Spindlewheel Stories

How is your loyalty earned?
It is of course demanded often, a coveted and valuable thing to many. And it can be lent, or faked, or retracted, a temporary boost or slight in a long line of alliances. …

What makes a legend?
The iconic Jolly Roger long outlasts its captain. The history books cherry pick the notorious and the bombastic to remember from a vast trade of mercenary sailors. But the kraken…

Where do you place your faith?
When hard numbers err and machine gods falter, when their prophecies speak to the untenable, you might put your trust in the knowable fallacies of the human heart. When…

How is power measured?
If you bring down the moon, can you call yourself stronger than someone who quells a generational fear? If the magic in your heart commands the sea with a gesture, are you wort…

What has more value: companionship, or clout?
All things being equal, or ceteris paribus as they'd say, far above the worries of hunger and war, when your biggest concern is impressing your contempor…

When you die, what hand will guide you from your body?
Let's make the assumption that there is something beyond this flimsy world. Let's assume whatever life or afterlife awaits you, you will meet it…

What does a town need?

Why raise a mansion no one lives in? Why fit a jail door with a lock that shines? What landed gentry goes to seed that does not rot the roots? Speak as soft as you want, but if…

Did I know THIS was going to happen? Not in so many words, no. But did I see this coming?

I’ll put it this way: unlike some people, I know where the right place, and when the right time, will be. So,…

Previously...

Osedax Roseus, pirate-without-a-ship, enlists the help of old friend Somniosidae and sea-witch And the Queen Bore Upon Her Shoulders Thousands of Chittering Insects, Vindictive Servants…

On a clear day you can see it from the city limits: a silhouette through the sea snow, perched on the very edge of an oceanic trench.

But... that’s all you can see, really. The maelstrom between here…

It's my birthday! Happy birthday, me.

It's also the two-year anniversary of the production of Spindlewheel. This time in 2017, I was crunching through the first two weeks of february to make a twine …

Previously...

The Reader has spent their entire life studying among the first fully sapient AI, Deep Sleep, who has opened their arms to Ion, a perfect machine in contention with an errant branch of …

The singularity occurred within living memory, and my entire career since has been spent talking to an inch of its existence.

Digital sentience was a miracle the way penicillin was a miracle; with th…

Previously...

Tamarind, scientist and unwitting leader, creates a new mold from which to make things. Vinnie the Vigor, ghost of a broken and forgotten time; Demerit Delour, pillar of the strange for…

They are always watching us, there, behind the veil.

I’ve only met their gaze a few times, only by necessity--a gift of the Witch demands to be used once it’s given--and it’s always me who flinches f…

Previously...

Trapped below the Marlen House with antiquities enthusiast Virgil France and actor out of work Terrace Mavelle in a bizarre labyrinth of gothic hallways lined with occultist runes, Regg…

A woman with a broad hat and a dark thin coat stood on my doorstep and told me, with condolences, that a man I'd never met had died.

She told me this, having seen my name written as one of his next-o…

There are people at this very bar who remember when the Heights Casino was a half-rate pit stop on the way to the real gambling dens on the coast, but that was back when we had a coast.

Ask any of ‘e…

The ship hurtled away from the molten light, leaving me terrified and alone as my chassis cooled and contracted down into a single state for the first time in decades. my optics took their time adjus…

Previously....

Venn, a retired monster hunter and newly adopted parent of several hundred freshly awoken automata, attempts to reckon with the Vampire up in its castle for its heinous crimes against …