Wait -- This Bit #10

Lines from the Elias Thorne Stories that have stuck

Sometimes a writing prompt escapes its creator.

Ian Patterson threw down a challenge to the fiction community: reclaim the mysteriously ubiquitous Elias Thorne by writing our own stories. And the fiction community answered the call like Rohan riding to Gondor’s beacons.

This week, I found myself lingering over three very different sentences that refused to leave me alone.

The Dancing Wing Blade, chapter 11: An Elias Thorne Tale
Alex Shifman

“...planting his blade through the heart of other Eliases would give him such a powerful rush... but now, it was like a small peck on the cheek from an Elias who won’t let you in their bed.”

This one made me laugh because I had absolutely no idea where it was going.

It starts as though Alex is about to describe the numbness that comes from killing hundreds of versions of yourself. You brace for something grand or philosophical... and then he veers right off a cliff!

It’s such a strange little image. Funny, obviously, but also oddly sad. We’ve all had moments where something that once felt exciting gradually lost its charge. Alex could have said exactly that. Instead, he reaches for a comparison that’s awkward, intimate, faintly pathetic... and somehow lands much closer to the feeling.

I think that’s why it stayed with me. It doesn’t just tell us Flitting Dragonfly has become desensitised. It lets us feel the weary disappointment of it.

Only Alex would describe the diminishing thrill of murdering alternate versions of yourself with an image that’s equal parts wistful and hilarious.

Elias Thorne: Vanlord of Broken Headlights
Guy Craig

Like the mural on his slider door, he said, and pointed to his windowless van: lattice-work-of-intentions, so fuck-all-colors and geometric symbols of darkness, dark houses, broken headlights.

The thing that struck me with this bit is how it refuses to resolve into a single image. It’s almost cubist. You’re handed fragments — a lattice, colours that somehow aren’t colours, geometric symbols, darkness, houses, broken headlights — and your brain keeps trying to assemble them into a coherent picture. But it can’t.

Which is exactly what standing in front of an actual mural often feels like. You don’t read it so much as experience it.

Then there’s “lattice-work-of-intentions.”

Which is gorgeous. Human purpose woven together until it becomes infrastructure, culture, art — an abstract idea given physical form.

And then Guy undercuts any temptation toward prettiness with “so fuck-all-colors.”

I cracked up at that. It’s simultaneously poetic and aggressively anti-poetic.

The Great Flood of Elias Thorne
Ian Patterson

“A wave that crests only to disappear into a wave that crests only to disappear into a wave that crests.”

Well, I couldn’t not include this piece by the man who started it all!

When I first read this, I just thought, “Oh, that’s clever.” The sentence becomes the thing it’s describing, cool cool cool cool. Your eyes keep travelling through it, one crest giving way to the next until you almost stop noticing where one ends and another begins.

Then over the last week or so, I’ve watched Elias Thorne stories spread through the fiction community here, and suddenly the sentence started meaning something else.

One story became another story, which became another story, which became another story. Every time I opened Substack there was another Elias. Different voices, genres, ideas... all on the same wave.

And that’s what I love about this sentence — it’s captures the strange way ideas move through people. They catch, they gather momentum, they crest, they disappear into the next person, who carries them somewhere new. Before long, nobody quite remembers where the wave began. They’re just in it.

I don’t know whether Ian intended any of that — maybe he just wrote a bloody good sentence about waves!

Either way, it turned out to describe the very thing he unleashed.

The Thousand Faces of Elias Thorne