Enigma (2/4)

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** If you missed the previous part, please read it here: Enigma – Part 1 **

Sidaniel had heard rumors about Enigmas, knew the theory as well as the whispered horror stories. But to see an actual manifestation? It had, quite simply, never seemed possible. Even now he was reluctant to share his suspicion. Once spoken, there was no taking it back. If wrong, he’d never hear the end of it. If right, it would be worse.

He tried again. “It’s an E—exception. A treat, if you will.”

“Sweet or savory?” Raphizal licked his teeth.

“I’m afraid he’s not talking about dinner, Raph, but a more metaphorical tidbit,” Gidmihr said.

“Shame.” Raphizal slouched back, ash-toned wings draped over his chair’s backrest. “I like sweets.”

Sidaniel’s under-feathers bristled, fluffing up his wings. He wasn’t in the mood for the duo’s antics. “Are you teasing me?” he asked sharply.

Raphizal jumped from his seat into a taut half-crouch. “Are we?” The air surrounding him flickered and rained soot flakes.

“Orrr—derrr…,” the Chairwoman drawled, attention still on her puzzle cube.

Gidmihr pulled is his protégé back onto the chair and left a calming hand his shoulder. A flame-red glint had come to the chaos agent’s eyes and his beard’s smoke turned a shade darker.

“Teasing? No. We’re accusing. I bet you botched the evaluation. Why else would you omit soul 126? This is like the Evo Last case all over again.”

“Nonsense. For one, I was ultimately right about Evo or we would have seen effects by now. And—”

Laquiela’s puzzle cube, one side solved, clattered to the table. “Stooooop it. Both of you,” she sighed. Then she pointed to the red-black flame that had burst from Gidmihr’s goatee. “Better watch it, Gidmihr. You’ll only trigger the sprinklers.”

Gidmihr’s gaze stayed fixed on Sidaniel. His goatee-flame blazed, licking with a steadily growing black tongue. “You are trying to rob us. Again!”

Angel Laquiela snapped her fingers. A water globule the size of a grapefruit appeared in front of Gidmihr and, correctly anticipating his evasive maneuver, exploded into his face. Defying physics, the water refused to splash all over the room. Instead, it ran in a merry rivulet down Gidmihr’s chin and drip-drip-dripped onto the table.

“Ewww.” Shuddering, Raphizal moved his chair over.

“That. Was. Unnecessary,” Gidmihr pressed out.

Laquiela eyed him with a mix of amusement and pity. “We are not revisiting the Evo Last incident. I settled that. Forget it.”

“Ah, but I’m afraid, Madam Chairwoman, that I don’t forget, much less forgive. This—”

“Enough. Take it up to appeals; this is the Last Judgement, not debate club.”

“And yet we’d all benefit from—”

Laquiela snapped her fingers again. Gidmihr’s voice cut out immediately, but he continued to mouth away. The chairwoman’s eyes sparked. “Five hundred seventy-seven years. Three investigations. No findings. It’s time to let it go.”

“Time,” Raphizal repeated, idly examining his fingernails. “Time is a construct affecting only mortal minds.”

“Be quiet, Raph,” Laquiela snapped.

Raphizal fell into a mutinous silence while Gidmihr proceeded with his outstanding red-snapper-pantomime. Ignoring both, Laquiela turned to Sidaniel. “You were saying?”

“Ahh…,” Sidaniel stuttered. He loathed bearing bad news. “Where was I?” he hedged.

“Sweets,” Raphizal prompted. Laquiela twitched but kept her eyes on Sidaniel.

“Right,” Sidaniel nodded. “Case 126. It’s nothing like Evo Last, I think. Not much room for differing opinions in—”

“Differing-shmiffering,” said Raphizal. He had started biting off his fingernails, spitting the half-moons to the side, then growing them back immediately to start over. Next to him, a carefully composed Gidmihr pressed water droplets from his goatee.

