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Sjan Evardsson

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2019

Stories (269)

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302 Followers

9 Following

269 Stories

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IX Incarcera

Nonum Incarcera — Ninth Prison — also known as Nonum Infernum, Ninth Hell, The Pit, The Devil’s Asshole, and more frightening names, kept its secrets and prisoners bound up tight. The only sentence served at the Ninth was life. The prison sat in a volcanic valley, sealed by magic, auto-blasters, and the heavily guarded borders of the no-man’s-land where it was located between Dwarven, Elven, and Orcish nations.Its founding during the Neoclassical boom of the early 18th century was evident from its architecture, its Latin name, and the Latin ...

2 likes

Gap Year

The haze blocking out the morning sky was the color of infectious decay. The weak sun, faint behind the fetid smog was an omen — of what, Zeke couldn’t tell.Mask secure and seals checked, Ezekiel “Zeke” Rankin, self-appointed scout, let himself out through the airlock to the cool, damp morning air. The silent alien city extended endlessly. What used to be a thriving ecumenopolis had been turned into a graveyard. Continent sized chunks of the city had been flattened, while others stood with no visible damage beyond the poisoned sky.The missio...

3 likes

Portal From the Underworld

Angel watched the restroom door. A small, stout woman, barely taller than the doorknob’s height, with lime-green hair and a bright, reflective safety vest had gone in several minutes earlier and still hadn’t come out. She hadn’t locked the door, so the green “Vacant” still showed. Angel was so busy watching the door that she didn’t see the woman with the squirming baby until she was already at the door. Angel opened her mouth to warn her that the room was occupied, but before she could say anything the young woman had gone in and locked the ...

3 likes

Day Labor

Adrian poured the clear liquid over the ice in the shallow glass, watching it turn white in swirls and eddies. He turned off the lights and carried the glowing glass to the mirror. Rather than the mysterious, cool image he was hoping for, the sickly blue glow left him looking pallid and cadaverous. With the overhead lights back on and the black light off, the liquid had the appearance of skim milk over ice. Adrian checked his appearance in the mirror. Even dressed as he was in his best, he knew he wouldn’t fit in. The word ‘poor’ might as we...

3 likes

What I Left Behind

The bed I lay on was comfortable enough, but not plush. The walls were a pale blue with no windows. An IV ran into my arm, and a tangle of cables connected me to a device that quietly monitored my vitals. There was a white corridor outside the open door. The closed door on the wall opposite my head had a toilet sign. Hospital. I sat up, putting my feet on the floor. I felt weak. At first, I wasn’t sure I was feeling it, but a faint thrum carried through the floor — deck, my mind corrected. Hospital ship. I’d no sooner deduced that than a nur...

3 likes

The Beard of Avon

Justin Smoot was known by his neighbors as the hippie who paints and has an overgrown plot full of weeds. The people of Bidford-on-Avon knew him as an eccentric that used a loophole in environmental laws to have his front and rear gardens declared wild habitat. The art scene in Warwickshire knew him as a painter of weirdness, best classified as abstract surrealism. The fact that there was an undeniable magic to his art, despite his being untrained as either an artist or a wizard, made them slightly more interesting to collectors than they wo...

2 likes

The Otherwar

They’d been found in a parallel universe of sorts. While working towards wormhole generation, scientists had accidentally punched a hole into a universe that was almost indistinguishable from ours. The creatures they found traversing the stars there were unimaginable horrors. Smaller ships, but far more numerous, crewed by behemoth abominations. The science ship had been seen, and one of the ships of the Other followed it through from their universe. Had it not been for the Navy standing by, no one knows what kind of hell they could’ve unlea...

3 likes

Little Guy

Sara followed the trail. Droplets of what she was certain was blood. Something small, she guessed. If it turned out to be somebody with a little cut or bloody nose walking slow, she’d be embarrassed, but that wasn’t likely. The trail led into an upturned cardboard box at the end of the alley. There was half of a strange footprint, paw-print really, on the flap of the cardboard that lay outside the box. She couldn’t identify it. Not dog or cat or rat or raccoon or opossum. Sara waited for a minute, listening for sounds of life from the box. S...

3 likes

All I Can Do Is Laugh

The room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here. Perhaps, if I was hung over, I’d have a clue, but I feel like I’ve had a good night’s sleep for the first time in recent memory. I try to remember waking up and moving to where I stand, but there’s nothing. If I’d slept on the small sofa or in one of the armchairs that made up the totality of the room’s furnishings, I would be stiff and sore, not the case. The thought tickles something in my mind — the case. What case? I examine the room. Aside from the sparse furnishings, the room has not...

4 likes

Worth It

The more technologically advanced a shelter, the more disconnected it was from nature. In the case of Travers Station, that was a necessity. Outside the station, nature was nothing other than lethal to all the inhabitants of the station. The sapient creatures that inhabited the station came from multiple stars. All of them had their own evolutionary history that drove them to innovate. They all had their own social evolution that drove that innovation to push them out among the stars. Still, none of them had evolved in an environment like th...

2 likes

Ritual

The ornate porcelain teapot was out of place on the scratched metallic countertop. Strong, scarred hands the color of worn khaki filled the center strainer of the pot with leaves from an airtight metal canister. Those same hands lifted the electric kettle and poured the boiling water over the strainer in the teapot before putting the lid on and setting it on the cheap, plastic table. “There’s something calming in the ritual of it, I find.” “Which ritual? The hunt, the capture or…the kill?” The woman that sat at the table was slight of build,...

4 likes

Let's Get Started

Time shuddered to a stop, slipped back a few seconds, then started back up. At first, there was a woman in the center of the room clutching a suitcase against her chest, then two of her, interposed on top of and within each other, then none. She left only a hole in the air behind, that filled with a bang and the rustle of papers swept up by the air that rushed to fill the sudden vacuum. Her arrival was quieter, a soft whoosh as the pressure in the room where she materialized increased a bit. Her heavy, orange, cable-knit sweater and cap, blu...

4 likes

A Promise Kept

“I remember….” The grizzled veteran rubbed the white fur along her muzzle, tracing the path of a scar with a clawed hand missing two digits. “I was a young lieutenant then; thought I knew everything.” “Grenan, don’t start getting maudlin now.” Next to the warrior covered in white and grey fur sat another bipedal tetrapod. The similarities ended there, however.  Grenan stood over two meters with clawed hands that better served slashing than grasping, a muzzle that extended the size of both her mouth and nose, large, low-set ears that hun...

3 likes

Reeve's Day

The woman who piloted the ship was in her mid-thirties, close to two meters tall, with broad, strong features, jet hair, deep brown eyes, and warm, golden-brown skin. Despite being human, the ship she piloted was of a sort no other human had ever seen. Sleek, with no visible seams or joins, no hint of door or portal, it tore its way across light years through an artificial wormhole. # The woman who watched the customers coming and going from the cafe was fifty-four, 149 centimeters tall, with soft features in a pale, ivory face. Salt and pep...

3 likes

Tale of the Bonny Marie

In the time before the devouring horde, humanity, thinking themselves alone, stretched out among the stars. They made barren worlds habitable, and in generations turned them into paradises. There was no part of the galaxy they considered off-limits. When the first unmistakable, non-human, artificial signal caught their attention, humanity celebrated. They were no longer alone. While humans were still trying to work out how to respond, They showed up. Hundreds of thousands of ships, joined together into a traveling city the size of a moon, ma...

3 likes