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BRECK: Dead Delivery: Chapter Eight

BRECK: Dead Delivery

Chapter Eight — The Forgotten Ones

Prompt: Who are some underrated people in history? Tags: dailyprompt | Breck | Crestfall | Dead Delivery | Lumenvale

He found the collection happening behind the granary.

Not in the square, where someone might witness and remember. Not at the gate, where merchants came and went with their paperwork and their careful faces. Behind the granary, in the narrow service alley where the grain dust gathered in pale drifts along the base of the stone wall and the only light came from a single torch jammed into an iron bracket above the rear door. Private work. The kind of work that needed walls on three sides and only one way out.

Pelk was running it.

Breck had heard him before he’d seen him — a voice carrying the particular easy confidence of a man who had never once been made to answer for the volume of it. He stood with his back to the granary wall and his thumbs hooked in his belt and two men flanking him with the studied casualness of people trying to look incidental, and in front of him stood a grain merchant Breck had seen setting up his stall that morning — a compact, gray-haired man in his fifties who held his receipt ledger against his chest the way a person held something they expected to have taken from them.

The merchant’s name, Breck had learned from Pell’s careful accounting, was Holt. He had worked the Crestfall grain market for twenty-three years. His father had worked it before him. His son helped him on Thursdays.

He was one of perhaps thirty men and women in this town whose daily labor had built the prosperity that Voss had spent three years quietly dismantling — the actual architecture of the place, the people whose hands and knowledge and stubborn daily presence were the reason Crestfall had sound buildings and a full granary and roads worth maintaining. None of them had statues. None of them had their names on the magistrate’s seal. They had calluses and ledgers and the specific dignity of people who showed up regardless of what the day cost them.

Breck stepped into the alley.

Pelk saw him immediately — hard not to, at Breck’s scale in a confined space — and the easy confidence didn’t waver. If anything it broadened. He was a big man himself, Pelk, running to heaviness through the middle in the way of men who had been strong once and had since found easier ways to apply it. He had the face of someone who had learned early that size was a conversation-ender and had never needed to learn anything beyond that lesson.

“Courier,” he said. It wasn’t a greeting. It was a categorization.

“Evening,” Breck said. He looked at Holt. The merchant’s eyes moved to him once — a brief, careful flicker — and moved away. Saying nothing. Asking nothing. Having learned, over three years of Thursday evening collections, that asking things made them worse.

“Private business,” Pelk said. “Road’s back the way you came.”

“I know where the road is.” Breck didn’t move. He stood with his hands loose at his sides and his weight settled and his eyes moving across the alley with the unhurried thoroughness of a man taking inventory. Pelk. Two others — one on the left against the wall, one near the door. Holt between them and Breck. One exit. Torch height casting the near wall in amber and leaving the far corners in useful shadow.

He filed it all away. Took perhaps three seconds.

“You deaf?” Pelk said. The easy confidence had acquired an edge. He straightened off the wall, and the two men on either side of him shifted their weight in the instinctive, practiced way of people who had done this particular choreography before. “I said move on.”

“Holt,” Breck said, without looking at the merchant. “You can go.”

The alley went very still.

Holt didn’t move. He was frozen between the instruction and twenty-three years of learned behavior that said staying small was how you survived Thursday evenings in Crestfall, and the two pieces of knowledge were not resolving quickly.

“He’s not going anywhere,” Pelk said. “He owes a collection fee.”

“He paid his tariff at the gate. I’ve seen the receipts.” Breck looked at Pelk directly for the first time. “There is no collection fee.”

Something moved across Pelk’s face — not fear, not yet, something closer to the recalibration a man did when a situation turned out to weigh more than he’d estimated. He looked at Breck the way people looked at things they were trying to find the correct category for and failing.

Then he made the decision that men like Pelk always made, because it was the only decision their entire history had ever equipped them for.

He came off the wall and closed the distance fast, his right hand coming up in a wide swing built for spectacle rather than precision — the kind of blow designed to end conversations with people who didn’t know how to respond to it.

Breck was not one of those people.

He moved inside the arc of the swing before it had fully committed, a single step forward and left that made the fist pass close enough to disturb the air beside his ear. His right hand caught Pelk’s extended arm at the wrist, redirecting its momentum rather than stopping it — using the man’s own considerable mass as the instrument — and his left palm drove hard into Pelk’s elbow from underneath.

The sound was brief and conclusive.

Pelk’s forward motion carried him past Breck and into the granary wall face-first, his useless arm trailing, and the sound he made when he hit the stone was the sound of a large object being suddenly and completely convinced of something.

The man on the left had been moving since the swing had started — Breck had tracked him in his peripheral vision the whole time, the way you tracked the secondary threat when the primary one was still resolving. He was younger than Pelk, quicker, and he had a short cudgel that he’d produced from somewhere and was bringing around in a low horizontal sweep aimed at Breck’s legs.

Breck stepped over it.

Not dramatically — just a single economical elevation of his right foot, the cudgel passing beneath it, and then his right boot came back down on the man’s leading knee with the full and deliberate application of two hundred and eighty-five pounds of moving weight. The man went down and stayed down, making the quiet, concentrated sounds of someone devoting all available resources to a single overwhelming problem.

The third man — the one near the door — had not moved. He was standing exactly where he’d been standing when Breck had entered the alley, his hands slightly away from his body in the universal posture of a person communicating that they had made a decision and the decision was this.

Breck looked at him for a moment.

“Smart,” he said.

The man said nothing. His hands stayed where they were.

Pelk was on his knees against the granary wall, cradling his arm, his face having undergone a comprehensive revision of the worldview it had held four seconds ago. He was breathing in the loud, ragged way of someone whose body was working very hard at several things simultaneously.

Breck crouched in front of him.

“The collection fee,” he said. His voice was the same as it had been at the start of the conversation. Level. Not unkind. “Where does it go.”

Pelk looked at him with the wide, recalibrated eyes of a man holding a new and unwelcome understanding.

“Voss,” he said. It came out smaller than anything else he’d said in the alley.

“All of it.”

“All of it.”

Breck nodded once. Stood. Looked at Holt, who had not moved throughout any of this — who was standing precisely where he’d been standing when Breck had entered, holding his ledger against his chest with both hands, his face carrying the careful blankness of a man waiting to determine whether this was better or worse than what had come before.

“Go home,” Breck said. “Tell your son supper will be late.”

Holt looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at Pelk on the ground, and at the man holding his knee, and at the third man standing very still by the door.

He nodded once — a small motion, more breath than movement — and walked out of the alley without looking back.

Breck watched him go. Then he looked at the torch burning in its bracket above the door, casting its amber light across the grain-dust drifts and the walls that held no names and would hold none.

Twenty-three years, he thought. Holt had shown up for twenty-three years.

He picked up the satchel from where he’d set it against the wall before any of this had started — he always set it down before anything physical, because it was the job and the job didn’t get damaged — settled the strap across his chest, and touched the bracelet once.

Then he walked out of the alley and back into Crestfall’s quiet evening streets, and behind him Pelk was still making the sounds of a man with a new and permanent education.

☕ Enjoyed this story? Writing Lumenvale is how I pay my bills. If these stories are worth something to you, a $1 Ko-fi keeps the forge burning — and tells me this world is worth continuing. 👉 Buy Chadwick a coffee

BRECK: Dead Delivery: Chapter Eight

BRECK: Dead Delivery

Chapter Eight — The Forgotten Ones

Prompt: Who are some underrated people in history? Tags: dailyprompt | Breck | Crestfall | Dead Delivery | Lumenvale

He found the collection happening behind the granary.

Not in the square, where someone might witness and remember. Not at the gate, where merchants came and went with their paperwork and their careful faces. Behind the granary, in the narrow service alley where the grain dust gathered in pale drifts along the base of the stone wall and the only light came from a single torch jammed into an iron bracket above the rear door. Private work. The kind of work that needed walls on three sides and only one way out.

Pelk was running it.

Breck had heard him before he’d seen him — a voice carrying the particular easy confidence of a man who had never once been made to answer for the volume of it. He stood with his back to the granary wall and his thumbs hooked in his belt and two men flanking him with the studied casualness of people trying to look incidental, and in front of him stood a grain merchant Breck had seen setting up his stall that morning — a compact, gray-haired man in his fifties who held his receipt ledger against his chest the way a person held something they expected to have taken from them.

The merchant’s name, Breck had learned from Pell’s careful accounting, was Holt. He had worked the Crestfall grain market for twenty-three years. His father had worked it before him. His son helped him on Thursdays.