The Chairwoman rolled her eyes and snapped her fingers a third time. Raphizal found himself fitted with mittens and a pacifier, both in neon pink.

“Unacceptable,” he mumbled past his new accessory.

Laquiela picked up her puzzle cube, inspected one of its jumbled sides, then turned the cube’s top layer clockwise in a show of forced calmness. “Sid? What’s the trouble? Unsolved business with third-party entities? Aura entanglement, daemon possessions…? Spill it.”

“Uhm, it’s actually worse. It appears to be uhm—undetermined?”

Angel Laquiela froze mid-move. “Come again?”

“Pick anything. Kindness, truthfulness, courage, patience, wit, valor. Soul 126 is smack on the line in all categories. A solid grey. Even after hours of drilling down, I couldn’t find a smidge of green or red.”

An odd expression flickered over Laquiela’s face. Amazement? Agitation? Anger? Sidaniel couldn’t say…

“So, how did you judge?”

“I—I didn’t. Yet.”

“Meaning?”

Suddenly, the air was charged, and electric currents ran along Sidaniel’s wings. He swallowed hastily. “Meaning, I can’t very well send it anywhere. It might be an En—”

“SILENCE!” Laquiela thundered.

#tbc

The penultimate part of Enigma is up. Read it here.

Enigma

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Part 1

After half an eon as a proctor for the Last Judgement Council, the angel Sidaniel discovered a gap in his supposedly infinite wisdom: disclose bad news to a superior right away—or leave the troublesome case for last?

Confident his divine insight would return just in time, Sidaniel walked into the daily council meeting, his summary report in speckless order. As tradition demanded, he went first, while the netherworld’s side had to wait their turn.

Working through his list, Sidaniel methodically listed each case’s judgement and additional honors. Soon, the offending case was only ten, then just two entries away. Sidaniel shifted in his seat. Where, in Judgement’s name, was that spark of enlightenment?

Uneasy, Sidaniel went on: “Case 124 was spiteful in her youth, downright vicious later. No redeeming actions. I sent her down to Terminal H.”

Sidaniel shuffled through his notes. One case remaining and no eleventh-hour epiphany in sight. “Case 125 was just as clear-cut and went the same way. Came in quite young after an unfortunate petty-theft-to-drug-cartel-muscle career.”

Suddenly pressed for a decision, Sidaniel found himself quite unwilling to discuss the troubling case—and skipped over it.

“Next came a good batch,” he said. “Numbers 127 to 159 passed well within green righteousness margins, two with outstanding merits. To those cases I awarded Silverbarters, three each, and they may off-load a proportional emotional weight in the ballast lockers before departing for—”

A laborious grunt interrupted Sidaniel and he looked up. Across the table at the Netherworld’s delegates’ side, the angel Gidmihr slouched in a chair. The tip of his carefully groomed goatee emitted its trademark curl of smoke. Next to him, the angel Raphizal had his left hand in the air. Upon Sidaniel’s pause, he raised his left wing as well, clearly hoping to underscore the urgency of his contribution.

Sidaniel glanced to the head of the table where the angel Laquiela, the Last Judgement Council’s chairwoman, sat in her elevated seat and fiddled with a jumbled puzzle cube.

The rules for the council were clear: one envoy for each side. This duo’s presence was egregious cheating, plain and simple. Laquiela should have thrown Raphizal out centuries ago, but all her attention was on that blasted toy!

  Sidaniel ruffled his wings, so the whispering feathers masked his sigh. “Why is he still here?” he asked, hoping the strain in his voice would register with Laquiela. “He’s not—”

“Now, now, dear Sidaniel! You know why.” Angel Gidmihr raised his hands in mock surprise. He pointed at a sticky note on Raphizal’s lapel. It looked on the verge of disintegrating and had TRAINEE scrawled on in faded, barely decipherable script. “Raph is my apprentice.”

“For two millennia?”

