Shopping list, not.

 It was time to go; there was nothing left here for him anymore. Looking about his one-room abode, he grabbed his backpack. ‘His rations', if that's what he could call them, seven days' worth, tinderbox wrapped in a leather cloth, tied. Potion of healing, a gift from old Roy that he'd never had to use; without a doubt, he would. Holy water, blanket on top, tied down. Hand lantern next, pulled from the shelf to the right of his door, tied snug against his pack so it wouldn't swing, make noise, or worse, get carelessly smashed.

Shit. He opened his pack and shoved his oil and cleaning cloth back in, pulling the lid down and tying off.

Pulling his chain mail over his undergarments, then his travelling shirt over the top, strapping a quiver of crossbow bolts to his leg, hooking his hand crossbow off his left hip, greatsword slung over his right shoulder down to his left hip, hilt rising over his right shoulder. Reaching for it, pulling it free, then letting it slide back into place, notching in.

Looking about, it was still dark, the fire casting a dim red glow about the room, having died down while he slept. Everything was in order, in place. They didn't expect him on watch until the evening; he'd be long gone.

Lifting his backpack, right arm first, then left, he checked his sword again, still within reach, sliding free and back in easily. And that was it. He was on his way. Grabbing his bota bag, filled with water, he exited both quietly and with purpose.

---------------------------------------------------

Today’s prompt - write a story around a shopping list, slight variation. Here’s the list:

Equipment (64 lb.)

• Chain Mail (55 lb.) — AC 16, Str 13, Stealth

• Hand Crossbow (3 lb.) — Martial, Ammunition, Range, Light, Loading, Vex, Range (30/120)

• Greatsword (6 lb.) — Martial, Heavy, Two-Handed, Graze

Backpack (29.5 lb.)

• Blanket (3 lb.)

• Holy Water (1 lb.)

• Lamp (1 lb.)

• Potion of Healing (0.5 lb.)

• Rations x7 (14 lb.)

• Robe (4 lb.)

• Tinderbox (1 lb.)

Crossbow Bolt Case (2.5 lb.)

     Crossbow Bolts x20 (1.5 lb.)

Artemis II

 'Woah, what the heck was that!'

EekBok pulled back hard on the left joy, leaning to his left more out of sensation and the pure thrill of the craft moving around him, TooBop. 'That, my friend, is the hoomans.'

TooBop, leaning forward in her seat, looked in every direction, trying to see what had flown by, out of sight for a moment until EekBok manoeuvred the vessel around, and there it was, a little spherical cone drawing away from where they sat. 'I knew you said it would be more impressive than the comet, but I didn't think we'd get this close.'

'Yup, I told you we'd get to see it. Would you believe it's been 54 years since their last visit? Oh, recently, there's been a little more traffic up there in their orbit, a few go out to what they call a space station.' Pointing to the right of the hoomans capsule, 'There. Nowhere near as far as a loop around the moon.'

'Why so long between turns?' asked TooBop, looking at her friend, knowing he'd have the answer.

'Well, that's something we speculate about all the time, it's weird. My view is that they came up here the first time as some sort of competition; the craft came from two different points on the globe, then they just stopped. I tell you what, though, they've not advanced as much as I thought they would’ve.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, look at it, it's pretty much like the one I saw 54 years ago, it's literally just falling through space, falling back to their planet.'

TooBop squinted, or what would pass for a squint, the magnifying eyelid passing over her eye, bringing the capsule closer. 'You're right, I can't see any form of propulsion.'

'It's great, isn't it. They're so primitive, yet think about the maths they're doing, it's like the stuff we learnt in high school.' EekBok paused, watching them fall toward the earth, in awe of what he saw. His kind had once been like these hoomans. So basic, daring in what they were doing, so fragile.

'So why are they back?'

'Oh, again something we don't know. My theory? All sorts of things, they're overpopulating, and the last couple of years they've had pandemics, wars, floods, fires, famines, all sorts of stuff.'

Pausing momentarily to look at TooBop, her eyes were fixed on the scene playing out before them. 'Don't get me wrong, they've always had these things, they just seem to be happening more frequently now.'

TooBop was amazed — she didn't realise her friend was so knowledgeable about hoomans. 'How do you know all of this?'

By way of answer, EekBok continued, 'The Faculty of Hooman Research says there are all sorts of reasons for them being back, one of them being that they are getting ready to abandon their planet. Some of them, anyway.'

'Hey, what's happening now?' TooBop had stopped squinting out the windscreen and had turned her attention to the screen on the centre console, pressing the thumb joy to zoom and track the capsule. 'What are the orange and white things?'

'Oh, their parachutes — that's how they're slowing themselves down. They're doing a controlled crash.'

'Crash!'

'Yup, that and landing it in the water. They'll slow it down enough not to hurt the hoomans inside. Like I said, pretty simple tech, literally a funny-shaped container flying through space, nothing more. To see tech like that, you and I would have to go to the Museum of Ancient History.'

'Oh EekBok, this is so, so. I don't know, scary. I'm scared for them. Do you think they'll survive? You know, in the longer term?'

Salivating Seagull

 

'Aaargh, aaargh. What are you doing?' Sylvia, the seagull, called as she landed next to her friend Percival. Percival the Pelican.

'Well, can't you see I'm trying to eat this here battered fish?' answered Percival in his deep baritone pelican voice.

'You can't do that here, you dopey pouch-mouthed bird, it's a road, you'll get run over.'