He was one of perhaps thirty men and women in this town whose daily labor had built the prosperity that Voss had spent three years quietly dismantling — the actual architecture of the place, the people whose hands and knowledge and stubborn daily presence were the reason Crestfall had sound buildings and a full granary and roads worth maintaining. None of them had statues. None of them had their names on the magistrate’s seal. They had calluses and ledgers and the specific dignity of people who showed up regardless of what the day cost them.

Breck stepped into the alley.

Pelk saw him immediately — hard not to, at Breck’s scale in a confined space — and the easy confidence didn’t waver. If anything it broadened. He was a big man himself, Pelk, running to heaviness through the middle in the way of men who had been strong once and had since found easier ways to apply it. He had the face of someone who had learned early that size was a conversation-ender and had never needed to learn anything beyond that lesson.

“Courier,” he said. It wasn’t a greeting. It was a categorization.

“Evening,” Breck said. He looked at Holt. The merchant’s eyes moved to him once — a brief, careful flicker — and moved away. Saying nothing. Asking nothing. Having learned, over three years of Thursday evening collections, that asking things made them worse.

“Private business,” Pelk said. “Road’s back the way you came.”

“I know where the road is.” Breck didn’t move. He stood with his hands loose at his sides and his weight settled and his eyes moving across the alley with the unhurried thoroughness of a man taking inventory. Pelk. Two others — one on the left against the wall, one near the door. Holt between them and Breck. One exit. Torch height casting the near wall in amber and leaving the far corners in useful shadow.

He filed it all away. Took perhaps three seconds.

“You deaf?” Pelk said. The easy confidence had acquired an edge. He straightened off the wall, and the two men on either side of him shifted their weight in the instinctive, practiced way of people who had done this particular choreography before. “I said move on.”

“Holt,” Breck said, without looking at the merchant. “You can go.”

The alley went very still.

Holt didn’t move. He was frozen between the instruction and twenty-three years of learned behavior that said staying small was how you survived Thursday evenings in Crestfall, and the two pieces of knowledge were not resolving quickly.

“He’s not going anywhere,” Pelk said. “He owes a collection fee.”

“He paid his tariff at the gate. I’ve seen the receipts.” Breck looked at Pelk directly for the first time. “There is no collection fee.”

Something moved across Pelk’s face — not fear, not yet, something closer to the recalibration a man did when a situation turned out to weigh more than he’d estimated. He looked at Breck the way people looked at things they were trying to find the correct category for and failing.

Then he made the decision that men like Pelk always made, because it was the only decision their entire history had ever equipped them for.

He came off the wall and closed the distance fast, his right hand coming up in a wide swing built for spectacle rather than precision — the kind of blow designed to end conversations with people who didn’t know how to respond to it.

Breck was not one of those people.

He moved inside the arc of the swing before it had fully committed, a single step forward and left that made the fist pass close enough to disturb the air beside his ear. His right hand caught Pelk’s extended arm at the wrist, redirecting its momentum rather than stopping it — using the man’s own considerable mass as the instrument — and his left palm drove hard into Pelk’s elbow from underneath.

The sound was brief and conclusive.

Pelk’s forward motion carried him past Breck and into the granary wall face-first, his useless arm trailing, and the sound he made when he hit the stone was the sound of a large object being suddenly and completely convinced of something.

The man on the left had been moving since the swing had started — Breck had tracked him in his peripheral vision the whole time, the way you tracked the secondary threat when the primary one was still resolving. He was younger than Pelk, quicker, and he had a short cudgel that he’d produced from somewhere and was bringing around in a low horizontal sweep aimed at Breck’s legs.

Breck stepped over it.

Not dramatically — just a single economical elevation of his right foot, the cudgel passing beneath it, and then his right boot came back down on the man’s leading knee with the full and deliberate application of two hundred and eighty-five pounds of moving weight. The man went down and stayed down, making the quiet, concentrated sounds of someone devoting all available resources to a single overwhelming problem.

The third man — the one near the door — had not moved. He was standing exactly where he’d been standing when Breck had entered the alley, his hands slightly away from his body in the universal posture of a person communicating that they had made a decision and the decision was this.

Breck looked at him for a moment.

“Smart,” he said.

The man said nothing. His hands stayed where they were.

Pelk was on his knees against the granary wall, cradling his arm, his face having undergone a comprehensive revision of the worldview it had held four seconds ago. He was breathing in the loud, ragged way of someone whose body was working very hard at several things simultaneously.

Breck crouched in front of him.

“The collection fee,” he said. His voice was the same as it had been at the start of the conversation. Level. Not unkind. “Where does it go.”

Pelk looked at him with the wide, recalibrated eyes of a man holding a new and unwelcome understanding.

“Voss,” he said. It came out smaller than anything else he’d said in the alley.

“All of it.”

“All of it.”

Breck nodded once. Stood. Looked at Holt, who had not moved throughout any of this — who was standing precisely where he’d been standing when Breck had entered, holding his ledger against his chest with both hands, his face carrying the careful blankness of a man waiting to determine whether this was better or worse than what had come before.

“Go home,” Breck said. “Tell your son supper will be late.”

Holt looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at Pelk on the ground, and at the man holding his knee, and at the third man standing very still by the door.

He nodded once — a small motion, more breath than movement — and walked out of the alley without looking back.

Breck watched him go. Then he looked at the torch burning in its bracket above the door, casting its amber light across the grain-dust drifts and the walls that held no names and would hold none.

Twenty-three years, he thought. Holt had shown up for twenty-three years.

He picked up the satchel from where he’d set it against the wall before any of this had started — he always set it down before anything physical, because it was the job and the job didn’t get damaged — settled the strap across his chest, and touched the bracelet once.

Then he walked out of the alley and back into Crestfall’s quiet evening streets, and behind him Pelk was still making the sounds of a man with a new and permanent education.

☕ Enjoyed this story? Writing Lumenvale is how I pay my bills. If these stories are worth something to you, a $1 Ko-fi keeps the forge burning — and tells me this world is worth continuing. 👉 Buy Chadwick a coffee

#PhantastikPrompts

13. Sportreporter fragen Sportler nach dem Spiel genau drei Fragen: Zwei Fragen zum Spiel und eine Frage zu einem Mitspieler. Führe für uns so ein Interview mit einem deiner Protagonisten. Du bist der Reporter.

Sport ist Mord. In meinen Büchern gibt es keinen. Und auch keine Sportreporter. Meine Charktere rennen so schon genug um ihr Leben. 😅

#phantastik #fantasy #darkfantasy
#literatur #bookstodon #autorenleben

The world map and setting for my #darkfantasy #novel!
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Dwaj Bracia

Skazani Na Los

Który Odrzucili

Lotrhic&Lorian

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Le dénouement de la première partie du Cycle du Dieu Noir est proche. j'ai programmé les 3 derniers épisodes aujourd'hui.

Vous avez déjà 9 épisodes à lire sur https://fantasy.aemarielle.com/ en attendant vendredi ! 😊

Au menu : érotisme, mystère, magie et aventure ! Un épisode par semaine jusqu'au 29 mai, avant une courte pause.

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BRECK Dead Delivery: Chapter Seven

BRECK: Dead Delivery

Chapter Seven — The Weight of Less

Prompt: What are the biggest benefits of minimalist living? Tags: dailyprompt | Breck | Crestfall | Dead Delivery | Lumenvale

He inventoried his possessions the way he did every few weeks — not from anxiety, but from discipline, the same discipline that had kept him breathing through four years of war and a decade of roads that didn’t care whether he made it to the next town or didn’t.

He did it on the floor of the inn room, the satchel open between his knees, each item removed and placed on the rough plank boards with the deliberate care of a man who understood that what you carried was a decision, not an accident.

The sealed reply document, his legitimate reason for being in Crestfall one day longer than planned. The oilskin packet against his chest — he’d moved that to the floor beside his knee, keeping it in his peripheral vision the way he kept everything important. A compass, worn smooth on the brass casing where his thumb had rested against it for ten years. A folding straight-edge. The stub of mapping chalk, slightly shorter now after Pell’s work on the riverside boulder. A money pouch, lighter than he preferred. A short-bladed knife, more tool than weapon, its edge maintained to a standard that would have satisfied his old commanding officer and would have baffled everyone else in the inn.

Flint. A length of waxed cord. A small tin of salve for the blister on his right heel that had been threatening to become a real problem since the hill road north of Millfield.

That was everything.

He looked at it arranged on the floor around him — the totality of what he owned and carried, spread across perhaps four square feet of plank boarding in a room that smelled of tallow and old timber. Another man might have found that inventory depressing. Breck had long since arrived at a different conclusion.