Gidmihr’s eyes narrowed, and his smoldering goatee emitted a volley of sparks. “Training on the job is vital. You of all people should know that. Without it, Raph could easily screw up a judgement. And then where would we be?” He licked his finger, smothered an ember flake on his robe’s cuff, and turned to his protégé. “No need to put your hand up, Raph. You had a question?”

“He skipped 126.”

“Not a question, but an excellent observation, Raph. Excellent indeed.” Gidmihr tapped his fingers on his pursed lips in an almost convincing show of concern. “Odd thing to do. Care to enlighten us, Sid?”

Sidaniel blinked, his mouth open as though an explanation might roll out of its own accord. When it didn’t, he snapped it shut. Alright! Next time, he would lead with the…difficult cases. Before he could collect his thoughts, Gidmihr went on.

“Granted, I’ve been there myself,” Gidmihr said, his black-rimmed eyes full of gleeful malice. “A little shuffle and boom! – a virtuous deed, a merit, a whole entry goes missing.” He twirled his goatee’s wisp of smoke around a finger and flicked it across the table like so much gossamer ribbon.

Sidaniel, nose pinched, fanned the air until the sulfurous smoke dispersed. “Nothing is missing. Case 126 will be last today. It’s a special soul, most likely an En—,” he choked on the word that had been haunting him since this case had come to his desk.

#tbc

***

Read the next part here: Enigma 2.

NYC Midnight SSC – The Submission

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for the first round IS DONE!

And it wasn’t even a last-minute submission either. I didn’t have to pull an all-nighter, even though it took me quite some time to actually get started on writing.

Somehow, the 48h timeframe with last year’s FFC put me on the spot and I got the stories out fast – with 8 days to go, I seemed to lack the motivation to even start in the first days.

But anyway, now it’s done and submitted and all I can do is wait.

As always, I’m trying to not get my hopes up in terms of advancing to the next round. With the FFC, every participant got to do the first 2 rounds, regardless of their placement in the first challenge. But with the SSC, I would need to be among the best 5 in my group to advance – and that’s a high bar.

I’ll share snippets and the synopsis with y’all at a later time. Promised!

SSC – The Prompt

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Today is the day – the challenge starts and the prompts are here. This is what I got:

Just like last year’s Flash Fiction Challenge (FFC), I’ll be writing a Mystery. Whelp!

With the FFC, writers got Genre, Location, and Object as a prompt. Now I got Subject and Character? Uhm… I didn’t expect that.

I better read up on how to use those in the story, so I don’t run into problems.

The Challenge will run for 8 days (20th to 28th midnight NYC time) so I got until Monday 29th 6am (due to time zone difference) to get something to paper that fits.

Everyone, wish me luck!

***

Here are the statistics for this year’s SSC:

So many writers from all over the world!!! Happy to be part of this and the amazing writing community.

Short Story Challenge

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Last year, I participated in NYC Midnight’s Flash Fiction Challenge. I didn’t expect to get far when I started, flash fiction being a new kind of writing for me. (In general, I’m an over-writer, so flash fiction didn’t seem to be the best fit for me…)
BUT, surprisingly, I made it as far as round 3 of 4 – finishing 4th and with honorable mention in my group in round 3.

NYC Midnight holds other challenges during the course of a year. Upcoming right now at the start of the year is the Short Fiction Challenge – and of course, I signed up! The challenge will start in only two days’ time.

CAN’T WAIT!

(Secretly dreading that I will get a bad genre because I have been so lucky so far.)

I’ll yet y’all know what I got to work with once I got my prompt.

NYC Midnight FFC – it’s over!

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So, the results are in & I will not advance to the final round. Booooh!

But, I’m not super sad about it, because 1) it was my first time participating at all; 2) I made it this far despite writing my a second language, and 3) I finished round 3 on 4th place, one place short of advancing – getting the first honorable mention in my group.

