In the last while I've been doing very little long-form writing, but I have been doing a bunch of sitting down at the table and seeing what I can write before standing up again. This began as deliberate automatic writing. It's interesting for me to read back over as I lose my memory of the exact thought process that produced it, and what had been a vivid map of that thought process goes partly dry and inexplicable, like a dying leaf. I will not share any of this because it would be dry and inexplicable to anyone else from the beginning. However, it did sort of nudge me imperceptibly closer to normal writing until I suddenly went 'I think this is now just me writing fiction again in the usual way.' I will post here a few of the bits toward the story-er end of this process. They are still not guaranteed to make sense or to resolve like stories, and to prove this, I will start with one that doesn't.

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Dragon didn’t know what he was getting when he ordered that leg from a human. It’s a huge crystal structure all chain-hung and shivered by light and wind. The guru who lived in it fed her followers on meat she got from somewhere - they said she cut off pieces of her own flesh and grew again whole. I don’t believe it but it’s not as though I ever caught the delivery vans. I never ate there, though they say it tasted fine – better than fine.

There was a little village nearby that predated her structure and hadn’t changed much in relation to it. The cultists needed no supplies and the villagers weren’t friendly, having other gods. There, they made clothes by growing lichen on statues. You could order a dress for your granddaughter, hoping you’d have one and she’d be about such-and-such a size. Or you could get lucky. They were expensive but not that expensive – the village had such fields of statues in all different body-forms that it wasn’t a luxury reserved for kings. How they treated the lichen and got it off the statues in strong, supple condition, with the beautiful, wild patterns hiding in the green and grey, was a secret you could only have learned by staying there ten years and learning every part of the process – and no one in the village, taken away from all that lived-in expertise, could have set the thing up again! Just one of the nutrient paints had its own maker with her own handed-down teachings. Not secret, but hidden in day-to-day life.

So this was how things stood before the dragon came: the new cult with its cathedral-sized beauty of glass, and the old village where doctors weren’t trusted. The dragon turned up at the structure to eat human meat because it had been told that there, it was encouraged. Having slept through an age of the world, it wasn’t sure how things stood, and it was more cautious than some of its brethren, having the idea that humans had become a lot more dangerous in the meantime (and in that it was correct). It was less large than the structure but certainly no single person could have done it much harm, for even its eyes dwelt behind a membrane like iron, and the throat – that tunnel proof against fire – was the very toughest part of it. Dragon throats last while all the rest of the insides have rotted away, hanging in the skeleton and the suit of scales.

After some surprise and a lot of running about, the guru’s followers called her out of trance, which displeased her but she agreed it had been the right move when she saw the dragon. She agreed to give the dragon what it wanted and withdrew to her holiest chamber, where, allegedly, she butchered her own leg on a chopping block without ever shedding a drop of blood and then grew back upon herself layer upon layer like the fastest of lichens. And she emerged with the meat, which was perfect and not quite like anything – I had seen it and imagined a Pegasus, or one of the great birds. The dragon ate. And then asked for more.

Now, the sacrament could not become a dragon-feeding factory, so the guru said no. And so the dragon – why, no one knows – abandoned its patience and advanced after the guru when she withdrew into the structure of chains and glass. The noise could be heard for miles.

Whatever contest followed had no victor. The cathedral’s remains lie strewn now, tarnishing and scratched, over all that field, along with a few pieces of the dragon – though not as many as you would expect. No worshippers gather there, though now and then some sad pilgrim passes. The locals still grow their lichen finery and to them, it seems, what happened was only as memorable as that time someone’s uncle got indiscreetly drunk and proposed marriage to three people in a single evening.