Author
Mark Fagan
is an author from Edinburgh with a deep connection to the Highlands, having spent years exploring its landscapes, climbing Munros, and studying its rich folklore.
Allegory Magazine
Man of War
Man of WarIn the last few seconds of his life, Emmett didn’t recall the wars he’d fought in, the countless planets he’d touched down on, or even the woman he’d given the best part of his life to. None of that. Only a little boy clutching the hand of his dying mother, like he was leading her to something beyond this world.
Wing Commander Emmett Engel dipped the fighter low across the dunes, banking a hard right while keeping under detection level. Thruster bursts boomed over the dunes and his squadron broke formation, choosing separate vectors back to the mothership. ‘Desert eagle’ was the handle they’d given him, but to the enemy on Tyneeria, he was Shaitan ‘The Sand Devil’.
Ninety-eight percent accuracy rate, who could argue with that? His three-hundredth successful drop. Every confirmed kill was a step closer to the endgame, to securing the safety of the settlements on this dust-bowl of a planet.
Emmett looked at the picture of his wife, Amelia, pinned to the cockpit for good luck. In the picture, she stood between her parents on their farm, her father dressed in his military uniform. He could hear his father-in-law's voice as clearly as if he were in the cockpit next to him. “Freedom comes from men like us, willing to fight so others can sleep soundly. War, boy, it’s not just necessary—it’s inevitable.”
Like an apparition from a mirage, Emmett saw it, a blur against the horizon, a solitary figure standing atop a dune directly in his line of sight. Within a second he’d marked the danger, but perhaps, a second too late. The insurgent fired, a missile snaking its way through the air in an erratic trajectory. It was a one-in-a-million shot—impossible, according to command—but yet the impact was unmistakable.
A sudden jolt erupted through the cockpit, punched deep into his gut, and before he could react, the fighter was spinning uncontrollably. Thirty years in the service and countless crash sims, but nothing could have prepared him. His body lurched with violent tremors, fingers twitching, the ejector override out of reach.
The world came at him, fast and final.
How he survived, he’d no idea, losing consciousness somewhere in between hitting the ground and the fireball of the cockpit. Taking a deep breath, he hauled himself out of the shattered canopy and onto the sand. First, he checked himself for injuries—blood was pouring from somewhere, from his nose, from beneath his glove, and from a cut just below his knee, but he was alive—no broken bones. That seemed like a miracle.
Get some distance between yourself and the crash site. He’d emphasised that lesson enough in his mission briefs. In a few minutes, the place would be crawling with the enemy. So, Emmett led a trail in the opposite direction watching his blood drip onto the dry sand, then doubling back, he wrapped his wounds with his shirt and headed west against the setting sun.
It didn’t take long for the air to cool once the sun had dipped below the horizon of sandstone mountains. Keep pace, he told himself, even as the pain in his leg throbbed with every step. Reaching the top of a dune, he paused. A few clicks ahead there was a small town, a mining outpost controlled by the enemy that he recognised it from a bombing run a few months back. It was cover, at least.
Once in the refuge of the town, he stuck to the walls and crept through the shadows. A few people, dressed in linen robes, wandered back and forth—just civilians going about their business—although he needed to treat everyone as a threat.
A loud crack split the still night air. A gunshot.
Emmett took a prone position behind some fuel drums and counted the men arriving, studying each face as they passed between the buildings. Even his breath seemed too loud and his heartbeat pounded with such fury he feared it might give him away. High on the dunes, from the path the men had taken, a reaper tank stood ready, watching, its missiles set to strike.
Lie low. Find shelter. Even pack wolves will tire eventually.
He waited for the last of the soldiers to pass, then moved quietly along the side of a corrugated fence, where dry earth stretched, dotted with a few struggling crops. Before him, on top of a wooden table, lay the remnants of an insect, its beetle-like shape stripped of its hard shell, revealing dissected innards and spiky legs. A local delicacy, no doubt. Next to it was a small carving knife. Not much, he thought, but maybe enough to take one of these sand-snakes down with him.
Voices called out from behind one of the huts, two men who talked with the urgency of the hunt—men who knew violence and death. With only one choice, he crawled along to a window and to his relief, the metal shutter creaked open. Inside the house was pitch black. He took the chance and leapt over.
A ceiling light came on. Blindingly bright. Emmett shielded his eyes and blinked the flash away. As the room came into focus, he could see a silhouette standing by the doorway—a woman dressed in a soft white linen gown, skin brown and tanned from years in the desert. With a duck of her knees, she ran to the door.