Everything on that floor was there because it had earned its place. Every item had been evaluated, found useful, kept — or found wanting and left behind in some previous inn room or roadside camp or post station along one of the hundred routes he’d run in the years since the war ended. The compass had replaced two inferior compasses. The knife had replaced a longer blade he’d carried for three years before acknowledging, with some difficulty, that its weight wasn’t justified by its use. The salve was new, added three weeks ago after the blister incident, because ignoring a blister until it became an infection was the kind of decision that got couriers killed in wet weather on long roads.

Nothing decorative. Nothing sentimental.

Except the bracelet, which wasn’t either of those things — or was both, in a way that didn’t fit any category he’d found for it.

He picked it up from the satchel strap where it rested and turned it in his fingers. Pale cord, woven tight by small hands from whatever had been available — grain stalks, roof grass, the kind of material a child in an occupied valley used because it was there and because the making of it was the point, not the material. It weighed almost nothing. It occupied almost no space.

It was the heaviest thing he owned.

He set it back on the strap. Began repacking.

The benefit of carrying little, he had learned, was not what most people assumed. They thought it was about freedom — the lightness of movement, the ease of departure, the romantic simplicity of a man with nothing to lose. There was some truth in that, but it was the surface truth, the part that looked clean from a distance.

The deeper benefit was clarity.

When everything you owned fit in a single satchel, you knew exactly what you had. You knew exactly what you could lose. You knew exactly what decisions were available to you at any given moment, because your resources were fully visible and fully accounted for — no hidden reserves, no forgotten assets, no comfortable surplus that let you avoid doing the difficult arithmetic.

It was the same quality he’d valued in Aldric Moss, without ever having met the man. A miller who kept careful records in a hand so neat it looked like architecture — who had known exactly what he had, exactly what was owed, exactly where the difference lived between the official number and the true one. That was not the habit of a man who avoided difficult arithmetic. That was the habit of a man who understood that clarity, however uncomfortable, was better than comfortable confusion.

Voss lived in comfortable confusion. Or rather — he created it deliberately, in everyone around him, because confusion was profitable and clarity was dangerous. The gap between what merchants paid at the gate and what the official ledger recorded existed in the space of that confusion, fed by it, protected by it. Men like Voss understood instinctively that a town which couldn’t see its own numbers couldn’t resist what was being done with them.

Breck cinched the satchel closed. Stood.

The room was as he’d found it — bed, chair, table, the cold hearth that he hadn’t bothered to light because a man who was leaving in the morning had no use for a fire laid the night before. He’d slept in his cloak, which was efficient, and eaten the bread and cold meat the innkeeper had left on his table without asking, which had been kind of her.

He owed her for that. He’d added it to the accounting.

Dawn came gray and thin through the single window, barely distinguishable from the night it was replacing, the sky the color of old pewter above Crestfall’s wet rooftops. The town was already moving — the sounds of it filtering up through the floorboards, the low voices of the innkeeper and her morning staff, the distant iron ring of a cart on cobblestone, the particular quality of silence from the direction of the magistrate’s office that meant nothing was happening there yet.

The third bell had rung twice since midnight. Regular as a heartbeat. Efficient as a threat.

He went to the window and looked out at the square below. Eleven stalls setting up in the gray morning light, the same eleven, the vendors working with their heads down and their hands quick, operating with the spare economy of people who had stripped their days down to the essential and left everything else — complaint, conversation, the small indulgences of ordinary life — somewhere behind the threshold of survival. They hadn’t chosen that economy. It had been imposed on them from outside, methodically, over three years of climbing tariffs and disappearing neighbors and bells that rang on schedule to remind everyone what was at stake.

The benefit of carrying little, he had said to himself once, is that you know exactly what you have.

The benefit of taking everything from people, he understood now, was the same thing seen from the other side of the ledger. Strip a town down far enough and it lost track of what it had been before the stripping — lost the muscle memory of prosperity, the instinct for resistance, the simple knowledge that things had once been different and could be different again.

Voss hadn’t just taken money. He’d taken inventory.

Breck picked up his satchel. Settled the strap across his chest. Touched the bracelet once, the old reflex, the checking without naming.

He needed three things this morning. His reply document from the magistrate’s office. A conversation with the innkeeper about what she was willing to risk. And another look at Pell’s map, which he’d memorized but wanted to walk in daylight before he committed to anything that couldn’t be undone.

He went downstairs.

The innkeeper was at the hearth, the fire built up properly now, the common room filling slowly with the smell of bread and the sound of the morning’s first customers settling into their chairs with the careful movements of people who had learned not to make themselves conspicuous. She looked up when he came down. Read his face the way she’d been reading faces across that bar for twenty years.

She poured him a cup without being asked and set it on the end of the bar where he preferred to stand.

“You’re still here,” she said.

“Thought I’d stay another day.” He picked up the cup. “If the room’s available.”

She held his gaze for a moment. Something moved through her expression — not surprise, not quite relief, but the particular stillness of a person absorbing news they had told themselves not to hope for.

“It’s available,” she said.

Breck drank his tea and watched the gray morning deepen toward day, and thought about what it cost to carry nothing you didn’t need — and what it meant to stay anyway.

☕ Enjoyed this story? Writing Lumenvale is how I pay my bills. If these stories are worth something to you, a $1 Ko-fi keeps the forge burning — and tells me this world is worth continuing. 👉 Buy Chadwick a coffee

BRECK Dead Delivery: Chapter Seven

BRECK: Dead Delivery

Chapter Seven — The Weight of Less

Prompt: What are the biggest benefits of minimalist living? Tags: dailyprompt | Breck | Crestfall | Dead Delivery | Lumenvale

He inventoried his possessions the way he did every few weeks — not from anxiety, but from discipline, the same discipline that had kept him breathing through four years of war and a decade of roads that didn’t care whether he made it to the next town or didn’t.

He did it on the floor of the inn room, the satchel open between his knees, each item removed and placed on the rough plank boards with the deliberate care of a man who understood that what you carried was a decision, not an accident.

The sealed reply document, his legitimate reason for being in Crestfall one day longer than planned. The oilskin packet against his chest — he’d moved that to the floor beside his knee, keeping it in his peripheral vision the way he kept everything important. A compass, worn smooth on the brass casing where his thumb had rested against it for ten years. A folding straight-edge. The stub of mapping chalk, slightly shorter now after Pell’s work on the riverside boulder. A money pouch, lighter than he preferred. A short-bladed knife, more tool than weapon, its edge maintained to a standard that would have satisfied his old commanding officer and would have baffled everyone else in the inn.

Flint. A length of waxed cord. A small tin of salve for the blister on his right heel that had been threatening to become a real problem since the hill road north of Millfield.

That was everything.

He looked at it arranged on the floor around him — the totality of what he owned and carried, spread across perhaps four square feet of plank boarding in a room that smelled of tallow and old timber. Another man might have found that inventory depressing. Breck had long since arrived at a different conclusion.

Everything on that floor was there because it had earned its place. Every item had been evaluated, found useful, kept — or found wanting and left behind in some previous inn room or roadside camp or post station along one of the hundred routes he’d run in the years since the war ended. The compass had replaced two inferior compasses. The knife had replaced a longer blade he’d carried for three years before acknowledging, with some difficulty, that its weight wasn’t justified by its use. The salve was new, added three weeks ago after the blister incident, because ignoring a blister until it became an infection was the kind of decision that got couriers killed in wet weather on long roads.

Nothing decorative. Nothing sentimental.

Except the bracelet, which wasn’t either of those things — or was both, in a way that didn’t fit any category he’d found for it.

He picked it up from the satchel strap where it rested and turned it in his fingers. Pale cord, woven tight by small hands from whatever had been available — grain stalks, roof grass, the kind of material a child in an occupied valley used because it was there and because the making of it was the point, not the material. It weighed almost nothing. It occupied almost no space.

It was the heaviest thing he owned.

He set it back on the strap. Began repacking.

The benefit of carrying little, he had learned, was not what most people assumed. They thought it was about freedom — the lightness of movement, the ease of departure, the romantic simplicity of a man with nothing to lose. There was some truth in that, but it was the surface truth, the part that looked clean from a distance.

The deeper benefit was clarity.

When everything you owned fit in a single satchel, you knew exactly what you had. You knew exactly what you could lose. You knew exactly what decisions were available to you at any given moment, because your resources were fully visible and fully accounted for — no hidden reserves, no forgotten assets, no comfortable surplus that let you avoid doing the difficult arithmetic.

