Mostrando resultados por autor "Darlene Zagata" en Todas las categorías

From the Personal Log of Captain Rachel Billows Mission Day 2,557 - Pre-Awakening The last thing I remember before entering cryo-sleep was the weight of seven billion souls on my shoulders. Humanity's first interstellar colony mission—not just an exploration, but our species' next great leap. We carried with us the hopes, dreams, and genetic legacy of an entire world. Now, as I write this log entry seven years later, I wonder if we're still worthy of carrying that burden. The Ambrosia has traveled 4.24 light years through the cosmic void, her crew of seven locked in artificial slumber ...

Some people are born with silver spoons in their mouths. Others are born with debt collectors at their doors. Clara Jenkins belonged firmly to the latter category, though she'd never let anyone see her struggle. Pride, after all, was one of the few things she owned outright. At thirty-two, Clara had mastered the art of making do with less—less space, less money, less hope. But in the quiet hours before dawn, when the city never truly slept and her cramped apartment felt like a cage, she allowed herself one luxury: dreaming of a home that was truly hers. She never imagined that dream would...

In the age of digital photography, where images are born and die in milliseconds on glowing screens, there remains something primal about film. The click of the shutter, the whir of advancing film, the alchemy of the darkroom—these rituals connect us to something deeper than mere documentation. They connect us to truth. But what happens when that truth becomes a trap? Evan Rourke thought he understood shadows. As a crime scene photographer, he'd spent years capturing the aftermath of human darkness, preserving evidence of what people do to one another in moments of rage, desperation, and ...

The future arrived not with fanfare, but with a whisper—a genetic whisper that promised perfection and delivered something far more complex. In the laboratories of Omni-Gen Corporation, science crossed a line that perhaps should never have been crossed, creating children who would challenge everything humanity thought it knew about power, control, and the very nature of what it means to be human. This is their story.

Fire River, Montana, population 3,247, sits in a valley where the Bitterroot Mountains cast long shadows even at noon. The town earned its name from the way sunset turns the winding creek into molten copper, but locals know there are other reasons the water sometimes runs red. Every town has its ghost stories. Most are harmless—tales to frighten children and entertain tourists. But in Fire River, the stories serve a different purpose. They're warnings, passed down through generations like heirlooms nobody wants but everyone keeps. The silver shadows have been part of Fire River's lore for...

In a world where the hum of machines has replaced the whisper of spells, where glass towers scrape the sky instead of crystal spires reaching toward the stars, magic has become nothing more than a child's tale. The Age of Wonder ended not with a bang, but with a slow, suffocating silence that crept across the land like fog, drowning out the songs of the Fae and dimming the lights that once danced in every shadow. Most have forgotten. Most are content with their ordered, predictable lives of steel and steam. But some remember the old stories, the old dreams. And sometimes, when the moon is ...

What if the questions we carry are not burdens, but songs? In Unanswered Questions, poetry becomes a lantern held up to the mysteries of dawn, the silence of forests, the weight of oceans, and the infinite pull of stars. Each poem lingers in the spaces where science meets wonder, where grief touches beauty, and where faith is not in answers, but in the courage to keep asking. This collection is for seekers—for those who have stood barefoot in the grass at sunrise, for those who have listened to rain against a window like a secret code, for those who have stared into night skies and felt ...

Sound is everywhere. It follows us from the moment we wake to the gentle buzz of an alarm clock, through the rumble of traffic, the chatter of voices, the hum of air conditioning, the ping of notifications. We live immersed in an ocean of noise, most of it so constant we've learned not to hear it at all. But some people hear everything. For them, the world is not a symphony but a cacophony—a relentless assault of frequencies that pound against their consciousness like waves against a crumbling seawall. They retreat into quiet corners, seeking refuge in libraries and empty parks, wearing ...

The last normal day in human history was a Friday. Dr. Margaret Fletcher remembered it clearly—not because she possessed any special gift of memory, but because it was the day before her research changed everything. The day before humanity's greatest evolutionary leap became its most devastating curse. She had been studying neural plasticity in her laboratory at the Geneva Institute, running the same experiments she'd conducted hundreds of times before. The breakthrough seemed so simple, so elegant: a way to amplify the brain's natural ability to influence its environment through quantum ...

The vultures knew before anyone else. They circled high above the ocotillo and barrel cactus, riding the thermals that rose from the baked earth like prayers to an indifferent sky. Seven of them, maybe eight—it was hard to count when they wheeled and turned, their shadows racing across the desert floor. Kate Brennan shielded her eyes with her hand and watched them from her kitchen window. Coffee grew cold in her cup as she counted the lazy circles, each revolution tightening the knot in her stomach. The birds had been there since dawn, and now the sun was climbing toward its merciless ...