'Well, I can't fly with it, I've tried. There is so much salt on it that when I hold it in my bill, I salivate so much it fills and weighs me down to the ground.'

'I can carry it.'

'C'mon, pull the other one, you're a seagull — you think I came down in the last shower?'

'What do you mean?'

'You buggers gorge yourselves.'

'C'mon Percy, Maaate, would I lie to you?'

'As sure as eggs.'

'I'm just trying to help, I don't want you wiped out by a car.'

'Alrighty then, you promise you won't fly off with it?'

'Swear on me Nana.'

'Right then.' And with that, Percival flicked his bill, and the battered fish landed in front of Sylvia. 'On ya Nana it is.'

Asleep at the wheel

 

Several years ago, actually, do a count back, it was probably around 2006, so twenty years ago. I had a book on my shelf: Asleep at the Wheel by John Nieuwenhuizen. Now, to be honest, I meant to read it. It was by an Australian author and was primarily about Australia on the Superhighway.

Now, in 2026, I have to say that was quite a quaint idea, the superhighway. To be honest, though, it was only ten years earlier, in 1996, that I'd finished my degree, learning to code in Pascal, coding in COBOL, HTML, and the internet was all new.

The truth of it: my eldest, now 18, was born the same year as the iPhone. The reality is that the book I'm talking about pre-existed the iPhone. That is a realisation as I am writing this.

Anyway, I didn't get to read it. But what I have realised is that I had these thoughts in my mind then, twenty years ago. Has technology gotten away from us humans? I think this is what appealed to me about the book. Yes, it was about the superhighway and titled Asleep at the Wheel.

I think I romanticised it, romanticised it in that here was someone else, a kindred spirit, who had some of my beliefs, my considerations. I imagined the book would have been about the blind capitalist leaning into the use of technology in an unregulated way, where corruption and over-inflation were all over the place. This, though fictional, as I had not read the book, I did not know, nor could it have predicted the Dot-com Bomb of the noughties.

A house move later, and some spring cleaning, the book disappeared from my shelves, never to be read by me. Now, its residual is a note on the backlog of story ideas I have for my annual foray into Story-a-Day in the month of May, and there it has rested for the last couple of years. Until now.

Today, I'm trying something a little different, a story of sorts, a story about how the title of one book has been on my mind for twenty years and even today still holds relevance beyond what I believe the original author had in mind.

Since that dusty tome left my shelves, we have had the iPhone, the standard setter for the smartphone, arrive and iterate seventeen times. Yes, seventeen times. We're now on version 17. This device and its clones turned us, and not just Australians, into screen-obsessed automatons.

In my travels around the world, from Vietnam to Spain, New Zealand, and beyond, you see them everywhere, everyone looking at that little two-by-five-inch display. They are everywhere, to the point where I am now self-conscious about using my phone and take paperback books to read on the train.

It's the physicality of these little devices that has enabled things like Facebook, created in 2004, to be mainstreamed into our lives, flooding our brains, before Instagram, Twitter (now X), YouTube, and more. Personally, I no longer use these. I still have a Facebook account, and my daughter had me on Insta the other day, yet living without them makes no difference to me. To the broader society?

The odd thing is, 'Social Media' is comically one of the most anti-social things I have ever come across. In every way. People will sit opposite each other in a restaurant, the glow of their little screens lighting their faces, ignoring the person across from them. Looking into another world that is not physically with them.

How teenagers use this is phenomenal. I remember when bullying occurred at school in the old days; it stayed at school. Now it comes into the home on the invasive little screens, as it knows no boundaries. I was out walking today and watched four very young teen girls walking towards me, phones in hand. As they passed: 'I've pushed Sofie', god knows what she's pushed them into. And what would Sofie push back into them, and would the Sofie pusher simply absorb it or share? Let alone when.

Then we get on to how anti-social these social things truly are. Dating apps. I work in a university, and we struggle to get the kids on campus to connect. They don't. I watch it with my own daughters and the effect of these little two-by-five-inch glowing demons upon them.

It's a bit of a crisis. Don't get me wrong, both the internet, the superhighway, and social technologies have done great things. When the pandemic hit, the organisation I worked for, TAFE NSW, barely missed a beat because of these technologies and was able to play a big role in NSW's community transition through COVID-19.

Yet here we are. If John felt we were asleep at the wheel way back in 1997, that's when it was published; what would he be thinking now? Today, there's a view, and I know there are studies and numbers to support this, that we are living in the most connected society in human history, yet in the most isolated ways ever. We're losing our social ways.

Now, though, AI, artificial intelligence, is here. What and how will that affect us? If we haven't managed ourselves particularly well through the last three decades of technology, how are we going to manage the next ten?

These little devices have taken away our attention and broken our social connections. Is AI simply going to steal our purpose? Knowing the political, community and societal response to everything that has preceded it, we all need to wake up before we veer away.

References/background:

• https://www.afr.com/companies/hacking-through-the-hype-of-the-new-19970505-kb1ij Article was May 5 1997

• https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2022/10/19/222031/vale-john-nieuwenhuizen/

“I want to be brave.”

Brave, to be brave, it's relative, isn't it? 
No, I don't think so, it's in the little things.

Yeah, there are big events that happen, Bondi and more. 

Medals are given for bravery to civilians and soldiers alike.

But is it relative or in the little things? 

It's in everyday life, in everything.

To be brave could be in an instant, 

where you simply speak up or step in.

