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Reactor, March 2026

Presented as a traditional folktale from the fictional Alak Empire, “Tatterdemalion” is framed by an introductory scholarly apparatus explaining its cultural context before the story proper begins. The Alak Empire is a rigidly ordered civilization in which conformity and productivity are paramount virtues. The story’s protagonist, Temedy, is a stock figure in Alak folklore: the ne’er-do-well, a young woman of talent and curiosity who wastes her gifts through disaffection and daydreaming. She works as a copyist for the local calendary in the village of Sogtrul, sleeps in a loft above the offices, and spends her free hours wandering the countryside alone, reading documents she has no business reading and dreaming of something more.

One day, during one of her solitary rambles to an abandoned Zaman Wislin camp called the Cloister of Glowing Cores — a site she knows only through official records she has illicitly pored over — Temedy encounters a strange man named Obelizer. He is a mathete, an adherent of Zaman Wislin, a divinatory philosophy tolerated by the Empire. Obelizer is searching for a wooden document case he has lost, and enlists Temedy’s help in exchange for payment. She finds it almost immediately: inside is the Deed of Ilianeghis, a magical parchment covered in silver, red, and blue script, emanating an intoxicating fragrance. Without thinking, she steals it, concealing it in her bag, and lies to Obelizer about finding anything. He pays her three heavy gold coins anyway — smiling his unnerving closed-lipped smile — and departs. The coins leave a bruise over her heart.

The Deed, a work of the sly influence (a chaotic, entropic force underlying the Alak world), grants ownership rights to its holder over a place called Tulltillarna, a coastal town that Obelizer had mentioned in passing. Temedy becomes obsessed with the document, unable to stop reading it, and eventually resolves to travel to Tulltillarna and claim whatever it promises. The journey takes her three sleepless days and nights on foot to reach the sea, driven by feverish compulsion and paranoid fear of discovery.

When she finally finds Tulltillarna, she finds nothing but grass and the buried stone foundations of a town long since vanished. She collapses in grief. With no purpose left, she squats in an abandoned cottage nearby, doing odd jobs in the hamlet of Sluich Temnook to survive, returning each night to study the Deed by firelight. The Deed infiltrates her dreams. One morning she wakes with a vision of Tulltillarna restored — its spires, its streets, its bells — and in broad daylight she brings out the parchment and begins reading it aloud as an incantation, over and over, trying to speak the ruined city back into existence. She reads until she tastes blood, until her limbs go cold, until her vision fails entirely. A passing shepherd later finds her dead, her body drained of blood — and her head gone.

The story does not end with her death. The blood-streak she left never fades. A headless ghost in rags begins haunting the coast — singing, scavenging food, devouring gold, scattering blindness and fever among those who look at her too closely. She carries her voice in her satchel where her head once was. When authorities try to catch her, she collapses into a grey rag and blows back to the ruins of Tulltillarna, which cannot be entered because it no longer exists. Over time, Sluich Temnook empties out entirely. The story closes as a warning: if you hear the tatterdemalion singing, leave without looking back.

Themes include the danger of unsanctioned curiosity and desire, the costs of reaching beyond one’s station, the seductive power of magical artifacts, and the Alak ideology of order versus the chaos of the sly influence. The narrative voice is itself a folktale narrator — moralistic, sardonic, addressing the reader directly — which gives the story its distinctive tone.

Michael Cisco is an American writer, Deleuzian academic, teacher, and translator currently living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, winner of the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999. His novel The Great Lover was nominated for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel of the Year, and declared the Best Weird Novel of 2011 by the Weird Fiction Review. Other fiction includes the short story collections Secret Hours, ANTISOCIETIES, and Visiting Maze. His nonfiction book, Weird Fiction: A Genre Study, was nominated for a HWA Stoker award in 2023. He teaches at CUNY Hostos.