The Bloom War (Confinstabloom Rooky)

He wakes in a burning trench with a woman's laugh in his chest and no idea who he is. The firmware says CONFINSTABLOOM ROOKY. The war says he is a weapon.

Rooky is a war machine with a bloom of light behind his ribs, and the bloom casts anything he asks for at a price: every spell takes one real memory, and takes it for good. Seven Skulls rule the world of Kessarine by selling memory, hoarding it, mending it, rationing it and silencing it, and a ragged priest swears that Rooky is the only thing that can break them.

So he spends. A wet road. A name he has said a thousand times. The face of the only friend he ever made. Every win saves a city and leaves him emptier, and the laugh in his chest still has no face.

Then he learns who has been letting him win.

Thirty-seven days. Seven Skulls. One memory he promised he would never spend.

And in a repair shop in Ottawa, a man with a kitchen drawer he never opens has just switched on a drive that should not exist.

About the Author

Felix N.BBA.MA.QA'rb. writes fiction that treats ordinary communities as the site of extraordinary moral weight - small towns and mid-sized cities where a single formula, a single silence, or a single inherited decision turns out to carry the whole history of who a place has chosen to protect and who it has chosen to let go quiet.

Felix's work returns often to the same conviction: that injustice rarely announces itself as villainy. It arrives instead as policy, as process, as the reasonable-sounding choice a frightened, well-intentioned person makes under pressure - and that fiction's job is to make that choice visible again, long after the institutions built on top of it have learned to call it normal.

Felix lives close enough to water to never quite stop thinking about what it remembers.