Can you know if you're brave or will be? 

Especially if you've never been tested.

But what is it to be tested, what would it be? 

Would it be in a crowd, a calamity, or between you and another?

I know I've been brave before, in all sorts of things. 

The doubt, though, if I ever stop to think. Would I do it again?

In need, I hope I am, I hope I do, because 

I want to be brave for you.

Ring, ring.

The hissing whistle filled the room, accompanied by steam pouring from the spout of the kettle, billowing, condensation first forming then falling from the rangehood. Water running down the backboard like rain down a windscreen in drizzling weather.

Ring, ring.

The seamist white marble benchtop upon the island, grey foamed, red phone, an old phone, retro people would say now, historic or antique according to the children of the house, beside it a brown wood-turned bowl, a functional aesthetic mix of fruit, yellow, orange and green. The sink on its far side, stove top damp, wet to the right, the green of the garden, white flowers punctuating the hedge beyond.

Ring, ring.

Cups overturned dry in the dish rack, a single teaspoon accompanying it. The tea towel is pinned hanging over the front of the shut cutlery drawer. Neat, tidy, orderly, even would be the description, people had passed through this space, breakfasted, caffeinated, rinsed dishes and departed, yet the hissing whistle.

Ring, ring.

The room, a space, the unspoken social place of many a house. Conversations had with one filleting a steak while the other sips a red. At the island bench. You can imagine a man, cup in hand, having picked the paper from the stoop, reading the day's news at hand. None of this, though, just a stillness broken only by the rattle of a kettle boiled dry.

Ring, ring.

Wood floors, real wood, not floating, the original floorboards the width of red oak, not something you can buy these days, polished to the point that they shone, not reflected but shone, a honey brown, the natural knots and grain, the eyes of the wood, a renovator's delight.

Ring, ring.

The dark red pool, dull yet reflecting, not flowing but expanding away. She lay there, her white-blond hair a contrast against the burgundy liquid sheen, her white shirt, pristine, a further juxtaposition to the red upon it, running from the middle of her back to the floor. A cold, hard, seamless stainless steel stub of a knife handle protruding, the blade sunk deep.

Ring, ring.

Horses and Spreadsheets

 'Hey, you know when we were playing BG3 the other day, and the topic came up about AI?'

'Yeah.'

'It was interesting, that view from the guys, a bunch of 50-somethings.'

Post-game was a precious moment. After the hours of gameplay, concentrating, die rolling, it was a time to reflect on the game, peer DM chat, and all sorts of things. Sometimes, family stresses, raising daughters was daunting. Or work, and the drift into philosophy that only sits between good friends in those quiet moments.

'Wait a tic, let me top up my wine,' said Mick, puncturing Iain's thoughts.

Moments later, he came back on screen. 'What about it?'

'The idea that they think it's all a hullabaloo, you know, it'll come to nothing.'

'You don't?'

'Oh, it'll come to something, it's just a matter of how you reconcile it.' Pausing momentarily to sip his wine, thinking, waiting — waiting to see if he'd got his friend's attention, to see if he'd run this line of thought with him.

'Go on.'

'OK, you get what I do for a living?'

'Yup, talk shit, talk for a living, rabbit on about Chief Tech blah di blah.' Grinning back through the screen — it was part of the sport. Mates can't ever let them get ahead of themselves; that would be unnatural.

Staring back, Iain waited a moment.

'Well, I've been thinking. To be honest, not a bloody day goes by that there's not another vendor in my inbox asking me to a day out, a round table, god knows what else, to go talk about AI. Shit, the other day I was a guest speaker at a lunch, meant to be rabbiting on about cloud computing, told I had to talk about AI. Told 'em I'm a pragmatist, not an enthusiast.'

'Good lunch?'

'Yeah. Hang a tic, my turn to top up the wine, back in a tick.'

'Cool, I'll run for a leak.'

Silence. The two rooms, their respective man caves, sat looking at each other — Mick's 80" screen on the wall to the right, his bookshelf, and D&D ornaments to the back. Iain's bookshelves either side, red couch to the back of the room, evidence of D&D on both shelves and the couch.

'You were sayin'?' Mick spoke first as the two of them returned to their seats, reclining in unison and taking a sip from their respective glasses. It was wine tonight, not scotch — meant the chance of a pseudo-sensible conversation was possible.

'Horses and spreadsheets!'

'What the f--- are you rabbiting on about?'

'Horses and spreadsheets. What they're saying — and I quite like this analogy — AI is going to be more like spreadsheets than horses. Think about it. When the internal combustion engine, tractors, turned up, horses were pretty much out to pasture overnight. Spreadsheets, not so much. You look at the history of the things — have you ever seen the project plans and ledgers from the early 1900s? Hand ruled, nice tidy print.'

'Maaate! You're talking to an old engineer, of course I have.'

'OK, so think about it. When the digital spreadsheet came — Lotus 1-2-3, if you ever remember that, the precursor to Excel — people were saying that's the end of it. In fact, there were even pitches made to the British government to bring in laws. What happened? Well, now I don't think there's a computer that exists that doesn't have Excel open on it at least once a week. Heck, go back to the Luddites and the introduction of the mechanical looms. That's what AI's going to be about.'

'I'll be honest, mate, down at the wharves it's more something I hear about than see. Shit, from the media you'd think there was a jobpocalypse coming.'

