Coffee cupFinishing up the final polish of a story today, titled “Reality Storage”. It fits in both the Villa Encantada series as well as the category of “stories inspired by the remodeling and moving process.” Here you go:
So there I was staring at the bank of monitors. It was still early in the morning; my coffee was half-full but I’d finished my muffin. I was thinking about the way Bonnie smelled in the morning, before she showered, still a little sweaty but with a lingering edge like lilac and mint from her bodywash, and a little musty too, when you burrowed your face down into the hollow of her neck.
On monitor three, the guy entered, got a cart, and then pretended to load stuff onto it from his car. That’s what made me look a second time, catching him lifting empty air up. He did it five or six times, then trundled the cart onto the elevator and took it up to locker 234.
I watched him all the way, sipping my coffee, wondering what he was up to. He opened up the locker, mimed lifting six things into it, closed and locked it. He even wore work gloves to protect his hands. I wondered if he was practicing some kind of act. It looked so realistic, to the point where he staggered on the last lift, as though thrown off balance by the burden’s heaviness.
He stripped off the gloves, closed up the unit, and locked it again. He didn’t bother to take the empty cart back down with him, just left it there, which made me think the worse of him. It’s shitty not to do little things like that, to make someone else clean up after you.
While he was in the elevator, he looks straight at the camera. He rubbed at his ear, frowning. Then he shrugged and gave the camera a wave, as though he saw me watching.
Then he got back into his sporty little pickup truck and drove away.
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Documents of Tabat: A Brief Treatise on Magical Energy and The Practice of Eating Beasts
What are the documents of Tabat? In an early version of the book, I had a number of interstitial pieces, each a document produced by the city: playbills, advertisements, guide book entries. They had to be cut but I kept them for this purpose. I’ll release them at the end of April in e-book form; careful readers will find clues to some aspects of Beasts of Tabat in them. -Cat
A Brief Treatise on Magical Energy and
The Practice of Eating Beasts,
Being A Primer for Elementary Students
of the College of Mages
by Sebastiano Silvercloth
(private publication of the College of Mages)
To understand the basic principle behind this practice, one need look no further than the custom of keeping Oracular Pigs, common among larger merchant households. Since such Beasts are capable of seeing only matters in its own physical future, they must be kept in places where their warnings of fire, attack, or other household disasters will involve the household, such as outside but near the kitchen, or beside outlying buildings of importance.
When the time comes that the Pigs foretells its own death (or shows signs of concealing such a prophecy), it is slaughtered and prepared for a feast in which the entire household takes part. The pig is consumed in the belief that its oracular powers may be acquired; some gamblers swear by a diet of such flesh.
Absorption of magic energy through ingestion of the flesh that held it is at the heart of many magical rituals. In truth, the roast pork and other meats are of little use to the consumers in the manner they desire. Luck is not a transferable quality. But it does advantage them in other ways: such consumption is known to increase life span dramatically, to prevent some illnesses, and cure others. The longevity of many of those able to afford the practice is augmented, while those with flatter purses lead richer lives.
Some Beasts and animals are much richer in magical energy than others, depending on their race’s characteristics. Almost every by-product and physical bit of a Dragon, for example, is highly valuable in that regard. The wings, which are typically removed from captive Dragons, are dried, while the meat is powdered and used as an ingredient in the alchemical cooking for which the Chefs of Tabat are famed. The leather is employed in the construction of aerial apparati and some armors, though the cost of such is prohibitive enough to keep them from the ordinary soldier’s wardrobe.
Dryads are similarly prized, for once they have taken on their ultimate form of a rooted tree, the wood of their bodies becomes steeped in magic over the course of season after season, and yields great quantities of energy when treated and burned in special furnaces. Such fuel supplies much of the energy that drives the city and gives its citizen the rich life we enjoy, and the trade boats are always on the look-out for Dryad groves, in order to collect the substantial bounty the city pays for their trunks.
For the most part, though, the effect created by partaking of a Beast or magical animal’s body is slight. Both Fairy blood and honey are faintly hallucinogenic in nature, but one would have to ingest vast quantities, such as the blood of two or three dozen Fairies (depending on the ingestor’s body weight and susceptibility to the drug) to experience anything appreciable. Still, the creation of dishes incorporating such substances have become an art for which Tabat is famed throughout the world. This reminds us that such knowledge may well be turned to practical purpose without suffering scorn. While pure Magicians pursue abstract knowledge, others help keep the College and city functioning through their willingness to put aside such lofty pursuits.
***
Love the world of Tabat and want to spend longer in it? Check out Hearts of Tabat, the latest Tabat novel! Or get sneak peeks, behind the scenes looks, snippets of work in progres, and more via Cat’s Patreon.
WIP Snippet: Five Ways To Fall In Love on Planet Porcelain
Five Ways To Fall In Love On Planet Porcelain(From a story I’m working on.)
Over the years, Tikka’s job as a Minor Propagandist for the planet Porcelain’s Bureau of Tourism had come to shape her way of thinking. She dealt primarily in quintets of attractions, lists of five which were distributed through the Bureau’s publications and information dollops: Five Major China Factories Where the Population of Porcelain Can Be Seen Being Created; Five Views of Porcelain’s Clay Fields; Five Restaurants Serving Native Cuisine at Its Most Natural.
Today she was composing Five Signs of Spring in Eletak, her native city. Here along the waterfront, she added chimmerees to her list as she watched the native creatives, cross between fish and flower, surface, each chimerene spreading its white petals as it surfaced, white clusters holding golden centers, tendrils of golden thread sending their scent into the air along with the most delicate whisper of sound, barely audible over the lapping of the sound’s water.
The urge to pose beat along every energy vein of her silica body, but she resisted it. She would remain alone this spring, as she had every spring since she had made her vow and inscribed it in the notebook where she kept her personal lists, under “Life Resolutions,” #4 under “Keep myself clean in thought and mind,” “Devote myself to promoting Porcelain’s tourism,” and “Fall in love.” The third item had been crossed off at the same time, in vehement black pen strokes.
