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Six-headed mudskippers that feed on men, tentacled creatures that stink like a thousand corpses, giant sea urchins that paralyse their prey before devouring them while they're still alive... Yes!

The pufferfish's default expression of rigid shock seems designed for this sport. Manus fati, at it again.

A thousand stars reflected and warped in the black of his helmet, the edges of the universe all purple and blue.

Divine severer of threads, bearing a new set of shears.

You see them now as puncture wounds. Bullet holes. Shrapnel from an ancient bomb.

Beauty subsumed by style. The wearer is not the point, the statement is.

You can already see how. A lightness of the mind, a willingness to let go of yourself. You could step straight into the void with her if you dare.

An image comes to you, one you've thought about for a long time.

Not a cryptonym but a role -- keeping her another step removed from the voice on the phone.

Like a sad, dry snowball.

The beast seeks to know his audience of giants.

The sing-song boredom of a child repeating a civics lesson.

A sunken grey cunt lost amid vast expanses of rubbery skin.

Two ghosts stalk this house -- a teenage girl stomping the attic, a middle-aged man screaming in the basement.

Maybe you've solved a cosmic mistake, you were supposed to be him all along.

His heart forever torn, if you were to put your ear to his chest you would hear its tender, arrhythmic sob.

You've had dirty laundry on your floor for longer than this man has been alive and yet here he is, probably about to die.

Maybe you've solved a cosmic mistake, you were supposed to be him all along.

Because he is one of them.

Created to be destroyed, like a grass dog -- named and decorated and burned on the pyre.

Confidently superlative. In this case it seems fair.

They can carve it onto your shared headstone.

A woman you will never see gets you off.

What's coming will be ugly. You deserve something beautiful, here at the end of all things.

A ham-fisted attempt at creating character depth, predictable even for a fascist.

And in each eye, a tear. A hundred assets. A hundred vanishings.

Around the ceremony, another ceremony -- above it, below it, enveloping it.

It's not, it's an essential concept in the latter writings of the critic Dositeo Fernandez.

Her hands were not there to pray. She was trying to absorb the essence of that stone.

A black hole in human form. Devourer of stars.

When a statement says nothing, readers are forced to invent a statement of their own, most likely in conflict with that of the author.

A line from an old communist anthem returns to you, a fragment from your reeducation.

He savours it. Like a sommelier detecting notes of oak and cherry, he swirls the particular kind of death around his mouth.

The spectacular in-theatre eruption of psychic capsules, a thousand months of nightmares unspooling in one instant.

An insane thought flits across your consciousness, to be kept absolutely to yourself.

Belonging to the order of things that should not exist.

They'll ask for the moon.

Meat dragged out of the freezer starts going bad the minute it is done thawing.

You suddenly picture Melita, Luzian features behind her clipped, trained Kohilan accent, smiling to herself as she manipulates you from a control room just across the Noscorrentes.

Sky burial by seabirds. The gulls will pick the scant papery skin from his bones.

43 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual