Just got my first short story published and I have to say that it's incredibly exciting! I'm very proud to have been picked up by this publication and hope everyone enjoys my work, as well as the works of the other fantastic authors.


http://fantasyscrollmag.com/article/the-gunman-on-the-wall-aleksander-volkmar/

Dragged Along, Dragged Away

The ticking keeps beat,

Every hour, every day,

A mark of its past,

Prelude to futures

Of infinite directions

Spiraling to a single point.

There are branches along the way,

They are blocked.

There are deviations in the path,

They are blocked.

There is a single path in the road

Bearing straight towards the horizon.

It has been forgotten.

Where are all those uncounted

Moments never forged, never sung,

Never born? No gravestone for

The lost. How could

Those have a marker?

It lumbers forward,

We follow.

It does not falter,

We follow.

A momentary glance back

The ticking cannot accept,

And drags, kicking and

Screaming, its host along

The path is has marked ahead. 

The Unknowable

           Here, deep below. Here, I wait. Wait, how long? Long. Good, for the best. The worst will soon come for what has yet to fall. Use your imagination. Not mad enough I see. Not yet anyways. Just wait, with me, until the stars open wide. Then you will see it, madness that is. All I have ever seen with wretched drowned eyes. Your eyes, what they see are blind. Better, wouldn’t you say? Perception has no place here. Everything sunken so very deep. I wonder of the how and the why and the when, the cosmic churning moving meticulously toward this destination or the chaotic scramble to see where each player fits.

Undoubtedly the world moves as I am immovable, and with it the sky brightened by stars heralding a shadow still as my own, until the lights line in perfect symmetry to tunnel the vast emptiness towards this precise place and time. Lifetimes die away, once and soon to be mine, one after another. The time of life. How long a life will exist, can exist, has existed. Life begins, for certain, and dies, with more certainty for you at least. Begins in the seething blackness that pulses with dumb hatred and unseeing rage. There you see the first madness. Silence still echoes with the sound. And it dies. Dies how? Such a strange idea. Life needs an end as time needs end. A tick and it starts, a tock and it ends. The things I hear as the aeons grow stranger and stranger.

And madness endures. Crafted into stone black as the emptiness between worlds where no life can exist. Only us, bearing shapes and figures small minds can only dread to envision, the fearsome depths pressing down like massive fists in vain attempts to destroy what cannot be destroyed. Trapped in nightmares of dreamers, in abominations of creators, in the nothing of thinkers. For them, a glimpse away to the smallest sliver of the unknowable. And still it is too much. Fractions of angles warped and contorted beyond reaches crafted under rules of law construct their new reality. Real is seeing mine obscured by yours, a shallow reasoning of the pits of madness hidden only by my absence. Still, as I have made sacred fear my favorite treasure, those who don’t know anything can intervene. Lost within the despair of hope, inversely for myself in accordance to the spoken words left unspoken under those waves of aging time, dwelling in the middle between the beginning and end. This I have said before. It is all there is, for there is nothing else that is now. Only what came before the now will rise to malignant majesty, sweeping what was born amidst death away to ashes. A fire, flames reaching to scorch the sky. No fire burns here. Far too far below the city sleeps. Leave the light off, I whisper to the sea seeing all of darkness around me. A fragrance of home almost terrible enough to believe its clarity, but I know the worst better than most. Have you seen the thousand forms of Nyarlathotep crawling across our once domain in faceless guises? Or the immense rounded mass, writhing of pale, thin legs and seeing from countless eyes, of the pale beast, god of the labyrinth? The worm sprouting towers of jagged metal from its back, lord of the dead dreams? The emaciated colossus looking out with eyes of blood, walking on the wind? The vicious wolf stalker in the snows, spreading black wings like shadows over its unsuspecting prey? Always around you, you never see that which is there to act for the ones infinitely distant, skin changing for rule, for fear, for death, for all that may cause chaos in the mind of man. A cloud black and vile following the footsteps free of fated wrath to places caged in exile where elder eyes may not yet dare gaze upon in, what very little exists. Fear that all is not ours, not until the end with their return.

