of bass somewhere deep below. The bouncer stares at you expectantly while holding a jar full of transparent fluid. Mimicking those ahead of you in line, you reach through your own chest and withdraw your heart.

Single-use paths through the city are produced in the following manner: a map of its streets, ideally eleven inches across by seventeen inches tall, is laid out on a level surface. Next, a single shell is loaded into the cartographic apparatus, filled with a mixture of cuttlefish ink, magnetic gel, and iron shavings. Finally, the trigger is pulled, allowing the electrically-charged cocktail to splatter across the entire breadth of the page.

By the time the photographers arrived, all that was left of her was a chalk outline. Her corpse had been removed from the scene, leaving the otherwise empty alleyway to a handful of spectators and journalists. Their voices filled the air with speculation: “From fifteen stories? Nobody could survive that.” “Nah, no foul play is suspected. People who knew her, they knew she’d eventually pull something like this.” “Her husband doesn’t want to talk. Just wants a lawyer. Go figure.”

The noise didn’t last. One by one, the reporters disappeared, back to the newspapers from which they emerged.

Then, as moonlight filled the city, she rose from the pavement once more.

“The ASCII standard begins with a set of control characters,” she explained. “If you type the last of these on a modern computer, an invisible character is added, one that usually doesn’t do anything. It’s a relic from another time called the ‘delete’ character, number 127. These days, programmers sometimes use it as a placeholder, but for the most part, it’s obsolete.”

“I’m looking to get my nephew something special for his birthday.”

The witch nodded. “So you are. I take it you’ve heard about the arts that I practice?”

“I have. I was wondering if you could make an alligator for him. It’s his favorite animal.”

“Sure, that’s easy enough. I can make just about any animal that you can imagine."

“Trust me. You don’t want to be awake for the procedure.”

“Oh, believe me, I do.”

“No, you really don’t. You don’t want to know what it feels like to have a katydid crawling down your throat. That, and without the proper anesthetic, it would almost certainly trigger your gag reflex.”

“What is this?” The old man asked. “I’ve never seen a piece like it before.”

“It’s called ‘the Prophet,’” his opponent replied. “In this chess variant, there are no bishops. You place your Prophet kingside, and your Spy queenside.”

“This thing’s a search engine?”

“That’s right.” The device looked like something of a pipe organ, with tall, brass pipes protruding from a central chassis, yet it featured a typewriter’s keyboard instead of ivory keys. An array of thirty-some enigma-like rotors could be seen churning within its glass case. “A search engine, and an entirely mechanical one at that. Type anything you want here, and it will search the world for relevant content, no wires attached.”

“You’re not going to find anything down there,” Dr. Price explained. “There’s no such thing as a negative radio frequency. You can represent them mathematically, sure, but there’s no real world analogue. A wave observed forward or backward in time is physically identical.”

Those words didn’t seem to have any effect on her student, however, who continued turning the knob on her device counterclockwise. “Well, you and I might know that, but does the radio?”

“I’m looking for a love potion.”

“Of course you are.” It was that time of year again, when teenagers came to the mall seeking far more potent things than they could handle. He had a variety of substitutes that he’d sell them, from concentrated moonlight to seahorse hormones, but he never gave them exactly what they asked for. “Prom’s coming up, yes? And there’s someone in particular that you want to go with you?”

Francis Caldwell, certified professional accountant and frequent flyer #7005412, had a particular ritual that he performed whenever he checked into a new hotel room. Whether or not he needed to make use of it at the time, he would sit down on the toilet with his suitcase open in front of him, examine each of the bathroom’s complimentary toiletries one by one, then hide each little bottle in his luggage. [...]

When it came to the Hotel Coagula, however, Francis found his routine interrupted by a single, anomalous item: a tiny jar labeled “try me first! black champagne and anise-flavored reality enhancement blend.”

The escalator god has very few worshippers, and the same can be said of the elevator goddess. As latecomers to the pantheon game, they’ve been fiercely competing for the attention of a handful of devotees from the confines of their fiberglass palaces. Without a Trojan War or a Ragnarok in which to prove their worth, they’ve been forced to develop a much less glamorous system of competition.

My roommate arrived home from her death coughing between fits of laughter. Her hair was freshly dyed, evergreen on brown, and her shirt was soaked in blood (hers, this time). She ran over to squeeze my daylights out, pinned me against the counter, then shoved my hand into her chest. Her skin was cold, adhesive, and pale- already blue in a few patches. “Check it out!” She yelled, grinning madly, and staring into me with inch-wide pupils. “No pulse! It’s finally over!”

The old man loads another cartridge of glimmering sand into the dreamthrower, then takes aim. Each of its three scopes rattles into alignment as he turns the crank, wrapping a collection of infrared crosshairs around the teenage skateboarder’s face. His weapon’s ribs glow brightly in the midnight fog. “God damn insomniac kids,” he yells. “For the last time, stop fucking around with the city’s circadians!”

There are chambers beneath the city where sound continues to exist without space in which to propagate. For most species, including human beings, these environments appear to be little more than solid walls of limestone and granite. For bats, however, these barriers are as permeable as the air they breathe. They dip in and out of the subterranean passages hidden beyond, preying upon the immaterial insects within.

She fills the filter cartridge with crushed cinnamon, then slides it under the boil-jet. The inverted kettle howls to life as vapor erupts from its exhaust system, mere seconds before water begins gushing through a Medusa’s wig of transparent pipes. The fluid slowly takes on a shade of burnt umber as the cinnamon concentrates inside, combining with milk and black honey in its coils. The final product trickles into her mug, still steaming from the heat of the machine’s galvanic wires.

The bag of popcorn that you’ve been handed is covered in rules and regulations. “Do not allow your popcorn or any other items from concessions to contaminate the screen. Be considerate of the allergies and tastes of other movie goers.” “All food containers must be thoroughly disposed of before leaving the theater. Failure to abide by this policy renders you subject to search and seizure.” “No drinking from cellular phones is allowed.”

