Hi, I’m Max and I write fantasy, science fiction, and all sorts of genre stories as well as essays on the craft. If you enjoy what I write below, I’d appreciate you sharing the piece or my newsletter more than you know!
Each of my stories is stand-alone. However, many are in a shared universe. If you want to check out a specific world…
You can click here to dive into the fantasy world of Breiar
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Mathea never fumbled with the pen and ink. She was sure of her instruments, much more sure than anything else in her life.
They were her tools. Crisp black ink, dark and pure, unwavering and unwashable along with a pen, carved obsidian colored wood with a custom built nib made out of gold that shined everywhere but the splash of ink on it.. Everything was custom built in the monastery. It may be the last one on the planet.
Mathea wasn't sure. She didn't really care though. It wasn't her purpose to care about that. She had to care so much at her work, there was no part left of her to give to wider things. The others may disagree, and they would do as they always did: shake their heads and walk away, unsure whether to smile or to frown.
Such was her way.
Mathea loved her work. She hadn't at first.
Fiction.
Who cared to chronicle fiction? False events, fake futures and fake pasts, the dreams and whimsy and folly of a dead people. A society and a world birthed such writings, and they couldn't save any of it. Mathea wanted to work in history. There she could know the story of the end of the world. She could know why life was the way it was. Religion could tell her so as well, but many of those texts had survived the end of days and the great blackouts. There were far too many copies of the Bible and the Quran to be eradicated fully. There was no work in religion here, save for the most sacred of texts to be found. There hadn't been much finding of that sort recently.
Matthea continued her writing, scratching ink onto the thick vellum atop her desk.
Paper didn't like the sunshine. The world was cruel to paper, almost as cruel as it had been to the electronics of the before-time. Paper had survived the blackout, but it had not survived the sun.
Vellum was stronger. It would last longer, and it could be made in the monastery grounds itself. But it was valuable. It is not an easy thing to make, and so each stroke of Matthea's pen was as steady and sure as it could possibly be. There was no wasted ink and no line set for too long or too short a time. Each stroke was intentional and each left a mark which could survive ages.
Mathea hadn't wanted to chronicle fiction because it felt like a waste of time.
What could one learn about humanity from their fables? What a foolish question, she thought now. A foolish line of thinking, without a scrap of logic. But it felt right to think when she first heard where she would be assigned.
The first story didn't change her opinion. It was incomplete, fragments in the middle lost forever. The second didn’t either. More complete, but somehow less whole than the first. It had pushed Mathea to almost enshrine her opinion within herself. This was a waste of effort.
The third tale though... it felt different. Mathea had heard tales of The Intelligence from a time before the blackouts. When humanity and computer lived together and worked together, before the computer left humanity on their own. This story almost told exactly such a tale, but it was far older than any computer as Mathea imagined them.
The story spoke of monasteries, almost like hers, and it spoke of politics and horrible plots, like those she imagined happened out in the world, out where the people were.
She couldn't read the whole thing, it wasn't complete, but there had been enough.
As she transcribed it, Mathea felt transported. She was not writing in the monastery, though her mind never fully left that task, she was wandering a sandy world and worrying about harrowing plots, wondering at the politics and the history and the deeper questions that it brought to mind.
She worried about water in a way that made her uncomfortable drinking from her glass, now sitting at a table across her workstation so as not to spill on the work.
It had been wonderful.
Then it had been over.
She reached the end of the record, finding a gap in the story insurmountable to cross. There was too much missing data. Too much had been taken from the blackout.
It didn't matter though. The story had worked. She fell into another world and wanted to fall in again, if not to that sandy place, then to another world, on another adventure, in another tale.
Every time Lukash came in from outside, with burns on his skin where he forgot to cover, as he always forgot to cover, she would get a swelling feeling within her chest that was incomparable to any other she felt.
There was always a chance that he came bearing a copy of the story she chased.
Even if it wasn't that tale though, it would be a story.
It could affect her all the same.
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Love ya!
Max
Beautifully written - every word felt so thoughtfully in tune with one another
One of my favorites!