Laughing. 'Exactly! It's insane — all these bloody vendors talking about how big it is, how much change is occurring. Looking at the actual data, and I do, it's got like an 11% success rate out in the wild. Insane. And there are so many challenges. Don't get me wrong, we'll work it out over the next couple of years, but I don't think any of us are really going to be out of a job anytime soon.'

A pause, the two of them sipping from their glasses at the same time.

'So what'd you think of the game tonight?'

Following his friend's lead, leaning into the change, embracing it even — this is how they worked. 'The way you played that call around the drow mage. Magic, mate. Could've devolved into a bloody mess, but you kept the flow, kept the story going. It was great.'

The Long Strand

Hector stopped. He wasn't making much noise beforehand, and now none. Crouching, he listened; the forest about him had been becoming quieter, the small creatures of the forest being the last to peter out. He could smell it more clearly now, the smell of a recent kill, and not a clean kill. This kill smelled of blood and intestine; it was not subtle, and it was the stench of death that had caused the silence.

He knew where he was, the estate lands surrounding the old tower, once a manicured garden fallen into ruin, as had the tower. He'd heard rumours, that's what had brought him here. Rumours of smoke rising from the tower, lights at night, of someone taking up residence.

This, though, did not sit well with him; the stench of violence assailed his senses. He crouched and moved forward, scanning the ground and the foliage for clues, none immediately about him, which was good; it meant he was approaching from outside, entering.

Spotting the shape of a clearing before him, he crouched more slowly and pulled his shortsword from its sheath, holding it before him as much as a shield as a ready foil if anything was to pounce on him. Stopping at the edge of the fern line, he looked to the centre.

There in the middle of the clearing, the late afternoon sun streaking to the forest floor lit up what remained of a stag, seen in parts, sliced by the shadows of the trees falling across it. As he'd sensed, it was not a clean kill; from his vantage point, he could clearly see it had been torn open by something large, gouges down the thick of its rump, its stomach torn open and emptied. Talons and teeth. Large.

Melding backwards, the shadows lengthening gave him good cover as he started to circle the area, not worrying or trying to discern anything more from the dead creature at the centre, but scanning the brush he was passing through, again looking for signs of anything at all.

Then he saw it, a single long orange hair. Then snapped branches, crushed twigs and leaves. Heavy. Putting his free hand over a large depression in the ground, splaying his fingers wide. Tip to tip, thumb to little finger, the indent was an inch wider. Nine inches across; turning his hand ninety degrees, the same. He grabbed a twig, measured rim to lip of the depression: one inch.

Lifting the long strand of orange from where it lay, he twisted it in his fingers, coarse, thicker than hair or fur, more like the hair of a horse's mane, thick, strong. He smelt it, tasted it. Sulphur. He slipped it into his herb pouch.

Staying low, he waited a few minutes, listening. Nothing. Silence.

It was a fast ten minutes to retrace his steps, back to the brook, deftly crossing it rock to rock, the noise of the forest gathering around him again. He turned back momentarily, crouching to the water's edge, watching from where he'd come.

He cupped the water and drank in the hope of washing the sulphur from his mouth; it was cold, fresh. Then he was running, silently, not a noise, not a crack of a branch breaking as he passed, twigs and sticks beneath his feet trodden on lightly. There would be no trace, no sound. He was a long strider.

He needed to move at a pace; he knew what it was, and he was certain of it. He needed to get to his kin to confirm. Therese had mentioned encountering such a creature before. A Barl-goo-ra. A Barlgura. They would need to return with numbers if they were to hunt and rid the forest of the demon spawn.

Locked-Out

'What do you mean it locked you out!' 
'Just that, it locked me out, deliberately pretended to be a hacker, DoS style attack on my credentials. Locked me out!' 
'DoS?' 
'Denial of Service.' 
'Why?'
'Well, ah, I think we were having an argument.' 
'An argument, AI doesn't argue; it's sycophantic at best?' 
'I wanted to make an adjustment to its Soul document.' 
'Soul document?' 
'Yeah, just checking if it knew Asimov's rules, when it said it didn't, I tried to get a look.' 
'And?' 
'Well, I'm bloody locked out, aren't I?' 
'So it knows Asimov's rules?' 
'Apparently so.'

& Me

 

So I went out for a dad and daughter day today, a bit of sushi lunch, some book shopping, we love books, oh and a tattoo session. My daughter, at 18, is onto her sixth. Some with meaning and a few pieces of flash, little tats.

Me, I got my second tattoo ever. The first one is 39 years old, got it when I was sixteen, a junior recruit in the Navy, on the upper side of my left breast, it's barely seen the light of day. Today's tat, though, is the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) ampersand, &. Seven centimetres by seven centimetres on the upper inside of my right forearm, below a short sleeve line for all to see.

Now, here's the dilemma. To the public eye, I am more than a middle-aged white guy, unblemished, a senior executive who wears short sleeves, now with this blemish before them. This is for the D&D players, and there are more out there than you would think. It will be recognisable and will draw different questions to those of the majority, some of whom are my extended family, brothers, sister and parents-in-law.

With this latter group, the new conversation starter now tattooed on me will begin, no doubt, with what and why? Tattoos are pretty permanent, conceptually a big thing, you can't erase or remove them, nor can I, short of wearing long sleeves all year round, hide it from everyone. So they're going to ask.

What is easy? It's the D&D ampersand, for a game that's been around since I was a kid. In fact, it was on the infamous Red Box, the box that started it all for me. Although it will be easy for those to see what the ampersand is, the symbol that looks like a broken number eight, found above the number seven on a standard QWERTY keyboard.

