Everything I Dreamed Of
Following the dream of a room that she shouldn’t remember, Ari, a cyborg who’s entirely made of metal but for her human brain, is woken by her Dad, the man who built her into what she is today. Just so she can get back to another day of life among a group of young adults known as ‘reborn’. She was one of many children that were taken from their parents, memory wiped, placed in jars, and forced to live and train in a virtual reality until they came of age and got a metal body. Only to then act as supposed peacekeepers between the streets of a walled-off Baltimore stricken by crime and poverty and the Mega City floating above that now houses the well-off.
As one of the original reborn, this is a life Ari has gotten to know better than most others. No matter the danger, she can handle it. At least until that danger is the very reality she has come to know, the family she no longer remembers, and the people she calls her own. When pieces of the past finally come together, she has to pick a side. Who matters the most? The family that is lost to time, the family that floats in the clouds above, or the family that roams the streets below?
“Who let you decide? Who made it so you can play God?” -Ari
No Name for the Free
Shortly after his father’s death, Aedan, a young man with little connection to his home, risks his life at sea rather than meet his end once the people of his family’s kingdom have grown tired of their reign. Fortunately, he washes up on a beach before he becomes one with the water, and is discovered by a camp of fighters happy to take him in and make him one of their own, while he hides his identity and is reborn as a foolish boy named Fjord.
Though these men have no name, their purpose is clear. They do not fear death like the rest of us, and they will not end their journey until they have all met their demise or hunted down creatures that have existed for generations, so that their adventures will be remembered for longer. As they travel across the lands, the misfits Aedan was not so sure of slowly become his new family while new love blooms, men and monsters fall, and they travel from the coast he once called home, to the snowy mountains where a sheltered people lie hidden away, and finally to a desert where all may be lost before they can defeat their final foe. Who will survive it all?
“What do you mean we’re supposed to go up the beast?” -Aedan
The Devil Within
Two decades after an apocalypse that wipes out most of human life on Earth, Luca, who knows nothing more than protecting those he cares little about, resides within a small village that seems to be the only bastion of humanity for a hundred miles, and, as the only person who knows how to put up a fight in the town, he goes between menial tasks, smoking away his pent-up past despite the failing health of his heart, and deciding who gets to live or die with nobody but his priest and God to judge him. Though, there is something that sets Luca apart from any other living human through the powers of what is best described as a gift.
This gift, one that can only be given by something that is beyond human, grants him visions of a man’s evils whenever he falls asleep and is only one of many clues that may mean Luca is not who he thinks or who he believes he is. So, while God or a creature far more wicked doesn’t mind looking the other way whenever someone needs to be put to rest, this ever-watching figure also shields its eyes from everything else that happens in a world where the dead refuse to sleep and where there is more than one mystery Luca is helplessly tied to while he slowly discovers that, within the place he calls home, less humanity exists than he ever could have thought, and, unlike the sick men, murderers, and cult leaders he kills, Luca will have to remember what makes him human when the truth to everything that has happened is revealed to us all.
“If I told you that there was a man around here that is a monster worse than the people who killed our families, would you trust me?” -Luca
Unto Another Life
Five years after the death of her husband, Ann spends most of her time withering away, caught up on the thought of the man she shared her soul with for more than fifty years and does not know how to live without, yet that all changes one day when, after she starts writing down the history of her life within a strange book that captures her past up until the date her partner took his life, she suddenly finds herself inside of the story she has written, right beside the man she has never stopped loving.
A discovery such as that leads to endless temptations, a journey down memory lane, and new moments together when the day is done, but, even if each page of the book offers her another attempt, will she manage to win her fight against fate and secure a way to live one more life with the man of her dreams or will she find her efforts fruitless and lose her own life in the process? Only the story of a second life can decide.
“If they promise us until death do us part, what am I supposed to do when he’s gone?” -Ann
Sword & Spirits
Thousands of moons gone since a day of great death, Jonah, an aging swordsman, still finds himself haunted by his past, those he abandoned and lost, yet, with little left in the world, he manages to trudge on, once the fastest sword under the rule of a bloodthirsty king but now beholden to whoever can pay.
Such a life brings him from one town to the next, more afraid of building human connections again than he is of the foul creatures and beasts that he is tasked with slaying, but, under unforeseen circumstances–held back by the same people he used to love–he finds himself tied up with a family that deeply needs his help through the terms of a dying wish that forces the guilty man out onto a quest that will require him to return to a city he knows all too well, one he called home before he became the man he is today and one where the ghosts of his past are forced to clash with a future that could hold his death.
“Somehow, I find peace in that, wanting to die in battle. That is how I’ve always wanted to go, at least not under the rule of someone undeserving of that sacrifice, yet how could I still want that when it was how I lost all of you?” -Jonah
Tranquility
During an assignment in space in the year 2135, Captain Kailin Patrick tests a dream den built to give people the chance to relive and create new, pleasant memories, but, as the machine offers the opportunity for him to reexperience intimate moments with a past love, Kailin can’t resist and builds himself up to a devastating mental breakdown, bringing his personal mission to an abrupt end just after observing the destruction of Saturn at the hands of a cosmic event, one that may also destroy the planet he calls home.
For a man whose life has revolved around the New Earth Coalition space program, being forced to live the life of an everyday citizen will be full of trials as he balances his love for another woman, haunting dreams mixed with reality, and a series of events that will force him to rediscover and remember what his heart and mind fears most.
“I’m confident that I’ll never change. Most people never do. It’s just a matter of living with who you are, and, by sharing my story, I believe I’m starting to do just that.” -Kailin Patrick
Background Photo Taken by @d4ve_bravo
Devin Harbison | Writer, Dreamer, Fool 