The Tomb At Starocel

The silence around the Thracian stones was so intense that Jamie could hear his footfalls on the sandy soil. What rites had taken place up here, to cast their memories down the future so? Magic tingled in the very air, the landscape not brooding, but waiting to be awakened once more, holding its breath in expectation of life restored. Climbing carved stone steps scaled to something slightly more than human, he approached the dark profundity of the beehive tomb lurking in the heart of the hill. Seeking to understand, he wondered if he could be more than just another tourist.

From Guest Contributor Alastair Millar

Gothic Punishments

The idea was to keep piling bricks until you'd walled yourself into a tomb of your own making. It was all very Gothic, something straight out of Poe.

For Walter Rochester, however, the laying of bricks was not strictly a punishment. He found the monotonous labor helped to relieve his mind of thoughts of his unfulfilled existence and he embraced the endeavor. Where others resigned themselves with morbid indifference, Walter used the opportunity to indulge all of his latent fantasies.

His father had forbid him to attend architecture school, so his tomb would be a monument to those abandoned ambitions.

A Minor Transformation That Would Later Be Cited As Evidence Of His Divinity

He woke up from what felt like an intensely deep sleep. His first instinct was to feel his wounds. They were still there, but something felt different. It may not have been a big change, the kind that people would notice, but he was definitely aware of it himself.

He realized it was dark, and he felt his way around and decided he must be in some sort of cave. That's weird. He would have thought they'd have built some kind of tomb or something befitting his celebrity.

Ah, now he recognized what was different. He wasn't dead anymore. Cool.

The Daily Theme from Figment for March 21, 2012

Literature is full of stories about people who wake to find themselves in extreme altered physical states--a man wakes up as a giant insect; a girl grows antlers in her sleep; a poor weaver discovers that his head has been replaced with that of a donkey. But what happens when a person wakes up only slightly transformed? Write a story about a person who wakes one morning with a small physical change--big enough to feel profound to him or her, but subtle enough that it's not immediately apparent to others.