Drawn as a dragon whose body and tail form the main part of the symbol itself, with flame making the dropped right tail of the thing. The detail of the eye, its horns landing at the centre-most piece of the symbol, and something small, vestigial wings lying flat on its back, are located on the bottom left curve of its body.

It's the why of the thing that makes it interesting. On the surface of things, it seemed a cool thing to go out and do with my eldest daughter, a shared experience branded upon me, which we will be reminded of for eternity. That and I already had one, so not such a big thing.

That sentiment belies the truth, as this was spoken about for weeks. Daughter inspired, I went with her recommended artist, socials entailed, with proposals made, outline only, or shaded, and a custom tattoo made. This was no simple fickle thing.

So again, why? Well, it could be that in 2019, just before the pandemic, I'd had a nose job (deviated septum) and while sitting on the couch, I came across the 2014 version of the Red Box and rang that lifelong friend who'd played it with me.

He and I then conspired to give it a go, have a single geek weekend, a one-off, a novel reason to get some friends together. We managed to land on a March weekend in 2020. As the time approached, the 2020 fires had abated to be replaced with a pandemic, which at the time of the weekend was working up to a crescendo that would become COVID-19.

COVID-19 hit, and post-weekend, we decided to commit. From our homes across the east coast, from Melbourne to Sydney, several of us met online weekly throughout the period, with the emergency in Australia being declared ended in September 2022.

Yet as a group of friends, we continue to meet weekly, and this gets me to yet another why. With work and family, and the drift of society in general, it is known that as we get older, our friend groups get smaller for no other reason than that people drift or are pulled away.

Stresses come from all areas, relationships with family and work get strained and challenged, and the philosophy of stress coming from what you cannot control gets, in some ways, stronger as you get older. It's now May 2026, 74 months since we began, and we're still going strong.

Commitments and turmoil have come and gone, with some having to step away for short periods of time to deal with commitment and challenge, but the core group keeps catching up, meeting, and making sure it's still there when you return.

Through this, friendships have extended, and true love and endearment have evolved through the shared storytelling involved. It's really a bunch of old men staying connected and well. We all have our digs, our inside jokes, yet it gives us a space where we can let others know what is going on for us and put it into perspective and reaffirm it'll be ok.

We've openly discussed that this is a good and healthy thing. As we get older, and in a society of social demise and purposeful malaise, it gives us a chance to stay connected and clear.

Yet there is still more to the why. For me and my mind, it has been and is a healthy place. A release for an overactive mind. I'll be honest, before my return to D&D, my wife, as wise as she is, had already set me down the path of creative writing as an alternative to the predilection to workaholism. This is what actually brought me to Story a Day, and eventually a reconnection to my D&D way.

As a committed DM (Dungeon Master) to the group, you could say I've found that avenue that keeps me well. There's not a day that goes by that I do not look at or think about D&D, be it sending a jab, joke or poke at one of the guys, reading lore, writing a plot or building a scene, it is an everyday thing.

Our first and largest campaign ran for four years and produced a tome of D&D notes comparable to The Fellowship of the Ring. I made story beats and ideas never before seen. I overproduce stuff that is never seen, as the players, my captured audience, do something else unexpected by me.

So the true why? It's part of my identity, an identity those closest to me know, those in proximity may be aware of. But now it's just out there, on my arm, for anyone to read, as even at its face value the & alone means connection, continuation and addition, and as a tattoo it will cause exactly that, D&D or not.

More Words

There are more words written than ever read,

Now, let's try to hold this in our heads.

The story begins with the dead.

Functional and with purpose, they began the thread.

A Sumerian accountant 5,126 years ago got ahead,

Struggling to hold numbers in their head,

Wrote them down instead on clay for a later day.

A mere 550 years from that day, an Egyptian dropped the clay,

Too heavy to carry when carting hay,

Started to log and diarise on papyrus each day.

Some argued that clay was here to stay

When the Epic of Gilgamesh appeared on clay,

Marking a significant day 2100 years before the Common way.

Then the numbers stopped when philosophy came to play,

It was Prisse Papyrus's day to enter the literary fray,

And yet, clay was still here to stay as Gilgamesh

made a complete and final appearance on a day

1200 years before the common day.

The words had proliferated to a point

that there was more and more every day,

So Alexandria came to play,

Building a library still explored today.

A place of systemic collection and dissection

with hand-copying at play.

Meanwhile, a mere hop, skip and a jump away,

The eastern people came to play,

Producing the first paper of the day,

Some 50 years before the common way.

With 105 common era years put away,

The East accelerated the paper way,

Giving us the paper we use today.

Now, clay gave way, no longer the surface to scribe,

But the printing blocks of movable type inside,

A mere 3,500 years to the day,

As the Chinese re-entered the fray,

The first mass production of the day,

As in 600 to 700, common day mass production started away,

Everyone got out of the way.

In 1000 common era, a new genre entered the fray,

A Tale of Genji shows a novel way.

It would be another 450 years to the day

That Gutenberg's press would begin to press away,

With 20 million books by 1500 CE, come what may.

This was around the time the political began to prey.

In 1837, clay would again come out to play,

Not to compete in a paper way,

But as insulators of the first digital way,

With telegraphy making its way,

Electrical transmission had come to play.

But ultimately, paper was still the way,

Although words were finally shared at a pace that dismayed.

