The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real
Previously: A koth celebrating at a London pub late one night was shot dead by a police officer. The city holds its breath.
Late shift
On duty: All hands
London.
1974. November.
The day had started with a press conference and was going to end with a riot. It wasn’t quite there yet, but Clarke knew it was coming. He stood inside the gates of Buckingham Palace, looking down The Mall towards William Square, a route that was at that point a writhing mass of furious koth. Somewhere at the far end and off to the right was Scotland Yard, but all eyes were on the advancing protesters.
It had always been inevitable, from the moment that idiot child fired his gun and killed the koth the previous night. Regardless of what had actually happened, there was no way this was ever going to be swept under the rug, or talked away by Miller at a press event. Nobody was going to wait for the official investigation, which would be assumed to be a biased inside job anyway.
Blood called out for blood, and there was no way this was going any other way. Several hundred koth bearing down on Buckingham Palace, marching slowly, placards held high, chants and song and roars echoing down The Mall.
Clarke’s bowels trembled. It was taking all of his concentration to keep it together. One koth was enough. An angry protest crowd? That could turn into a massacre at a moment’s notice. There were armed officers lining the streets and the front of the palace, but everyone knew that if several hundred koth wanted to come in, they didn’t have to knock.
That’s not what they were doing, though. There was no flying, no breathing of fire, no charging of the gates. The koth knew that everyone else knew what they could do, which meant they didn’t need to do it. They might not have stature in society, but in a straight fight everyone knew who would come out on top.
Except that rarely happened. Koth didn’t get into fights — or, at least, didn’t start fights. Clarke had seen the stats. He took in a long, deep breath. They’d been summoned to the scene to advise, given that the SDC was assumed to have better insights into koth behaviour than the standard Met officers. Clarke had often thought that the SDC existed so as to give everyone else an excuse to not have to think about complicated matters.
He was trying to channel some Lola Styles optimism. It wasn’t easy, given the company.
“We need to start kettling these sons of bitches,” Holland said. “What do you think? I think we need to tell them to move in. A show of force. Otherwise they’re just going to trample all over us.”
The man was panicking, which was unusual for Frank Holland. That he hated anything that wasn’t human and born within ten miles of Brixton didn’t help.
“No,” Clarke said, straightening his back and trying to look more confident than he felt. “They’re not attacking. It’s a peaceful march, and we can keep it that way as long as we don’t give them a reason to get angry.”
“They’re already angry, Clarke.”
“Fine. Don’t give them a reason to get more angry. We start blocking them in, it’ll escalate. And if it escalates, it’s going to be bad for everyone. But especially for us.”
Holland grimaced. “You sure? If those obsidian motherfuckers take to the skies and start raining fire down on us, it’ll be too late.”
Clarke rubbed the bridge of his nose. The late afternoon air was getting cold. “It’s already too ate. Jones shot one of them dead for no fucking reason. Anything we do now makes it worse, but we do get to choose how much worse.”
Grunting, Holland shrugged. “Thought you’d be wanting to go all guns blazing on them. After what happened.”
Clarke didn’t bother replying, and instead started towards the chief constable in charge of crowd control. It was time to be the expert.
Kaminski and Chakraborty were further down The Mall, closer to the marching column. Close enough to hear the shouted demands for justice and decrying police brutality and corruption. When koth wanted to be loud, they could be really loud.
Stubbing out his cigarette with the heel of his shoe and immediately lighting another, Kaminski nodded towards the protesters. “Times like this makes me glad I don’t wear uniform anymore.”
Chakraborty snorted. “You still look like police.”
“Really? I thought I was doing nonchalant bystander really well.”
Chakraborty’s radio crackled and Clarke’s voice came out of the speaker. “This is Clarke. We’re holding position,” he said. “Nobody’s to take action without further orders. Over.”
She acknowledged receipt. “What do you think happens when they get to the palace gates?”
Kaminski nodded, his mouth turned into a drooping crescent. “Either they smash down the gates, break into the palace and kill the King, or they turn around and go home. Or maybe they set up camp and form a resistance commune. Then the King would have to always leave by the back door.”
“You’re very chipper.”
“Not really. There’s just not much we can do.” He gestured to the marching crowd. “And, you know, they’re not wrong, are they?”
