An Acorns Flash Fiction Feature
By: Matt Ivy Richardson
A body falls, gets back up again, swathed in black. It is one of us, will always be one of us, now that it has been taken into us—our mind.
We do not choose it, the connection; it is forced upon us. Some of us had more say than others, a weighted bargain that forced their hand, saving a family we all know but have no true recollection of. Faces and names, mothers and husbands and children, but no emotion. A family that has died anyway.
Others were unconscious, were tortured, were manipulated. We remember that too. We do not know if it aches, the memory. Other things burn more now.
It does not matter how we came to be anymore, only that we are, only that there is someone higher than all of us. He lives in our minds, in the space between thoughts, in the pause before a movement. The seconds before a leap, before the pulse of magic, are owned by him. We know this. It is one of the few things we know.
There, an enemy. We see it. We swarm to it, devour it as our Lord commands. It will not join us, weak as it is, dangerous as it is.
Our limbs are not our own. They tear apart flesh and bone with magic we did not wield when we were alone. Again, and again and again. We see our hoard through a thousand eyes, innumerable.
Libraries and blacksmiths and palaces crumble at our feet and we step over the rubble to take the survivors. False magic turns our veins black, foreign and burning in our bones and blood. It takes us eventually. As we step over rubble, we step over our bodies, but our numbers never dwindle.
We can remember what it was like, before. The images are vague and belong to all, a mashed together amalgamation of sunlight and calm farmland. There is no longing for it, any sight of it dashed away by the constant presence of our Lord. We feel him, an itch, the burn of magic in our limbs. It eats away of us. It will take us all.
We do not care. We are no longer designed to.
The world falls, we know this to be true. We see it. We hear it whispered from mind to mind. We feel when our Lord bellows it to us—the echo within makes us howl. It is ours. It is our Lord’s.
We linger in the remains. We follow our Lord, protect him. We hunt for survivors. We are everywhere at once, seeing everything, showing it to our Lord for him to take. None can withstand the magic we have been gifted, not even us, foreign to all except him. It pulverises bone and brick in a matter of moments. The land left over is dark with destruction, the trees mere skeletons, bleached white and reaching for the sky.
There are flashes of green, of a bustling marketplace, of a child laughing in the flowers long wilted. They are distance, fleeting things, stamped out in an instant by our Lord.
He laughs in his palace in the centre of the end of the world. He watches his decayed domain, watches us.
The first time we see Her, she is nought but another face. One to steal into us. She resists, more than any other. None have won before, but She does. She is plain, so nothing, but so strong. Why does She resist us? She does not need to resist us. We will take Her, break Her, make Her one of us.
We rage. Our Lord rages. Hatred pulses through us, not ours and dulled by distance, but we feel it nonetheless.
We lose Her, but we know Her face. Our Lord knows Her face too. We will not forget it.
We see Her again among the rubble, in the barren fields, between the skeletal trees. She hides from us if we are many and slaughters us if we are one. We do not catch Her, cannot catch Her. She withstands our magic, moves faster than we ever could.
We know what She is. We know what She is trying to do. Our Lord sees it, uses us to track Her movements, cannot find Her in the dead world we have created.
There, in the rubble. There, in the desolate city. There, a sword in our stomach. There, in the darkness She leaves behind. She begs us.
She will save us, She will break us free of this curse. Don’t we remember Her? Please, we have to remember Her.
We do not know Her. We have never known Her.
We become more, as our Lord commands. A thousand eyes roaming the world for any sign of Her. She grows stronger, more powerful, more resilient, and our Lord roars in our mind. A hundred eyes blink out in an instant, not from decay, but from Her.
We watch Her through a single pair of eyes, curled on the ground and sobbing over our bodies. Our Lord laughs, but we can feel his fear. It lingers in the spaces he owns like a shadow.
She lingers too. Her grief like a disease, Her sobs echoing in our mind like his laughter and his fear. We have seen others cry—before dying, before joining us, before the magic ever came to be. It does not stay, not like Her.
He draws us back to him, to the new centre of the world, where he lies in wait for Her. An army of thousands, eyes of our Lord, watching every corner of the ravaged city he calls home. She will not make it far without being seen, She knows that. Our Lord knows that too.
She comes in the night, the sky as black as the magic in our veins. She does not sneak, does not make a grand entrance, simply walks towards us. There is a sadness to Her face, this lone survivor, a sadness we pass between our minds to the space between, to our Lord. Her promise is carried to him too.
She screams into the empty air.
We will be free. Enough of us have died already. She won’t let any more of us go. She will set us free. We simply need to let Her through. Don’t we want to be free?
Our minds are a tangle. We see our Lord, hear his orders, move toward Her as one. We see unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar memories, faces we cannot place. We feel the magic pulse in our bodies over and over and over again, multiplied by a thousand.
The world that we see in those flashes of green is gone, its beauty replaced by black and grey. Faces that flit by in a split second are gone, one of us or fallen long ago. A thousand faces flash through the web. We cannot name a single one.
Don’t we want to be free?
She grabs our hand, a single hand but still all of ours. We look at Her, at Her plain face, at Her strength and Her anger. Her hand is warm, like that of our mother and our father and our child. We are taller, guiding Her through once-green fields. We are smaller, being guided by Her. We remember this. We should not remember this.
We are mother and father and child. We are parent and sibling and friend. We remember this. We have always remembered this.
The world is silent. We are silent, despite the roar in our mind from our Lord. The decay takes another, a sudden black spot in the tangled web. We fall at Her feet, a lone body in the fray. It will take us all.
It does not have to.
We let Her pass, all of us. She will end this. She will free us, tear the magic from our veins. She will kill him.
We part for Her, an ocean of bodies, and She walks over the rubble. It will all be over soon, because of us. Our Lord knows this. He screams in our mind and we laugh at him, the noise discordant and separate.
Our Lord sees Her coming through our eyes. He cannot stop Her. And we will be free.
About the Author:
Matt Ivy Richardson (they/he) is a queer fiction author and editor from Australia, whose stories experiment with points of view and the lives of queer characters. Their fiction can be found in Baffling Magazine and Apparition Literary Magazine, and their editorial work can be found in AUSTRAL 2024 and AUSTRAL 2025.