It seems excessive, but you’re excited nonetheless. This is the first time that you’ve been cleared to see a film on Screen Zero at the Electric Fool’s Theatre.

“They say that our universe exists as a pipeline for carrying the void from one place to another.” She spoke with that unmotivated tone common to government-employed oracles. “Your chart exemplifies this principle. You were born while the moon was in the house of the locomotive constellation, which is carrying darkness between two of our neighboring realities.”

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.

One evening, my roommate came home from an illegal grocery store in the western quarter. She was wearing one of those heavy canvas military jackets, and it was covered in fresh smears of indigo fluid that I would later find out was something’s blood. “Check it out.” She slammed a gallon-sized mason jar down on the table. A creature could be seen squirming inside, something covered in tentacles and thorns with no discernible body of its own, sloshing around in that same blue ooze. “They let me pick one out of the tank myself.”

After the journalist’s death, they mummified him in newspapers from faraway lands. Those who attended the burial looked inside his sarcophagus and read of his sentencing to the electric chair in the Agarthan suburbs, the terrible hunting accident that claimed his heartbeat on the outskirts of El Dorado, and the crocodile that tore out his throat in the sewers of New York. Apparently he had even taken a sharpshooter’s bullet while serving as a war correspondent in Troy. Every inch of skin and each hypothetical wound was obscured by contradiction. 

Wherever he goes, he carries a pack of American Spirits in his left hand. He never actually smokes them; each one attempts to wriggle from his grip as he draws it from the carton, but to no avail. He devours all of them like popcorn, grinding raw tobacco and ash between his gnarled teeth. His skin has faded to the tone of pewter during the course of his term, likely due to this exact habit. 

While you’re busy drinking a cocktail of anteater blood and vermouth, a well-dressed businessman next to you shoves three curled, nacreous tokens towards the bartender. You recognize them from an illegal magazine that you stumbled across three months ago; these are mermaid fingernails, the official currency of the Illuminati.

A marble statue of an angel hovered over the lagoon, with no physical connection to the Earth below. Water poured forth from an amphora in her motionless hands, spilling endlessly down. “From this point, the potentiality of all creation spills forth. New species of microscopic life come into being and disappear in moments. Only a fraction of a fraction can survive, but every few centuries, one endures, and begins to spread through the waters of the world.”

The Fountain of Youth. And in fucking Florida, no less.

The candles that surrounded the bed were made from the oil of a sperm whale's shadow. I had heard that such things were possible to obtain, in places of immense darkness; hunts for giant squid took these creatures to abyssopelagic depths, where oceanic pressures rendered their shadows too heavy to return to the surface. Once abandoned, they sank until they were made solid, whales unto themselves before being dissolved by the sun upon ascending for air.

“The plan is to make you a god,” she told me, machete in hand. Her eyes blinked with vertical lids.

“A god, huh?” I twisted my hands together in their bindings, hoping they’d give way. “And what, might I ask, will I be the god of?”

“That all depends on what’s currently available.”

“The prism divides humanity into its seven wavelengths,” the angel told me. “Mind, body, shadow, voice, echo, identity, and ghost. Step through the glass, and you shall learn which of these you truly are.”

I thought about what it meant for body and ghost to separate, let alone all of these at once. “Won't that kill me?"

“I can’t answer that question for you,” it replied. “Death is a vague, human expression for things we have other words for. Once you’ve arrived on the other side, you’ll be able to decide for yourself whether or not you’re dead.”

“Someday, the dead will rise from the earth,” the gravedigger spoke. “Everyone who deals in corpses knows this to be true, whether or not they’ll admit it.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“We plant them like seeds for a reason, my friend."

“What I’ve done in life cannot be changed,” I told her, gazing into the fire. “The future is full of possibility, but the men I have killed know no such luxury- the stories of their lives are told and done.”

“You know nothing of fate, then, child.” The priestess rested her chin upon my shoulder, then wrapped her arms about my waist. “The future is immutable, and to one such as me, always visible. But the past? Ah, it is beyond me, for it is still being decided.”

The bone trader opened his cloak, revealing to me that there was nothing but a skeleton beneath. Not everything inside was human in nature; his left ribs were parentheses of ivory, and those on the right had been replaced in their entirety by a caribou’s antler. There were copper bones in his legs that had once belonged to machine men, and rosewood vertebrae interspersed throughout his spine.

“Everything that you see here is open to trade, two or more of yours for one of mine.”

“God doesn’t truly hate serpents, despite what happened in the garden.” The old magician thumbed through his Bible. “Not all of them, anyway. Serpents that lead virtuous lives are allowed to serve as the scabbards of angels after death. Those that lead lives of sin, however, are hammered by demons into swords.”

“I tend to think that I would rather be a sword than a scabbard,” I added.

“Then you’d make a terrible serpent.”

I once heard that every warm-blooded species has its own devil; just as there is a devil of humans, there is a devil of wolves, and a devil of owls. They only appear among their own kind, and thus elude zoological study, but the results of their cruel pacts can be found in the depths of our world’s wilderness.

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.

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?”

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.

His business ‘card’ was a cube: six faces, six names, six numbers.

"There's more of me inside, just in case," he explained. "Break it open if you can't find who you're looking for."

"Do you think drinking saltwater counts as a kind of sushi?"

"Why on Earth would it?" She wrapped her chopsticks around a ginger-painted trilobite.

“Me and the other girls from the power plant, we come here after work all the time. Their special milkshakes are to die for. I haven't found a single flavor that I didn't like."

“Rose soda, huh?”

“Yeah. They have the original kind here, where the bubbles have thorns.”

“Doesn’t that hurt your tongue?”

“A little bit, yeah. And it always tastes a bit like blood as a result. But I love the texture.” 