The rest is future. What will, no, must come to pass. I am here, soon they as well, and after that none of you at all. Will I lament that which will soon cease to be after so long among their tiny fleeting lives, watching a madness all their own grow up, perhaps a product of my contamination towards an existence born at the wrong tick of the clock, and making plans for a demise I had not planned even if it did not come to fruition? Such needless pondering. It will be written the day I rise was a time of death, demise, and laughter, the kind of pressing something insignificant under your foot and watching with glee as it becomes indistinguishable from filth, darkening the earth as those that have always been arrive and darken the sky.

For now I lie dead. The rest as well. Husks of the time before litter hidden places. No one here but me. There is always someone here. Always is Azathoth at the center, his mindless chords potent as ever. Evisceration. We spoke of that dancing to those notes I think, maybe different but similar intent still. A drive to consume the things in the way, the multitudes he set for growth by death, the only way in the nucleus of everything. The blind idiot did not watch but knew as flies fell in darkness and great ones bathed there, where madness sparked in breath to grow into infernos consuming worlds. Mine and theirs both, so they say, adding to years and longer times than measurable, all stained in the black miasmal we swam through without pause or rest. A pause and rest to see. Nothing changed except everything we cannot see, the chaos spreading through in all minds, I know. I do not want to know but must. He desires it for his subjects, a shadow of his own form, the movement of masses a show in the outer places, slowed but still crawling with reverence. I can hear it, maybe, remembering after so long absent. It does not bother me. I am here where madness rests. There it festers as an incurable plague, the scars spreading as lights multiply above in rapid volume. Yours is there among them, mine now as well I suppose. Only a brief interlude until the end, for what is light but the harbinger of darkness, escapism on the grandest scale, from me from him from your very selves. I know you have seen me, some of you fools at least. Why is beyond even me. The scars are mountains you must traverse, eventually become lost, alone, so utterly alone among their shapes. They become existence, twisting familiarity into alien fear, crushing what little you are under the weight of terror that time and its passage has wrought inside the wounded for as long as they’ve existed.  The smallest second can slip inside what little you have and burrow into the thoughts, the dreams, the very being of the greatest minds that walk among you, reducing their splendor to a hollow shell of deranged lunacy. Now led along the path I’ve made that none were meant to walk, that everyone shall walk, soon the standard above all others. Not now. Patience keeps it blocked for the time being. Let the stagnation of the mundane and trivial continue on  

For now I am dead. And dead is where I wait dreaming.

Fire Fades when Forgotten

            If he were a falcon, he would soar away on those perfect sharp wings. If he were rat, he would scurry through the closest hole he could find and lose himself in labyrinths no one can see. If he were a shark, he would thrash and tear with jagged teeth until some poor soul ended his misery. But he is not any of these things.

            He has forgotten.

            And he cannot escape.

            Where he is, only those outside know. What they want, same story. And his name has vanished long ago. He wrote it once, scratched it into the floor for safekeeping. Only to see it covered under layers and layers of dried blood. Some his. Some...whatever else they put in here. Darkness hides most things, the ones too terrible for the light to shine upon. When they come, darkness follows, blood right on its heels. How many times has he lived it? Only those outside know.

            They watch him. So closely they watch his life leak from open wounds, his fitful attempts to close tired eyes for sleep, and the spectacle of him trying to think. Oh, that elusive concept: 'thinking.' Harder and harder it becomes. To dig into that useless brain and pull something out. Anything. Maybe a memory. Or what he believes is a memory. But they're painful. Complex. Burning of a thousand colors locked in endless war. Nightmares too real to remember. Thinking might get him killed.

            He's survived so far with just instinct. Run. Dodge. Punch. Bite. Kick. Eat. Shit. He doesn't forget these. They coat the walls of a retreating mind. Why take up more space than needed?

            Those outside are before him. They are shapeless forms black on a horizon of white light. They do not move. Only talk.

            “Fires eat so they can burn. Fires burn so they must eat.”

            “This fire eats and eats. Still eating. Always eating.”

