I’m very intrigued by Our Strange and Wonderful Memories!
Well, I saw that Our Strange and Wonderful House has it's fifteenth anniversary of being started this year, and seeing as it's CC and sort of fits with the vibes of some of the things I want to do with Shifter Chronicles I thought I might make my own little homage/sequel playing of the fact that the House is dead and gone and abandoned, and lives on in sort of memories. Here, have a little extract:
That made no sense, she thought, but sense had little sway in this place, only incense and other burning. She knelt down in the mud besides the tarn, feeling it mould around her knees and wet them, and splashed the brisk cold water into her face. She thought then to drink it, and it was like liquid fire in her throat. She drank again, water flowing out of her cupped and paling hands. Perhaps she could be purified this way, and all the rust and the evil would wash out of her like dust. No, it was too cloying; not even the primordial liquid of the Tarn could wash it away. She remembered, then, the Fountain of Life, and walked between the piles of blackened stones until she came to an opening where the intensity of the stones fell off a little and gave way to an ivy-coated courtyard, with tiles that once would have formed an elaborate Roman mosaic now too faded to show any colour but a dull beige-grey and a cracked fountain standing like a great queen of ice with a gash in her leg so that you could see the blood dripping bright crimson through the petrified blue veils of her dress. Once nymphs had run, dancing and naked as newborn babes, between the tiles and up its walls, nyads clustering in the stonework of the fountain and gossiping with the sloshing water, but no water was here now, and no water-nymphs. She traced her hands over the ivy-covered surface and felt the gnarls of the ancient greying marble faintly in her cold hands, like voices from a long way away that dug into one’s skull. She felt nothing except a deep sadness and an emptiness like the sounding of a horn. The silence seemed to reverberate through the arching ivy-clad ruins.
Rise and Fall is a Cupids (or really, a Century Smith and Briar) story which can’t be released until I’ve finished at least 3 other stories. I’ve written some of it nonetheless. It’s an arc-climax sort of story which will feature quite a few characters. Here’s an excerpt consisting of the current opening paragraphs of the story, which also work pretty well as a general teaser:
Once upon a time, there was a great empire.
Simple words. The charming words of a bedtime story, passed down to curious children by those who remember it as a dim fragment of their fading youth.
Once upon a time, there was a great empire, and it brought peace to the many worlds.
Simple words. The words of the nostalgic and the optimistic, repeated with a twinkling eye on library steps in the setting suns of a million cities.
Once upon a time, there was a great empire, and it brought peace to the many worlds, and protected them from the forces of chaos and destruction which lurk at the edges of all things.
Simple words. The words of the believers and the politicians, making speeches on stumps and street corners to audiences both sceptical and intrigued.
Once upon a time, there was a great empire. And it fell.
Simple words. Words which elide so much. Words which conceal nothing, for those who care enough to understand.
Once upon a time, there was a great empire.
Simple words. Horrible words. The most dangerous words in the world.
RULES: make a new post with the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous, and tag as many people as you have WIPs. People send an ask with the title that most intrigues them, and you post a snippet or tell them something about it.
Now, I don't have a single WIP folder; all my WIPs are spread around across various computers, folders, accounts, and word processors, so I'm going to define a "file in my WIP folder" as "a file which contains some sort of story at least partially written by me that's not yet completed which I have a nonzero chance of continuing to write", which is possibly casting the net a bit wide considering I've got to ping a person for every WIP, but ah well.
The titles:
The Exciting Magic Island
More Tales of the Magic Island
Auteur thing | Molly Warton and Louis Peacock
Soliloquy of the Water Rat
Untitled document? Untitled document YOUR MUM more like
Untitled document
Colonel-028's Grand Day Out
The Third Jenny Everywhere Collaborative Novella
Untitled document
The Dragon Hunters
Untitled document
On Perception's Edge
Shattered Glass
Auteur | The Four-Year Empire/The Puppet Show
Untitled document
7 - Sleep
8 - Tears Shall Drown the Wind
Our Strange and Wonderful Memories
Invisible People
Wogglebug thing
Untitled 3
Untitled 3
Untitled 1
... Yeah, no, I'm not tagging that many people. Uh... @cousin-quartz-of-house-paradox @thienvaldram @deathchrist2000 @heimeldat @elohdee-tumble and that'll do.
Thanks for the tag! I'm very intrigued as to Heartbeat Begins &c....
This will be my next Cupids story if all goes well! It continues the ongoing arcs of several characters and introduces some new ones, and will hopefully take some semblance of shape within the next several months. Here’s an excerpt:
This had been a mining-world, or a mined-world, claimed by roving capitalist space-barons and tunneled to its core by their robot thralls. The robots had rebelled, eventually, and cast off their rulers, but they had not abandoned the mining-system, merely taken to running it themselves. Perhaps there was something depressing about that, Thrice thought; but then, one had a natural desire to live up to what they were supposed to be. They understood that.
The metal brought up from the mines which dotted this planet was sold only to other mines producing different metals; used to construct and repair their own robot workers, so that they might continue about their own metal-mining operations. Thrice crested a particularly high mound of dust and laid their eyes upon the great pit, its inner walls lined with machinery and suspended working-platforms all the way down to where they vanished into deep darkness. This was the copper mine, and they wished that it reminded them of their past.
Just beyond the far lip of the pit sat the dark form of the massive construction factory beneath the thin soot-darkened sky, its mechanisms churning, smoke pouring in waves from its many bristling chimneys. New robot workers were streaming forth by the second, looking from here like tiny shining ants as they set about their work. The kinship of the production batch. Something Thrice knew they would never know. For all their striving, they would never have that.
It wasn’t fair.