Something was bothering him, though. A nagging feeling at the back of his mind, like he’d forgotten something. Left the house unlocked, or the gas turned on. The last time something big had gone down in London, with the bombings, it had been used as cover to transport the last piece of the rogue AI through the portals. What were they missing this time? Was all of this, even down to the killing of the koth, nothing more than a distraction?
HMP Thamesmead didn’t go into lockdown when it should have, which was an hour before the news broke about the fatal shooting of the koth. With no such action taken, the prison was allowed to boil over, the pressure building throughout the day. On the televisions in the communal rooms, footage of the protest in central London was broadcast to the inmates. Each of the blocks, watching the koth march towards the palace.
The koth prisoners sensed an uprising.
The aen’fa felt even more trapped than they already were, as always stuck between several impossible positions.
The majority human population of the prison wondered what would happen next.
It only took one particular guard failing to secure a door between sections to create a trigger point. He’d be paid handsomely, of course, and knew to get well clear before it began. His shift was over and he was through security and out of the front gates on his way home.
Careful choreography was required, of the sort that looked natural rather than rehearsed. It began with a gang of human prisoners realising the security gate had been left unlocked. Already aware of events in the city, it was their opportunity to cause trouble and make it clear to the incarcerated Palinese, who owned the prison. The fighting spread like fire through a wooden building, the prison guards woefully unprepared. It didn’t take long for keys to be acquired and more doors opened, all the way through to the koth block. In the following days, the death toll would slowly tick up as charred bodies were recovered and separated from each other. Several koth were killed; over one hundred human inmates never made it out of the koth part of the prison.
That, still, was merely a feint, unknown to all of those directly involved. Across the prison complex a small contingent broke through into the block housing aen’fa and other Palinese species. There was some fighting, but not at the same intensity. A handful of humans made their way purposefully through the agitation, hunting for one person in particular.
They found Achlin hiding in the showers, trying to keep away from trouble. It took less than a minute to leave him bleeding out on the wet floor. His death would be recorded as one of many fatalities in the prison that day. Those who carried out the attack would find their accounts swollen upon their eventual release from Thamesmead, weeks or months or years later.
Achlin had sold a few too many drugs to the wrong kind of people. He’d been good at networking, which had always helped him with his entrepreneurial ambitions. As his blood drained away through the floor grates, so too did all of his dangerous knowledge. There would be no further risk of him pointing fingers or whispering accusations. It was a loose end tied off. There were several more that needed attention, but that was one down, at least.
On to the next.
Thank you for reading!
I you don’t entirely remember Achlin, you can remind yourself by re-reading ‘Fantasies: part 8’. Apparently that went out in November 2023, so fair enough if it’s not at the very top of your mind. That’s a curious thing about serialisation: plot points can end up being real time months apart, whereas someone reading this at a later date as a finished work can romp through at their own pace and have those chapters separated by only hours or days.
The thing to read this week is this wonderful thing by
:It’s an interrogation of herself, exploring her motivations behind writing and using Substack. It explores the form of online writing and its opportunities, but ends up being much more than that. You’ll feel better for reading it.
Excitingly, Eleanor has interviewed me with those same questions, so you can see my responses via her newsletter very soon.
Last weekend I visited the house of my good friend Jon Kempton, a teacher by day and a dungeon master by night. As the wrangler of our weekly Dungeons & Dragons games, I’ve come t realise that Jon is a master storyteller, doing things in real time that I can’t quite fathom. I was there to record a podcast interview with him all about D&D, oral storytelling, interactivity and player agency. It’s a good chat. Also his dog Indy made a few contributions. I’ll get that out as soon as I can.
The delightful
is crowdfunding his next book over on Unbound.“It’s already the most ambitious and unusual thing I’ve ever written. That is to say: it’s absolutely terrifying to write, in a way that makes me wake up every morning excited to get to my laptop and find out what happens next.” Tom Cox
You can find out more and support Tom’s crowdfunder here:
Earlier in the week I popped along to the
video meet. Always lovely to see regular faces and some new ones. The recording should be up soon. Lots of interesting thoughts on writing, being paid as a writer, the current state of Substack, newsletter alternatives and so on.On Wednesday the Babylon 5 rewatch continued. Do come join us, if it’s your sort of thing:
Lastly, don’t miss
’s diary of being a new parent, written in the sleepy gaps, complete with utterly gorgeous sketches of his family.Author notes
The ending of this one went through several iterations. Originally I included a time hop forward by a couple of weeks, to Miller looking over the report on the prison riot. It was satisfying to draw the link from events back to him, but the problem with making that time leap is that I’m not quite done with this storyline. Hopping back in the next chapter I thought would be overly confusing.
