Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. We commissioned four authors to approach the theme of apocalypse through fiction

from the perspectives of past, present, and future.

Our second installment, Inc. is a story by Shian, an Icelandic poet and writer. He is the author

of the Blue Fox, from the mouth of the whale and Moonstone, the boy who never was. In this short

story, narrated by Shion, where you're introduced to Vardier's Finston, a charge of

affairs in London. Born with the gift of second sight, Valiur encounters supernatural beings

called the ink porn and witnesses their telling of an apocalyptic vision of the future.

You know, Inc. An essay by Valer Svinson Schatz Dafferz. When I was a child, I was sometimes led to think that I had the gift of second sight. It was never stated directly,

but I remember remarks such as, he's seeing something, the dear, or I wonder who he's listening

to now, the little one. I would then be regarded with a mix of interest and worry. That was in the days of the old

experimental society, when the city's elite still actively searched for the world beyond,

and attempts were made to approach the matter of the afterlife in a sensible manner.

Before the Society's Board was overrun by poets, pastors and speculators' wives,

and its name changed into the Psychical Research Association.

My parents were pioneers in that remarkable experimental activity.

My father was trained in law and my mother home taught in Latin and Greek, educated people, and spiritually minded.

Still, I have little memory of anything that might be called a transcendental experience.

At most of having once stood alone in the doorway of the dark dining room, looked into it and felt a presence in the shadow of the big cupboard where nothing should have been. Many people have similar memories from their

childhood. But from within the drawing room behind me, I heard my mother's voice say,

Well, now, it appears to me as if someone has made contact with him.

...