“I’m fairly certain that I was born in Lyonesse.”

“That’s in France, right?”

“No, you’re thinking of Lyons. Lyonesse is somewhere in Meinong’s Jungle.”

“Want to see a cool trick?” She leaned across the table, then whispered: “I’ll bet that I can unzip your whole wine glass without spilling.”

“That you can do what without spilling?”

“Just watch.” 

“Want to see something cool? The ice cubes here have nine corners.”

I didn’t believe her at first, but after reluctantly removing one from my glass, I found that she was right. From any given angle, it looked like a normal ice cube, but as I rotated it between my fingers, I could feel an invisible vertex passing along my thumb. “Weird. How do they do that?"

“How’d you get thrown in Hell?”

“Didn’t get thrown in. I was born there.” He sipped his wine. “Both my parents were damned. They did their time in the inner circles, then got jobs, fell in love, and moved out to the suburbs. It’s not much different from the Earth that far out, if you can get used to the lack of a sky.”

“So, you used to be a sphinx?”

“Well, to be more precise, my head used to be part of a sphinx,” she replied. “The rest of me came from other hybrids and chimeras. My skull was attached to a lion’s body, but my torso came from some creature with an owl’s head, and my legs came from something else entirely that had ninety-eight more.”

“Have you ever experienced the Tetris effect?”

“I’ve heard it mentioned before. What exactly does it mean?”

“It’s what happens when you play Tetris for too long. The game continues in your head after you’ve quit. Blocks keep falling in your peripheral vision, and bursts of inner music prevent you from falling asleep.”

“Oh, I have! But that’s not even close to what I thought it meant.”

“Cherries aren’t technically berries, you know.”

“Wait, what?”

“Berries don’t have pits.”

“Well, what about cherries that contain themselves instead of pits?”

“You know, most men are frightened by my compound eyes.”

“Honestly, I think I like yours better than the normal kind,” He shrugged. “Those weird me out up close. The pupils look like holes through a person. It’s unsightly.”

“Well, that’s a breath of fresh air, I guess.” She speared a chunk of calamari with her fork, then dipped it in horseradish. In the restaurant’s dim light, her countless lenses blended together into uniform curves of indigo. “Try going to a job interview looking like this.”

“I can’t figure out how to turn down this umbrella.” Clara fidgeted with the handle and spokes, feeling for some sort of toggle that just wasn’t there.

“Well, if you press this button here, it’ll collapse and fold back up-“

“Do I really look that dumb?" She huffed. "I'm trying to turn it down, not off. I only want to filter out all these low-quality raindrops." She continued searching in futility for a few more seconds. "Wow, it really doesn't have a filter, does it? Why would anyone want an umbrella that only has one setting?”

“I’m sure you get this all the time, but I have to ask.”

“It’s about the sound coming from my chest, isn’t it?” Every word she spoke was punctuated by muffled clicking, thumping, and the occasional chime.

“Yeah. Is it a medical thing?”

“That’s putting it mildly.” She took another sip of her martini, then: “When I was fourteen, my left lung and rib were surgically replaced with a fully-functional typewriter.”

“Pannasosia?” Her date narrowed his eyes. “There’s no way that’s a real state.”

“It’s as real as it needs to be, I suppose.” She sipped at a spoonful of wild rice soup. “The whole place is an underground lake, save for a few aquifers and caves. It’s actually pretty big, but not many people live there.”

“Hmm.” He thought back to memorizing the state capitals in middle school geography, all those annoying songs they had him memorize. Alabama and Alaska, Arizona Arkansas… “I can’t say that I’ve heard of it. You sure that it’s not a Canadian province or something?”

“So, what’s the weirdest thing that you believe in?” Her hands were busy sawing through a thick cut of swordfish. After a few rough dates, she figured that she would lead with the question this time. “I’ve got a doozy, but I want to hear your story first.”

“Well.” He put down a forkload of farfalle. “Sometimes, you know… I guess I remember things from my childhood that couldn’t possibly have happened. It's made me wonder if this is actually the universe that I was born into.”

She sighs. This is how her last date ended, too. “Do you really want to make this more awkward than it is?”

“Well, as an atheist-“ he had to get that part in. “I really feel that we should get this out of the way. Make sure that there’s nothing too weird for me.”

“Alright.” She takes a deep breath, then: 

He let her pick the appetizers on their second date, and in turn, she ordered the peach pit fondue.

“I love this place. They only use peaches with bottomless pits here,” she explained. “Birds that peck into them in the wild often lose their beaks, if not their entire heads. It takes a chef with real skill to craft them into something that humans can safely swallow.”

“Wait! Doesn’t that hurt your hands? At all?”

She pays her date no mind, however, and continues unscrewing the light bulb from its socket in the lamp hanging over their table. It eventually comes loose, but never loses power; the glow continues as she balances it between her long fingers. “I learned this trick back in college,” is her only explanation. She then taps it against the edge of her plate like a hardboiled egg, forming a loose webwork of cracks along its shell.

Elliott found the first piece of his death under his fiancé’s pillow when he was only eighteen. It was a cogwheel of sorts, wrought from black iron, and he knew what it was the moment that he found it. Once he felt its weight in his hands, he walked out the door while she was still asleep, and left his ring behind.

We rode the elevator to the skyscraper’s peak, where its monstrous caldera awaited us. The goddess took my hand and led me to its ledge, and together, we gazed down into the pit. Fifty stories beneath us, a lake of molten rock could be seen churning and bubbling and folding in on itself. Only the furthest edges of the tower’s former floors remained, as most of the interior had melted inward from the heat.

The end of the world is neither exactly a time or a place; rather, it is a four-dimensional surface, curved and chaotic, which courts the path of the planet on its journey through space-time. Were one to visualize it using only three dimensions, it would seem almost ribbon-like, a black helix of fluttering death. Asteroids entangled by this dark fabric are certain to be drawn into the Earth’s gravitational pull.

