Dime Novels From Oblivion

Cheering crowds lined the street, and confetti rained from the windows
Medals gleamed on the broad chests of strapping straight-backed lads in uniforms creaseless and pressed.
In a smoked filled room just above the parade route, were the invalids.
No one on the street had any idea about the convent of mangled men were watching the procession from a dingy smoked filled room, looking out at the world from between closed blinds. Their ears were torn between the crashing cymbals and blaring horns of the marching band and the screams of men whose minds were permanently trapped in a waking nightmare; only death could end. The crowd below couldn’t hear their cries.
For the invalids, the parade was a morbid curiosity, maybe even a torment for some. Victory was a hollow word to an 18-year-old kid with a face melted by napalm.
The invalids were casualties of the war that had been too unfortunate to die. They were not to be commemorated with a field of ivory wite crosses, they were to be forgott…

Palden was born only eleven years ago was but his body a vessel for something infinite.  He was the sacred force that powered the quantum machinery of the cosmos in living form. It was proclaimed that behind the child's squinty eyes were the mind of the universe. That's why he was Emperor, a god wearing a man's flesh. The child's wiry body was adorned in imperial dress woven from fibers worth many times the lives of the subjects who crafted it. It was a flowing tapestry of gold and jade that incorporated designs to intricate they were almost hypnotic to the human eye.

 The godchild lived in a palace built on the eastern side of the highest summit that loomed over his imperial capital. The monument that would stand long after the demise of this latest mortal incarnation of the emperor was a reminder to the people who lived in its shadow he was always watching. Albeit it with vision blurred by a permanent stigmatism.

His official shrine was at the peak of his fortress. I…