It was the same quality he’d valued in Aldric Moss, without ever having met the man. A miller who kept careful records in a hand so neat it looked like architecture — who had known exactly what he had, exactly what was owed, exactly where the difference lived between the official number and the true one. That was not the habit of a man who avoided difficult arithmetic. That was the habit of a man who understood that clarity, however uncomfortable, was better than comfortable confusion.

Voss lived in comfortable confusion. Or rather — he created it deliberately, in everyone around him, because confusion was profitable and clarity was dangerous. The gap between what merchants paid at the gate and what the official ledger recorded existed in the space of that confusion, fed by it, protected by it. Men like Voss understood instinctively that a town which couldn’t see its own numbers couldn’t resist what was being done with them.

Breck cinched the satchel closed. Stood.

The room was as he’d found it — bed, chair, table, the cold hearth that he hadn’t bothered to light because a man who was leaving in the morning had no use for a fire laid the night before. He’d slept in his cloak, which was efficient, and eaten the bread and cold meat the innkeeper had left on his table without asking, which had been kind of her.

He owed her for that. He’d added it to the accounting.

Dawn came gray and thin through the single window, barely distinguishable from the night it was replacing, the sky the color of old pewter above Crestfall’s wet rooftops. The town was already moving — the sounds of it filtering up through the floorboards, the low voices of the innkeeper and her morning staff, the distant iron ring of a cart on cobblestone, the particular quality of silence from the direction of the magistrate’s office that meant nothing was happening there yet.

The third bell had rung twice since midnight. Regular as a heartbeat. Efficient as a threat.

He went to the window and looked out at the square below. Eleven stalls setting up in the gray morning light, the same eleven, the vendors working with their heads down and their hands quick, operating with the spare economy of people who had stripped their days down to the essential and left everything else — complaint, conversation, the small indulgences of ordinary life — somewhere behind the threshold of survival. They hadn’t chosen that economy. It had been imposed on them from outside, methodically, over three years of climbing tariffs and disappearing neighbors and bells that rang on schedule to remind everyone what was at stake.

The benefit of carrying little, he had said to himself once, is that you know exactly what you have.

The benefit of taking everything from people, he understood now, was the same thing seen from the other side of the ledger. Strip a town down far enough and it lost track of what it had been before the stripping — lost the muscle memory of prosperity, the instinct for resistance, the simple knowledge that things had once been different and could be different again.

Voss hadn’t just taken money. He’d taken inventory.

Breck picked up his satchel. Settled the strap across his chest. Touched the bracelet once, the old reflex, the checking without naming.

He needed three things this morning. His reply document from the magistrate’s office. A conversation with the innkeeper about what she was willing to risk. And another look at Pell’s map, which he’d memorized but wanted to walk in daylight before he committed to anything that couldn’t be undone.

He went downstairs.

The innkeeper was at the hearth, the fire built up properly now, the common room filling slowly with the smell of bread and the sound of the morning’s first customers settling into their chairs with the careful movements of people who had learned not to make themselves conspicuous. She looked up when he came down. Read his face the way she’d been reading faces across that bar for twenty years.

She poured him a cup without being asked and set it on the end of the bar where he preferred to stand.

“You’re still here,” she said.

“Thought I’d stay another day.” He picked up the cup. “If the room’s available.”

She held his gaze for a moment. Something moved through her expression — not surprise, not quite relief, but the particular stillness of a person absorbing news they had told themselves not to hope for.

“It’s available,” she said.

Breck drank his tea and watched the gray morning deepen toward day, and thought about what it cost to carry nothing you didn’t need — and what it meant to stay anyway.

☕ Enjoyed this story? Writing Lumenvale is how I pay my bills. If these stories are worth something to you, a $1 Ko-fi keeps the forge burning — and tells me this world is worth continuing. 👉 Buy Chadwick a coffee

#PhantastikPrompts

12. Wenn dein Protagonist Langeweile hätte: Womit würde er sich die Zeit vertreiben?

Edward besiegt Langeweile mit Alkohol, Nikotin und Sex. Wer auf eine harmlose Antwort gehofft hat wird definitiv enttäuscht. 😅

#phantastik #fantasy #darkfantasy
#literatur #bookstodon #autorenleben

Dire Bound (The Wolves of Ruin) "If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my twenty-three years alive, it’s this: women in pain give men confidence" Sale: $21.99 to $1.99 by Sable Sorensen Rating: 4.6/5 (57,306 Reviews) #romantasy #wolves #bonding #trials #darkfantasy #booksky #books #slowburn

Dire Bound (The Wolves of Ruin...

:bugcat_fire: Harvester Woods :bugcat_fire:

People avoid this deep forest that is home to towering trees and the old demons of Persevera, but not the Greenscouts. Greenscouts often come here to forage. Over thousands of years, they have learned how to survive without engaging in combat, because there is no chance of winning against the old demons of Persevera.

#worldbuilding #art #digitalart #drawing #mastoart #lore #environmentart #conceptart #darkfantasy #fantasyart

:bugcat_fire: Harvester Woods :bugcat_fire:

People avoid this deep forest that is home to towering trees and the old demons of Persevera, but not the Greenscouts. Greenscouts often come here to forage. Over thousands of years, they have learned how to survive without engaging in combat, because there is no chance of winning against the old demons of Persevera.

#worldbuilding #art #digitalart #drawing #mastoart #lore #environmentart #conceptart #darkfantasy #fantasyart

BRECK: Dead Delivery: Chapter Six

BRECK: Dead Delivery

Chapter Six — What Boys Are Made Of

Prompt: What’s a thing you were completely obsessed with as a kid? Tags: dailyprompt | Breck | Crestfall | Dead Delivery | Lumenvale

The boy found him at the river.

Breck had come down to the bank after collecting his document — the reply sealed and tucked into the satchel, his official reason for being in Crestfall now fully discharged — and he’d stood at the water’s edge for a while, watching the Calwick move. Rivers were good for thinking. They didn’t require anything from you. They just kept going, which was occasionally the most useful thing in the world to watch.

He heard the footsteps before he saw the boy — light and quick on the gravel bank, the particular rhythm of someone trying to look like they hadn’t been following him for three streets. He didn’t turn around. He waited until the footsteps stopped a careful distance behind him, and then he waited a little longer, because patience was instructive.

“You were at the miller’s house,” the boy said finally.

“I was.”

“I saw you go in.” A pause. “I see most things.”

Breck turned then. The boy was twelve, maybe thirteen — the same one from the cooperage step, brown-haired and serious-faced, with river mud on his boots and the look of someone who had appointed himself to a task without being asked. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets and his chin slightly forward, projecting a confidence his eyes hadn’t quite caught up to yet.

“What’s your name,” Breck said.

“Pell.”

“Your father runs the cooperage.”

Something moved across the boy’s face — brief, controlled, gone quickly. “Ran it.”

Breck turned back to the river. After a moment he sat down on a flat boulder at the bank’s edge, which brought him closer to the boy’s eye level, and he watched the current move around a submerged stone in the middle of the channel, the water dividing and reforming downstream as though the interruption had never happened.

Pell came and stood beside him, not sitting, still maintaining the posture of someone who hadn’t decided yet whether this was a conversation or a surveillance operation.

“What do you want to know,” Breck said.

“What she gave you. In the house.” The boy’s voice was careful and direct. “Sela. What she gave you.”

“Something that belonged to her husband.”

“The records.”

Breck looked at him sidelong. The boy met his gaze without flinching, the way he’d done in the square — that old patience, that stillness that didn’t belong on a young face. Up close, it was even more apparent. Whatever had made Pell serious had made him serious all the way through, not just on the surface.

“You knew about them,” Breck said.

“Aldric told me.” A beat. “Before. He said if anything happened to him, the records were behind the fireback. He said I should tell someone useful eventually.” The boy’s jaw tightened slightly. “I’ve been waiting fourteen months for someone useful.”

The river moved between them and the far bank. A heron stood motionless in the shallows downstream, one leg raised, a creature built entirely around the discipline of waiting.

“How did you know your father’s cooperage figures into this,” Breck said.

Pell was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice had lost some of its careful construction — not broken, just worn thinner, the way a path wore thin where feet passed most often.

“Papa used to make barrels for the merchants coming off the river. Good barrels, tight seams, the kind that lasted. He had more work than he could handle.” He paused. “Then Voss changed the tariffs on river goods. Merchants started moving their routes inland, away from Crestfall’s landing. Less river traffic meant less cargo meant less need for barrels.” He said it with the flat precision of a child who had listened to adults explain something terrible to each other enough times that he’d memorized the shape of it. “Half days since spring. By summer it’ll be no days.”

“And your father.”