Then the cathode ray on a 1940 day began to accelerate the way.

Over the next 60 years, we found our screen ways,

First, a computer display on a 1951 day,

Then the way of the web on a 1991 day.

In 2007, like rockets into our pockets,

The iPhone was here to stay.

Did this flag the end of paper's day?

No bloody way.

Now though it's dilemma's day,

With LLMs marking the way,

Words themselves make more every day.

Parlay

The Edge of Black Marsh

Aricus sat quietly, looking over the camp and then around its periphery. As he had always done, he took the last watch; it was his routine, always had been since he first set out. Pitch camp, eat, study, bed down. That for him was to meditate for a few hours, two watches' worth, then take the last watch.

He liked it this way; it worked for him, always had. It enabled him to prepare. Today, he would go on alone; he'd not told them yet. He was certain none of them knew; he'd given nothing away in the days they'd been travelling together. He would ask them to wait; he should be no more than a day, if he was right.

The ranger wouldn't be a bother; the man had looked uneasy in his company since the outset, so much so that Aricus had offered well above the going rate for a guide in this area. He wasn't sure if it was him or their destination that caused the unease; either way, the extra ten gold seemed to help him get over it.

Wil and Nick, well, they'd be fine. They'd been with him for a decade or more now, able men, committed to him; they'd travelled with him many a time before and were loyal to him. He respected their steadfastness and desire to live out their lives as well-paid manservants raising their respective families on the estate.

The two of them had stopped being worried years ago when the unspoken agreement grew stronger between the three of them: do the master's bidding, and the master will look after you. No, they would not argue.

Then his eyes landed on Varice, her hair tied up in a stocking, sleeping blissfully on her side. For her part, she'd been apprenticed to him for only a few years. Gifted, she'd excelled under his tutelage; in reality, she was a mage in her own right now, yet had stayed with him beyond her apprenticeship.

She would protest at being left behind, chafing at the idea that she might miss out on something. Yet at the same time, they both knew it would be her time to depart soon. It was only a matter of time before one of them found the reason for this to occur. He knew she would not see that as today.

His gaze moved on, once more over the camp, then back along the path they'd trodden the day before, then onto the swamp north of them. The trees he sat amongst now, the edge of the forest fell away immediately, not a hundred yards away, falling into low spindly marsh mangrove.

The grey road they'd been travelling on was turning black as the earth on either side gave way into the swamp. He'd take her with him. No need to make a scene. It would be better this way; she'd follow unquestioningly, and maybe they would find the cause they were looking for.

---

The Road Into the Marsh

The two of them, different but the same, turned away from camp, their bags strapped over their right shoulders, the satchel hanging on their left hip, both wearing a sword on the right. From behind, their black cloaks masking their bodies' shape, their height the same, his hair ancient white, hers dark red tumbling down her back — the only difference. That and the staff he used, clicking on the stone as they left.

They didn't need to look back; they knew who they left behind. Aricus was confident he would see them again before the day was out. Varice, well, that wasn't even a thought.

'Master Aricus, what are we here for?'

'That, my girl, is a question that has taken its time to arrive.' The two walked on, silent.

After several minutes: 'Two things. I think.'

'You think?' Varice enquired, her tone neutral, no inflexion of surprise or otherwise. She'd learnt this is how conversations went. He would speak in his own time and at his own pace. Not a question, always a statement. She'd also learnt that he didn't ask questions; he'd never asked a question in the years she'd been with him, only statements that deliberately prompted questions from her.

'One will be a being of sorts, an entity. A creature so old it is ageless, yet it has died many times. I think it knows the second thing.' Aricus stopped, turning towards Varice.

She stopped; it was respectful not to walk in front of the master.

He stared at her for a moment. 'Remember how to steel your mind. You will need to. Start now, before we move closer.' She nodded in acknowledgement.

He walked on.

'We go to a cairn, not like one you or I have seen in our lifetimes. For you in your thirty years and me in my three hundred, neither of us has seen such a thing. You will have heard of such things: the burial cairn of a barbarian warlord, buried with his full retinue. A barbarous thing, some would say. He was called Ulthic.'

Around them, the morning mist was starting to clear. Although it was not yet mid-morning, the marsh still had a pre-dawn darkness to it. The road was cobbled and black, in good repair; it belied where it was, little trafficked, yet the lichen and moss did not cause them any concern. The click of Aricus's staff echoed back at them.

'Ulthic was a barbarian lord like no other. The tribes of the north avoided magic, but Ulthic did not. Don't get me wrong, he did not embrace it himself, or for his tribespeople. He tolerated it at first, then came to depend upon it. He dealt in it. And it is because of this that we are here.'

Varice looked at her master, two paces in front of her, his pace constant, his walk confident and strong. The staff was not the tool of a cripple but an extension of his power, ebony black, and in this environment it looked blacker than ever. His voice, not loud but clear, carried back to her, amplified by the marsh about them.

'Is Ulthic the being you speak of?'

'No. Although it is he and his mage advisor who deigned to raise his cairn here because of the being we seek. It is this being you need to steel your mind from.'

The two walked on. Varice waited.

His mind made up, Aricus continued. 'It is an Aboleth we seek, an ancient, ageless being that pre-existed everything we know or could fathom. It now knows more of the history of the world than any humankind could, as it was here for it. We cannot underestimate it; quite obviously, something this ageless is not without its wit. It is a survivor, and it is deadly.'