"Don't," Emmett growled, voice low. "Don’t move." He could hear the sound of boots outside, closer now. Too close. Heavy footsteps of men armed with automatic rifles, all around him.
He was on top of the woman before he knew it, forcing her to the ground. She screamed in a muffled yelp but he held her there, his hand over her mouth, his knee pressed into her belly. She fought—stronger than he calculated—a strength that no doubt came from a life working the soil. Clamping her teeth down on his fingers, she bit sharp as a rabid dog, then, as he let the pressure off just a little, she forced his arm away.
"Please. Help!" Her voice was shrill and shaking. "Hel—"
Emmett plunged the knife deep into her abdomen—it felt almost reactionary. It was enough to shut her up, turning her shriek into a guttural moan. His fingers clenched around her throat stopping even the noise of her breath. He waited for the sound of the door bursting open certain it would come at any second.
It didn’t. After a minute or so passed he relaxed, assessing the situation. The woman took a deep, long breath, and strained against his body weight. Slit her throat, let her bleed out—put her out of her misery. The infantry soldiers wouldn’t think twice.
“Put her out her misery,” he repeated. He remembered his father-in-law saying those words when one of the farm horses had broken its leg. None of the meat had gone to waste.
“Please, no,” a quiet voice called, simultaneously a whisper and a shout—a plea for sure. Emmett turned to where the voice was coming from, a small boy crouched under the desk as still and quiet as a mouse. He was seven or eight, Emmett guessed, around the age his son would’ve been if it hadn’t been for the miscarriage. They’d tried, Amelia and he, to have another, but even with the treatments, nothing.
Slowly Emmett stood back, only just noticing the heavy pool of blood under the woman's body and his reflection in it. Just another casualty of war, he told himself, like all the others—the two percent error margin.
The boy rushed out from his hiding place and fell to his mother's side.
Don’t you dare run, don’t cry out! He’d silence the boy just the same. But the boy didn’t flee, didn’t scream, just quietly tended to his mother’s wounds with the patience of a practised medic. After tearing a hole in his mother's dress, he tried to put pressure on the wound and pack it with the torn linen. Blood kept flowing like a floodgate.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” Emmett surprised himself by asking. What the heck do I care? Probably patching up insurgents. The boy didn’t answer, just kept dabbing his mother's forehead with the now blood-soaked rag. Her eyes were shut but she was trying to say something.
“Didn’t you hear me, kid?”
“Shhh...” the boy whispered, keeping his eyes fixed on his mother.
Emmett noticed how tightly his hand still gripped the knife. He unclenched his fist and drew a breath. For the first time, he closely studied the woman's features, she looked like her—his wife, Amelia—only with darker hair and more drawn-in. But the same green eyes. A green that reminded him of the farmland back home, of sunlight filtering through the trees.
Amelia…
The woman gasped, her lungs wheezing, desperate for air. Her brown skin was ghostly pale, almost blue underneath. Emmett had seen this before, in gunshot casualties—hypovolemic blood loss—an artery had been severed and she was going into shock. There was barely a pint of blood in her to begin with.
“Help her,” was all the boy could manage to say.
It’s too late, kid—was Emmett’s initial reaction, but before he said it, something about the way the boy looked at him made him stop—his jet-black hair curled and overgrown, the sheen of sweat that wept over his skin—he seemed more like a man at that moment than an adolescent boy, like a depth of understanding hid behind his eyes.
“Does your family keep an emergency kit? A box with a cross like the ones you people steal from our relief ships.”
“Maybe—in the back cupboard.”
“Right kid, hold her legs.” Emmett scooped an arm under the woman’s calves. “Keep them raised, like this.” The boy did as he’d instructed.
It didn’t take him long to force the cupboard lock and once he’d thrown half the junk out, he found a med kit. Clicking it open he discovered it had what he needed. Back beside the woman, he powered up the plasma compressor and then ran his hand over her chest feeling for the beat of the heart. She groaned in pain, yet her eyes stayed closed, unconscious.
In that moment, he thought of Amelia again, of the words she’d said to him when he left on this latest tour of duty. “Darling, I couldn’t be prouder of the man you are, we all are. You show 'em what you’re made of.”
Three goddamn years. I’ll make it home if it’s the last thing I do.
“What’s her name son?”
“Faiza,” the boy said, the worry on his face evident.
“Fa-ee-zah,” Emmett repeated. “Okay Faiza, be strong. This is gonna feel like a swarm of desert ants crawling through your veins.” He wasn’t sure if she heard but she rolled her head as if in response.