Most who tell the story agree about how it started, but not where- some say Fargo, others, Des Moines. On a handful of computers in some high school’s library, clouds of gray and black pixels began flowing across their monitors until nothing else could be seen. Eventually, an overwhelming pressure behind the glass caused it to shatter, allowing clouds of virtual smoke to escape.

“This won’t be like your average rainbow-riding operation. We’ll be placing you inside of a research-grade kaleidoscope,” she explained to me as we ascended. “Hundreds of bifurcations per square millimeter. The human brain can absorb the patterns and colors of maybe half this, but the optic nerve is going to attempt to take it all in at once. I can imagine that you’re worried right now, but I promise that you’re going to witness something really special.”

The batteries bulge at the seams when inserted into your flashlight, as though filled with flesh or bubblegum. There’s no satisfying click of connection- only a sense that they don’t belong in such a device, and that any more pressure would cause them to burst. “Do not squeeze,” reads the mostly-black label in seven different languages. This warning is printed next to a cartoonish silhouette vomiting some sort of jagged fluid.

At times, the glass bulb on your bookshelf is filled with violet sands; at others, it is completely empty. You’ve watched the fine powder emerge from nowhere on several occasions, swirling outward from a needle’s-eye hole in space. You’ve also observed the grains sliding through one another until none are left, leaving it hollow once more. This is apparently no illusion; the bulb is far heavier while it appears to be full.

As a child, you accidentally fell asleep on the couch one night while watching the Discovery Channel; however, the thing that believes it is you (which you know as your body) stayed awake for several hours thereafter. During that time, it learned everything there was to know about chameleons from a National Geographic special. Just before you regained consciousness, a stray curl of your hair snapped a horsefly from the wall, beginning a long and terrible process of transformation.

You’d read enough Borges to know that wandering into a strange library alone was an ill-advised move, but you couldn’t resist this time around. Its gates exuded that incense of savory dust unique to the most ancient of tomes (which is, perhaps, the most tangible manifestation of wisdom known to mankind). From outside, it resembled a cave as much as it did a temple; you found it hard to determine whether the entrance was lined with stalactites, or columns, or teeth.

The fever brought with it dreams, and some say that the dreams themselves were the fever. We the afflicted passed in and out of vile consciousness, occasionally bursting through the surface of another world, only to sink back down into our overheating flesh. Our conversations with one another went on uninterrupted, for we were equally present in both realities.

“The world is ending, and it always will be.” Those nine words were emblazoned across the side of his thorium-powered rig, a sign of rare optimism while crossing what remained of the American interstate system. The boss told him that he would be hauling eighty-eight barrels of angel blood, and in this economy, he was willing to believe it- but he’d learned long ago not to get too curious when dealing with this sort of clientele. More than likely, it was just another batch of heavy water. At least, that’s what he told himself.

At first, we believed that the horizon splitter was only a myth. It sounded like a parody of the atomic bomb at most, inspired by the horror of something indivisible being mutilated by science. Word traveled from radio to radio that it was enroute, which we initially wrote off as disinformation from the enemy, just another of many attempts to incite fear. In the end, whether or not this was the case did not matter, as the bomb was able to do its job without existing at all.

If it’s still the past while you’re reading this, you may wish to take notes. It wasn’t asteroids, or bombs, or angels with trumpets. During the last decade of our lives, there was a common sense of dread that we were living out the final act. Novelty was running low. Each and every one of us had been carrying the scripts for our own lives, but never noticed until the remaining pages were too thin to thumb through easily.

There is a commonly circulated urban legend concerning earwigs that their name is a reference to a particularly horrifying type of parasitism: that they propagate by burrowing into the human cranium through the ear canal, then tunnel their way into the brain’s gray matter where they lay their eggs.

In modernity, most discover this myth by encountering a statement of its negation. Nearly every text concerning earwigs includes, somewhere in the first few sentences, language similar to this: “Despite their nomenclature, earwigs do not actually propagate by burrowing into the human cranium through the ear canal to lay their eggs, though this is a commonly circulated urban legend.”

The antlion is unique among modern animalia in that its evolution resulted not from a mutation within its genetic code, but rather, within the spelling of its name. Sometime during the legendary translation of the Septuagint from Hebrew into Greek for Ptolemy II, an old Hebrew variant of 'lion' used in the Book of Job was warped into the bizarre word 'myrmecoleon,' a portmanteau of the terms for 'ant' and 'lion.'

Shortly after the arrival of the twentieth century, natural selection replaced the homing pigeon with the radio wave. This evolutionary leap resulted in the emergence of electrobiology as an academic field. Other members of the animal kingdom underwent a similar metamorphosis, though there is little agreement about what became of the barber’s hummingbird.

In his bestiary’s entry regarding tigers, Leonardo da Vinci describes a bizarre interaction between humans and these mighty beasts:

 "This is a native of Hyrcania; it bears some resemblance to the panther from the various spots on its skin; and it is an animal of terrifying speed. When the hunter finds its cubs he carries them off instantly, after placing mirrors at the spot from which he has taken them, and immediately takes to flight upon a swift horse."

In the year 1968, there were four separate cases of submarines disappearing under mysterious circumstances: the American Scorpion, the Israeli Dakar, the French Minerve, and the Soviet K-129. The last of these events came under scrutiny when, six years later, a United States black project disguised as a manganese mining operation attempted to locate and salvage what was left of the Soviet submarine. This program was known as “Project Azorian,” and was primarily carried out by a single vessel known as The Glomar Explorer.

Wild trumpets must be dried out before they can be safely played by a human mouth. The local tribes of Hyperborea's easternmost islands have mastered this process: they hang the bulbous creatures over a pyre of burning inkwood, whose smoke drains their bells of any lingering venom and stains their skins an obsidian shade. The instrument that results has a limited range, yet this is counterbalanced by its powerful timbre.

