A unique mint of my tiny story, in version with specially commissioned art from Olesya Hupalo. If anyone buys this NFT, I will use the money to immediately commission more art from Olesya. She is that good.

Flood by Jamie Brindle

​When the icecaps melted, people were surprised. Not at the water that came pouring. Everyone had been expecting that. It was the flood of stories that took everyone off guard. Tales of woolly mammoths, of desperate tribes caught between the devil and the frigid blue sea, of trickster gods and their whole lost pantheons. They unthawed, came marching out of the icy wastes in which they had frozen solid whole ages of the world gone by. They wondered what we had done with the place in their absences. It was all very strange. Water had been expected, but how do you build psychic dikes to keep your mental ramparts from being overrun by tales frozen for ten thousand years? It was tricky. Minds were saturated, short-circuited; ran amok. People suffered. But then, the ancient stories had a terrible time adjusting to the modern world, too. Those wonderful old tales - each unique, each springing from some long-lost tribe or ancient, doughty people - were simply not prepared for 24/7 streaming services, for always-on-demand, for the ubiquity of franchises, for crossover event movies. They were not expecting lines of action figures, or T-shirt merchandising, nor for the endless need to promote and exploit themselves by appearing on soul-crushing reality TV. In the end, most of them decided it was too much bother, and went back into storage. Now they are sleeping again - the woolly-mammoth-stories, the lost-tribe-stories and the rest - resting still and silent in those gaping, hopeful vats of liquid nitrogen, lined up beside all those other Hollywood dreamers, waiting patiently for the dawn of a better day.

The End