Lions of the Cross

A Snapshot in Time Writing Contest


Cursed be thy Greeks

Damnation beset my fate.

The tower defenders dismantled the upper terrace, using the stone bricks to drop upon our heads. With burning oil and arrows, the misery brought on us by the Greeks plunged my fellow knights, my brothers, into despair. Heaven’s determination to punish our great transgression with this fierce deluge of rain, sent us scampering like mud rats back towards the Bosporus.

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Rise of the Dark Empire: A Star Wars Tragedy

Life imitates art.

It inevitably has to, because art starts off by imitating reality in an attempt to explain it in ways we humans can understand. We tell each other stories, to teach ourselves how to coexist in this strange existence, this universe. We learn from these tales all about what it means to be complex social beings.

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The Tesseract

The featureless salt desert spread out to infinity. The horizon; is nothing but a smooth chrome landscape under a dark taupe sky. The type-2 moon’s gravity helped her along, but the cold surface seemed to sap the warmth out of her suit with every step.

Ashley Isuuza couldn’t complain. She’d craved adventure ever since birth, and no adventure was worth taking without the prospect of death associated with it. So in theory, her little stroll across Obirus b III exemplified the very essence of a perfect, eventful life. Yet Ashley suspected she wasn’t going to live to tell her story.

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Nagasaki

Jekka felt cold, the rain and the southerly breeze blowing from the bay not helping her situation. Had she time to plan she would have worn her florincoat. Instead, her impromptu escape into the Free Zone had left her running through backstreets wearing only a matching Vesper Morales bra and panties set, a pair of silicon geta and a RaiBox in her hand.

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cajero - from the science fiction horror novel The Blood Ring

Cajero

Excerpt Chapter from the novel, The Blood Ring

First published on The Blood Ring

Martin felt the van pick up the pace as it hurtled down Salamander Highway, devoid of traffic or life. She looked over at Rick, who grappled with the steering wheel as if he were attempting to rip it off. His battle with the self-drive function could have been avoided had he been successful in disabling it. Rico managed to purge the van’s smartie and kill the geotracker, but not the self-drive. Only via the emergency override could he steer the vehicle, otherwise it will retrace the last waypoint entered into its memory by the now-defunct smartie.

“Fucken Hianto, over-engineering everything,” growled Rico.

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Sonic Crab

First published on writing.com for a scifi flash-fiction competition, but the moderator never called a winner, in fact, the forum page just disappeared. So, this could be the winning entrant.


Victor heard the sonic crab.

The short bursts of ultra-bass tones echoed across the night-bound, dead-quiet city. He suspected the auton may have already detected his presence when he entered the supermall district. No matter how discreetly he travelled, these autons were sound-sensitive. As well as emitting audio, these things detected it.

Listening.

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Halloween: The Two Evils

The Halloween remake, or second remake, is, by all means, a very good return to the franchise. It does its job of capturing the feel, atmosphere and style of John Carpenter’s original. It doesn’t miss a beat, the dread and the scares are genuine, and the Shape is as menacing as ever. One decision the producers went for in this reboot, however, is the elimination of the events of Halloween 2, and pretty much everything that came later.

Michael Myers ceased being this paranormal, un-killable ‘Shape’.

Why?

A fascinating aspect of horror, in particular the slasher genre that the Halloween series ventured into, is which of the following possess the most frightening kind of horror; psychological evil or supernatural evil?

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