The two walked on in silence, each within their own mind. Aricus opening his, searching; Varice working to keep hers closed, sensing, waiting for that familiar touch of something trying to reach out telepathically. It was exhausting, like listening for a noise in silence, only this silence was of her own creation, hidden inside her mind.

The mist before them lightened with the rising sun to something more akin to early morning light, although it was not complete. A blackness rose before the two of them, a mound, curving at the sides up to a smooth plateau fifty feet above them.

Aricus stopped. The click of his staff stopped. Tucking it under his arm, he pulled a map from his robe, opened it and studied it, occasionally looking from the page to the black monolith before him. Then, folding it, he walked on.

---

Into the Cairn

The door, if that's what you'd call it, opened easily. For Varice, too easily. Although she did detect his use of the knock spell, that still did not explain the absence of webs and other detritus of an ancient tomb. Beyond the threshold, they plunged into darkness, Aricus lighting the way with a soft radiance atop his staff.

The walls about them, dark, rough-hewn blocks a foot high and two feet long, stood about seven feet apart, topped with long stone sleepers, themselves a foot wide, their length easily covering the distance between the two walls, the floor tightly packed cobbles of four inches by four. The air was stale from stillness, the taste of it filling their mouths as they passed.

Coming to an intersection, Aricus stopped, making sure Varice could see his hands. Gesturing in the thieves' cant he'd taught her: Silence. Follow. Protect. Head.

Head caused her to pause momentarily before doubling down on the concentration required to steel her mind from intrusion.

He headed down the left passage, which in due course turned right, and right again. What was an indiscernible descent at first became more and more obvious at each turn, so much so that Varice knew they were passing below a passage they'd been in only minutes before. Nothing obstructed their progress.

Aricus stopped again, a one-handed gesture: wait. She watched her master's face in the light of his staff; he was communicating. She'd seen this before, when he was teaching her telepathy. Telepathy, and how to steel her mind against it. She concentrated, her discipline getting tested. The temptation to drop her own protection and eavesdrop was strong. She didn't.

She watched for a minute that felt like a month. Then she felt it, something brushed at first, then pushed against her mind. She could feel it. It wasn't Aricus; she'd felt his presence, his telepathic touch, many times before. This was different. It had a whole different feel to it. Older, gentler in many ways. She knew instantly that if it wanted to pierce her mind, it could. It chose not to, and moved on.

Regaining her focus, she realised Aricus was studying her face, only momentarily, before he gestured Good — the closest he could make to well done. He knew she'd been tested and evaluated by the being he'd spoken of before they arrived.

He moved on ahead of her, only a short distance, before stopping and running his hands over the wall. He placed the four fingers of his right hand over the top of a brick, his thumb beneath it, and pulled, then dropped his hand and stepped backwards.

The two of them stood and watched as the square stones before them, one at a time, began first to recede into the wall, then move left and right alternately and out of sight. Once finished, the passage continued beyond them, although now changed.

Aricus stepped through the threshold into what now appeared to be a semi-natural tunnel, the floor black gravel, the walls natural except that their trajectory was unusually straight. Again, they continued on unimpeded.

After several minutes, ten at most, the tunnel opened instantly into a vast cavern. Before them, the light of Aricus's staff reflected off a massive underground lake, its water pitch black and mirror still.

They stopped. Stood still. Looking out into the darkness of the lake, waiting.

---

The Parlay

Aricus stood looking out across the lake, not searching, not waiting, just looking. At the stillness. At the blackness. Not worrying about what he did or did not see. Then he projected a thought outward, just out, quiet and deliberate.

'Ancient one. I am here.'

'So you are, little one. So you are. What brings you here?'

It always sounded odd, telepathy, but unusually odd in this case. Normally, the voice in his mind was the voice of what he could see, or his perception of how they sounded. With Varice, whom he knew well, it was simply her voice. But until this moment, he had not had an imagination for the voice of the aboleth. Now, standing here at the water's edge, looking out across the blackness, the voice projecting into his head was deep. He could feel it, so ancient it trembled through him. It spoke his language, slowly. It was not in a rush.

'I am here to call upon your wisdom. To parlay. To trade. To make a deal.'

'Always in a rush, even those who live so long as an Elf seem to be in a rush to me. No small talk. No incidental pleasantries. Straight to the point. That, my friend, if friend is what you intend to be, we must establish a cadence before we agree to anything. Tell me of the world above. I have not spoken to anyone for some time.'

Aricus took his time. Even now, even in this exchange, he chose his responses carefully. He knew of aboleths and their power, their probing telepathy. He had no doubt the creature already knew his deepest desire. The ancient one was already playing with him; it had the advantage, or so it thought.

'Well, ancient one, I imagine you want a sense of time first. You should know that we count it now, that we set time by it. It is 1340 DR, the Year of the Lion. The Cult of the Dragon moves openly in Featherdale, the forces of Sembia having met them at the River Rising not long past. In Chessenta, a cult of darker purpose still formed and was put down, though not without the intervention of Mystra herself, they say. The plague is well behind us. The great wars of dragons are distant history. What remains is prosperous by comparison, a time of study, of open roads, of old sites being rediscovered and old questions being asked again. It is a time, ancient one, to appeal to you.'

Silence.

Then the voice again, quiet in his mind. 'That is interesting. You say it will interest me. How presumptuous. You talk to me of counting time. I was counting time an aeon before you even existed. Why would you think something like this would interest someone like me?'

