Refuge Pg 3
The seelie are a High Court now. They parade around in moonsilk and faeweave, showing their tits. They ain’t got a speck of flash showing, they’re nat all through. The tower is their home, the tower, rising like a finger, like a phallus from the center of the City. The tower is the shaft, the slums the balls, the outcasts and unseelie the little hairs and mites. The tower is the phallus of the High Court. You step outta line, you get fucked.
Flash is a good industry these days. You know how to rig a body-bot? A new arm? You can hold the flesh together when it starts to fail, and you’ll keep your own hide just a little longer. Best flashwalla is a beast, little ape with horns and a temper. Flings his shit if he’s had anything to eat, otherwise just makes new eyes and ears, new muscles. It ain’t pretty, but it works.
In the slums, there be one rule, na? You stay alive at all costs. You beat back the sickness, the wasting, the slow death. You keep moving, you keep reaching. Die by the sword or the sizzle and that ain’t a bad way to go. No one wants to sit and wait to fall apart, and anyone you meet will kill to keep it so.
(The attached image is the third page of the comic short Refuge, written by me and illustrated by Christina Beard.)
