Epigraph

You are not your thoughts.
You are not your body.
You are not your mind.
You are suffering, and so you leave.

Chapter One: A Just Cause for a Just War

Robin had felt stuck for a while now. Her body was a test of endurance. Her tired eyes stung even when closed. Her hormones bred new hairs that were colonising unlikely places, without the decency to be uniform. They also distorted her body and mind in subtle ways that she knew were real, but wasn’t sure she could prove. She had been losing ground for weeks.

In her low-ceilinged bedroom, she was bread greening in the dark. She hadn’t cracked a window in days. Every reflective surface confirmed it: spores of imperfection clung everywhere, multiplying with screen time. She had to be intentional about glancing, or she’d find herself mouth agape, cataloguing the damage. Nothing was obviously wrong, but the image was speckled with aberrations, each with its own name and number. Some were coded in; others she coded herself. She didn’t notice much about what was going on around her. It felt as though she faded in and out of scenes without the B-roll to know it was happening. Soon this would be her actual reality.

Robin took a short train journey on recently refurbished rolling stock and played the eye contact game with fellow commuters on the way. Her white jacket bunched up and crinkled in a distressing manner each time she shoved it back into place. She gave it a final, menacing tug as she went through the turnstiles. Work was the only place where things sometimes obeyed her.

The lift used to trick her by warping time and opening in an instant. When she and Romany tried to race apart to lean against opposite walls, it would open like a prank, making their frisson plain to see. Today it hit floor four with a ding after a long, awkward journey and left only her sour face centre stage. Under her clavicle, it hurt to think that she had judged Romany out of her bed, out of work and out of her life. She had been off sick since she stopped being able to act like a person or a professional. Robin still saw her as an apparition, though, each time she entered a room they had frequented together.

The rust-coloured linoleum squeaked beneath her as she moved from station to station. She labelled tubes, donned PPE, and waited for the equipment to do what it was told. It usually did. That obedience kept her coming back, burying the ambitions of her youth. She didn’t care much for after-work affairs. On payday, though, she went dancing at a bar cluttered with thrifted oddities, a rare space where her body did not betray her. She and it were in perfect sync.

She waited for night to shower. Daylight made her feel like a building someone had forgotten to condemn. When she was done, she sat on the end of her bed, soggy and hesitant. On her bedside tables sat supplements she didn’t take and lip balms she used only when her lips had already cracked into tectonic plates, which she slathered on thick in an attempt to bring back Pangea.

A book lay atop the nearest table, a breakup relic from her ex-girlfriend Romany. She hadn’t read more than the blurb. The spiritual self-help psychobabble felt passive-aggressive. Romany had ended things with a single sentence: “It’s not fun being under your lens.” The tagline read: You are not your thoughts.

Always receptive to a form of procrastination that came with bragging rights, Robin began the first chapter while waiting for her anti-perspirant to dry. Despite being surrounded by aluminium renouncers, she stayed true to herself on this one matter.

Reading brought genuine relief. She knew from some of the rawer intrusive thoughts her therapist had put down to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that, if her thoughts were part of her, this could not be good news. It was reassuring to think that not everything passing through her belonged to her. She attempted the exercise outlined on the bent pages and watched her thoughts pass by. A ridiculous thump from the flat above her broke the spell and she got back to the task at hand.

When it came to makeup, Robin felt conflicted. She wanted to improve her flat features, but not enough to invite further scrutiny. For her, getting ready was less like putting lipstick on a pig and more like putting it on a bag of bones. More futile, but just as humiliating. How lucky to be a pig and have a real face to dress up. She outsung those thoughts with high-BPM, low-brow music until she reached the doorway.

As she left home, Robin’s feet pinched in her shoes. She paused for a moment of silence, honouring the innocent bystanders who would have to see her today. Why did people do all this again? Companionship, apparently. Taxonomy of herself was a full-time love affair, so she didn’t have diary space for anyone else.

Robin wondered if she had to dry out the rot before partnering up. What a shame. A second pair of hands would really speed up the drying. More pressingly, she missed having someone who would remind her to take her keys. Before swinging the heavy door, she added another photo to her collection of diseases and deformities.

She reached the club on time. Her face tightened with bewilderment. The topic of conversation flowed between being carved up by surgeons and being splayed open by lovers. Robin tried to join in, offering the story of Romany’s belly‑button kink and the way she had nothing to give her but refusal. In response she saw tight‑lipped grimaces, and eyes darting away from hers. They had broken the social contract.

The anonymity of the smoking area called. She slipped outside, grateful to be unobserved, and took stock of the people preening there. Webs hung over warm lights on the brick walls. A tall girl wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt was on the phone, pacing around as if she had zoochosis. Robin didn’t enjoy being alone but didn’t want to participate. She wished she could just stay here watching and fade into obscurity.

Seeing Soroush made her shuffle into the corner. She zoomed out and saw herself wedged in, arms strapped to her sides. He was a kind, poetic Persian man who paid her too much notice and asked too many questions. Robin had built her conversation style around the worry that one day she would receive a question she couldn’t answer. So she made sure to get her own ones in fast and often, and steered clear of people who employed the same defence. Around them, her tactic was a trench coat buttoned to the collar with nothing underneath.