The heartbeat was so faint that the compressor barely registered it. Still, the laser focused and he pressed the device onto her chest. The machine’s mechanical arms curled up, spider-like, gripping her flesh as the needle on its underside burrowed toward her heart. He watched as it adjusted for blood type, pulsed once, and fired up the transfusion.
If Emmett had been a religious man, he would’ve prayed, maybe whispered something hopeful or pulled one of the bible passages Amelia would read. She’d have known the right words. She always did.
As he was emptying the bag of powdered Quickclot over the dressing, a sharp whir buzzed overhead. He looked up. Somewhere out there, against the star-choked sky, drones moved, scanning the desert with the patience of a vulture. Insurgent tech. Sonar drones, searching for the slightest echo.
The boy knelt beside his mother, hands curled under his knees, his face quiet and unreadable. Emmett glanced at him and their eyes met. No fear, no rage. Just silence. An understanding settled between them and Emmett was aware that the boy could shout, could blow everything apart with one scream. But he didn’t. Emmett wasn’t sure why.
A red light on the compressor flashed. He wasn’t exactly a field medic but he knew what it meant. The woman’s face was even paler now, her lips blue, skin cold under his fingertips—the transfusion wasn’t working fast enough. He adjusted the compressor again, ignoring the warning signals flashing on the small screen. The needle twitched, but her body didn’t respond. He could feel the last of her warmth fading, slipping away, like the desert sand at night.
The boy inched closer, his small hands reaching for her. “Mom,” he pleaded. Her chest rose in a shallow gasp, mouth barely open, like she was stuck mid-sentence.
The compressor flashed again, flatlined.
Shit—no, no, no!
Then, it shut off with a click, arms retracting like it had done all it could. He stared at her face, the stillness of it, as a feeling he couldn’t name stirred inside him.
“She... she’s not moving,” the boy said, kneeling there next to the only family he had left. His voice was small, barely still in this world. “H–help her.”
Emmett wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say that could make it better, nothing that could make this right. He’d killed her. Now, and with everything that came before. He looked at the boy, who just kept crying, small, broken sounds.
“I’m sorry,” Emmett whispered. His words came out thick, almost choked. The boy’s body shuddered with a sob. For the first time in Emmett’s life, he was completely at a loss for what to do next. Are you still proud of me, darling?
There was one option left. “Okay, screw it.”
Emmett grabbed the IV tubing, his bloodied fingers shaking as he twisted the needles on. He found a vein in his arm easily enough but it took a few attempts to finally pierce one of the faint blue lines on Faiza’s. The clear plastic tubing remained empty.
“Kid, I need you to push, short and sharp, on your mother's chest. Right where the heart is.” Emmett hoped the transfuser had dumped enough nanobots in her system for this to work. With a few heavy thumps on her chest from the boy, the blood started flowing out Emmett’s arm and down the tube into Faiza. He sat his back against the wall. All they could do was wait.
“Your mom’s gonna be okay,” he said, not looking up. The sound of the drone was distant now. “Just gotta keep quiet. You understand? Trust me, son, I’m gonna make sure you're alright.”
Emmett leaned back against the cold metal, feeling the ache in his muscles. For the first time, he checked his own injuries, splashing the bottle of disinfectant over his cuts. Wait it out till morning.
When the boy spoke his voice was small, and Emmett wasn’t sure the words were meant for him. “Momma said we will all be together in Jannat Al-Ma’wa.”
“Is that some kind of heaven you believe in kid?”
“There are many places in the afterlife, and many gods.” The boy cupped his hands. “Yes, I trust, Father will be there, and my cousin, Yusuf and—”
“You truly think that’s a real place?” Emmett shook his head. “Amelia reckons there’s only one God. I reckon both of you can’t be right.”
“My mother said, it doesn’t matter who’s right—all that matters is we believe. That we have hope.”
Emmett thought about that for a moment. He went to ask something but stopped himself. What do these people know? Outside the drone buzzed again, louder this time. It had circled back. Emmett blinked, stirring himself back to life and pulled the tubing from his arm. Hopefully, the hour or so was enough to stabilise Faiza.
Emmett glanced at the window. “They’re coming.” He’d have to leave them here, like this. “Give her sips of water, salt and make sure the wound doesn’t open up.”
Under his breath, the boy was muttering some kind of prayer. He held his hands again like a cup towards Emmett. “We thank you.”
Emmett shook his head.
By their side, Faiza stirred but with her eyes still closed tight. “He chose you, Shaitan,” she said in a strained breath. “God brought you here for a reason.”
It seemed unreal to Emmett, but despite how drained he felt, the knowledge of her being alive stirred something in his heart. “Don’t speak, save your strength.”
