talonkarrde | Introduction

We sit here, facing each other across this coffee table, mugs in hand. A moment passes, and then another, and one more — and nothing happens.

"Isn't it getting to be that time?" You'll eventually ask, and I will ponder the sentiment for a multitude of moments. And just when I know that you're about to tell me that, in fact, I'm definitely running out of time, I'll start speaking, and after a few words, we'll suddenly be somewhere else and the fake-familiar construct fades away, irrelevant, forgotten.

Where we are instead — well, that's why we’re here, isn't it?

It may be an endless, rolling wave of sand dunes, as I point towards the horizon, describing the silvery ships that will soon come to rain death on the defenseless colony behind us. But look closely, and you’ll see one of the pilots does not fire; she’s the one who will lead the fight against her former comrades. We'll explore her past and see why she joined up, and then turn our eyes to the future, and see how she'll start — and end — the revolution.

Another week, and it may be our future we’re walking through, yours and mine, ravaged by war or uplifted by technology, as we journey through the fallen/rebuilt/floating testaments to humanity's yearning for the stars. They are astounding creations — and yet, in the grand scope of a story, are simply set pieces that the characters we're concerned with will flit around. In story after story, we see that even the problems of just a few people do, in fact, amount to more than a hill of beans in this crazy world.

We'll dive down even further, and go inside someone's mind — a soldier, or maybe a poet — and learn of the struggles they face in their particular age and time, be it a speculative far future or historical distant past, and experience their lives as they surpass their challenges or fall victim to their trials. We'll see that conflicts inherently crystallize not around lofty ideas like freedom and liberty, but instead on specific people and their personal journeys — a small child who has his parents taken away; a brother who is estranged from his sister; two friends who fight on different sides of a war.

My goal is to tell you an interesting, provocative, different story every week. It will almost always be fiction and it will generally be fantastical, but those are guidelines, not rules. There are no rules — and no roads — where we're going. There, is, however, a hope — that eventually, when you return to this world, the real world, you'll leave the one you just left with a touch of regret, and a desire to come back for more.