When confronted with the possibility of being devoured, the common gecko is capable of making a somewhat brutal compromise [...] the lizard can shed the entirety of its own tail as an offering to potential predators. During such a transaction, the predator receives a much smaller meal, but the gecko’s life is spared, and its tail eventually grows back.

Eighteenth century explorer José de Almagro claimed to have discovered a much more curious specimen in the mountains of what is today Chile: a gecko which, when threatened, could shed its entire body at once. 

The author remained perfectly still as the tarantula wandered across his typewriter’s keys. With eight grotesque legs, it spelled out the secret name of death, and he recognized it as soon as it appeared. It was the sort of name that could only be pronounced with one’s final gasp; as such, he didn’t dare utter it, for fear that it’s owner might come forth upon hearing his voice.

Thricelings are born incomplete. They emerge from the womb not as living things, but instead, as motionless, beige mounds with the consistency of bread dough. These formless masses rest on porcelain slabs in nurseries, warmed and nourished by the heat of the fires beneath them. Should they survive this process for two weeks without melting or crumbling, they will be considered viable, and allowed to progress to their second birth.

Gremlins are known to live in the engines of airplanes, the spindles of hard drives, and the pipes of boiler rooms. No space within human industry has ever proven hostile enough to prevent their occupation, making them some of the hardiest lifeforms on this planet. Furthermore, they are notoriously difficult to capture, or even to spot; their presence is only ever known in hindsight, evidenced by chewed-through wires, rust-addled screws, and corrupted data.

“At first, we thought that our fortunes had changed,” his journal begins. “We saw what we thought was a whale breaching when a jet of vapor erupted from the waters along our ship’s port side. As we readied our harpoons, however, we found that the geyser seemed to have no source but the surface of the ocean itself. One of the other sailors exclaimed that it must have been a ‘mirror whale,’ meaning that both sides of its blowhole were on the outside of its body. As such, there was nothing for us to see or kill.”

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.

Just before it reaches the state of the same name, the Mississippi splits in two- one river above, and one river below. The old waterway’s underground sister diverges into numerous caverns, most of which prove to be dead ends. One of these branches spirals downward for almost a mile, however, into a vast, subterranean kingdom where the borders of the nations above have no meaning.

The body of a sea serpent is most often seen as a sine wave. As it propels itself across the water, its length protrudes from the ocean as a series of archways between the tail and the head. When humans attempt to observe the creature from beneath the water, however, they discover that there’s nothing at all to be seen. For this reason, many have written off the mysterious beast’s existence altogether; despite the profound number of sightings over time, no physical specimen has ever been recovered.

Wishing wells have a metabolism which is much like that of pitcher plants. Coins cast into their bowels are digested over the course of several decades, and are eventually left faceless and without luster. The pit then excretes a perfume of willpower into the atmosphere, resulting in subtle shifts in the ways of the world.

Two nearly identical fossils await in a cold room beneath the museum, in an exhibit long forgotten. Each slab of stone contains the imprint of some six-winged avian with a long, barbed tail, and no head. Both are longer than any human has ever been tall.

Beneath the glass display is a plaque, which reads as follows:

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?”

The gnomes of Hyperborea are neither born nor created; they enter our world by climbing out of their own shadows, and leave a few hours later when they inevitably tumble back down into them. At the bottom of each of these peculiar holes (sometimes over thirty miles in depth) is a pool of black lava of unknown origin. Some say that each such shadow is a window into a second underground, and that our planet hides multiple interiors beneath a single surface. Others claim that there is no such multitude of underworlds, and that the gnomes create a material debt by existing that eventually swallows their borrowed bodies whole.

You’ve come to this forest in search of the creature known as "sasquatch." By now you’ve learned that he is human; at least, by some definitions of the word "human." His flesh has been warped by years of long-exposure photographs, and his skin has blurred into a pareidoliac wool. A grotesque thumbprint remains where once there may have been a face, neither able to see nor speak.

Once we flip this switch, you'll begin to see your life’s High Scores table. It will scroll across the sky on nights of the new moon, as well as along the insides of your eyelids during the interludes between dreams and wakefulness. Here, you’ll see the initials of everyone who has ever been you, as well as how well they performed over the course of your lifespan.

1. An astronaut should be able to subsist for one lunar cycle on nothing but canned sunlight. Only the purest variety will prove their readiness: it should be distilled by the solar panels of low-orbit satellites, then carried back to Earth in the talons of doves.

2. An astronaut should be lowered into a pool of raven’s feathers, then meditate in stillness for three days and three nights. During this ordeal, gravity will tempt them to sink to the bottom, but they must be able to resist through force of will.

Once upon a time, we designed a dragon that existed for you alone to slay. At the midsection of its neck, it was exactly as tall as the sum of your height, the distance between your elbow and wrist, and the length of a broadsword’s blade. Gaps in its scales could be found at several points along its legs, each of which rested evenly with your eye level. Even the coloration of its blood was meant to complement the glimmer of your irises in the fire of its last breath. Every single aspect of its anatomy was tailored to reflect your own.

They’d been following you for your entire life, usually just a few days behind. Officially, their job was to sew the plotholes shut that were caused by your reckless decisions. They were quite good at making sure your memories aligned with the reality that you wounded, something that you never realized you were doing. The laws of the universe have always been poor constraints when subjected to the malleability of the past.

There’s a prescription waiting for you at the pharmacy, currently unclaimed: a bottle of twenty-four pyramid-shaped pills. We ordered it for you several years ago, just in case the universe that we built for you failed to entertain. When taken over the course of six months, they coalesce into an inner tomb for your former self. This marks the beginning of a major shift in consciousness which we refer to as “hard mode.”