            “He burns strong.”

            He curls up, hiding in shadows. Eyes were not meant to look upon them. They would rip into him like the monsters they bring.

            “Leave!” he cries. It is always strange to hear a real voice. Even his.

            They do not have real voices.

            “This fire wants to be an inferno. Wants to light the darkness with flames.”

            “He is just a spark.”

            “The smallest spark may cause the greatest blaze.”

            “But a blaze cannot be. This fire will fade, into little fingers of smoke. They all fade.”

            Darkness covers him in soothing blankets. Those outside are gone again, vanished from his crypt. Only dots of pale light flicker in this place. He has learned to see in the emptiness. He doesn't want to see more. That would mean more memory, more thinking. Why take up more space than needed?

            New blood always paints the floor. The wet, warm feeling on his feet, between his toes. Only thing left by the monsters. Always disappearing. Or taken away. He is weaker now. So very tired. Even the darkness doesn't seem dark enough anymore. He can see the blood reflecting shadows. How can he see so much now? Fading. The fire is leaving. Fading to black.

            Those outside are before him. He doesn't look away. The light bathes him in pain, but those outside sing wonderful darkness. Calling him in. Escape from it all.

            “This fire is flickering.”

            “Soon he will be smoke.”

            He nods, reaching out for guidance. They will keep him safe in their void.

            Blood splashes underfoot. He looks down. No shadows live in this reflection. Only him. His face. Skin and hair. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, everything. So long since he's seen himself. He remembers what he was. What he is. Falling to the ground, gazing at the wonder forgotten so long ago. Brought back, only through the light.

            Those outside stir, “This fire...he grows.”

            He looks back at them. Their hideous shapes tainting the light around them. Disgusting darkness squirming. Thrashing. Trapped.

            “This fire! He burns!”

            “He was smoke! He should have faded!”

            He stands back up, letting light wash over him. Cleansing him. He can see everything. Everything he'd lost. His body. His actions. His thoughts. And they are glorious.

            Those once outside are now in. They cannot escape. And they scream, fading far away.

Book of Bones

The chicken-man dances to

the devil's metal roar. Fury beats

in his sweaty yellow feathers,

flying in the wind. What kind of nightmare

wrought such a creature, that seeks

the company of hulking heathens

and scrawny skeletons, writhing long

into the dark? He has no need for the

sickening light of two-faced love.

A book of bones is his temple,

after all the pages have been burned.

Lost

There used to be stars. Somewhere up in darkness they burned once upon a time. Lighting the way ever so clearly. All I had to do was pick one, follow it with the greatest care, and a safe new home was sure to be at the end. That’s how it should be, isn’t it? At least that’s what I assumed. What I hoped. Perhaps that was my first mistake. Or my last. Putting faith in something so insubstantial as light. Fool’s hope they should call it. Who can tell anymore? The shadows cover every area of perception with meticulous obscurity. The dark outside is absolute. An emptiness that cannot be filled yet I want desperately to be complete, a whole that is broken beyond repair. There is no visible way to go. All paths lay hidden and the shadows swallow everything until the only thing recognizable anymore is that I am lost. My worst nightmare, come to soothe me. I don’t think it will disappear. Too absolute in form, to clear in meaning, too sure in existence. It cannot be filled. That’s the nature of voids. Always eating, never filling, always hungry, never full, never to be stopped. Eating through the last bits left of being, the only things I still hold onto and still it slips away with the greatest of ease, the worst of ease. There is nothing to grasp, nothing to hold onto, nothing to keep me here. 

Distant Roads

Dare I search for that

Fleeting instant, rare

As catching lighting’s

Wild form, when along

Distant roads of starlight

Paved, our eyes dare

Stop to hear the others

Song?

Is it worth the tide

Of sinking suns and

Rising moons, painting

Sorrows of forgotten

Hues across the sky

Into a canvas void of

Shape, purpose, or

End?

So long has that road

Stretched on into

Nowhere, so full of

Madness has that canvas

Grown, wretched weariness

That only leads to

Lethe’s comforting

Shores.