Hence we have the riot, but it’s told from a mostly omniscient POV, rather than being tied to Miller (or anyone else). There’s something interesting about that, I reckon: Triverse is a 3rd person limited perspective almost all of the time, so those occasions when I break out of it feel consequential. It’s almost like a narrator, the voice of god, arriving to declare that something has happened.
It’s also, possibly, a bit of a cheat, but it felt OK to me.
The image of hundreds of dragons marching down The Mall towards Buckingham Palace has been stuck in my head for months, so I was glad to finally get it onto the page. That mix of the familiar and the fantastical is a big part of why I enjoy writing Triverse.
Burbling in the background of this story is the general theme of victims being recontextualised as perpetrators. An innocent koth being shot turns into a gang of koth threatening the police unit. Peacefully protesting koth are treated as hooligans (or would be, if Clarke wasn’t there to exercise some restraint). Achlin was hardly an innocent bystander, but you can assume he was a pawn in a much larger game.
I remember Charlie Brooker (of Black Mirror fame) noting in an episode of his excellent Newswipe show back in the day the way images from the Haitian earthquake disaster were misrepresented by the media:
I miss Newswipe. It was such a crash course in media literacy, timed perfectly as we went into the fake news era of political nonsense.
Right! Thanks again for reading. See you all next week.
Photo by Dwi Wahyu Pagau on Unsplash
Cooler heads prevail, for now...
Clarke is all that stands between bad and disaster, and some hothead isn't gonna listen to him.
Well - I certainly didn't think part of this "bad guy" plan was in silencing the drug dealer who knew where a bunch of the bodies were buried. One would think him NOT divulging information during his trial as part of a plea would prove his loyalty? Of course I'm assuming he's been tried. This could have been pre-trial custody.
Now we get to wait for the other-other shoe to drop.
Other-other shoe? Do Pierson's Puppeteers wear shoes? Is a Larry Niven reference something that fits here? Who knows?
Fucking Holland.
King? No Elizabeth in Triverse! A shame. In the real world I think she doesn't get enough credit for basically being a woman of peace and acceptance. Not many rulers would simply wish a colony territory well if it chose to disengage from the Crown. Sure, she had flaws, and we can debate on the relevance of royalty in modern England, but, for my money, she was a good Queen.
Yes, a good DM/GM is a master storyteller. A gifted one helps their PLAYERS become master storytellers. I'll be flexing my GM muscles next weekend at a con. Should be fun.
Waaay back in 89 or 90...and it's now bugging me I don't remember the year, I was at a con and sat down at a pickup game in open gaming run by some dude, Chuck Harris, I didn't know. The game was run on an AD&D framework (this was before 3.5 got OGL'd as "d20"). The PCs were the players themselves, as they were when they sat at the table. He took us into Hell, and we had escape.
At one point we were offered a game against a demon. One couid bet something important and valuable in exchange for something important and valuable. I happened to go last of the party.
The other players all bet things like their bank accounts vs really big gun. By the time it got to me I'd seen the demon seemed to be good to its word, so I bet... But mine was different.
I bet my sense of humor. My prize, enlightenment, discretion, and wisdom.
Chuck didn't even blink.
The mini game was "best of three." At the 1-1 mark I asked the party to sing the theme from the quiz show Jeopardy. "It's the last joke I may ever enjoy." I won the final toss.
Chuck interpreted my prize as a massive Stat boost on my Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Three 19s. I get to be superhuman.
When Chuck DID blink is when I started building a flamethrower and pulled the parts from my bag. Memory does not retain why 17ish Mike had rubber tubing, a mini tool kit, a zippo lighter, and a can of WD-40 at a game con.
After the game - I ended up recruited by the Illuminati who still wouldn't tell me who REALLY killed JFK - once the other players left Chuck and his GF, Barbara, invited me to join them in their room for late night food. While I was impressed at how Chuck handled my abstract, philosophical betting, he was impressed that I'd given him something interesting to adjudicate, AND that I'd kept the group focused enough to get all but two members of the party out of Hell (I did most of the "battle planning").
We were friends from that day until his personal demons finally beat him and he took his own life in 2008.
Chuck was a brilliant actor (we took classes together, and I directed him in multiple shows), a gifted GM, and a great writer. I still have some of his stories.
I miss that guy.