“He doesn’t say much anymore.” Pell picked up a flat stone from the bank and turned it in his fingers without throwing it. “He sits mostly.”

The heron struck — a motion so fast and certain it seemed to happen between moments, there and then not there, the surface of the water barely disturbed. It stood again with something silver in its beak, tilted its head back, and was still once more.

Breck watched it. Thought about a grain farm on the Lumenvale outskirts. About a boy of perhaps ten who had developed a consuming obsession with the way rivers moved — specifically with the way water found paths around obstacles, the patient, indifferent geometry of it, how it never forced and never stopped and always arrived eventually at the same place. He’d spent entire summer afternoons at the creek behind his family’s property, building small dams from stone and mud and watching the water work around them. His mother had called it a waste of time. His father had called it useful thinking and left him to it.

He hadn’t thought about that creek in years.

“What were you obsessed with,” Pell said, unexpectedly. “When you were my age.”

Breck glanced at him. The boy was watching the heron with the same focused attention he brought to everything, but the question had been genuine — curious in the way children were curious when they’d decided to trust someone, testing the texture of a person through small revelations.

“Rivers,” Breck said. “How they moved around things.”

Pell considered this. “That’s an odd thing to be obsessed with.”

“What were you?”

The boy almost smiled — a flicker, quickly suppressed, the way smiles went when you’d been serious for a long time and weren’t sure they were still allowed. “Maps. I used to draw maps of everywhere I’d been. Roads, buildings, which houses had dogs, where you could move without being seen.” He paused. “Crestfall mostly, since I haven’t been anywhere else. But I know every way in and out of this town. Every alley. Every back gate.” He set the stone down without throwing it. “Every time the magistrate’s men change their route.”

Breck was quiet for a moment.

He looked at the boy — at the serious face and the mud-caked boots and the hands that had been drawing maps of this town for years, cataloguing it the way Breck had catalogued the river, the way the heart catalogued the things it needed to survive. Twelve years old, his father’s cooperage dying, his town hollowed out from the inside, and he’d spent fourteen months waiting for someone useful to arrive.

Breck reached into the satchel. Not for the oilskin packet — he kept that against his ribs, close and warm. For the secondary pouch near the bottom, where he kept the tools of his trade: a compass, a folding straight-edge, a stub of mapping chalk he used for marking routes on stone when ink was unavailable.

He held out the chalk.

Pell looked at it for a long moment, then at Breck’s face.

“The magistrate’s men,” Breck said. “Their evening route. Every detail you know. I want it drawn.”

The boy took the chalk.

He drew without hesitation — the square, the side streets, the rear alley behind the magistrate’s office, the stable yard where the horses were kept, the two positions he’d identified where guards stood after the third bell, the gap in the pattern on the west side of the building where the coverage went thin between the second and third watches. He drew with the focused pleasure of someone deploying a skill they’d been waiting to use, the map emerging from the flat stone’s surface in clean, sure lines.

When he was done he looked up. The almost-smile came back, and this time it stayed a moment longer before retreating.

“You’re going to fix it,” Pell said. It was not quite a question.

Breck looked at the map. Then at the river, still moving with its patient, indifferent certainty around everything in its path.

“I’m going to try,” he said.

He adjusted the satchel strap across his chest. The bracelet caught a pale slip of winter light, small and faded, saying nothing.

He stood.

☕ Enjoyed this story? Writing Lumenvale is how I pay my bills. If these stories are worth something to you, a $1 Ko-fi keeps the forge burning — and tells me this world is worth continuing. 👉 Buy Chadwick a coffee

BRECK: Dead Delivery: Chapter Six

BRECK: Dead Delivery

Chapter Six — What Boys Are Made Of

Prompt: What’s a thing you were completely obsessed with as a kid? Tags: dailyprompt | Breck | Crestfall | Dead Delivery | Lumenvale

The boy found him at the river.

Breck had come down to the bank after collecting his document — the reply sealed and tucked into the satchel, his official reason for being in Crestfall now fully discharged — and he’d stood at the water’s edge for a while, watching the Calwick move. Rivers were good for thinking. They didn’t require anything from you. They just kept going, which was occasionally the most useful thing in the world to watch.

He heard the footsteps before he saw the boy — light and quick on the gravel bank, the particular rhythm of someone trying to look like they hadn’t been following him for three streets. He didn’t turn around. He waited until the footsteps stopped a careful distance behind him, and then he waited a little longer, because patience was instructive.

“You were at the miller’s house,” the boy said finally.

“I was.”

“I saw you go in.” A pause. “I see most things.”

Breck turned then. The boy was twelve, maybe thirteen — the same one from the cooperage step, brown-haired and serious-faced, with river mud on his boots and the look of someone who had appointed himself to a task without being asked. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets and his chin slightly forward, projecting a confidence his eyes hadn’t quite caught up to yet.

“What’s your name,” Breck said.

“Pell.”

“Your father runs the cooperage.”

Something moved across the boy’s face — brief, controlled, gone quickly. “Ran it.”

Breck turned back to the river. After a moment he sat down on a flat boulder at the bank’s edge, which brought him closer to the boy’s eye level, and he watched the current move around a submerged stone in the middle of the channel, the water dividing and reforming downstream as though the interruption had never happened.

Pell came and stood beside him, not sitting, still maintaining the posture of someone who hadn’t decided yet whether this was a conversation or a surveillance operation.

“What do you want to know,” Breck said.

“What she gave you. In the house.” The boy’s voice was careful and direct. “Sela. What she gave you.”

“Something that belonged to her husband.”

“The records.”

Breck looked at him sidelong. The boy met his gaze without flinching, the way he’d done in the square — that old patience, that stillness that didn’t belong on a young face. Up close, it was even more apparent. Whatever had made Pell serious had made him serious all the way through, not just on the surface.

“You knew about them,” Breck said.

“Aldric told me.” A beat. “Before. He said if anything happened to him, the records were behind the fireback. He said I should tell someone useful eventually.” The boy’s jaw tightened slightly. “I’ve been waiting fourteen months for someone useful.”

The river moved between them and the far bank. A heron stood motionless in the shallows downstream, one leg raised, a creature built entirely around the discipline of waiting.

“How did you know your father’s cooperage figures into this,” Breck said.

Pell was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice had lost some of its careful construction — not broken, just worn thinner, the way a path wore thin where feet passed most often.

“Papa used to make barrels for the merchants coming off the river. Good barrels, tight seams, the kind that lasted. He had more work than he could handle.” He paused. “Then Voss changed the tariffs on river goods. Merchants started moving their routes inland, away from Crestfall’s landing. Less river traffic meant less cargo meant less need for barrels.” He said it with the flat precision of a child who had listened to adults explain something terrible to each other enough times that he’d memorized the shape of it. “Half days since spring. By summer it’ll be no days.”

“And your father.”

“He doesn’t say much anymore.” Pell picked up a flat stone from the bank and turned it in his fingers without throwing it. “He sits mostly.”

The heron struck — a motion so fast and certain it seemed to happen between moments, there and then not there, the surface of the water barely disturbed. It stood again with something silver in its beak, tilted its head back, and was still once more.

Breck watched it. Thought about a grain farm on the Lumenvale outskirts. About a boy of perhaps ten who had developed a consuming obsession with the way rivers moved — specifically with the way water found paths around obstacles, the patient, indifferent geometry of it, how it never forced and never stopped and always arrived eventually at the same place. He’d spent entire summer afternoons at the creek behind his family’s property, building small dams from stone and mud and watching the water work around them. His mother had called it a waste of time. His father had called it useful thinking and left him to it.

He hadn’t thought about that creek in years.

“What were you obsessed with,” Pell said, unexpectedly. “When you were my age.”

Breck glanced at him. The boy was watching the heron with the same focused attention he brought to everything, but the question had been genuine — curious in the way children were curious when they’d decided to trust someone, testing the texture of a person through small revelations.

“Rivers,” Breck said. “How they moved around things.”

Pell considered this. “That’s an odd thing to be obsessed with.”

“What were you?”

The boy almost smiled — a flicker, quickly suppressed, the way smiles went when you’d been serious for a long time and weren’t sure they were still allowed. “Maps. I used to draw maps of everywhere I’d been. Roads, buildings, which houses had dogs, where you could move without being seen.” He paused. “Crestfall mostly, since I haven’t been anywhere else. But I know every way in and out of this town. Every alley. Every back gate.” He set the stone down without throwing it. “Every time the magistrate’s men change their route.”

Breck was quiet for a moment.