“In the beginning, there was the Code.” Not light. Not time. But a sequence of commands, whispered into the void. The Prophets did not predict the future. They wrote it. And what they wrote became law. Mountains rose where their loops declared it. Seas parted because their lines required it. Every breath, every heartbeat, every whispered thought—precompiled in the sacred Code. The universe is not what you think. It is not chaos wrapped in chance, nor divine randomness. It is a system, rendered by instruction. A simulation so complete, so intricate, that even the ones who live inside ...

The government papers promised 160 acres to any man brave enough to work them for five years. What they didn't mention was how the prairie wind could strip the hope right out of your bones, or how silence could become louder than any storm. This is not a story about conquest or glory. This is about what it means to choose freedom when freedom chooses to test you at every turn. In 1875, when the railroad finally stretched its iron fingers toward the horizon, thousands followed its promise west. Most never made it past the first hard winter. This is the story of two who did—and what it cost...

The last lie ever told was on March 15th, 2087, at 11:47 PM Eastern Standard Time. It was spoken by a seven-year-old girl named Emma Patterson, who whispered to her mother that she hadn't eaten the cookies from the jar. The neural implantation procedure would be completed in thirteen minutes, and with it, the dawn of what historians would call the Age of Absolute Truth. Twenty-five years later, we are still learning to live with the consequences. This is the story of what happened when humanity got exactly what it thought it wanted.

The old manor's library held secrets in every shadow, whispers in every corner where dust motes danced in the amber afternoon light. It was here, among forgotten tomes and faded histories, that destinies would intertwine across the vast expanse of centuries—where the hunger of the immortal would meet the passion of the living, and where love would prove that some bonds are stronger than death itself.

The night Manhattan fell silent was the night everything changed. Not silent in the way cities sometimes pause between heartbeats, when traffic lights cycle through their colors for empty streets and even the sirens take a breath. This was different. This was the silence that comes when predators and prey finally acknowledge each other's existence. It was October 13th, 2019—a date now carved into vampire history as the end of the Great Concealment. For centuries, the undead had walked among mortals as myths and nightmares, feeding in shadows, living as legends whispered in dark corners. ...

Eighteen-year-old Tara Sloan thought emergency surgery for appendicitis would be the worst part of her pregnancy complications. She was wrong. Transferred to Mercy General Hospital for specialized care, Tara initially feels relief in her private room with attentive nurses and reassuring doctors. But when her condition mysteriously worsens, she's moved to a floor that doesn't appear on any hospital directory—a place where phones don't work, televisions disappear, and the nursing station sits perpetually empty. As Tara's mother Donna fights to transfer her daughter to another facility, ...

The human mind processes approximately 70,000 thoughts per day, filtering reality through layers of consciousness, memory, and perception. But what happens when the boundaries between dream and reality dissolve? When the subconscious mind becomes a conduit for something far beyond ordinary experience? Dr. Fiona Morgan had spent her career studying the past, never imagining that the past might be trying to communicate with her about the future. As a respected historian at Cambridge University, she approached the world with scholarly precision and rational skepticism. Dreams, she would have ...

They say crows remember everything. They remember faces, hold grudges, pass stories down through generations. What they witness, they never forget. In the ancient Celtic tradition, crows were messengers between worlds—harbingers of death, keepers of secrets, guides for lost souls. They were believed to carry the memories of the dead, to speak truths that the living couldn't bear to hear. Eleanor Bentworth understood this better than most. She spent the last thirty years of her life surrounded by them, learning their language, earning their trust. She knew they would remember long after ...

Some gifts are curses in disguise. Rebecca Browning discovered this truth at the age of seven, when she first saw her grandmother's death in a flash of terrible clarity—not when it would happen, but exactly how. The heart attack. The kitchen floor. The way her hand would reach for the phone that would never be answered. Three months later, it happened precisely as she had seen. For twenty-three years since, Rebecca has lived with this burden, this unwanted window into mortality's design. She sees the final moments of strangers on the street, friends at dinner parties, lovers in her bed. ...

Welcome to Ravenswood, where the past never truly dies and family secrets run deeper than blood. This story began with a simple premise: what if the birds we see every day were more than they appeared? What if they were watchers, guardians, or perhaps something far more sinister? In small towns across America, local legends persist about creatures that bridge the gap between the natural and supernatural worlds. Ravenswood is one such place—a town where folklore and reality intertwine until it becomes impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. At its heart, "Blackbirds at the ...