The Knight of Ships

A tiny clockwork timer chimes with the high, broken tone of a porcelain bell, and Selen removes her new arm from its shallow basin of water. Beneath its dripping, articulated ceramic plates, two roots of living green wood stretch out with a blind will. They find the scar where Selen’s flesh ends, two inches below her elbow on the left side. It doesn’t hurt when they constrict around the stump—some laboratorial sorcery of botanical drugs and interstellar dust—but Selen’s stomach still churns with sudden vertigo, and her nerves prickle as the roots find them and connect. Two more plates snap closed around them, hiding both roots and scars from view.

Continue reading “The Tarot of the Gates, Chapter One” →