Faiza coughed, clearing her lungs. “Sometimes he puts us through suffering, so when the moment comes, we know the path back to him.”
Emmett placed a hand over Faiza’s as she fell back into silence. He didn’t have the time to wait. He looked at the boy. “Take care, kid.”
Outside the first rays of dawn were stretching their fingers above the horizon's sandstone ridges. The village though, was empty. Too empty. Like a pasture before a storm. Emmett looked for the drones but the sky was clear, only an ocean of stars. Then he spotted where the noise was coming from. Low, across the sandbanks, the V-formation of starfighters on a direct heading.
A rescue mission?
The thought had only just left Emmett’s head when he saw the tell-tale trails of air-to-ground rockets.
Not a rescue—a bombing run.
In a way, he welcomed it. He took a glance back at the house where he’d left that woman and child. The fear he felt
DarkAcademia
The Pillars of Divinity
Vena Veritas—the vein of truth. One drop of that blood is to venture into the mind of God.
I only know a couple of faces at the clubhouse, mostly other students from classes we share. The lights are low—flickering electric candles—and gold panels split the room like a heat sink. Bodies lean in close on cream upholstery, and fingertips play softly on skin.
I smile my best “don’t mind me” smile and shuffle through, trying to act casual while pretending to check my phone. Cilicia slides her way across the room toward me.
“Daisaku, you made it!”
She dresses almost gothic, only more refined—like a princess gone to the dark side. An angel in black. Tonight, she wears crushed velvet, a midnight-blue top laced tight across her chest that sighs with every breath. Just a slip beneath it, I hope.
“It’s good you’re here,” I say, shrugging.
The nickname Daisaku was one she’d given me—a character from an old anime series she was into. The other kids had started calling me that, too. But it was fine. I preferred it to my real name.
“I didn’t think I’d get past the lobby. You should’ve seen the way that doorman looked at me.”
She laughs, then takes a lick from her glass of Chablis. For a second, I wish my blood were the liquid in the glass. Could she take a sip of my soul?
“Thanks for getting me in,” I go on, trying to hold eye contact.
“No big deal. I don’t exactly get many chances to hang out with you. If any of the faculty turn up, act like you’re not here, okay? We’re meant to be all hush-hush about this.”
“I mean, it is supposed to be a secret society, right?”
“You bet your ass it is.”
We sit on the lounger for a while and talk, but never really get a real conversation going. Every minute or so, some guy or other in a buttoned-down Gucci shirt—all paisley and pin-striped—comes over. Was there even one drop of mixed blood in this place?
There are times when I feel more Vietnamese than British, especially in places like this. Although, I think that side is where I get my real intelligence from. Despite Ông Chú—Mum—never learning English until my father married her, I glimpse that intelligence sometimes, buried deep within her, like a seedling that never found the light.
Out of nowhere, Cilicia stands, grabs my hand, and pulls me up.
“C’mon, I’ve something to show you.”
We swerve back through the people to this little private room, and once the door is shut and we’re alone in the silence, all I can feel is my heart fluttering about like a bird against a pane of glass. Cilicia adjusts her skirt over her thigh as she bends down to take something out of the little mirrored cabinet beneath the rattan table.
“You need to try this.”
Inside the trinket box is a syringe. I flinch. “Is that—?”
“Relax—a pinprick is all.”
I try to object, but being alone with Cilicia is all I dream of. Overwhelming almost—like being drawn into the centre of a whirlpool.
“I’m not sure about drugs and all that.”
“It’s not drugs—better.”
The syringe contains some weird glowing liquid, shimmering cobalt blue, that swirls like ink in water. A pinprick. I feel it creep, inch by inch, up my arm and to every sharp edge of my body. Everything snaps into focus. As if I've just bitten the fruit of Eden and can see the world naked.
Back in the main room, the first thing I notice is the couple by the drinks table. They stand together but, in a group, and the guy’s attention keeps flicking toward other women. As her fingers tear tiny squares into a napkin, she is thinking what it would be like to sleep with his best friend.
In the corner, a lanky kid in a Cambridge-blue blazer leans too close to a first-year with scratches on her arm and a nervous laugh, nodding a half beat too quickly. The first-year is already failing her classes, and is considering whether the boy might be her only future.
On one of the settees, two girls I know from Applied Mathematics sit thigh to thigh wearing beaded friendship bracelets. One of them is in love with the other. The other knows and pretends not to.
I look at Cilicia, her lips are still red from the Chablis. She’s already thinking ahead, beyond this place, beyond me.
