elf land: the lost palaces
by uzwi
Eldranol the Elf Lord is wheeled to bed every night on a reinforced composite & titanium gurney. Two or three attendants lift the thick laps of flesh & lovingly clean out the sores down in the creamy, lardy folds where his genitals still nestle. He has lost some of his right foot to diabetes. The Queen left him 100 years ago, with her dwarf, for the North. But none of this will ever spoil his dream of finishing an ultra-marathon. At night in a secondary world of his secondary world the Elf Lord runs, barefoot & effortless, across the Great Erg Desert (see map), wearing only the traditional leather kirtle, while his favorite daughter keeps watch over his sleeping body with its faint, calming smells of ketones & antifungal cream. She’s a feisty urban vampire princess but her heart is so in the right place. She can’t help but wonder how things will go with them when the horde arrives at the gate next Wednesday. Tomorrow, in a final attempt to reach out to his people, the Elf Lord will feature kingdom-wide in the Don’t Do This To Yourself segment of Supersize vs Superskinny; while for the Princess it’s a Kickass Battle Looks last chance on QVC.
Image by Zali Krishna, from his Flickr
the m john harrison blog 
Nice picture of the Bert Weedon Memorial Cafe, Zali.
As a child I bought my Dungeons and Dragons product from a chain bookstore in a drab local mall. I’d sit and read the stuff while Mom shopped for clothes. Then we’d drive home, always passing a high, long, wide, crack-laced, weed-infiltrated cement embankment that shone with reflected sunlight. To this day when I think of secondary world fantasy I think of racks of dresses taller than myself, and the reflected light of urban blight.
So I’m enjoying these world mashups. Castle Greyskull there is closer to the real experience of fantasy nerdery than any Boris Vallejo calendar dares to suggest.
Oh stop it! (uzwi, not the others)
HE said I’d like this. And of course he was right.