The Lantern Festival (7) : Scientists have been hard at work trying to understand the strange, glowing qualities of the luminescent caterpillars found in the caves by the reservoir. The caterpillars still shrivel up if they are taken out of the caves but their glowing secretions have been processed into an organic paste that can withstand the outside world. The city is selling paper lanterns infused with various seeds. The glow paste is full of minerals to support healthy plant growth without risking damage to the environment; all lantern purchases come with a small packet of activating power that will heat the paste up enough to mimic the effects of a candle without the concerns of flammability. When the glow paste loses its heat, the lantern will return to the Earth and upon the first rain (or any contact with water) the paper will dissolve and the seeds may begin to grow. All proceeds from the lanterns are put right back into the community to support local conservation and environmental protection efforts.
Turn of the century EDM drifted across the yard, the piano at its heart lifting above the steady, driving beat, imbuing the scene with both tranquility and pulsing emotion. A figure made of the blacks of clothes and midnight, interspersed with pale flash and moonlight. Pants rolled up and ankles idly stirring in the water, he’s bent over a flat paper circle, its odd glow giving gentle highlight to his profile. With careful motions he writes:
Dirk loses 2 pounds and stops getting fat shamed by the vet.
Fairy dust is applied and slowly the circle expands and expands into a sphere and rises silently into the air to join several others, no two alike. Watching it for a moment, the boy reaches for another flat paper shape from the stacks upon stack upon stacks that surround him. After a moment's thought, he began to write once more.
Eles stops ruining bathrooms.
Malory let out a gusty, disgruntled sigh. He wasn’t sure in what manner the other boy would go about it, but he was pretty sure another would bear Eles’s agonies, impulses, and creative household DIY energy soon enough. Though…some of his efforts were enjoyable, even gratifying, depending on his boy’s whims and desire to coax Malory into loving him a little more. Speak to him another small truth. And haunt him with joy with every glance in certain mirrors.
Eles
With a purse of his lips, he lifted the marker. It had been an early night, with Hybris feeling restless and bored the way some nights could. Faces around him flattening, losing all the dimension and movement he always liked to observe. Voices too. The chatter that built up little stories until they became lives, turning into white noise around him. It had been a whim to pick up a few of the festival lanterns, they’d both seen them around so often these days. Malory still thought that maybe they could be used for wishes. But he felt that maybe wishing was too cliche/ Maybe they could just make statements on the lanterns and gaslight reality into being what they wanted.
But the house had been empty. Which was fair. And there was no text, because both of them were stubborn when it came to enjoying the frustration of the other, even if it occasionally ******** themselves over as well. Also fair. And fine.
Deciding that it’d be fun to just set up all the lanterns himself, Malory then went back out to buy a hundred more. No sense in treating himself with restraint. Especially when there was no need to share.
Eles learns to use his ******** phone.
Eles steps in dogshit tomorrow.
Soft glowing shape after shape rises above the yard.
My hair grows another 6 inches without losing any volume.
Eles gets to feel fear. The really good and ******** up kind.
I find out more about the Dumpster Man.
I get to hear a really g-
The sky cracks apart and a body falls into the pool with a huge, graceless splash. Holding the current lantern above his head and out of the way, he looks up at the not-unfamiliar phenomenon, eyebrows raised.
“Thank you?”
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Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2025 8:56 am
A second passed. Then two. Then three. Bubbles rose up and burbled their carbon dioxide into the air. A black shape turned and rose like smoke.
Then a pale face burst out of the otherwise calm waters and a whip of hair cast chlorinated spray everywhere but into that waterlogged face. Eles sucked in a ragged, half-drowned breath before it left him just as quickly in a raspy laugh. Genuine delight spread a smile across his face, across chapped lips, and the boy swam for the pool ledge nearest him.
Two hands slap-clasped atop the deck as Eles birthed himself, wet and honest, into the night air. Standing up had him stumbling, his legs a little weak, but he looked hale apart from the dishevelment from falling out of the sky and into the damn pool. His thoughts hadn't yet turned to what he just encountered, to how he might be able to better aim that furtive jaunt across town through some shattered shard's private wormhole. He hadn't begun to care about how his white shirt became transparent and allowed an inculpatory view of his wasting body. It didn't matter. None of that mattered — not to him, not now, but maybe sometime later when he was in the shower, washing away all the grief and grime.
Having had his jubilance about the whole affair, Eles started around the bed of the pool until he realized that one (1) sly little ghost dressed in black shadows was there, watching. Beside him, like giant piles of ectoplasm, were round glowing papers.
You're not supposed to be home yet, was his first thought.