The effects of the stuff last for days. I consume whole textbooks in an hour or so, complete essays I’ve been chewing on, and finally crack those trigonometry assignments—as simple as adding one plus one. Revelations appear before me. A stream of seemingly unconnected events becomes a through-line of cause and effect.
I see the first caveman press his handprint into stone, watch Botticelli and da Vinci meticulously bring light to the Renaissance, and get lost in the chromatic chaos of the surrealist stuff—Degraf and Shimoda. I understand it all as if I were there, creating those artworks myself with a paintbrush in hand.
Afterwards, I can’t get hold of Cilicia. I try calling her and leave a bunch of messages—up to the point I start to feel desperate. There’s a rumour she’s dating one of the professors, what’s-his-name with the tweed jacket from Political Science.
“Do the returns, then lock up for the night,” Trish says to me.
She’s the head librarian and the one who recommended me the part-time position, as I’m in here studying most days anyway. Father’s company has been struggling a bit recently, and the extra cash from the job helps.
“I was just wondering,” I ask, flicking through a book of poems after finding nothing of note in the first few pages. “Only, I was looking into some of the famous people who studied here.”
Trish takes off her glasses and wipes the lenses with a cloth. “Newton, Oppenheimer, Darwin and Turing… even Schrödinger and all those physicists of the Quantum Era have studied in this very library.”
She wears the type of glasses you’d expect a librarian to wear—wire-rimmed and usually perched on her nose. Her hair is as coarse and grey as a ball of cat fur. Bet she’s as old as some of the books in here.
It’s staggering, really, how many scholars have come from this establishment. Artists who have created images no one even dreamed of before, biologists who unlocked the secrets of life, and physicists who’ve completely altered our understanding of the universe.
“And they were all part of that society, too, the Pillars of Divinity?” I ask.
“I don’t know where you heard about all that…” Trish says. “Best not to pay much heed to it.”
She leaves shortly after we’ve done the returns. I reach up from the ladder, slipping the last book away—an early edition of Dante’s Inferno—into its place on the highest shelf of the special collections. That’s when I notice them—the basement keys. Trish must’ve set them there on the book cart while tidying.
A temptation too good to refuse.
For hours, it seems, I stumble around those cold tunnels, emergency lights buzz and waver in jaundiced yellow. Then a door. Like bones rattling, the old key turns in the lock, and the heavy wood creaks open, revealing a dome-shaped stone prison. I hold my breath.
There it was.
Chains bind it to two cracked pillars, and a metal cage—Faraday-style—arches the walls. A round hole like a chimney runs all the way up to the sky, letting in a dim shaft of light. The thing shimmers—or more like, it refuses to be completely seen—shifting. A face, but also not. Muscular and feminine, strong and beautiful, all at once.
Its long, pale torso is wrapped tightly in bandages, stained in patches of Prussian blue, and its wings curl, dirtied and broken, like a fledgling fallen from its nest.
What is this creature? Why would someone do this?
But I already know. I can almost read its mind. It screams in song, hymns drawn from heaven’s well. A clear plastic tube twists from its arm to a glass beaker, half-full of that gleaming blue liquid. Vena Veritas—the vein of truth.
What kind of twisted ritual did this? Some messed-up experiment? Had they bound it in those first days, built the academy atop its suffering, and fed on its power? Whatever it is, I have the feeling it’s unbalanced something, like a fracture in the normal order of things.
Outside the Cambridge library, on the front façade of this building, there’s a big gold clock—the Chronophage. No hands, no numbers, just a spinning gold disc. And sitting right there on top of the rim is this demon-like thing, eating up each second as it turns.
I’m only now grasping its meaning. Time is something forced upon the world. Built, standardised and mechanised. Our spirits swallowed by every tick. What was it that Francis Bacon said while conducting experiments in these very chambers?
“Nature must be hounded and made a slave to the new mechanised devices—science must torment nature until she yields her secrets to us.”
Jerking against the chains, the creature blinks its eyes, then opens them wide—deep voids like far-off constellations. It lets out its cry, a sound that pierces bone, as did the cries of the children of the mad King Herod.
I want to run, but something stops me. Tell me, what am I supposed to do?
Seriously, I mean it, I’m asking you. What would you do? Would you unlock the chains and kneel beneath the wings of an angel as it takes flight back to the heavens? Or keep it imprisoned here, draw a vial of its blood, your own little taste of the divine?
Footsteps sneak up behind me, and comforting arms drape around my shoulders. Cilicia. She whispers in soft breath—
“As long as we look away, our sins stay clean.”