On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 217, of 240 so far.

The Shell of the Material

The woman ran her hand across the rough bark of the trees as she wandered along the riverbank, moving slowly downhill to follow the water, which was a silvered streak in the light of the new moon.

The night-time animals were unworried, going about their usual tasks without concern about the intruder in their domain, because they understood that the woman was not so different from them.

It had been many long months since the woman had last been along this way, and since then she had travelled vast distances — some in this world, and more in the other. She had to focus her mind to remember what year it was, in the reckoning of the people of this place. They had such a basic understanding of their place in the greater plan, and they understood very little of the ways of the world in which they were temporary visitors. None of that was true for her.

She had lived for a dozen centuries, and for most of that time she had felt little interest for ordinary people. They rarely changed, and nor did their habits or failings, chief amongst them being a lack of imagination. But now something had stirred. Her expression became troubled as she thought of it.

Human beings had begun to inquire, and to suspect, and to wonder in ways that had previously seemed to be barred to them. They had begun to make things which were simple in themselves, but which spoke of a deep truth: that within each world there lies the potential to create all other things, including the ability to move beyond that world. The woman’s way was what the superstitious people called magic or witchcraft, but those terms only showed ignorance and prejudice. The woman, and all her sisters, were beings of knowledge; the knowledge of the world.

The ordinary people, in their villages and towns, tending to crops and scraping out a meagre survival, had turned their minds to machines, and to weapons, and to thoughts of how the pieces of the world meshed together and might be turned to their advantage. She and her sisters called this science, and by its light she could call down a storm or calm a raging river; she could bid animals to obey her commands; and she could twist the very minds of men so they would believe whatever she wished. She did these things only in the service of natural law, and the safety of herself and those like her, but she knew that the fearful and aggressive humans would never see it that way. To them, a capability was always a threat, and a possibility was treated as a certainty. And they could be so very cruel.

The wind spoke to her, telling of people and their livestock not far away, which was expected. There were many villages in these lands, because of the rich soil and the access to water. She and her kind didn’t travel by the roads, but there were many of those too, spreading like the arteries of some great circulatory system, expanding month upon month. And with the expansions came trade, and visitors, and growth. It troubled her, because nowhere in the minds of the ordinary people was the concept of balance, or of respectful limitation. Always more, but never enough.

Suddenly, there came the sound of hooves, and of the great wooden wheels of a wagon, on the road just visible a short distance away. Then she heard the voices of men, and they sounded both angry and jovial, a combination which was doubly unsafe.

The woman whispered in her thoughts to the world, and to what lay beneath it all. The world answered, as it always did, and in an instant she could no longer be seen, or heard, or felt. The humans passed by, one of them looking in her direction and peering into the trees, but it was impossible to them to see her with the whole will of the world bent against them. There were things that men had never learned, and now they never would, set as they were on their path of the worship of physical things, and their simple view of this plane; the shell of the material.

The woman moved on, nodding to a bird which could see her perfectly well because it saw with older and more direct eyes than mankind could ever regain, and because it was no threat to her. The bird said that the humans had gone, and the woman thanked it, all without either creature making a sound.

She walked on for a short distance, and she came to a place where the terrain sloped more steeply downhill, giving a view through the trees to the moonlit valley below. There were plumes of smoke here and there from chimneys and the occasional bonfire, but the scene was peaceful and in harmony with the land. It would not always be so.

The woman allowed her eyes to lose focus, turning instead to the eyes within, the ones connected to the world from its beginning, and unbound from mortal concerns. The image in her mind changed rapidly, with roads running across fields like snakes, and forests cut down, and the black tumours of cities and factories and docks and even more.

There were machines on meandering metal tracks, and machines with wheels of dark tread, and then there were machines of the air, and deep below the oceans. Before long there were even machines above the canopy of the earth, looking directly upon the lights of the heavens. There were weapons of enormous destruction, and the leaving behind of cooperation in favour of acquisition — but always the need for more, and the perception of threat and loss. Always the fear.

She lifted her vantage point to that of the machines under the stars, and saw the world aglow with lights beneath, its air choked, its people separated more than ever despite travelling between continents in hours. They were dangerous, and they would always be so.

She blinked the vision away, and reflexively tore open a door in the air which led away from the material plane and into the places beyond, which were her true home. Her sisters waited for her there, and they would ask what she had seen, and she would tell them all of it. The cities, and the fire from the skies, and the impertinence of daring to hang beneath the stars.

The decision was all but made. They would retreat from the human realm, taking the magic out of the world for all time to come, and mankind would forever lose its chance to learn the ways of the Fabric.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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