The theorbo is basically the double-barrelled sniper rifle of lutes. Impractical but sometimes used to banish especially tenacious ghosts.

Evolution has made the human skull a near ideal resonator for ideas. Put a few strings on one, play it well, and ghostly dreams will emerge.

Should you visit one of those old stone circles, take care not to wake it up. The maw these teeth belong to has claimed many a fool.

Leviathan skin is in fact rather soft, but they always wear armor handed down the generations, priced heirlooms of granite and mussel silk.

a lone sunbeam, scattered by dust, presents an austere beauty, but one only attainable at great pain to the beam - need it suffer for us?

An architectural teratoma grows in our orbit, a corrupt beauty dedicated to no god, jealously protected against pilgrims by its gargoyles.

Gargoyles contort in search for a city to look down onto, or a sense of where down is. A bell tries to chime but the vacuum does not carry.

Cathedrals don’t grow well in zero G. Their pillars are stunted and grow in every direction while rose windows open on random surfaces.

hunt down a tornado, wrangle it to the ground, mount it to ride the skies, conquer heaven

F5 the day until it changes

Sitting in your window and drinking coffee [wait, where’d that cup come from?] , you watch a plane lag across the sky, sometimes backwards.

Someone’s taken a hammer to this day and shattered it. Despite cleanup efforts, second-long shards of night interrupt the afternoon.

A city of thieves and tricksters, bisected by a river, where the shadows have their own nightlife: Its inhabitants call it Duplicity

The Venus city is built as a giant floating rotor, always ready to slow down to sink further into the clouds, or speed up to escape a storm.

From one of these fights though, an unlikely child emerges: The quartz clock with a heart of sand, more accurate than either of its parents.

Sand and clockwork fight over who tells the time: Sand ends up jamming the mechanism but only trickles uselessly over the gears.

A Glitch Phoenix started the last great realm fire in its self-immolation. Playing a mere recording of the event can scramble hard drives.

A Glitch Phoenix is a logical construct that grows more complex until its own inconsistencies devour it and leave only trivial tautologies.

after it’s burned out, you’re among the first to log in and play in the ashes, not dust but devoid of color and reduced to random low polys

the realm is being shut down for maintenance: a glitchfire has been raging for days and has encircled the spawn, suffocating it in noismoke

as you get older, an adult soul grows inside the child soul; when it’s loose enough, this child soul is usually lost painlessly one night

“black holes are not hairy”↵you’ve obviously never met one, they actually have magnificent fur that they’ll let you stroke if you ask nicely

You go home but your shadow doesn’t, slips into your bed only much later. You see that its fringes are unusually tousled, but don’t ask.

alternative ending:↵the road to well is paved with strict abstention

the road to yell is paved with loud contention↵the road to cell is paved with drunk detention↵and that to smell is simply bladder distention

a stock market for salvation where you buy shares in various afterlives and other religious services, often used as a political indicator

a world in which seeing someone’s aura is mainstream and we use text colors and fonts to convey emotion

bite the ground: feel the crust crack under your teeth↵smell the exposed mantle↵let continents melt on your tongue↵lick lava off your lips

The notion of furious sleep is absurd? Then you’ve never seen one. Even lying in their beds, they radiate fervor.

Sleep dervishes shorten their diurnal cycle to mere minutes. In their dreams, their planet’s rapid rotation makes them weightless.

He plucks notes from light rays pulled taut between the stars and your eyes. Your soul wants to leave with the song but you won’t let it

Under the pond, she plays a warbling tune on her water flute. Lissajous patterns dance on the surface and spell out an invitation.

That one time Mercury stole Jupiter’s shadow and pretended to be him in front of the sun, she kissed him and there went his atmosphere.

The palace is a maze of pipes and strings upon which the winds play an endless lullaby, to keep asleep what is trapped within.

The candle freezes, but the shadows begin to dance to an unheard tune and your teeth vibrate↵The mad piper is near

Elves are rarely good with computers: Few programs still work well when the trees underlying their function suddenly sprout new leaves.

you chide your pet octopus for having graffitied the neighbor’s garage again, but are secretly proud: that summoning circle was top-notch

Both their hair stands on end: where they touch, sparks fly between their skins↵They dare not embrace for fear of lightning

The search for Earth’s oldest cloud continues↵Is it a mountaintop hermit in the Andes, or an ancient cave dweller that’s never seen the sun?

as you find out more about each other’s past:↵a soulmate! yay! -> separated at birth? spooky -> holy shit fuck you past me for pulling that

upload yourself twice, then erase all memories of it↵a few years later you meet the other: you have finally found your soulmate↵or have you?

He takes the magnets and does something complicated looking.↵”There, I tied their field lines into a knot” as they orbit his hands.

After the apocalypse, the four horsemen had to downsize and switch to cockroaches as mounts. Maybe they should’ve been less thorough.

To craft a storm golem, hunt down a tornado and feed it a Name of God. You’ll later find it floating in the center of a toroidal cloud.

Those who have seen the witch of the coral reef say that kelp grows on her teeth and her tongue is a moray that will eat your dive buddy.

The mechanical storyteller whirrs, clicks, spits out a slip of paper: “animal made of gravity”↵I envision a star cluster and start typing.

“semantic contaminant (99B). corrosive, infectious. keep quoted at all times. professional use only.

The sea has become impatient, doesn’t wait for its level to rise but makes bold raids inland, packs of waves have been spotted hunting deer

“And what is this?“↵”The Critic’s key, a skeleton key to lay open all stories. You probably won’t like its results, best not to use it”

Lost your direction in life?↵Soul searching wouldn’t help?↵Call Ashcrombe, Private Eye & Certified Guru, and we’ll find your way in no time!