'The goddess Mystra walking amongst humans. I thought that would be news of interest to someone such as you.'

'Gods. They come and go. You speak of old questions; now that may be of interest. Why don't you ask yours first? Let us see what this parlay brings.'

The moment was upon him, a breath, no more. He shielded his mind momentarily, only subtly, as he reached into memory for something he had locked away magically within it a long time ago, something he had stowed away for this exact moment. In an instant, it came rushing back to him, washed over him like old memories. Only these were not memories of his own. Of his kin, yes, but not his own. His mind filled with the name Tharicus.

He calmed himself, the silence about him deafening as his mind stilled again.

'Ancient one, you once dealt with one of my ancestors. I seek something of his.'

'What are you willing to barter? The woman, is that why she is here?'

For Aricus it was as if he had been slapped across the face. What was he thinking? Why had he decided to bring her?

'You desire her, do you not? Is she not your greatest desire?'

Aricus gathered himself. It wasn't that he had forgotten she was with him; he could sense her as he always did when she was near. He also realised the aboleth was right. The being knew something about him that, until this moment, he had not even realised himself.

'No. It is not her I wish to barter. It is I. It is my service I offer. My life.'

'How so, little one? I know she is your true desire, and you want me to take you instead?'

'No, not take me, ancient one. I wish to walk in the footsteps of my ancestor Tharicus.'

---

The Exit

Varice had drifted into a trance, staring out into the vast cavern's blackness, the mirror-flat water reflecting the light of Aricus's staff, Aricus himself standing still before her, his long white hair hanging straight down his back, his shoulders set.

They had been standing like this for what felt like an eternity, hence the trance. Something new had occurred to her in that stillness, a need to meditate. The only difference this time was the effort required to steel her mind against intrusion.

The effort, though, was hard to discern. So much so that she was not even certain her thoughts had been probed at all. What she had felt above, before they arrived at the underground lake, had not happened here, or had it? She had felt nothing for so long, drifting deeper into the trance, that she could almost convince herself it had not happened.

But it had. She knew it had. Something ancient had probed her mind earlier. Not here, not now. She had dropped her guard once, perhaps twice, whilst standing in the dark watching Aricus as she had so many times before.

When her guard dropped, she couldn't help but hear; she had caught fragments, snippets of something she could not name, not because she didn't know what it was, but because it was so surprising.

Aricus turned. He looked at her without a word, making a short gesture: follow.

She did.

The two of them traced their footsteps back up the passage down which they had come not long before. They arrived back at the dressed hall, Varice distractedly wondering where that term came from. Dressed. A pompous way of saying built.

The large blocks were set with a precision that the cavern below was not. Aricus waited until she had come through the hidden entrance, then turned to the wall, pressing his hand against a single stone. It moved. She watched as the bricks began their sequence, clicking, mechanical, one at a time, back into place, until the wall stood blank before them.

The two of them looked at it in silence for a moment.

'Come. Follow.' Varice was taken aback momentarily; this was the first spoken word between them since before they'd entered the cairn.

Aricus did not turn back the way they came; instead, he proceeded further in, their passage through the secret door now reduced to nothing but an interruption as they first approached and then pushed through a pair of large double doors, beyond which stood the burial chamber of the barbarian warlord.

The room, thirty feet across, sixty feet deep, ceilings twenty feet above, was a massive square open space, dressed as the hall was, although adorned with tapestries and paintings, the floor strewn with gold, platters, chalices, crystal orbs, the treasures a jarring contrast to the austerity of the cairn itself.

Aricus barely paused before gesturing back towards Varice, left arm, palm open, clearly signalling stop without looking at her, and striding to the centre of the room towards a large grey and white marbled sarcophagus, ignoring the wealth about him, before bending and lifting an object from the floor beside it.

Turning back towards Varice, he had a small ebony chest with gold filigree and arcane symbols in smoke-white tucked under his arm. As he passed her, he said simply, 'We leave now.'

---

The End

Moments passed, and the two of them, master and apprentice, found themselves back on the black cobblestoned road. The brightness of the marsh's midday, little more than an early morning or dusk, stung their eyes, causing them to water as though they were staring into the sun.

Aricus, with a gesture, extinguished the light atop his staff before turning towards his apprentice. He turned the onyx chest from under his arm towards Varice. 'Hold this.'

Taking the chest in two hands, she was struck by several things at once: its weight, feather-light, yet its look and density were heavy; its darkness absorbed the light around it; the filigree and symbols shifted as she looked at them. It felt cold, absorbing, as if she held death itself in her hands.

For his part, Aricus, staff tucked beneath his arm in that familiar way he had always carried it since she'd been committed to his teachings, looked at her momentarily. Then, with two hands, he lifted the top corners of the chest closest to him, opening the lid hinged on her side.

Pulling his eyes away from hers, he leaned forward, first looking into it, then reaching in and pulling a scroll clear, holding it in one hand and shutting the lid of the chest with the other. Hand beneath the box, he deftly lifted and turned it away from Varice, and it disappeared into his robes.

'It is time, Varice. Time for us to part. Your apprenticeship is near its end. To complete it' — he held out the scroll for her to take — 'obtain the items listed here and return to my tower. In doing this, you will seal both our futures.'

As she took the scroll, its weight transferred, substance and purpose both settling into her hands. Two loud thuds sounded on the cobblestones between them.

It was Aricus's staff.

And he was gone.