Random Shots of a Reluctant Traveler#4: Prague

1. The Lord of Time and Space lives in Prague, hidden in plain sight. It ruled all the clocks in the world, and some in others.

2. What is a memorial if people don't understand what is being remembered?

3. The two agents walked away from the past and into the present, not knowing that the future was watching them carefully. In a three-way war that involves Time, there are no civilians and there are no innocents. In a war that involves Time, everyone must choose a side.

4. One day, he woke up to find a river outside his apartment window. In this city-- like the streets-- even the rivers snake silently through the night to find their place in the sun.
5. Evil doesn't last forever. Even the historical Black Duke's feared torture tower has become a tourist attraction in this city.

6. I hate zombie apocalypse stories. The way they keep showing up in different stories, they remind me so much of flash mobs in fiction.

7. I was surprised to find out someone had kept an old tool of my trade and stuck it in an exhibit. As they say, old executioners never die, they just become HR consultants.

8. I could never figure out what I invented. But adding the spikes to it made it look cool.

9. He was chagrined. In his world, portals had power. He was amazed that this world had so much of it but everyone seemed to ignore what they had.

10. Mario finally escaped his prison but found himself lost in the wide, wide world where everything seemed too real for him.

11. He looked at the bridge, where he had last seen her. He wished he had said all the things that was inside him, but had just expressed as a sigh.

12. For each lock, two hearts had come together and promised to stay with each other. One would wish it were enough.

13. Ah, young love-- or young hearts in love. They scrawl their promises to each other, laughing as they do, not afraid of the future but only hoping to stay in the present forever.

14. As the sun set on the city, he lit his last cigarette. He had to buy another pack before he went out again to hunt the monsters that roamed the night.

15. The future was laid out before him, a future of running, of hiding in a mediocre, grey world where no one knew him and he knew nobody. This was his city and all the cities that he would eventually visit were all his.

Random Shots of a Reluctant Traveler#3: Prague

They had warned me about losing my shadow on this trip. They said he would wander away. So I tied him down to me using my shoelaces.

It broke my heart to set them free. But what could I do? The monsters were never meant to live in such a small cage. I think they would be happy living in the sewers of the city.

The wedding was a simple affair and all the ghosts attended with such solemnity.

Shush, my darling. Don't move, don't say a word. If we stand still, nobody will notice us. Don't look at their sharp teeth or their glowing eyes; I will keep you safe in my arms.

As he stood there, weighed down by all the history that surrounded him, he thought of flying away from this, from time and age and the present.

Do ancient cannons have memories of forgotten wars and battles? Do they remember the smell of smoke, burnt skin, and gunpowder as they sleep the sleep of just?

L'esprit de escalier, they call it, the spirit of the stairs. But they are such unfortunate things, really, tormented by the saddest word one could find in any lexicon: "Wait..."

The House of the Illuminati looks unprepossessing; it does not look like the place the whole world stands balanced on.

Toys are just silent memorials to dead heroes.

Can you hear it? The laughter of ancient cats sounds strangely like running water.

I visited the toy shop of the old Doctor who lived up in the castle. His marionettes always look so lifelike.

He manned the walls of his heart vigilantly, until at last he became a ghost of his own making.

These things we leave behind to mark our passage-- would people in the future see them like they see this seal? Take pictures and move on with their lives?

When the fossil-like disease first spread throughout the houses of our city, the doctors recommended using nets to prevent it from spreading. But eventually our houses died, suffocated by the suffocating stone, and we had to move to other cities.

The fortress sighed; where they used to be martial glories of soldiers marching on its roads, now there was only the lazy trample of tourists. Old soldiers never die indeed.

He shivered. He could never get used to the breaches of his reality, where one world melted into another.

"Help me!", he cried out to the people, finally wandering out of the maze. And with the last of his strength gone, he faded away unnoticed.

At first I spent my days of imprisonment looking through the bars at the world passing me by. But then they decided that the sight of my incarceration was bad for business so they covered my cage with a bamboo fence imported from the Far East.

Random Shots of a Reluctant Traveler#2: Vienna

Sadly, the place they had met and had fallen in love looked even more beautiful in the daylight.

So far, none of the giant moles that had made the secret tunnels that ran underneath the city had yet been sighted.

"Trust me, literary immortality is overrated," he ranted as he lit another cigarette. "Literary immortality is a statue sitting in the middle of the fucking park, covered in bird shit and ignored by the general public who haven't read a single piece of your work."

"Oh, they know it," he said slyly, "but they just don't have time to read it."

There are monsters in our city and these are their fossilized bones.

When he was a child, he remembered the giant clock that loomed over the dining room, larger than he was tall and quite, quite old. Because of this, he was never really comfortable about eating in general.

Shhh. The street is sleeping quietly now. But sometimes it wakes and moves into the next corner looking for sunlight. (With apologies to China Mieville.)

A fossilized church, finally revealed to the public after years of careful uncovering from the stone that surrounded it.

Random Shots of a Reluctant Traveler #1: Budapest

So the traveler sets forward, not knowing where the end lay but knowing at least that there is a beginning...

The church glowed in the night, a sanctuary to the fearful vampires that hid from the burning torches of the lynch mobs.

The boy sorcerer fell from the cliff and into history, the oppressed non-magic-using peoples setting up a hidden memorial for the one who tried to defy his own kind.

There is a sunset that will never come, one painted red and gold by memories that will never tarnish, that will never be forgotten by those who love us.

Do you see the secret? Do you? It's there, if you know where to look.

The lions of this place, they speak to me. They are old souls and they have seen so many things. That is why they are constantly laughing, for what other reaction would you expect them to have?

The master of all creative geniuses is an empty mask that hangs over your head and mocks your best efforts. Didn't you know that?

It was an old picture he found dumped in his closet. When he compared it to memory, they were the same: the colors faded by time and age.

She walked away, down and out from his life. From where he stood, it seemed like she was walking away into forever.

He shook his head: the defenders of the castle had finally come, in their tourist buses and bearing their weapons of digital cameras and tourist maps.

The sentinel does not mind. He will wait.

Their family portraits had always been grand and glorious affairs. Unfortunately, they took forever to create.

I finally understood what it means to be enshrined in people's memories, trapped by the weight of regret and anger bearing me down. Like a tomb.

The past is a palace that stands on the far side of the river of time, musty with age and lonely with echoes.

He sold crossbows and bows and arrows for a living. He used to joke that his target market was a hit-or-miss thing.

Look, over there. I can see you standing in the distance, waving at me. But I do not believe it's really you. It's just a dream and you are too far away to be real.