He looked at the boy — at the serious face and the mud-caked boots and the hands that had been drawing maps of this town for years, cataloguing it the way Breck had catalogued the river, the way the heart catalogued the things it needed to survive. Twelve years old, his father’s cooperage dying, his town hollowed out from the inside, and he’d spent fourteen months waiting for someone useful to arrive.

Breck reached into the satchel. Not for the oilskin packet — he kept that against his ribs, close and warm. For the secondary pouch near the bottom, where he kept the tools of his trade: a compass, a folding straight-edge, a stub of mapping chalk he used for marking routes on stone when ink was unavailable.

He held out the chalk.

Pell looked at it for a long moment, then at Breck’s face.

“The magistrate’s men,” Breck said. “Their evening route. Every detail you know. I want it drawn.”

The boy took the chalk.

He drew without hesitation — the square, the side streets, the rear alley behind the magistrate’s office, the stable yard where the horses were kept, the two positions he’d identified where guards stood after the third bell, the gap in the pattern on the west side of the building where the coverage went thin between the second and third watches. He drew with the focused pleasure of someone deploying a skill they’d been waiting to use, the map emerging from the flat stone’s surface in clean, sure lines.

When he was done he looked up. The almost-smile came back, and this time it stayed a moment longer before retreating.

“You’re going to fix it,” Pell said. It was not quite a question.

Breck looked at the map. Then at the river, still moving with its patient, indifferent certainty around everything in its path.

“I’m going to try,” he said.

He adjusted the satchel strap across his chest. The bracelet caught a pale slip of winter light, small and faded, saying nothing.

He stood.

☕ Enjoyed this story? Writing Lumenvale is how I pay my bills. If these stories are worth something to you, a $1 Ko-fi keeps the forge burning — and tells me this world is worth continuing. 👉 Buy Chadwick a coffee

Mooslande 3 wirft seine Schatten voraus!
Mooslande 3 is on the horizon!
#Mooslande #bookstodon #booksky #writingcommunity #Büchertipp #Bücher #darkfantasy #Eigenwerbung #Fantasyromane #fantasy #Fantasie #Lesetipp
🇬🇧 im ALT-Text!

🕹️ Title: Flare: Empyrean Campaign
🦊️ Idea: A libre ARPG on a dark fantasy theme
🏡️ https://flarerpg.org/mods/flare-empyrean/
🐣️ https://github.com/flareteam/
🔖 #LinuxGaming #Flagship #ARPG #DarkFantasy
📦️ #Libre #Arch #RPM #Deb #Flatpak #AppIm
📕️ https://lebottinlinux.vps.a-lec.org/LO.html

🥁️ Update: 1.15
🕵‍ 1.15: 🙏️⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
⚗️ Major release(Stable)🍎️
📌️ Changes: https://flarerpg.org/2026/05/03/flare-1-15/
🦣️ From: https://mastodon.social/@holarse/116545080259069781

💥️🏝️1.15 https://www.youtube.com/embed/rj7XfoCERK4
🐹️ https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ot1QU6PokME
🐧https://www.youtube.com/embed/c9SdhACeEzQ

🕹️ Title: Flare: Empyrean Campaign
🦊️ Idea: A libre ARPG on a dark fantasy theme
🏡️ https://flarerpg.org/mods/flare-empyrean/
🐣️ https://github.com/flareteam/
🔖 #LinuxGaming #Flagship #ARPG #DarkFantasy
📦️ #Libre #Arch #RPM #Deb #Flatpak #AppIm
📕️ https://lebottinlinux.vps.a-lec.org/LO.html

🥁️ Update: 1.15
🕵‍ 1.15: 🙏️⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
⚗️ Major release(Stable)🍎️
📌️ Changes: https://flarerpg.org/2026/05/03/flare-1-15/
🦣️ From: https://mastodon.social/@holarse/116545080259069781

💥️🏝️1.15 https://www.youtube.com/embed/rj7XfoCERK4
🐹️ https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ot1QU6PokME
🐧https://www.youtube.com/embed/c9SdhACeEzQ

🕹️ Title: Flare: Empyrean Campaign
🦊️ Idea: A libre ARPG on a dark fantasy theme
🏡️ https://flarerpg.org/mods/flare-empyrean/
🐣️ https://github.com/flareteam/
🔖 #LinuxGaming #Flagship #ARPG #DarkFantasy
📦️ #Libre #Arch #RPM #Deb #Flatpak #AppIm
📕️ https://lebottinlinux.vps.a-lec.org/LO.html

🥁️ Update: 1.15
🕵‍ 1.15: 🙏️⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
⚗️ Major release(Stable)🍎️
📌️ Changes: https://flarerpg.org/2026/05/03/flare-1-15/
🦣️ From: https://mastodon.social/@holarse/116545080259069781

💥️🏝️1.15 https://www.youtube.com/embed/rj7XfoCERK4
🐹️ https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ot1QU6PokME
🐧https://www.youtube.com/embed/c9SdhACeEzQ

🕹️ Title: Flare: Empyrean Campaign
🦊️ Idea: A libre ARPG on a dark fantasy theme
🏡️ https://flarerpg.org/mods/flare-empyrean/
🐣️ https://github.com/flareteam/
🔖 #LinuxGaming #Flagship #ARPG #DarkFantasy
📦️ #Libre #Arch #RPM #Deb #Flatpak #AppIm
📕️ https://lebottinlinux.vps.a-lec.org/LO.html

🥁️ Update: 1.15
🕵‍ 1.15: 🙏️⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
⚗️ Major release(Stable)🍎️
📌️ Changes: https://flarerpg.org/2026/05/03/flare-1-15/
🦣️ From: https://mastodon.social/@holarse/116545080259069781

💥️🏝️1.15 https://www.youtube.com/embed/rj7XfoCERK4
🐹️ https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ot1QU6PokME
🐧https://www.youtube.com/embed/c9SdhACeEzQ

🕹️ Title: Flare: Empyrean Campaign
🦊️ Idea: A libre ARPG on a dark fantasy theme
🏡️ https://flarerpg.org/mods/flare-empyrean/
🐣️ https://github.com/flareteam/
🔖 #LinuxGaming #Flagship #ARPG #DarkFantasy
📦️ #Libre #Arch #RPM #Deb #Flatpak #AppIm
📕️ https://lebottinlinux.vps.a-lec.org/LO.html

🥁️ Update: 1.15
🕵‍ 1.15: 🙏️⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
⚗️ Major release(Stable)🍎️
📌️ Changes: https://flarerpg.org/2026/05/03/flare-1-15/
🦣️ From: https://mastodon.social/@holarse/116545080259069781

💥️🏝️1.15 https://www.youtube.com/embed/rj7XfoCERK4
🐹️ https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ot1QU6PokME
🐧https://www.youtube.com/embed/c9SdhACeEzQ

#PhantastikPrompts

11. Wonach sehnt sich dein Protagonist? Welchen Traum würde er sich gern erfüllen?

Edward sehnt sich nach Frieden und einem normalen Leben, nur lassen ihn die Unsterblichen nicht in Ruhe.

#phantastik #fantasy #darkfantasy
#literatur #bookstodon #autorenleben

#PhantastikPrompts

10. Welches Verhältnis hat einer deiner Hauptcharaktere zu seiner Mutter? Gäbe es den Muttertag, würde der Charakter ihn begehen?

Edward wurde als Waise aufgezogen. Seine Eltern sind unbekannt. Seinem Vater begegnet er am Ende von "Edward Corby" Band 1. Ein mächtiger Unsterblicher, der ihn zu seinen Zwecken entfremdet.