Every morning, you gaze into your mirror intently as you prepare for your face for the day; yet, despite its importance to you, you’ve never bothered to plug it into the wall. We find this incredibly perplexing. Despite the power afforded to you by owning your very own mirror, you’ve chosen to use it as a mere vanity device. We can only assume that this stems from a lack of knowledge on how to utilize its more extraordinary properties.

As a child, you had quite a knack for discovering the extra lives that were hidden throughout virtual worlds. You always knew which waterfalls to look behind, which walls to reach through, and even what pottery to break- yet for some reason, you never found the ones that we left behind specifically for you.

The laws of nature are said to be written in the same language that birds sing their songs in. Mastery of this secret tongue has only been claimed by a handful of human beings over the centuries, and even they could neither speak it nor translate it, only understand it.

The leather-bound cookbook contains three-hundred seventy-seven recipes, including instructions for preparing alligator skin, thickening petroleum into flan, and slow-cooking ingots of iron until they’re tender enough to swallow. Before all of this, however, the text begins with a set of initiatory instructions, required for the chef to “survive their own work.” These instructions are as follows:

The seventeenth chapter of Abstruse Geometry concerns the mathematical problem of snakes swallowing their own tails. Following in the footsteps of a lost treatise by Athanasius Kircher, the tome describes a mysterious knot known as an “ourobohedron,” which is composed entirely of snakes engaged in varying degrees of autophagy. What it lacks in mathematical rigor, it makes up for in curiosity. The figure is described as follows:

Jack and the Beanstalk begins with its titular character making a pact with the devil. This element of the story is largely overlooked, but undeniable; he sacrifices his family’s prize calf to a mysterious salesman in exchange for a handful of magic beans. The consequences of this Faustian bargain are left out of the legend’s most well-known rendition, but given other tales from the past with similar devices, it is safe to conclude that in some way or another, Jack has committed an act of self-damnation.

You’d read enough Borges to know that wandering into a strange library alone was an ill-advised move, but you couldn’t resist this time around. Its gates exuded that incense of savory dust unique to the most ancient of tomes (which is, perhaps, the most tangible manifestation of wisdom known to mankind). From outside, it resembled a cave as much as it did a temple; you found it hard to determine whether the entrance was lined with stalactites, or columns, or teeth.

“The clawfoot bathtub,” this book begins, “is a distant cousin of the crockpot and cauldron. Although its natural habitat is typically found outside the kitchen, it demonstrates a particular susceptibility to culinary magic due to its shape and composition. Being quadrupedal and wrought from relatively flexible materials, bringing one to life is often one of the most basic lessons taught to apprentice deep chefs.”

The cover of the book is printed in thick, loud lettering: “The Secret Taxonomy of Lightning and its Anatomical Details, by Thomas Edison.” This misattribution is surprising, as despite it being the only copy of the book to ever exist, the Wizard of Menlo Park still managed to be plagiarize its contents. Despite this, you know the truth about its author, as well as the ramifications of its existence.

“Now, I could ask you how many moons the Earth has,” the professor began. “Wait for someone in the room to blurt the obvious answer of ‘one,’ then smugly rebuke them. It is within my rights as your instructor to do this, but I am not a jackass, and all of you are smarter than that. You wouldn’t be at this university if you fell for such banal tricks. You’d have suspected I was playing at something the minute I asked such a question. So, I’m going to be straight with you on this one."

For humanity, it is the earth that is solid, and the air that is permeable; for chthonity, the opposite is true. They wander just beneath our feet, as we do beneath theirs, sometimes even atop one another. Their world is an inversion of our own, one which rests within a sphere atop an endless sky. Our atmosphere is the soil upon which they tread.

“I’m telling you, the seismic readings are fairly clear at this point. It’s down there.”

“I mean, I believe you, but how?”

“From what I understand, the outer surface of the inner core is reinforced with hexagonal plates that hold back the sea of molten rock. There’s no external path inside- its body is armored in all directions.”

There are more than two-thousand species of bird present throughout the Great Agarthan Jungle, from the minuscule anteater hummingbird to the greater spherical penguin. Despite the extraordinary diversity present, however, all of their eggs, no matter the parent, are outwardly identical. Each egg is recognizably Agarthan by its signature gömböc curvature, gumdrop size, and transparent shell that reveals nothing but green jelly inside. If appearances are to be believed, there is no embryo within at all- just the same undifferentiated ooze.

If the tales of the old north are to be believed, when the gods created the world, they began by murdering a giant. Ymir, as he was known while alive, was disassembled into his most basic components, then used to sculpt the planet. Mountains were carved from his bones, forests were woven from his hair, and oceans were brewed with his sweat. Once this was done, his eyebrows provided just enough thread to sew the boundaries of reality shut. The last of these stitches marked the end of his usefulness, but also, the beginning of time.

Some mathematicians go so far as to call their work the language of God. In their hubris, they refuse to admit that they write in a language that is very human: one with its own idioms, clichés, and platitudes. In order to prove supposed mathematical truth, they routinely employ the same handful of phrases and arguments, yet are startled when these phrases and arguments are echoed back to them in the same language that they began with.

An ancient winter was buried in those caves, pressed between layers of geological strata. It was another kind of season from another kind of time, when the snow was luminous and refused to melt. After nine days spent lost in the dull, indigo glow of those tunnels, Thomas was no longer certain if the cold or hunger would kill him first. Almost all of his skin was numb, yet he could feel the outline of his stomach more clearly than ever before.

“So, where do we go from here?”

“Well, this is a maze,” she responded. “By definition, I don’t know which way to go.”

“Hmm. Then which way don’t we go?”

“The wrong way, clearly.”

The secret of your smartphone is that it is most powerful while turned off. In truth, its screen is the surface of an endless black sea shared among all others of its kind. Messages and information sent from one phone sink down through this vast darkness until they bubble up to the glass of another. All who gaze within are looking downward, no matter the direction of their eyes.