His second was spoken aloud as he wrung the wet from his hair. "What brought you home? Didn't get your a** kicked again, did you?" Malory couldn't dodge a black eye every time.
And what the ******** was he doing with all those glowing papers? Did Mirrorspace give him homework now?
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Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2025 12:00 pm
A fey thing rose from the depths of Malory's pool and laughed, sopping wet and pleased with himself. Watching silently, Malory's eyes were solemn as he considered the wish, unspoken, that had been granted along with the one still waiting to be finished. But the curl of his lips was frivolous, "I got bored. So I came home."
Voice turning petulant, he went on, "I very rarely get attacked, you know. And youma don't count. They're just hungry and I'm delicious."
I get to hear a really good story.
Finally he dragged his gaze away from Eles and back to the lantern and the powder that brought it to life and flight. "So what was that?" As if he'd never seen such a thing before.
Another paper circle.
I see a boy who
Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2025 2:34 pm
Eles smiled. "Youma have good taste." He supposed that, if he had to survive off of attacking and eating people, he'd want to go for the beautiful ones who had no real sense of self-preservation. The ones who expected other people to do the mission-critical saving for them, else continuing to live became unnecessarily burdensome. Why not be devoured when running sounded like such a chore?
He stripped out of his wet shirt and discarded it; it struck the pool deck with a heavy, sucking slap. Next came his shoes, stepped off with a little work, then the socks lest he get trench foot, and lastly he freed himself from zippered and belted pants only to abandon them in this small trail toward Malory. He was left in a pair of midnight briefs that he'd borrowed without asking and had no intention of returning. The summer sun had scorched the earth long enough that the air still felt pleasant on damp skin.
Taking up a seat next to Malory, he remained near enough to lean shoulder to shoulder. Even for the lingering warmth, he folded his knees up to his chest and encircled his arms about them loosely. Mostly he stared out at the far end of the pool, but whenever Malory let one of the lanterns fly, Eles watched it like a silent vigil.
"It's, um," And here he had to be choosy with his words, for many still sounded like a garbled transmission that was chewed up by a radio tower. "That thing I picked up when you took me to Mirrorspace. The thing I thought was a mirror shard? Turns out it can cut a hole in the world. Then you bleed from a wound in the spot you chose. Guess I ******** up a little to have fallen in the pool," he finished with a barely suppressed chuckle. While quite a shock at first, the audacity and survival instinct thereafter jettisoned him into a good mood.
"Had to get away from someone. And I'll tell you about it, but… What the ******** is this?" The boy gestured to all the stacks of ectoplasm paper.
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Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2025 4:54 pm
I see a boy who has learned something interesting.
Eles shed his skin, a careless selkie returning home, and when he settled next to him, Malory indulged in the wordless press of cheek against cold, damp skin. Then sat up and grabbed another lantern.
I see a boy who settles next to me and belongs there.
Perhaps a little too factual and not very aspirational. So it was soon joined by
I enter...
Advanced sessions at the dance studio would be a lot of work, actually.
I enter someone's nightmare and they remember it next we meet.
All the enjoyment without any risk or effort.
At the mention of the "mirror shard", Malory's mouth tilted up, secretly satisfied. He'd have to bring it a lot of energy next week, a thank you for delivering his boy a good treat. Bled out through a wound in the world. How terribly, beautifully appropriate.
Turning to look at the other boy, he caught the laugh that wasn't. He really was so pleased with himself. Malory's eyes narrowed on Eles with a consideration that couldn't be relied upon to be entirely pleasant. Get away from someone?
Promising.
"I saw a stand on the way home and decided I would take all the wishes for myself " And just himself, by himself, with no intention of sharing in bullshit and petty thoughts at all.
Eles learns to use his ******** phone.
Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2025 5:08 pm
"Wishes?" Eles peered at what Malory had been writing. Apart from a humorless stare at the boy who had greeted him with such a softening and intimate gesture from before, Eles wasn't sure how to reconcile what he was reading with paper lanterns with wishes. Were paper lanterns for wishes? And if so… "Those are statements.
"Besides, I know how to use a phone." He remained rather impressed with himself, despite his meaning the antique rotary phone that was so carefully restored by Malory's parents.
As he glanced around them, he spotted a few markers lying out for use and grabbed one. If Malory was wasting wishes on statements of dubious fact, then Eles would join him. He took up a paper lantern from the stack and set it before him, damp hand poised above it with his fingers perched around the base of the pen. In careful, considering slashes of script, he wrote the following:
He teaches me how to speak better.
It helped to practice, but not all of it came back so quickly. Rather, he assumed it was coming back; maybe he woke up after such a long coma that he'd forgotten all of that. Anything medical was beyond his realm of expertise. And interest.