#phantastik #fantasy #darkfantasy
#literatur #bookstodon #autorenleben

Hellsing – Ein blutiger Anime-Meilenstein

Die Straßen von London färben sich rot! Das Hellsing-Franchise gehört zu den wichtigsten und kompromisslosesten Werken der Anime-Historie. Während die Hellsing-Organisation unter der kühlen Führung von Sir Integra gegen ghulische Bedrohungen ankämpft, entfesselt ihr Meisterstück – der unsterbliche Vampir Alucard – eine Urgewalt der Zerstörung. Egal ob die stylische TV-Serie aus dem Jahr 2001 mit ihrem unvergleichlichen Jazz-Soundtrack oder die bildgewaltige, extrem blutige OVA "Hellsing Ultimate" – dieses Dark-Fantasy-Epos stellt existentielle Fragen über Menschlichkeit und den Wahnsinn des Krieges. Ein Muss für jeden Fan von ernsthafter, erwachsener Action.

https://funime.de/2026/05/10/hellsing-ein-blutiger-anime-meilenstein/

#Anime #funime #Alucard #DarkFantasy #Geheimorganisation #Gore #Horror #London #Religion #vampire #ZweiterWeltkrieg

Hellsing – Ein blutiger Anime-Meilenstein

Die Straßen von London färben sich rot! Das Hellsing-Franchise gehört zu den wichtigsten und kompromisslosesten Werken der Anime-Historie. Während die Hellsing-Organisation unter der kühlen Führung von Sir Integra gegen ghulische Bedrohungen ankämpft, entfesselt ihr Meisterstück – der unsterbliche Vampir Alucard – eine Urgewalt der Zerstörung. Egal ob die stylische TV-Serie aus dem Jahr 2001 mit ihrem unvergleichlichen Jazz-Soundtrack oder die bildgewaltige, extrem blutige OVA "Hellsing Ultimate" – dieses Dark-Fantasy-Epos stellt existentielle Fragen über Menschlichkeit und den Wahnsinn des Krieges. Ein Muss für jeden Fan von ernsthafter, erwachsener Action.

https://funime.de/2026/05/10/hellsing-ein-blutiger-anime-meilenstein/

#Anime #funime #Alucard #DarkFantasy #Geheimorganisation #Gore #Horror #London #Religion #vampire #ZweiterWeltkrieg

Chciał Ich Ochronić

Została Tylko Przysięga Przyjaciela

Król Bez Królestwa

Yhorm Gigant

🎧 https://youtu.be/ESuXUd6buwk

🎶 Playlista w Wszystkimi Utworami z serii Litany of Ash

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuPsm3OYj2u3ua79ZozR7sPoqNdDSEfLb

#DarkSouls #DarkSouls3 #AIArt #music #RosenkreuzVoices #darkfantasy

BRECK: Dead Delivery: Chapter Four

BRECK: Dead Delivery

Chapter Four — What a Good Life Looks Like

Prompt: If you had to describe your ideal life, what would it look like? Tags: dailyprompt | Breck | Crestfall | Dead Delivery | Lumenvale

He was up before the inn.

That was how Breck preferred it — the hour before a building woke, when the timbers were still and the fire had burned to orange coal and the only sound was the river moving somewhere behind the rear yards, steady and indifferent to everything that happened on its banks. He dressed in the gray dark, moved the bracelet from his wrist back to the satchel strap, and went downstairs to the empty common room.

The innkeeper was already there.

She was rebuilding the hearth fire alone, kneeling with the same focused economy she brought to everything, feeding kindling into the coal-bed with practiced hands. She looked up when his boot hit the bottom stair — not startled, just acknowledging — and went back to her work.

“Early,” she said.

“Habit.”

She nodded as though that explained everything, which for her it probably did. She had the look of a woman who had stopped requiring explanations from people a long time ago and found life simpler for it. Breck respected that. He pulled a stool to the far end of the hearth and sat, and they shared the silence companionably while the fire took hold.

She brought him bread and hard cheese without being asked. He ate slowly, watching the flames establish themselves, and after a while she refilled his cup and sat across from him with her own, and the morning came in gray and quiet through the front window.

“Been here long?” he asked eventually.

“Born here.” She wrapped both hands around her cup. “My mother ran this place before me. Her mother before that.” A pause. “Three generations of women keeping travelers fed and dry. There are worse things to be.”

“Is it what you would have chosen?”

She considered this with the seriousness it deserved. “I used to think about that when I was young. What I’d have chosen if I could have chosen anything.” The fire popped, and she watched the spark die on the hearthstone. “I’d have wanted something quieter, maybe. Smaller. A house with a good kitchen garden and enough custom to keep me busy but not so much it wore me down.” She smiled, brief and private. “Then my mother got sick and I took over the inn and twenty years went past and now I can’t imagine anything else.”

“That’s an answer,” Breck said.

“What about you.” She said it without expectation, the way people asked questions they didn’t necessarily need answered.

Breck turned his cup in his hands. The fire had established itself fully now, filling the hearth with steady warmth and the smell of clean wood smoke, and outside the window the sky was beginning to separate itself from the darkness by degrees.

He thought about it honestly, the way he rarely did — usually he kept that particular door shut, not out of anguish but out of pragmatism. An ideal life was a pleasant thing to want and a useless thing to carry on the road.

“A house,” he said finally. “Nothing large. Stone, if I could manage it, so it stayed warm in winter. South-facing, for the light.” He paused. “A kitchen with a proper hearth. A table big enough to work at. A room for guests, if anyone came.” Another pause, longer. “A dog, probably. Something big and useless and glad to see me when I came in.”

The innkeeper smiled properly this time. “That’s a quiet life for a man your size.”

“Quiet suits me.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere the roads aren’t too close. Close enough to walk to a market, far enough that you can’t hear the cart traffic in the morning.” He set the cup down. “Somewhere I hadn’t been before. So there was nothing I already knew about it.”

She studied him across the fire. The quality of her attention had changed — not sharper exactly, but deeper, the way a person listened when they recognized something they’d heard before in a different voice.

“And the work?” she asked. “In this quiet house. What would you do?”

Breck was quiet for a moment. Through the window, the first real light was touching the rooftops of Crestfall, turning the wet slate from black to the color of old pewter. Somewhere in the building above them, the first guests were beginning to stir — the creak of a floorboard, the sound of water poured from a pitcher.

“Something that stayed finished,” he said. “Whatever I made in the morning, I’d want it to still be made in the evening.” He turned the cup once more. “Courier work — you deliver and it’s delivered and tomorrow there’s another delivery. There’s no accumulation. Nothing you can stand back from and see.” He paused. “I’d want to make something that lasted.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know yet.” He said it plainly, without apology. “I know what I’m good at. I don’t know what I’d be good at if I stopped doing that.”

The innkeeper nodded slowly, as though this was among the more honest things she’d heard in some time. She rose to stir the fire, and the coals shifted and breathed orange, and the warmth in the room increased by a degree.

“The man who was here last night,” Breck said. “Corner table. Left side door.”

Her stirring slowed. Didn’t stop.

“Drav,” she said. The name came out flat, stripped of everything that wasn’t pure fact. “He’s been in Crestfall six months. Came with two others in the first week of autumn.”

“He work for the magistrate.”

“He works for whoever pays him.” She set the poker down carefully. “The magistrate pays him.”

“What does he do.”

“Whatever needs doing.” She turned back to face him. The warmth in her expression hadn’t gone exactly, but something had moved behind it — the way a fire looks when a cloud passes over the sun. “He’s not like the others. The others are loud. They drink and they push and you know exactly what you’re dealing with.” She paused. “Drav just — appears. When there’s a problem that needs to stop being a problem.”

“Like the miller.”

The fire crackled between them. Outside, the first cart of the morning was rolling down the main road, its iron-rimmed wheels loud on the wet cobblestone, and then it passed and the quiet came back.

“Like the miller,” she said.

Breck stood. He was a full head taller than her, maybe more, and in the low-ceilinged common room he filled the space above the hearthlight in a way that should have felt threatening and somehow didn’t — the stillness of him absorbing his own scale, the way large water absorbs weather.

“My document,” he said. “The clerk said morning.”

“The magistrate’s office opens at the second bell.” She looked at him steadily. “You could be on the north road before the third.”

“I could.”

She held his gaze for a moment. Then she turned back to the fire, and her hands resumed their work, and the subject was closed in the way that subjects closed between people who understood each other without requiring confirmation.

Breck put on his cloak, settled the satchel across his chest, and moved the bracelet once, the way he always did — checking it without knowing he was checking it, the old reflex, the one that lived below thought. It was pale in the firelight. Small against the worn leather of the strap.

He walked to the door and opened it onto the cold morning air, and Crestfall lay before him under its pewter sky, quiet and watchful and waiting to see what he would do.

He stood in the doorway for a moment, the fire at his back and the empty square ahead.

A quiet life. A stone house. South-facing. A dog.

Something that stayed finished.

He stepped out into the cold and pulled the door shut behind him.

Not toward the north road.

BRECK: Dead Delivery

Chapter Four — What a Good Life Looks Like

Prompt: If you had to describe your ideal life, what would it look like? Tags: dailyprompt | Breck | Crestfall | Dead Delivery | Lumenvale

He was up before the inn.

That was how Breck preferred it — the hour before a building woke, when the timbers were still and the fire had burned to orange coal and the only sound was the river moving somewhere behind the rear yards, steady and indifferent to everything that happened on its banks. He dressed in the gray dark, moved the bracelet from his wrist back to the satchel strap, and went downstairs to the empty common room.

The innkeeper was already there.

She was rebuilding the hearth fire alone, kneeling with the same focused economy she brought to everything, feeding kindling into the coal-bed with practiced hands. She looked up when his boot hit the bottom stair — not startled, just acknowledging — and went back to her work.

