Four stories for Priori
A few pieces of micro-fiction excerpted from the booklet I wrote for Priori's 2024 album This but More
In 2023, my friend Francis Latreille, who produces and performs music as Priori, asked me to write a series of micro-fiction stories for a booklet that would accompany his next album, which would later come to be called This but More.
To frame and guide the process, he prompted me by text message with various simple yet evocative ideas or mental images, all in the form of brief phrases like “someone placing something on an altar,” or “an animal licking its wound to heal.” The stories needed to be short and sweet, filling only the smallest possible space of a single page each, yet needed to support the album not simply as a piece of music, but as a multi-disciplinary exercise in world-building.
We had originally been brought together by a mutual love for weird and speculative fiction, yet we shared an intention to ensure that the stories conveyed a sense of the otherworldly without being limited to the conventions or aesthetic qualities of any one genre in particular. My biggest challenge was to engage in the kind of world-building that Francis was looking for while using as few words as possible, something that, given the notoriously verbose style of most world-heavy fantasy and science fiction, was no easy task.
In collaboration with Jesse Osborne-Lanthier on design duties and Benoit St-Jacques on illustration, what we ultimately came up with was a limited run of hand-bound booklets that I’m still very proud of — objects deceptively simple in presentation yet loaded with painstaking craft and care, from the minimalism of the stories themselves to the fine detail of the drawings and typography.
I was pleased to even see images and environments from the stories rendered in beautiful animation by Jack Anderson, which were used both in the video for the track “Wake” and live performance visuals during a string of tour dates following the album’s release.
Fast-forward to today and This but More is one year old, has won a 2025 Juno award for Electronic Album Of The Year, and for me, already holds tremendous staying power as a piece of work devoted to immersion and intentional listening — two things that are more difficult than ever to cultivate amid a music culture where singles take precedence over albums and short attention spans are par for the course. I’m still very proud to have been part of the project and the collaborative experience that brought it into the world.
While the booklet itself is long sold out, the album is still of course readily available in digital and vinyl formats here.
To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the album and booklet, I’m posting four of the eleven stories here, which have over time become my favorites. This may give some sense of the fiction that will appear on Paracosm, eventually, as I find the time…
Thanks for reading, I’ll hopefully have some new writing for you soon.
I. The Altars
It had taken half a century for dozens of shrines to sprout up near the tributary, built and visited by countless people as they flowed through the trade routes nearby. In half as much time thereafter, years of neglect and hostile weather had taken their toll, and Mahia watched what was once an interfaith garden become a landfill of stray votives and lost devotions.
The corrosive weight of that time was plainly visible — she could see it in the piles of things that had accumulated in vast quantities, from decaying food and flowers to valueless currency, once-precious objects, and in recent years, the litter of faithless travellers. One rainy evening, months after the final harvest of her farm, she said a prayer and placed an empty oyster shell on one of the piles. By then, it was all she had left.
—
II. Thick Like Pitch
The marsh, much like us, doesn’t understand who the foreigners are or what they want. We’ve waded its depths for generations. It knows our movements, our thoughts, what we taste like. It gives way to us like milk. For the foreigners, it holds tight and thick, like pitch. The language barrier is too deep for us to advise them, so all we do is watch.
They’ve tried with boats and even on foot, managing only a tiny distance per day. During a storm, they noticed that the marsh was flowing loosely in an area where lightning had struck. In hopes of inducing the same effect themselves, they’re using a system of spear-like probes to infuse the path before them with swells of electricity. We have no way to tell them that, for the marsh, this feels nothing like a lightning strike and amounts to little more than a gentle massage. We can hear it groaning.
—
IV. All Beasts of Healing
Before Keiko left for the mining colony, she sent me a letter that is, to date, the last I heard from her. She used to take her motorbike out to the controlled zones during the winter, often driving for a day at a time.
In the letter, she said she’d gone out to the site of the East Cathedral fire only days after it had happened. As she walked its perimeter, she came upon what she called an apparition — an injured dog curled up at the base of a camellia tree. It lay there licking a severe wound on its front leg. She described it as a muscular hound with a shimmering black coat and amber eyes, and had felt a temptation to collect one of the fallen bright-red flowers that were scattered around it, but was too afraid to move closer. Instead, she watched the snow fall on the ruins of the church. Before leaving, when she turned toward the dog once more, she was startled to see that it stood fully healed. It gazed at her for a moment before running off into the field behind the tree, shrinking away in what little light of dusk remained.
I was told that the letter was probably cursed and that I should burn it. I haven’t been able to, at least not until she sends me another.
—
VIII. In Florescence
Most of my thoughts have been lost, and I can feel just about everything that touches me.
Under the flattened mesh of grass blades are countless tiny fragments of plant debris, compacted together with organisms just as small — or even smaller — and imbued with a rich blend of gases and water. Somehow, it all speaks to me, through the skin of my back, in its strange, miniature language. Not long before now, I may have looked at it from afar and seen only silence and stillness, but I was wrong. Everything is moving and always has been, now collapsing into itself by imperceptible distances as gravity slowly pulls me against it all.
Beside me is the silhouette of a stranger. It’s squatting and hunching, facing away from me, providing me shade. A fine halo glows at its edges as sunlight flows towards us, cutting a stranger-shaped hole in the swirling blood-orange sky. It speaks just a few words:
Have you seen the flowers?
I say something and sit up, feeling the air move against my face as my head travels from the ground. The silhouette has picked a flower from a patch of weeds and is inspecting it with great care. It reaches for another, whose stem has only so far produced a bud. Once picked and brought closer, the bud unfurls and blooms into a flower, presenting its ashy blue petals and spiny white stamens. I do the same with one like it nearby, watching it bloom as I slowly draw it near.
Almost as if to respond, it holds me in its own gaze, and before long the remainder of my thoughts are lost among the curious organs that sprout from its centre.