"Went to a bar today," Eles explained as he began writing another message on a captive paper lantern. "Thought I'd get out of my head for a while. People-watch. Didn't get that far into it before some smarmy-looking guy tried to get me to talk to him in the laziest way possible." He rolled his eyes with a brief slouch in his posture for it. "Sounded about as socialized as a rabid dog when I started talking to him." Then Eles paused in his writing.
"Well. Signing. He didn't earn the right to hear my voice. I figured, what the ********, might as well have some fun at his expense so I started spouting off total bullshit. Things about monsters and looking for trouble. He seemed to buy it."
He makes deals with me because he wants me to stay. He thinks I'll fly away, brief as a paper lantern. Eles handed the two lanterns to the boy, curious to see how he got them to float so readily.
"This guy — he tried so hard to play himself up as a predator. A monster." Eles mimicked claws with his hands. "So I thought I'd see where that went, if anywhere at all. Maybe he'd give me something to fear. But when I took him back to the bathrooms, he just ******** transformed right in front of me into a Negaverse agent. Called himself Borax? Like the laundry cocaine. I wasn't scared and he wasn't pulling my starseed, so I decided to have a little fun. Maybe get a taste.
"He didn't mind much. Was pretty boring until someone walked into the bathroom. Some kid — could've shared a class with you if he didn't look like roadkill — seemed mildly annoyed by the whole thing. Didn't walk back out. Tried to bust his way into a stall and Laundry Cocaine just reached out and dropped him like a stone. Showed me the kid's starseed. Looked a lot different than yours." Brilliant. Shining. Like a fresh-plucked fruit still glistening with dew.
His arrogance knows no bounds And he will make no peace today
That one was set aside and Eles took up another. "He had a kink for it — or it was coincidental. Guess he decided he liked me, or he wanted mine too, because he reached through my chest the way Goth Cheerleader did to you. Felt this ******** horrible pain from it. Black flowed down his arm like ink. Looked like it went into me, then it all hurt that much worse.
"But then Laundry Cocaine looked… Irritated? Maybe surprised? He took his hand back out and that's when I cut myself loose. Ditched him in that bathroom with some dead ******** kid. Bet he'll enjoy explaining that one to the cops." He finished another lantern, setting it aside.
And I shall be so lucky To find a boy like him
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Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2025 5:10 pm
“A phone,” Malory insisted, “...not yours.” And it was funny, but also irritating with increasing frequency. And there was something that had become undeniably appealing in the thought of having Eles at the tip of fingers. But still, he wasn’t going to buckle under the weight of the boy’s determined ignorance. He could absolutely outwait Eles, and just spend all his frustration sending increasingly lewd things to the untouched message box. Maybe it was even due for some video content.
He vaguely moves a few times to block Eles from his wishing trove, but not enough to actually block him. Malory was more curious about what the boy would write than sulky about coming back to an empty house, especially since it was no longer empty. The first statement of a wish was filed away for later consideration, as the story that followed was…interesting! To say the least!
Bullshit about monsters and looking for trouble. Malory gave a little smile for that. It rang more true to Eles than false, but he could allow his boy all the cocksure disdain he cared to show off.
The second lantern was scrawled across and he took both with a look that was properly solemn for the receiving of wishes. He thought back to the ludicrous morning where Eles painted him and his bedroom, and his bathroom, in hideous shades of blue and bile, and how the talk that followed had ended. And how maybe he really should be the one making little deals to keep his boy close, come what may. Something about doing so, though, felt like admitting that maybe…he couldn’t.
A bathroom assignation turning into a magical reveal was certainly a turn of events, and Eles of course, was fearless. Probably more eager and curious than he was letting on. A hook-up and a murder? With a quiet chuckle, Malory shook his head and gave the other an assessing look. He was clearly fine, exultant even.
“It sounds like he tried to corrupt you. Make you an agent like him,” Malory offered with a wide, cheshire smile. Taking up a little packet of power from a basket he’d dumped them all into, he sprinkled it on to first one, then the other of Eles’s lanterns. The glow began to increase slightly, and the round shapes began to expand, filling until they slowly lifted into the air and kept going up.
“He likely teleported out, though,” he unfortunately had to dash that little hope. It was better that Eles knew what agents were capable of if he insisted on pulling them for private bathroom chats. “They can do that and it’s very unfair.”
Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2025 5:12 pm
Eles sighed, offering a bashful smile for being caught out on his half-truth. Falling silent for a time, he watched Malory raise those paper lanterns up with only a sprinkle of magic. Like he was peering, quiet and uninvited, into Dream's careful cultivation of all those delicate imaginings.