The full synopsis of Do No Harm

When a cruel captain kills Kip’s friend, the med-tech cyborg needs to find a way past his hardwired Do-No-Harm subroutine to avenge the death and liberate his cyborg crewmates.

NYC and the SCBWI RT Meeting

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It’s been a while since I visited the States, but today I got up real early, put on a mask and took car, train, plane, AirTrain, and the subway to get to the hotel where the SCBWI Regional Team is meeting this weekend. More than 14h later, I’ve finally arrived!

I am super excited to meet many new RTs and see some of those I met in 2020 at the Winter Conference again. So far, everything went smoothly. I can’t wait for the programming to start tomorrow.

If I Were Moon 

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Separating night from day isn’t dusk or dawn–
it’s a glint, a shimmer in the air,
the hues of a changing world,
the quality of light.
Cold shadows. Sunny brightness. And everything in-between.
It’s a competition of sorts
and Moon always loses.

All praise Sun,
higher, hotter, too bright to bear.
Her radiant smile comes in many colours.
Tangerine. Gold. Eclipsing white.
Her guys can’t help but show off.
Enter: fiery quadriga, blazing headpiece, 
and some wicked lyre sound.

But Moon, my sweet, cold orb
is too modest
for such a flashy spectacle.
Nightingales carry her tune
shrouded in the grasping
mists of silver and grey and blue
—the serene triad of the dark hours.

Moon tries, time and again,
peeks out from behind her concealing shadow
a furtive glance
growing bolder, perkier, ever stronger
as she waxes and then
takes heart at last, exposing her full face,
for us, for a night. 

All she illuminates is an unaware crowd
fast asleep but for a few restless souls,
searching, stumbling, lost.
Gutted, she turns away,
throws her veil back on,
pulling it ever tighter.

If I were Moon, I’d wane one last time,
then hide from us sun-dazzled creatures,
become a shadowy enigma,
a blind spot on an inky firmament,
and send out bitter dreams to the oblivious
in revenge for their neglect.

Would anyone miss the moonshadows?
Know the difference between
a star-dotted darkness and a cerulean ocean trench,
filled to the brim with the lures
of a billion deep-sea anglerfishes,
Would anyone know if they are gazing up
or falling down?

A few, a score, perhaps a thousand
would search for a glimpse of Moon’s hidden face,
eyes raking the dark velvet in vain,
finding only emptiness
staring back into their hearts.

To them, I’d sing a chilling song,
a whispered confession,
a plea for forgiveness
that fades away
leaving nothing but glazed eyes,
lunar-pale lips, and noses filled
with the smell of cold shadows.

Everyone yearns for Moon
when the time is right
when another year, another life,
another love flits past. 
Everyone falls into the moonlight at one point.


Challenge #3: submitted and received

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A few days ago, I posted about the prompt for the 2nd round (3rd challenge) in this year’s NYCMidnight Flash Fiction Challenge. Luckily, I – and with me 24 more writers in group 12 – got this:

Genre: Sci-fi
Location: a trawler
Object: a pigtail

TBH, that wasn’t the worst prompt – but not quite as accommodating as the 2nd challenge’s fantasy-prompt. It didn’t take that long to come up with a way to put a trawler in a Sci-fi setting that I liked – but the whole pigtail number had me thinking for a while.

But, as inferred in the headline: I made it!
I submitted my story in the early hours at 3:17 am, with less than 3 hours to go before the deadline ended.
Tired. Happy with the story. But a bit doubtful, too. I’m not sure if it is going to be good enough to score a place amidst the best three of the group. After all, the competition is bound to be harder this time. Those who got to write in challenge #3 all made the cut of the best 600.

Now, there’s not much to do but to wait, and hope the judges like my story. Midnight EST (NYC time) on Wednesday, Nov 9th (aka Thursday, Nov 10th, 6am in Germany) I’ll know if I get to write in the final round. I’ll let you all know.