PrometheusDX

It has been said that true greatness is achieved only through service to an ideal higher than oneself. But should greatness be the aim of those who serve? When I began my journey in the Interact Club, my answer was a resounding yes. I began with starry-eyed notions of changing the world for the better and being a hero of the people. I had been given lectures on the rewarding knowledge that one has served the community, making a positive difference to the world, and was eager to experience that for myself. I shall be a volunteer whose dedication to selflessness exceeds not only that of Mother Teresa, I told myself, but Mahatma Gandhi as well.

"In the year 2042, the Information Age went one step too far." The students around you sit on splinter-ridden chairs. They must have been carved by the hand of someone who has never touched a planer machine, the way the splinters jab their skin. The tropical afternoon air is unpleasantly warm, the tepid moistness of it clinging in the claustrophobic closeness of the poorly-ventilated classroom. The blood-hot air is circulated about the room by the weakly turning blades of a standing fan. Mr Chan's chalk makes a grinding screech against the blackboard - a jagged, unrefined fragment, for the machines that produced proper writing chalk were de

"No! No! No! No! No!" The skeleton clung to the rafters of the seer's emporium, screaming at the top of a rattling yellow voice that sounded like finger-bones being shaken in a metal box. It was an ancient voice, but astonishingly loud, and not at all a pleasant sound. "No! No! No! No! No!" "Get down here, now!" the woman Chandra screamed, fingers in her ears. She might as well have been trying to communicate with it in semaphore; the skeleton shrieked louder than ever, and clung still tighter to the wooden beams across the ceiling, making them creak and groan. "No! No! No! No! No!" "How," shouted Astaroth from his hiding place under the

The Wood of the Seventh Prince This takes place in the Homelands, in those dawn days when the hole in Eternity had not yet been made, and the magic of the Homelands had not yet been spilled across all of Creation. In those dawn days, the world - the Homelands - were lush and green and young. In one particular fiefdom of the Homelands, there were seven princes competing for the throne. Being princes of the Homelands, each of them was more majestic, more regal, more strikingly regal than the last. They lived lives of complete luxury, surrounded by courts of servile attendants whose sole purpose in life was to ensure the pleasure of their mast

By day, London’s Camden Passage is a rambling alleyway, branching off into little streets that cross and intersect each other like veins. By day, along these, one can find little stalls sprouting like mushrooms from the rain-slicked cobblestones, selling antiques, items of clothing and little trinkets to all who happen to stop by. By day, Camden Passage is a fascinating trove of hidden treasures, of exotic shopfronts and bargain deals. By night, it is a different story. The woman Candace waits, in the warm shelter of a café, for nightfall. She is one of the few left at this hour, but where the others nurse cups of tea or plates o

A long, dark hallway. There is a telephone at the end of it. It is ringing. For you. brrrriiiing brrrriiiing brrrriiiing You walk towards it. Shadows dance in your wake. brrrriiiing brrrriiiing Closer. Closer. brrrriiiing You pick it up. For a moment, there is silence then a voice like sharpened sandpaper like needles of glass  like someone shaking your shoulder desperately— “Mark. Mark. Wake up. ” The man Mark opens his eyes. In the darkness of the room, the pallor of Cynthia’s face is eerie, nonhuman. For a moment, Mark sleepily considers screaming, jerking away from her touch… …but only for

Necromancy The necromancer’s art is often luridly portrayed in fantasy video games and novels; the necromancer himself may perhaps be depicted as a tyrannical overlord, commanding numberless armies of the dead. Other sources hold that necromancy is an inherently evil practice, and is to be treated with such horror as is accorded to, say, the art of murder, or the ways in which torturers inflict pain. As if any particular piece, or even a field, of knowledge, could in and of itself be evil. No, necromancy is not evil, any more than it is as dramatic as a single person causing a horde of corpses to begin hungering for the living. Real

There is a tower that juts out of the infernal skyline, a giant black claw that rakes the sulfurous heavens above the city that is the capital of the Under: Dis. It is made of the very finest polished onyx, blacker than a corpse-beetle's wing. It was designed, in an era in which time was still a novel concept, by an architect who put his heart and soul into the construction of what he saw as his masterpiece, and went mad shortly after its completion. It is not a thing born of a human mind, nor subject to human physical laws - it was designed to be despair given form, to mock the throne upon which the father of all things sits, in his citadel

I read a horror story online about a killer with a face as white as bleach, looking through the windows at night, waiting for you to go to sleep, with a smile painted in florid blood by sweet brushes of chemical flame. And I thought of my own country, where a woman was killed by her own lover, who opened the feverish blossom of her viscera to the chill air, who left her corpse to rot in the blind shadows of the unseeing trees. I read a scary story on the Internet, of a photograph attached to an email, a photograph of a delirium-dark room, a photograph of a bloodied hand outstretched and of a dog with a very peculiar smile. And I thought of

Ellen, I'm opening the front door. Hear it creak, like the trilling of the crickets in the trees? Do you remember the anticipation as you waited, with plaited hair and baited breath and an impish grin, for Daddy to come home? He never did, did he? He should have fixed those brakes. I remember it too. I'm coming in, Ellen, no need for me to ask permission. Ellen, I'm walking across the carpet. The pile ruffles under my feet, just like Roger's fur. Do you remember the way dear old Roger, the way he'd race to greet you when you came back home, mouth a-gaping, tongue a-lolling? Do you remember the silken feel of his thick golden