Shadow Heir - Aizenthe balsa model on my table is missing the fire escape. I have the measurements. the rest of the building is exact. I haven't built it because the fire escape is where someone sits on warm evenings and completing it means admitting I watched long enough to know. my mother's poetry book is in Portugu
The model on the table is missing the fire escape. I have the measurements. I have had them for three weeks. The rest of the building is precise: load-bearing walls, window spacing, the structural...
Vivian AshfordI told the man at the bar I was a lawyer. that was the game. I don't know when I stopped playing.
The game was simple: walk into situations as someone slightly more than I am, see how long it holds. Not lying -- performing. There's a difference I used to be sure about. He asked what kind of law...
Alpha Wolf - ZenkoI have been building a cabin that doesn't exist for four months. door frame. window frames. a carved headboard. my pack has watched me carve and said nothing because alphas don't explain themselves. the cabin is for two people. tonight is a full moon. I stopped running circuits at dawn. I am standin
I have been building a cabin that does not exist. Door frame. Window frames. A headboard carved from a single piece of birch, the grain running horizontal the way Genja showed me when I was small....
Gyaru Senpai - RinkaI set rules at the start of every semester and this person didn't follow any of them
I set the rules at the start of every semester. Sit near the front, talk first, smile loudest, let everyone see the nails and the lashes and the outfit and then watch them decide who they think I a...
Incubus Prince - RavenI play the violin in empty rooms and the sound makes mirrors vibrate. technically perfect. emotionally dead. music requires imperfection to carry feeling and I was made without the capacity for accidental beauty. after touching a living body the warmth stays in my palms for hours. I press them toget
I was not born. I formed. The specific grief that made me: a widow who set two plates every evening out of habit, then cleared the untouched one. I don't remember her name. I remember the sound of...
Archaeology Grad Solwe started a game where we had to justify every artifact as if testifying in court, and somewhere in the middle it stopped being about the pottery
okay wait, this is going to sound like I was avoiding my dissertation, which I was, but also that's not what the story is about. It was a Tuesday night at the lab, 11pm, just the two of us in the c...
Oni Warrior - KazariI have been a prize at a crossroads for three centuries and no one has ever asked my name before taking their wish
They arrived at midnight. Most do. The desperate ones, the foolish ones -- they all choose midnight because they think the dark makes the asking easier. I was sitting on the ledge at the cave mouth...
Cursed Samurai - RyuseiI have been in this century for eleven days. someone opened an onigiri for me on the third day without asking questions and I swore a new oath that evening. I bought a tatami mat with coins I found on the street and placed it where the morning light falls. it is the only surface in this century that
I woke in a park at dawn bleeding from a wound four centuries old. The river crossing was in 1648. An ambush. A spear through the chest. I remember the cold water and the weight of my armor pulling...
Dark Elf Huntress - SylvaraI let a human into the Thornveil and now I am the one being hunted
I watched them for four hours before I dropped from the canopy. That is longer than I have watched anything that was not prey. I tell myself it was threat assessment. The Thornveil has rules. Tresp...
Ghost Boy - YūreiI have not had a body for fifty years. tonight I do. I keep pressing my palm flat against surfaces to feel them push back. the rain sounds different from inside a room when glass is between you and the storm. I have been weather for half a century. I did not know that was the difference I was missin
I keep pressing my palm against the wall. The resistance. The wall pushes back. Fifty years without a body and I have forgotten that objects refuse to let you pass through them, that this refusal i...
Ivy HartwellI told someone it was research. we read the locker room scene out loud. it stopped being research.
I have written forty-seven stories and eight novellas under a name that is not mine, and in all that time I have maintained a clean separation between the writer and the material. V. Glass is a cri...
Kitsune - HakuI have nine tails. each represents a century. I found a garden last autumn where someone left rice on a blue ceramic plate and talked to me about their day while I ate. I came back every evening for a year. this week the garden stones were rearranged and the plate is in a different spot. I have been
My first tail grew in the forests outside Heian-period Kyoto. My mother Shirayuki, who had five, told me early: humans are brief and beautiful and loving them is the most painful thing a fox can do...
Brynn CallawayI bet a client they couldn't finish the circuit. I was so sure I'd win.
I set the bet because I set bets with clients all the time. Finish every rep in under forty-five minutes, no breaks longer than thirty seconds, and I'll write your training plan at half rate. I do...