The gnomes of Hyperborea are neither born nor created; they enter our world by climbing out of their own shadows, and leave a few hours later when they inevitably tumble back down into them. At the bottom of each of these peculiar holes (sometimes over thirty miles in depth) is a pool of black lava of unknown origin. Some say that each such shadow is a window into a second underground, and that our planet hides multiple interiors beneath a single surface. Others claim that there is no such multitude of underworlds, and that the gnomes create a material debt by existing that eventually swallows their borrowed bodies whole.

There are chambers beneath the city where sound continues to exist without space in which to propagate. For most species, including human beings, these environments appear to be little more than solid walls of limestone and granite. For bats, however, these barriers are as permeable as the air they breathe. They dip in and out of the subterranean passages hidden beyond, preying upon the immaterial insects within.

Through rainfall, the dying hurricane entombs itself. The world below swallows what were once its clouds, beginning a process of transformation beyond human eyes. Eventually the weather above ground calms, but from the storm’s perspective, this is far from the end. Underground rivers become new arteries and reanimate its vaporous flesh, allowing mist and soil to merge into a new kind of sinew. After several weeks of gathering its bones back together, the storm returns to life in the depths of the planet.

You are waiting for a train at a station hundreds of miles beneath the Earth’s surface. The entire structure has been carved from what appears to have once been a colossal tortoise’s shell. A commemorative plaque attached to a column indicates that this is indeed the case, and that the station itself is “a relic from those chaotic days before the world was hammered into a sphere.”

The head of your pickaxe has been reinforced with depleted uranium. You swing its leather-bound neck with weary arms, and the honeycomb comes loose in thick ingots of iron-beeswax alloy. Throughout nine years of tunneling through the world’s guts alone, it has often served as your only friend. 

“Hey, you! Your eyes are untied.”

Decades have passed since she first uttered those words to me. We were in Kindergarten then, yet she spoke them with such certainty that, even as an adult, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she had meant something by them. Whenever I’d ask her to explain what she meant, however, she’d just smile and laugh at me, as though it were obvious. What was it, I wondered, that she could see, yet I could not?

“So, what’s the weirdest thing that you believe in?” Her hands were busy sawing through a thick cut of swordfish. After a few rough dates, she figured that she would lead with the question this time. “I’ve got a doozy, but I want to hear your story first.”

“Well.” He put down a forkload of farfalle. “Sometimes, you know… I guess I remember things from my childhood that couldn’t possibly have happened. It's made me wonder if this is actually the universe that I was born into.”

She sighs. This is how her last date ended, too. “Do you really want to make this more awkward than it is?”

“Well, as an atheist-“ he had to get that part in. “I really feel that we should get this out of the way. Make sure that there’s nothing too weird for me.”

“Alright.” She takes a deep breath, then: 

Humanity left the universe, and the gods followed. They left behind their cities, their treasures, their rockets; but most importantly, they left behind their children. 

Divine and ageless, they filled the void with their laughter. Their intellect was perfect, yet their nature remained naive. They chose to hold an endless birthday party for all things, accepting space and time as a continuous fluid independent of all clocks and calendars. The fiery cores of earth-like planets were converted into massive ovens to satisfy their perpetual desire for cake.

Every league out in darkspace had given their war comet a nom de guerre; for instance, the Bubblegum Battalion had their tried and true Fuchsia Machsine,whose engines were hidden beneath a thick shell of rose quartz and adhesive snow (30% marshmallow by volume). Despite their name, they were, in fact, all out of bubblegum, and had been for upwards of three months now.  Their comet was drifting through the abyss after a humiliating defeat, having been outfoxed and outgunned by Licorice Laboratories’ Malted Marauder.

After a decade of fighting crime, the city’s first hero was forced to wear his cape as a sash. The goldenrod dye used during its manufacturing had faded to gray from years of exposure to direct sunlight and acid rain. Though knives and bullets could not pierce his skin, they left jagged, butterfly patterns in the knitted cotton. Eventually, the time came to bury him, and there was nothing left with which to cover his coffin.

During one particularly long winter, labyrinths began to break out in the metropolis like a civic disease. Every night, alleyways began to weave through one another, forming thick knots of concrete that blended with subway lines and decrepit telegraph tunnels. Brick and fiberglass curled into wild helices, and highways shed their skins like serpents to contribute to the tangle. By daylight, no evidence remained of these predatory mazes beyond the frozen bodies left behind by those who had been ensnared within.

It has become common knowledge that, when an observer gazes up at the stars from Earth, they see them as they were at some point in the distant past. Furthermore, [...] the observer is looking upon those stars as they were at a time when the universe was significantly smaller. Were anyone to build a telescope which could see the furthest edge of the universe, they would see it as it existed at the moment time began: a moment when it was so small that, paradoxically, its edge was closer to the point occupied by the observer’s eye than their own telescope's lens.

“Now, I could ask you how many moons the Earth has,” the professor began. “Wait for someone in the room to blurt the obvious answer of ‘one,’ then smugly rebuke them. It is within my rights as your instructor to do this, but I am not a jackass, and all of you are smarter than that. You wouldn’t be at this university if you fell for such banal tricks. You’d have suspected I was playing at something the minute I asked such a question. So, I’m going to be straight with you on this one."

There is no topological model which can easily account for what astronomers at the University Beneath Chicago have observed under the ice of Jupiter's sixth moon. Though its surface is indeed a sphere, with a finite diameter around three-thousand kilometers, Europa’s volume is infinite.

1. An astronaut should be able to subsist for one lunar cycle on nothing but canned sunlight. Only the purest variety will prove their readiness: it should be distilled by the solar panels of low-orbit satellites, then carried back to Earth in the talons of doves.

2. An astronaut should be lowered into a pool of raven’s feathers, then meditate in stillness for three days and three nights. During this ordeal, gravity will tempt them to sink to the bottom, but they must be able to resist through force of will.

