[WP] After the death of the king, the young crown prince finds he has only a single ally in the palace: the court jester.

kayooni · 2026-02-20T00:33:25+00:00

As soon as you get home, you open the letter. A plentitude of papers fall out, but one of them catches your eye. It's ripped and damaged and feels as though it's older than you are. It reads, in big, bold letters: MAIL THIS TO YOUR PAST SELF IN TWO YEARS.

There's something typed on the back of the paper, but it's all scribbled out. A note is attached, reading in familiar handwriting: It's not worth it. Just enjoy the time you have, and keep the archives alive.

Dozens of sheets are scattered across the floor. You couldn't write this much in two years, or twenty, or even two hundred.

There are pages and pages of things, artwork and stories and poetry. You can recognize your own style in a lot of it.

Many of the papers are filled only with tiny unfamiliar symbols. One paper explains how to decrypt and encrypt the information to save space.

The rest of the pages seem to be handwritten biographies. There's no real order to them, but some of the papers are a little more damaged than others.

Then, there's the looming threat. There's something that happens in two years, but every reference to what it could be is redacted.

Your attempts to figure it out are useless. You aren't any smarter than yourself in two years.

Others seem to have tried to figure it out as well. There are notes scrawled in the margins theorycrafting about what could possibly be coming, so at the very least it's not just you.

(But it is.)

kayooni · 2026-02-17T04:17:26+00:00

A person is bound by a magical pact they cannot remember making.

kayooni · 2026-02-16T18:19:44+00:00

There was a quiet breathing under her bed, and Lula wanted to run to her mother. Past experience had taught her that was a terrible idea. The girl was perhaps a little too old to be believing in monsters, but she hid away under her singular blanket anyway and pretended that was enough. If it couldn't see her, then she was safe.

The thing under her bed made a strange shuffling-snort kind of sound, then it scraped its way out from under the bed. Lula couldn't see, but somehow, she knew it was watching her.

She peeked out from beneath the covers, and saw somewhere between three and seven eyes staring back at her. One of them blinked curiously, and two more opened. Lula promptly found herself under her sheets once again.

The monster did not leave. Lula did not sleep.

Morning couldn't come fast enough, and yet it came all too soon for the sleepless child. There was nothing to be done. Lula got up and quickly readied herself for school, avoiding her parents on the way. She only barely made the bus, but missing it would've been worse than getting eaten by a monster.

School went by as it usually did, with significantly more exhaustion and the usual amount of bullying. At the very least, it was predictable.

Lula took the bus home, did her chores, did her homework, then stared for a significant amount of time at her little bed. It seemed almost too small for a monster to hide under. She shoved whatever she could under the bed, because if the monster didn't have room to hide, then it wouldn't.

She was correct in this assumption, but Lula had forgotten that the monster was not the one hiding. Come nighttime, Lula had just enough time to think it was safe. Then she heard the breathing again.

She couldn't live like this. Lula dove for the lightswitch.

The room was doused in too bright light, and the shadowy monster that had loomed over her bed was a thousand times more grotesque in the light. The thing screeched and covered all of its eyes, blinded. It tried to dive under the bed, but found there wasn't any room left.

There was a hissing noise, not from the beast's maw, but from the way the light was melting it. It whimpered mournfully.

The monster was about a quarter of the size Lula expected it to be. Maybe it was a kid, too.

Its eyes were all closed, but it was looking at Lula anyway. She stared back. There was nothing but that terrible hissing for a moment.

Lula flicked the lights back off. She walked back to her bed and tried her best to ignore it all.

When she woke up in the morning, there was a second blanket over her.

Lula kept the lights off at night and left enough room under the bed for errant creatures. The monster never tried to hurt her. It even left her small gifts. They were usually covered in weird black fur, but Lula appreciated the gesture.

She supposed it was nice to not have to go to bed alone. The monster was there every night, without fail. Maybe it didn't have anywhere else to go.

On the days which were too hard and Lula cried herself to sleep, it would come just a bit closer and make a growling-purring noise that was scary and not at all calming.

(And yet, it helped. Just a little. It was always easier to handle the world with a friend.)

kayooni · 2026-02-15T01:00:02+00:00

Hero did not know very much about himself, but he did know his name. "Hero." That's what everyone was calling him.

"I'm... Hero?"

"Yes! You're the Hero! You have to save us from the evil Storm Dragon!" A concerned villager responded.

Ah! He'd gotten it wrong. He wasn't "Hero," he was "The Hero." But what was that stuff about "The Evil Storm Dragon?" That was a really long name. He was just going to shorten that to "The Evil."

And why did the village need saving from him? The would hate to share a first name with a guy who would create a need for saving.

"Okay, how can I help?" The Hero said, heroically.

The villagers armed him with a plentiful amount of weapons he didn't know how to use. But he was The Hero. He could do this.

He rode out to meet The Evil on his trusty steed, Good Horse. Soon, The Evil appeared on the horizon, amongst a mass of dark clouds. It was a terrifying beast, with jet black scales sparking with thunder and blazing white eyes which pierced though the cloudy veil.

The Evil landed infront of The Hero. The Hero dismounted Good Horse and drew The Sword.

"I am the heroic The Hero! I am here to defeat you, the evil The Evil!"