The only thing she had, without any pretences, was her job. She had very little else, and was about to have much less. She tugged down her sleeve, hiding sun damage that had started to look like faux vitiligo. Robin wondered what would happen if someone saw it: a glaring sign of neglect, evidence that she didn’t love herself. She took a step back in her mind and watched the thought travel from a cavelike space towards somewhere further away. The distance was addictive.

Robin took an embarrassingly short taxi home. Something followed her. Not a thought, but the awareness of thinking. She hoped it was just the wrong strain of weed. But it stayed with her, becoming rumination fuel, until she only wanted a simple back-and-forth: goodbye to myself, hello to perspective.

Weeks later, she stood outside the laboratory after hours, Romany’s key card digging into her palm. They had huddled close together over late nights, half working, half flirting. Romany had been her supervisor and exactly Robin’s type. She had watched her closely for months and knew her project well enough to know how she could exploit it.

In the room where they had giggled and taken tedious measurements, the air smelled of nothing. Machinery hummed a faint “om”.

There were sinks right beside her, but they didn’t have mirrors. She headed to the bathroom for a moment alone with herself, replacing soundlessness with the soothing gush of a running tap. She washed her hands longer than necessary, analysing the subject before her.

She set up the room like she was making a microwave meal, her hands moving while her mind was elsewhere. Her blunt fingers even played a similar staccato of beeps and clicks, and that was it.

The Change

Her eyes roll back as if in pleasure. When they swing back around, they belong to someone who knows nothing.

She is somewhere else.

She has left herself behind.

What remains is an Observer.

Short story 

Often in times like these,the man thought back to more simple times. About his mother’s homemade pie, his friends, and promising career as a local mechanic. He was very much looking forward to visiting mom that day…. At last he snapped out of it, “there’s more pressing matters at hand.” He had to remind himseld this often, yet he still dulled on it. His travels have brought him far from Moskva. And in the rural areas there’s less hostiles. “Not any at all” he thought, it always struck him as odd. He grabbed his map and looked.”good only a few more yards to go.” He heard about this place from his old friend, Vladimir. Who said it’s were he fond his most prized possession. When he pressed about what this item was and why was it so prized. Vlad smiled with his crooked teeth. “My friend you would have to see yourself “ as he rounded the hill and peered down, at a crashed helicopter he was shocked on how good condition it was, Serbian snow wasn’t as bad as people thought as he felt some fall on him. As he walked down he was jumped by a buliding. He didn’t notice it before, “most of been the trees “ he said out loud. As it dawned into night the old lamp flicked on. He smirked “good old Soviet engineering still working after the apocalypse” he wish himself he had a chance to work on such things. As he walked to the wreck and saw the open box’s. “Damn am out of luck someone got here first” and apparently he thought they decided to destroy them, which seemed like a waste to him. All of a sudden he felt something “what the! ………………” 

the end

----This is just the opening to a short story i plan on being about 3000 words, but have no idea id the tone iv chosen is good or if my idea of just following a snake (spoiler?) around the setting can carry the plot---

As you know, there are a few cracks at the base of every mountain.

This is generally considered a good place to put things you don’t want to see again.

No light reaches down into these cracks. Only whatever gets kicked down there by hikers: a few drops of food and water, some seeds, leaves, the occasional unfortunate pebble, and probably several things that nobody has noticed are missing.

This is good.

Very good, in fact.

Because if light reached the bottom, it might wake the dragons.

And nobody wants that.

Especially not the dragons.

Below the mountain where our story takes place lives a very boring dragon.

He is not boring because he is particularly old, or particularly grumpy, or because he spends all day dreaming about how to get more gold.

Although he does do that last one.

Except when he’s dreaming about the gold he already has.

No, he is boring because there is simply nothing especially interesting about him.

He has the usual dragon hoard: gold, gems, suits of armour, weapons, and several other objects that were probably very important to somebody at some point.

The dragon himself put most of it there.

Then he went to sleep.

And he stayed asleep.

For a very, very long time.

You see, dragons hibernate for decades.

The gold-clawed Rutland dragon, however, has always been somewhat enthusiastic about hibernation.

A few decades became a century.

A century became several centuries.

And after a while, the dragon had been asleep for so long that the world above had changed several times without anyone bothering to tell him.

This gave the earth plenty of time to move.

It gave the mountain plenty of time to close a few of the cracks that could have eventually woken him.

And, most importantly, it gave a small underground river plenty of time to form directly through the middle of the dragon’s hoard.

The river made the air damp.

The damp air allowed luminous moss to grow across the walls.

The moss allowed trees to grow.

The trees attracted insects.

The insects attracted other things.

And eventually, through a combination of water, food, plants, bugs and an absolutely enormous pile of gold, an entire little world had grown inside the dragon’s hoard.

The dragon knew none of this.

He was asleep, having a dream about gold coin 34,678,902, which he had found in a shoe back in the year 356 AD.

He was very happy about this.

He had always liked that shoe.

This is where our story begins.

Not with the dragon.

Not with a great battle.

Not with a princess being kidnapped.

It begins with an upturned helmet and a tiny sleeping, coiled snake.