Eles leaned a little closer, close enough to rest his chin on the boy's shoulder. He eyed the way the ambient light from the lanterns brightened Malory's skin, yet left him still as pale as a corpse. For a while, it was all he needed – the constant ache behind his sternum and the contemplative gestures of a boy resurrecting wishes from statements. Sending them into the sky to mock those relegated to the ground.
After a time, he shifted and laid his head against that shoulder. Adrenaline was so quick to leave when threats that could prove such fun had evaporated like that.
And, worse yet, Malory had to spoil such a clever little ending for him. "Shut the ******** up," Eles objected as he straightened up. "Teleport? Really? So they can just ******** disappear, dodge all culpability, and that's it? Take your starseed and ******** vanish, game over?" How galling. That had to be cheating, right? Weren't there rules for war that prohibited such clear advantages? Maybe that was only normal human war, when all they had at their disposal were killing weapons made to manufacture mass murder.
Heaving a sigh, Eles reached past the boy for another lantern. This time, Eles's handwriting wasn't so precise.
He feels sorry for spoiling my fun. He shows me a few tricks about my phone to make up for it.
Handing the lantern over, Eles fixed him with a lidded stare.
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Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2025 5:13 pm
Eles does not get killed by cheap negaverse bullshit.
Grinning outright now, Malory took the lantern and once again dusted it, this time adding some flair to the gesture, all the while keeping eye contact with the boy. “Let’s make a deal. A couple nights a week, neither of us go out at all. We’ll do a read, off my scripts, or whatever screenplay catches your interest.”
Now it was his turn to lean in, “And if you’re good, I’ll show you how to record things on a phone.” It was definitely time to text some home videos to the stupid ******** tomb of a message box.
Rocking back, he took a lantern and wrote in a wild script, barely looking at what he was doing.
Eles agrees.
Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2025 5:14 pm
No, he will make no peace Even though his hands are empty
Feeling that perhaps that grin was a margin too bright for Eles to look at directly, he turned his attention to another lantern. To write was easy, to recall was easier. This lantern, the one in his hands, he tossed into the pool to be reclaimed by dark waters.
No, he started to write. A voice beside him pulled his attention like hooks in a lip.
"Not just scripts and screenplays," he amended. "Poetry too." Words so fettered with condensed meaning that it felt like blasphemy to speak them into the air. Words written with such cutting cleverness that to recite them was to taste blood in his mouth. He liked poetry. He could remember so much of it. All detached from their initial contexts.
Well, all but one. He spared a furtive glance at the delighted boy who grew so endearingly animated with his stack of stolen wishes. Like a dragon perched above an overflowing hoard of trash that no one knew existed. He had to look away.
Non enim videbit me homo et vivet.
"Fine," he decided, handing the lantern over.
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Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2025 5:14 pm
“And poetry,” Malory amended easily. He never minded at all whenever Eles saw fit to offer beautiful words, or even ugly but evocative ones. They always spilled so easily from him, readily on tap, lovingly stored up from a previous existence. He tries, and it’s mostly easy but sometimes very hard, not to think of Eles in terms of Faustite. Initially because it was a little frightening and very uncomfortable, and then simply because he’d just rather consider the boy next him as who he was within each shared moment. Not who he once was or might become.
But he wondered, with a distant brush of sympathy, if Faustite had spoken such beautiful words to the one setting fires. If they had fed directly into that seething swamp of a mind and made it all the more desperate for their loveliness.
Non enim videbit me homo et vivet.
He’d had to look it up, the first time.
Smile softening to the contemplative, Malory gave the lantern life, then turned back to Eles to close the gap entirely. His tongue teased the taste of salt, copper, and horrible life choices out of the boy’s mouth and a shuddering of laughter followed.
Pausing for a moment, the first question already answered, he asked, “So was it? A monster?”
Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2025 5:15 pm
His attention rose to the sky, to the meandering globes that ever shrank on their journey away from the boys that scribed them into being. Somewhere else, maybe a block from here, maybe a mile, maybe more, they'd shirk the last of their heat and find somewhere to settle down. Then they'd rot away over the months, their wishes long since conjured into being. The medium for their expectant prayers long forgotten. Then, by the time another lantern festival lights up the sky, shrubs will have sprouted from the corpses of their wishes.
Malory stole his attention. Scattered his thoughts like those seeds, like a brushfire. Eles poured plain his passions into a repartee — to convey another part of the story he'd told in a language unspoken but intimately understood. The wishes, those stories — suddenly they mattered not at all.
Eles felt like an incomplete sentence, glad for such a brazen interruption. Glad for freedom in being half-written, unfettered by its sentence to inevitably end.
"No. Worse." He couldn't bite back a smile. "A capitalist."