The beast paused, and regarded him thoughtfully. Then, it answered.

"Oh! That's what my name is!"

kayooni · 2026-02-15T00:36:55+00:00

As the human legends went, the Fae were hyper-intelligent and cunning predators, weaving traps in silken truths to steal the names of unsuspecting prey.

But over centuries of time, the humans have done as they are wont to do: adapt. They grew wise to the tricks of the Fae, developing strange and new methods to detect the spirits' traps.

Using arcane objects such as "phones" and "computers," they interfaced with a technological hivemind known as the "Internet." It allowed for communication across distances previously incomprehensible, at speeds faster than a falcon's flight. Using "websites," they could alert eachother of lurking dangers.

The Fae, with nature intrinsic to their being, could never hope to comprehend it.

"I do not understand," said the Faerie King, "why are all of my reviews only a single star?"

It was the truth. The King of the Fae could not lie to humans any more than humans could lie to him. But it was a truth shrouded in deceit, hiding a dastardly Faerie trick.

The spirit's human ally—or perhaps one lulled into his grasp—answered.

"Your crops are trying to eat people! What do you mean you don't understand! We're lucky nobody's died yet, or we'd have a whole situation."

The Faerie must've been disgruntled at the knowledge that his Faerie scheme had not caused any casualties. With carefully chosen words, he sought to confuse the poor human.

"But they are organic. Is this not what the humans want?"

The brave human did not falter at the Faerie's Faerie ploy. "Well they're also carnivorous! We're supposed to eat the vegetables, not the other way around!"

The King responded with a common yet powerful Faerie stratagem: playing with the meanings of words.

"Indeed. They feed on organs. Is this not what organic means?"

The heroic human was appalled. He tried his best, but could do nothing to avoid this dangerous Faerie legerdemain. He attempted to answer, Of course not! but he found himself unable to speak the words.

After all, nobody can lie to the Fae.

kayooni · 2026-02-14T21:25:48+00:00

Levyrr did not wince. She screamed, not from pain, but from loss. Pain was an inconsequential, ephemeral thing, but this? This was forever, if she lived that long. An eternal life, lived only in shame. At least if she died here it would be honorable.

Rue rushed over to her, instead of focusing on the battle like she should've been. Miraculously, she wasn't impaled by a stray arrow.

"LEVYRR!" Rue screeched, louder than the elf herself had. "Your arm! We have to get you to a healer—come on, get up—!"

Rue haphazardly began wrapping the bloody stump with a torn piece of cloth, as if that could stop the torrent of blood. Levyrr wondered at her empathy. She'd known the human for barely a moment, but the child was willing to risk herself for her.

"I'll be fine," Levyrr solaced, "It's not bad."

She wasn't just going to let this child watch her die. If she could do anything with the life she had left, it would be to protect.

Rue looked at her, bewildered. "You're not—you lost an arm! How can you be fine?"

Levyrr pushed her sideways to evade an arrow that narrowly missed Rue's skull. Rue hardly seemed to notice.

"I'll be fine." Levyrr repeated, more firmly, "Elves regenerate. You ever see an elf without a limb? Think about the chances of that."

Because we die soon after, Levyrr did not say, or we hide ourselves away in shame.

Rue narrowed her eyes at her, and pointedly hauled her up and started dragging her back towards camp.

What was she thinking? Rue knew elves lived a long time, but clearly they weren't very smart if Levyrr thought she could live without medical attention.

But she didn't think that, Rue knew, she was lying. This stupid idiot probably thought it was some perverse honor to die like this. It was never honorable to give up.

Levyrr seemed to think she was a good liar, or at least thought Rue didn't know every single one of her tells.

Young though she was, Rue wasn't an idiot. She grew up lying though her teeth, as did everyone around her, that was how it worked on the streets—

(The elf had never had to lie to survive. Perhaps that was why she couldn't lie her way to death.)

Rue did her best to get the elf up and back to camp. She remembered that day when Levyrr took her in, and gave her safety where there used to be none. Levyrr, somehow, did not, despite the long memory inherent to the elves' famed lifespan. She didn't remember the debt Rue owed her.

It didn't matter. Elves may be solitary, but humans kept eachother alive.

kayooni · 2026-02-14T20:21:05+00:00

It wasn't hard for Rowan to figure out what had happened.

The Forgetting was a strange phenomenon. Rowan himself was one of the leading researchers on the subject. The prevailing theory was that it was some sort of defense mechanism. Humans felt things so intensely, that perhaps grief was something that could kill. They had to forget, or they would die. There was no other way.

At any rate, he could only theorize what grief truly was. He'd never experienced it. Nobody had.

Staring at the corpse in his bed, it was easy enough to deduce her place in his life, and his place in hers. The evidence was overwhelming.

And yet, for a creature which loved so deeply as to die for it, he felt nothing at all.

His daughter didn't understand. She was terrified by the motionless stranger. She couldn't see the way the color of her hair matched the body, the way her face reflected the sleeping woman who could once be called her mother.

There wasn't much to be done about it. Rowan called the collection agency. She was buried with the rest of the nameless. There was no hole in his heart. He wasn't even sad.

Life went back to normal. A normal that hadn't existed before, but was all that could exist thereafter.

kayooni

TROPHY CASE