Hugh J. O'Donnell

The secret to the ritual is that it works if you need it to. Death does not appear before poseurs, but if your desire is pure enough, if your need is great enough, you will catch His attention. It matters little if you don’t arrange the candles correctly, or mispronounce every other rune.
When the door to the other side opens, He will step through in all His pomp and majesty, and you will be allowed to bargain.
And as He flies off into the night, you will wait beside your lost love and decide the price was worth it.

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He sailed an ocean that flowed between worlds, looking for home. Every time he set out in his little boat and rowed out into the water, he would return to a different realm.
Sometimes the differences were as subtle as the title of a beloved book. Others had strange physics or dramatically altered histories. Some worlds teemed with life while others were barren.
After spending time in each world and learning the wrongness of it, he would set out to sea and try again.
He never realized that home wasn’t a place you found. It was a place you made.

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They built the temple so high that the tops of its towers rested among the clouds. The massive complex was in a constant state of construction, with each new generation of builders adding to the project.
As the centuries went on, styles came and went, and the ideas of new generations clashed with those that came before them; sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The temple became a living map of history as each architect was driven to go higher and farther than their predecessors, reaching up to Heaven itself.
But the higher they built, the larger the cracks grew in the foundations.

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The cat had done it. After years of chasing and stalking, Nimbus had caught the red dot.
He had the point of light stuck fast between his claws, and no matter how hard the human pulled or waived the little hand-held device the dot came from, it was going nowhere. Nimbus meowed in triumph and bit the red dot experimentally. It tasted like the memory of lying in a sunbeam on a perfect summer afternoon.
His human gave up and set down the laser pointer. With the dot still trapped between his claws, Nimbus curled up and went to sleep.

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The ultralight aircraft buzzed through the sky above the gargantuan alien creatures.
“Can we get closer?” The biologist asked, leaning out of the craft’s door with her camera.
“Do you want to be lunch, doctor?” The pilot asked. To him, they resembled giant stingrays. He’d been stung by a ray once as a child. Back then, there were still fish in the sea; and humans on Earth.
“Don’t be so paranoid,” she said.
But it was his job to make sure she got back to base safe, and with so few humans left, he would make damn sure she did.

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The duke’s men had entered the palace. We fought them hand-to-hand with flashing blades and single-shot pistols, our organized lines dissolving into a chaotic melee through the corridors and ballrooms.
I had no love for the king, but the duke was no more palatable. I’d sworn oaths, and I would uphold them.
But as the day wore on, I watched good men die. I killed good men. For what? The vanity of a throne? A title? Their bodies lay among the smashed marbles and torn tapestries, and I swore a new oath.
Whoever won would have to deal with me.

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I expected the Priestess of Water to be a willowy maiden sitting beside a pool, using her powers for divination or healing. I didn’t think she’d kick my ass.
She flowed across the training yard, moving gracefully from stance to stance. A spiraling jet of water danced through the air around her, forming a shield to deflect my attacks one minute and snapping out like a wet towel the next. It wasn’t long before she forced me to yield.
“You weren’t what I expected,” I said.
“Water is unpredictable,” she said. “But you will learn to go with the flow.”

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Humanity had left everything behind. They escaped the prison of the flesh and transcended their physical forms. Living as beings of pure energy, they inhabited virtual realms only limited by their imaginations.
No longer shackled to their frail and limited bodies, they left the strife and conflict of the old world behind. It was the ultimate eternal golden age.
Sometimes someone would venture close enough to the physical world to let the last body know what was happening.
He was patient with them, as they were his only visitors. But somebody had to stay behind to keep the servers running.

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Tiger was engineered for violence. They’d grown him in a lab as an amusement for crowds grown used to mundane bloodsport. Gestated with the teeth and claws of an apex predator, he was expertly trained in the arts of fighting and killing.
The crowds, as fickle as they were, loved Tiger. He didn’t merely survive in the ring but excelled, winning the title of Champion.
But Tiger was troubled. He looked around himself and saw a gilded cage.
Tigers are cunning predators and patient. Someday, he would break that cage and come for the throats of those who created him.

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It was a perfect crime.
Technically, it wasn’t even a time at all considering where he committed it in the timeline.
He’d travel back in time to Amsterdam in the 1630s. A few short trips gave him insider knowledge on which bulbs would produce the most valuable tulips. All he had to do was resell the bulbs, deposit the profits, and check his bank balance in his own time. Sure, it caused hyperinflation in the seventeenth century, but that wasn’t his problem.
Except for this time, he materialized surrounded by bloodthirsty botanists looking to make a deal of their own.

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