Charlie Botzman
Stories (7)
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Secret Manifesto
If walls could talk, we would lie. Not the malevolent kind of lying. Nothing so bad that someone might get hurt. Just the sort of lies that oft enamor minds as their eyes are captivated on the pages between covers of a book. The sort of lies our occupants call “stories.” Walls have stories too. Stories to be told that could lift your spirits to the heavens. Stories that could chill your spine to breaking. Stories of adventure, of romance, of rebellion, and of love. Stories that align not only with the human experience, but with the experience of all things which have been and changed over time.
By Charlie Botzman3 years ago in 01
Mercy Kill
The eyes of the child are as luminous as the stones that encrust her skin, glowing like moons in the twilight as we share a gaze as intense and as searing as my own breath. A rich amber yellow that pierces the ever-growing darkness of the wood. These eyes know something, seem to know something about me. The pace of my hearts quickens. I should be unperturbed by a creature so small and so young…and so vulnerable. Just as she should be, were she to pick up an insect from this forest ground. Yet, she holds my gaze so intently, so unblinkingly, as if in her couple trips round the sun she has come face to face with the likes of my kind as routinely as her wingless race drinks water. And then it comes to me. The sunglow eyes, the pattern of emeralds and rubies and sapphire on her face, the sheer fearlessness. This child is the offspring of the Dragon Riders of yore.
By Charlie Botzman3 years ago in Fiction
After the Revolution
Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Nor could anyone hear their screams onboard the ship. Everyone’s voice had been rendered useless here. They had taken even that from Mabel when they captured her. Just as they had taken the captives’ bodies, years of history, entire lives meant to be shared with others back on Earth. The captives cannot talk. At least, not in the usual way. When the time comes, she will need to devise a method to alert the troops to action. She will need to find a way to make a sound to inform the troops that the revolution has begun.
By Charlie Botzman3 years ago in Fiction
The Dragonsborne
There weren’t always dragons in the valley. It was a phrase she had trained herself to repeat whenever she crossed the trail. A tool she always carried with her so that in passing through these smoldered ruins she might so suspend her own disbelief. It was a hard thing for any knight, let alone a night of Demores to trust that the smoldered rock, the old edifices which she approaches were once castles that tickled the belly of the sky. Now, as she nears, they appear as gigantic candles, melted and bent, luminous in the moonlight. A city lost to fire, a quiet sanctuary where hordes of refugees once made camp. A decade ago, life had flourished in these hills, but now they lay silent, charred, barely good enough even for the temporary housing she is tasked with prohibiting. The only comfort the relics have to offer is the knowing that if ever again she must take flight, their walls may shield her for a night or two. A possibility which grows more threatening, which teeters on the border of probability with every passing day. All because of the monstrous, winged, fire breathing beasts. No, there weren’t always dragons in the valley, but certainly there are now. And for a young woman who might just as easily be killed in the valley as behind the castle walls, disbelief is not something she can afford.
By Charlie Botzman4 years ago in Fiction