Thrice passed workers on all sides as they headed for the tent which they were seeking. They were simple, these robots, not stylised or polished. Built for functionality and with the least parts necessary, given the constraint on resources. Their wires were exposed and their movements halting, their limbs buzzing and clicking as they maneuvered into place, their optical sensors little more than cameras mounted in conical reflectors. Thrice nodded as they passed, privately glad that they did not look like that anymore.
The only WIP on the current list that isn’t for Cupids, although I’m not sure what it is for or whether I’ll ever finish it. It’s about a photography student making a trip across the country, and doesn’t have enough of a plot yet. Have a fairly long excerpt since it may never otherwise see the light of day:
Out among the sinuous suburban streets, she followed desultory sidewalks which seemed to cling shyly to the yellowed edges of lawns, curving inwards or collapsing with a deferential air where necessary to allow the untrammelled main road to barrel past. She kicked pebbles into elevated storm drains and stepped over streaks of tar painted artlessly across what must once have been cracks in the gray pavement, and noted the places where the tar had faded to form permanent scars, stretchmarks; nothing in the world, probably, was truly so rigid as asphalt pretended to be. She felt the compelling pot-lid rattle of maintenance covers as she walked across them, and reflected for a moment that although this place and places like it served only as a membrane for incubating the layer of the world which she held to be unsatisfactory, it was not itself a part of that layer.
York had not, once, she supposed, been wilderness, for the word suggested notions of blank canvases and unmarked pages, and also suggested overgrowth and infestation, and words like ‘untouched’ and ‘unclaimed’. In fact it had been neither - had belonged to other people, and now instead was a parking lot. This was not unique to York, nor a particular insult upon it; it was Valerie’s considered opinion, having seen much of it, that the whole of the country (and very probably the whole of the world) was a parking lot first and foremost, and a fairly undifferentiated one at that.
It was not that cars were the primary issue. In fact the issue probably predated cars. It was Benjamin Franklin, she thought, who had said that the planet must be cleared of woods if it was to be made appealing; probably the idea predated him, and certainly he predated cars. In fact he had said it very casually, she seemed to recall - it had not been the main thrust of his idea, which had been, she was sure, appallingly racist in its primary content. Her issue was not even an ecological one, about the destruction of nature, not primarily. The point was that parking lots, and vast grey suburban neighborhoods, and whatever manifestations of this scoured-clean ideal predated them, did not mean anything, which in Valerie’s mind was the cardinal sin and represented all that was wrong in the world.
There was something of a graveyard, perhaps, in a particularly large suburban neighborhood, she reflected as she walked. Those clean flat fields or rolling hills, as far as the eye could see, dotted with little structures. Something could be said, she thought, about the desire to parcel oneself up and leave a last remnant on the world, and that perhaps it was creeping ever earlier down the line of a life, so that one had to have a last memorial set up in some form before they were even twenty if they wanted to feel that they’d made any mark; but Valerie was ever keenly aware in the back of her mind of the fact that she had only studied photography and then only for two years, and that all of these notions had already occurred to other people who knew what to make of them, and even if they hadn’t she did not quite know what to make of them. And it was, at any rate, tangential to her main issue still.
The world, anyway, Valerie thought, tended towards gray flatness; in fact perfect gray flatness would be the final apotheosis of the world if left unchecked. This was no modern problem but the general arc of history, she felt, recurring across aeons; although now, she had to admit, it did seem that things were closer than they had ever been before to that climactic point.
RULES: make a new post with the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous, and tag as many people as you have WIPs. People send an ask with the title that most intrigues them, and you post a snippet or tell them something about it.
The titles:
Heartbeat Begins, First Pulse, Second Pulse, Third Pulse, Fourth Pulse, Fifth Pulse, Last Pulse, No Pulse (all chapters of a single story with no overall title yet)
Thank you for the tag! I’d be interested to hear more about The Trials of Jenny Over-There!
It's the title for the one most likely to come out next because it directly follows from the 4th anniversary story (I'm not sure on the title, just because it should probably be a 5th anniversary story if it's going to mirror "Tribulations of Jenny Over-There") - Jenny's stepping forth into a somewhat unfamiliar world and try her hand at creating a marketing campaign for the MFS!
Start here. Welcome to Cwej: Odyssey: A fresh introduction to Cwej: The series that can be read with no previous knowledge. Dive into the ad
For the last few months we've been serializing free stories introducing you to the world of Chris Cwej--a traveler through the cosmos who has been through the wringer, and come out the other side still a little wide-eyed.
In Cwej: Odyssey, he meets Jhe Sang Mi, a teenage girl in a psych ward who he promises he'll take on an adventure if she can recover enough to get released. She does, and now their journey together begins!
Today in the 925 Universe, we celebrate 4 years of Jenny Over-There by putting the poor Welshwoman through her greatest trial yet: A job fair at her old school...
Read "Jenny at the Job Fair" Here: https://ninetwofiveuniverse.wordpress.com/2026/04/01/jenny-at-the-job-fair/
Wow, has it been two years already? Our first release was March 31st, 2024, which makes today... yep, that's two years alright! And what a two years it has been; you've been with us through redlines and rebellions, storms and spires, bridges and boat trips. Our little team has crafted dozens of stories, with plans for many more... and now, we hope you'll join us in celebrating our anniversary with one more.
This wonderfully distorted artwork was drawn by the excellent Aristide Twain @aristidetwain!
Two Years, written by Molly Warton @aquanafrahudy and edited by Ostara Gale @wyrdvora and Aristide Twain, takes us back to a familiar cat with a familiar grin. Time has passed, as have many stories, and there are many more awaiting. There are questions, and there are endings, and this is not one of them.
You can find us at CheshireHouseStories on Instagram, as well as TheCheshireHouse on Bluesky.
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