Eight Arms and the Mask

 Season's greetings to all my readers out there, and happy holidays (or High Holy Days!)   As we move into the days when the world is destroyed and remade, remember this:   W e a r e a l l U s . T h e V i c t o r y s h a l l b e O u r s .     Have a wonderful Sacred Time!  

 -"There is a plot afoot on the Moon," she breathed out, her face worn into a pattern of shock and dismay. "The red one, not the blue."  I looked at her. "Is this a surprise to you?" I asked, as gently as a feather.  "This is different!" she snapped. "Usually the plots are simple enough. The Duchess of Bat Scritchies has a feud with the Countexx of Insignificant Symbolic Dreams over the use of the doubled "x" in er name, and so gets together with the Carmine Cardinal of the Cerise School, or the Claret of Garnet, and then there's some kind of humiliation involving a giant letter falling on someone. Maybe there's an explosion. All delightful- it's always so charming to see it in my viewing-glass, especially when that dashing Jar-eel the Razoress shows up and sorts things out." She looked from side to side. "This is different," she said, whispering.   I nodded. "Of course, of course, I understand that....

A Selection From The Entekosiaddi Rehti has previously been published in Einkorn Field Fire and Selves: A Magazine of the New Multiverse. She lives with her wives in Rhigos. – This story starts and ends with the radio, as so much of my generation's stories do. Probably they got there earlier in Nochet and Casino Town, but we didn't start getting the tiny portables until I was a kid. After that, everyone had theirs tucked under the pillow. The single-station radios in the shops were cheaper, too, so that's what our parents would get for us. In Jorsh when I was a kid, you could get RNLD in green, CLDR in red, and tucked in between a row of NTKS. Well, orange was my favorite color, so I picked that, and then I was an NTKS girl and that was that. Of course, I wasn't alone. Everyone at school who wore orange on the uniform-free Fridays, who had Air bangles and Harmony hair clips, those were my people. There were more colors when we moved to Rhigos - better reception – and ev...

  Content warning: this text contains depictions of gender dysphoria and a non-graphic depiction of infernal torment. As such, I have placed it under a jump break.