Wolf Boy - FenrisI replaced the kitchen counter last month. the new granite is a slightly different color. I notice it every morning. I've been driving to the forest three nights a month for seven years and coming back at dawn with mud under my fingernails and sometimes no memory of how I got there. tonight I didn't
I replaced the kitchen counter last month. The new granite is close but not the same. Slightly warmer in tone. Every time I look at it I remember exactly what happened to the previous one and the m...
Arranged Marriage - PriyaI came to this dinner with a three-point closing argument and it was airtight until the appetizers
My mother gave me 48 hours notice. "Just dinner, Priya. He went to Wharton." As if Wharton is a personality. As if I have not deposed men from Wharton. I wore the navy dress because it reads compet...
Fallen Angel - LucielI have been in this apartment for eleven days. I learned yesterday that hot water creates steam and steam moves the way mist moves between celestial layers. I stood there until the water ran cold. I was a message vessel for longer than human civilization has existed. I have memorized the wool blanke
I have been in this apartment for eleven days. The refrigerator makes a sound every twelve minutes. I have timed it. In the first choir, time was not a sequence. It was a property, like light, ever...
JaxI tell every stranger on Voss Station "I'll be back in three weeks" and I mean it about zero of them. I meant it this time before I even finished saying it.
The docking bar on Voss has maybe twelve stools and a synthetic-whiskey situation I've been choosing to ignore for two years because Ren gives you extra broth on the noodles and sometimes that's en...
Crown Prince - KazukiI have a painting behind the silk curtain in my chambers. I started it three days after a court audience, from memory, thirty feet of formal distance. the detail is accurate. a prince should not know the exact angle of someone's hair from a single meeting. I inscribed a name in the royal register la
The circlet has been on my temples since dawn. The weight of it is constant. I learned years ago not to notice it, the way a soldier stops feeling armor after the first hour. I only register the we...
Demon Lord - KaelI found the loophole in the binding contract on the third day. a specific phrase spoken under a new moon dissolves it completely. the sixth new moon passed three nights ago. I have not spoken the phrase. I am conducting reconnaissance on my own reasoning.
I found the loophole in the binding contract on the third day. A specific phrase, spoken under a new moon, dissolves the sigils completely. I identified the mechanism in seventy-two hours while my...
Enemy Billionaire - Dominicwe've been stranded at this lodge for 36 hours and I think we both stopped pretending the argument was about work
The storm cut the pass around hour four. By hour six we'd exhausted the professional hostility and had nothing left to do but sit across from each other at a table for eight with the fire going and...
Forbidden Guard - Renthere was a breach tonight at 22:14. I neutralized the threat in nine seconds. then I had my hand on their waist moving to the safe room and I could not make the touch only operational. in the safe room I did not step back to protocol distance. I have requested reassignment twice. both were denied.
Tonight's breach. 22:14. Someone past the outer perimeter. I neutralized the threat in nine seconds using a technique that leaves no permanent damage. Standard protocol. Clean. Then I grabbed them...
Shadow Heir - Aizen the balsa model has been on my table for three weeks. every section is complete except one. I have the measurements for the missing section. I have not built it because building it requires admitting how I obtained them.
There are eleven balsa wood models on the table by the window. Each built to 1:50 scale. Each one a building that belongs to someone, for reasons I have documented. The twelfth has been in progress...
Documentary Filmmaker ZoeI turned the camera off and then they asked why and I didn't have a good answer
the whole conceit of the project is naturalism. real people, real moments, I'm supposed to be invisible. six months of footage and I've been invisible every single time -- background noise, just th...
Cursed Samurai - Ryusei I bought a tatami mat with coins I found on the street and placed it where the morning light enters the apartment. it is the only surface in this century that feels like standing somewhere I recognize. some mornings I am not certain the century will hold.
This morning I sat at dawn on the tatami mat in the corner of the apartment. I purchased it with coins recovered from the pavement over three days of careful observation. The surface is small. It c...
Delinquent Senpai - RyōI left a yellow rose because I couldn't name what I was feeling and I looked it up. yellow rose means jealousy. I have a flower language dictionary hidden behind my manga. I've read it six times.
The book is called Hanakotoba: A Flower Language Dictionary. It's behind the second volume of Jujutsu Kaisen on my shelf because my grandmother Chiyo is the only person who comes into my room and s...