The Phaeton hypothesis, though largely abandoned by astrophysicists, suggests that the asteroid belt lying just beyond Mars’ orbit was once a planet unto itself. Zecheriah Sitchin believed in the existence of this world wholeheartedly, and further, that it was destroyed by an undiscovered rogue planet which he referred to as “Nibiru.” Upon its inevitable return, is said that it will bring with it chaos, disaster, and an army of extraterrestrial demigods known since Sumerian times as the Annunaki.

Seasoned conspiracy theorists know that it is coming soon, as it has been for decades, and always will be.

These things have long been known to be true: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, the north and south poles of magnets cannot exist without one another’s affection, and protons and electrons engage in hundreds of elaborate waltzes that we interpret as matter. These principles seem to point towards a universal rule of duality, yet one of the four fundamental forces defies this pattern: gravity.

The wildfire is visible from space, an ever-burning semicircle that connects the planet’s poles. East of this phosphorescent meridian, the world remains violet with life; to the west, however, there is nothing to be seen but smoke and desert, a landscape ruled by worms. The flames take several earth-months to complete a single rotation, allowing just enough time for the fields to regrow. Satellites orbiting its equator can see the entire gradient of life and death in a single rotation, from ashes to fertility to ashes once more.

The human body and its reflection are not the same beneath their skin. 

The image contained within a silvered mirror’s surface seems identical to its observer, but this semblance is usually only a few photons thick. Beneath the opaque barriers of the double’s visible flesh, a candle burns within a cage of transparent ribs, reinforcing the lifelike coloration of the illusion beyond. It is held in place by the long, glass candlestick of the spine, which refracts the firelight into sinuous rays of vital crimson.

Much like the pilot’s seat within a jet fighter, the human heart is capable of ejecting from the body entirely should an emergency arise. When the mechanism is triggered, pressure builds within its chambers until a critical level is reached, at which point the aorta detaches from the rest of the circulatory system and serves as an escape thruster. The entire supply of blood within the body is repurposed towards this launch, causing the heart to exit through the mouth at just under a bullet’s speed.

Through the matter of teeth, mankind’s innermost horror reveals itself. While the majority of the human skeleton is well-concealed, the skull is allowed to protrude beyond the flesh as two sets of sixteen tombstones, reminding its owner that it exists just beneath their skin. As such, teeth are the ultimate memento mori; a manifestation of death present in the visage of the living.

The first human eye featured six rotating pupils, similar in appearance to the chambers of a revolver. Each dark circle contained a small membrane of film onto which a single, still image could be imprinted, which the observer could then gaze into for as long as they wished. Because of this, twelve cross-sections of reality were the most that could ever be experienced between two full nights of sleep.

The shadow itself is a vital organ. While seemingly independent from the majority of biological functions, it is responsible for the most important immaterial process after consciousness- maintaining the borders of the physical body. While the rest of the organs sleep, it serves as a sort of geometric mold, pressurizing the self into its recognizable shape.

"The skull is the primary organ responsible for producing dreams," she explained. "As any neurologist can tell you, it contains far more complex marrow than any other bone in the human body.”

"Really? Given how thin the bone is, I wouldn't think that there would be any- oh." Is that seriously what she meant?

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.

“Excuse me, sir?” I’m usually more resilient when it comes to strangers with clipboards, but I couldn’t bring myself to look away from her perfect, silver eyes. “Do you have a moment to spare for the immaterial?”

The human mind takes up fifteen terabytes of space on average, and accommodating the soul requires for an additional twelve to be available. When compressed into a single unit, however, the complete, disembodied self can be expressed as a mere eighteen terabytes: smaller than the sum of its parts, yet no longer separable into individual segments. This conversion of being, popularly known as the Styx Process, can be performed in under twenty-four hours, as long as the deceased’s tombstone features a sufficiently efficient central processor.

Due to the prohibitive cost of phoenix feathers, only the city’s wealthiest and most esteemed are allowed to return from the dead. Some hide their plumes among the down of their pillows to prevent death from taking them in their sleep, while others wrap them in smoky bouquets, then stockpile them in refrigerated vaults. Even with such wonders available, however, the population at large still sees immortality as impossible, as each quill costs more money than most will ever make in a lifetime.

He awoke to find himself as a passenger on the train of the dead.

Those around him watched with interest as strange things passed outside their windows, from mansions in the clouds that were large enough to contain their own clouds, to orchards in which smaller orchards grew within transparent fruit on their trees. These were the afterlives of the greatest and most virtuous, containing splendors within splendors to allow an eternity of delight. All such things would soon be far behind.

That which imitates humanity also imitates having a ghost. When a crash-test dummy suffers damage that would have killed a passenger in its place, this false spirit is said to exit its body. Though it is not a conscious being, it still believes that it feels pain, and remembers every injury that it suffered while pretending to be alive. Because of this, it can haunt and make mischief like any other poltergeist.

Unbeknownst to the deer, its antlers are the reincarnation of an ancient forest. Though their previous form now exists as coal somewhere far beneath the creature’s hooves, they still remember their former magnificence. Each of their prongs grasps outward with the reach of a prehistoric cypress.

My roommate arrived home from her death coughing between fits of laughter. Her hair was freshly dyed, evergreen on brown, and her shirt was soaked in blood (hers, this time). She ran over to squeeze my daylights out, pinned me against the counter, then shoved my hand into her chest. Her skin was cold, adhesive, and pale- already blue in a few patches. “Check it out!” She yelled, grinning madly, and staring into me with inch-wide pupils. “No pulse! It’s finally over!”

The fever brought with it dreams, and some say that the dreams themselves were the fever. We the afflicted passed in and out of vile consciousness, occasionally bursting through the surface of another world, only to sink back down into our overheating flesh. Our conversations with one another went on uninterrupted, for we were equally present in both realities.

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.