“Early,” she said.

“Habit.”

She nodded as though that explained everything, which for her it probably did. She had the look of a woman who had stopped requiring explanations from people a long time ago and found life simpler for it. Breck respected that. He pulled a stool to the far end of the hearth and sat, and they shared the silence companionably while the fire took hold.

She brought him bread and hard cheese without being asked. He ate slowly, watching the flames establish themselves, and after a while she refilled his cup and sat across from him with her own, and the morning came in gray and quiet through the front window.

“Been here long?” he asked eventually.

“Born here.” She wrapped both hands around her cup. “My mother ran this place before me. Her mother before that.” A pause. “Three generations of women keeping travelers fed and dry. There are worse things to be.”

“Is it what you would have chosen?”

She considered this with the seriousness it deserved. “I used to think about that when I was young. What I’d have chosen if I could have chosen anything.” The fire popped, and she watched the spark die on the hearthstone. “I’d have wanted something quieter, maybe. Smaller. A house with a good kitchen garden and enough custom to keep me busy but not so much it wore me down.” She smiled, brief and private. “Then my mother got sick and I took over the inn and twenty years went past and now I can’t imagine anything else.”

“That’s an answer,” Breck said.

“What about you.” She said it without expectation, the way people asked questions they didn’t necessarily need answered.

Breck turned his cup in his hands. The fire had established itself fully now, filling the hearth with steady warmth and the smell of clean wood smoke, and outside the window the sky was beginning to separate itself from the darkness by degrees.

He thought about it honestly, the way he rarely did — usually he kept that particular door shut, not out of anguish but out of pragmatism. An ideal life was a pleasant thing to want and a useless thing to carry on the road.

“A house,” he said finally. “Nothing large. Stone, if I could manage it, so it stayed warm in winter. South-facing, for the light.” He paused. “A kitchen with a proper hearth. A table big enough to work at. A room for guests, if anyone came.” Another pause, longer. “A dog, probably. Something big and useless and glad to see me when I came in.”

The innkeeper smiled properly this time. “That’s a quiet life for a man your size.”

“Quiet suits me.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere the roads aren’t too close. Close enough to walk to a market, far enough that you can’t hear the cart traffic in the morning.” He set the cup down. “Somewhere I hadn’t been before. So there was nothing I already knew about it.”

She studied him across the fire. The quality of her attention had changed — not sharper exactly, but deeper, the way a person listened when they recognized something they’d heard before in a different voice.

“And the work?” she asked. “In this quiet house. What would you do?”

Breck was quiet for a moment. Through the window, the first real light was touching the rooftops of Crestfall, turning the wet slate from black to the color of old pewter. Somewhere in the building above them, the first guests were beginning to stir — the creak of a floorboard, the sound of water poured from a pitcher.

“Something that stayed finished,” he said. “Whatever I made in the morning, I’d want it to still be made in the evening.” He turned the cup once more. “Courier work — you deliver and it’s delivered and tomorrow there’s another delivery. There’s no accumulation. Nothing you can stand back from and see.” He paused. “I’d want to make something that lasted.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know yet.” He said it plainly, without apology. “I know what I’m good at. I don’t know what I’d be good at if I stopped doing that.”

The innkeeper nodded slowly, as though this was among the more honest things she’d heard in some time. She rose to stir the fire, and the coals shifted and breathed orange, and the warmth in the room increased by a degree.

“The man who was here last night,” Breck said. “Corner table. Left side door.”

Her stirring slowed. Didn’t stop.

“Drav,” she said. The name came out flat, stripped of everything that wasn’t pure fact. “He’s been in Crestfall six months. Came with two others in the first week of autumn.”

“He work for the magistrate.”

“He works for whoever pays him.” She set the poker down carefully. “The magistrate pays him.”

“What does he do.”

“Whatever needs doing.” She turned back to face him. The warmth in her expression hadn’t gone exactly, but something had moved behind it — the way a fire looks when a cloud passes over the sun. “He’s not like the others. The others are loud. They drink and they push and you know exactly what you’re dealing with.” She paused. “Drav just — appears. When there’s a problem that needs to stop being a problem.”

“Like the miller.”

The fire crackled between them. Outside, the first cart of the morning was rolling down the main road, its iron-rimmed wheels loud on the wet cobblestone, and then it passed and the quiet came back.

“Like the miller,” she said.

Breck stood. He was a full head taller than her, maybe more, and in the low-ceilinged common room he filled the space above the hearthlight in a way that should have felt threatening and somehow didn’t — the stillness of him absorbing his own scale, the way large water absorbs weather.

“My document,” he said. “The clerk said morning.”

“The magistrate’s office opens at the second bell.” She looked at him steadily. “You could be on the north road before the third.”

“I could.”

She held his gaze for a moment. Then she turned back to the fire, and her hands resumed their work, and the subject was closed in the way that subjects closed between people who understood each other without requiring confirmation.

Breck put on his cloak, settled the satchel across his chest, and moved the bracelet once, the way he always did — checking it without knowing he was checking it, the old reflex, the one that lived below thought. It was pale in the firelight. Small against the worn leather of the strap.

He walked to the door and opened it onto the cold morning air, and Crestfall lay before him under its pewter sky, quiet and watchful and waiting to see what he would do.

He stood in the doorway for a moment, the fire at his back and the empty square ahead.

A quiet life. A stone house. South-facing. A dog.

Something that stayed finished.

He stepped out into the cold and pulled the door shut behind him.

Not toward the north road.

BRECK: Dead Delivery

Chapter Four — What a Good Life Looks Like

Prompt: If you had to describe your ideal life, what would it look like? Tags: dailyprompt | Breck | Crestfall | Dead Delivery | Lumenvale

He was up before the inn.

That was how Breck preferred it — the hour before a building woke, when the timbers were still and the fire had burned to orange coal and the only sound was the river moving somewhere behind the rear yards, steady and indifferent to everything that happened on its banks. He dressed in the gray dark, moved the bracelet from his wrist back to the satchel strap, and went downstairs to the empty common room.

The innkeeper was already there.

She was rebuilding the hearth fire alone, kneeling with the same focused economy she brought to everything, feeding kindling into the coal-bed with practiced hands. She looked up when his boot hit the bottom stair — not startled, just acknowledging — and went back to her work.

“Early,” she said.

“Habit.”

She nodded as though that explained everything, which for her it probably did. She had the look of a woman who had stopped requiring explanations from people a long time ago and found life simpler for it. Breck respected that. He pulled a stool to the far end of the hearth and sat, and they shared the silence companionably while the fire took hold.

She brought him bread and hard cheese without being asked. He ate slowly, watching the flames establish themselves, and after a while she refilled his cup and sat across from him with her own, and the morning came in gray and quiet through the front window.

“Been here long?” he asked eventually.

“Born here.” She wrapped both hands around her cup. “My mother ran this place before me. Her mother before that.” A pause. “Three generations of women keeping travelers fed and dry. There are worse things to be.”

“Is it what you would have chosen?”

She considered this with the seriousness it deserved. “I used to think about that when I was young. What I’d have chosen if I could have chosen anything.” The fire popped, and she watched the spark die on the hearthstone. “I’d have wanted something quieter, maybe. Smaller. A house with a good kitchen garden and enough custom to keep me busy but not so much it wore me down.” She smiled, brief and private. “Then my mother got sick and I took over the inn and twenty years went past and now I can’t imagine anything else.”

“That’s an answer,” Breck said.

“What about you.” She said it without expectation, the way people asked questions they didn’t necessarily need answered.

Breck turned his cup in his hands. The fire had established itself fully now, filling the hearth with steady warmth and the smell of clean wood smoke, and outside the window the sky was beginning to separate itself from the darkness by degrees.

He thought about it honestly, the way he rarely did — usually he kept that particular door shut, not out of anguish but out of pragmatism. An ideal life was a pleasant thing to want and a useless thing to carry on the road.

“A house,” he said finally. “Nothing large. Stone, if I could manage it, so it stayed warm in winter. South-facing, for the light.” He paused. “A kitchen with a proper hearth. A table big enough to work at. A room for guests, if anyone came.” Another pause, longer. “A dog, probably. Something big and useless and glad to see me when I came in.”

The innkeeper smiled properly this time. “That’s a quiet life for a man your size.”

“Quiet suits me.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere the roads aren’t too close. Close enough to walk to a market, far enough that you can’t hear the cart traffic in the morning.” He set the cup down. “Somewhere I hadn’t been before. So there was nothing I already knew about it.”

She studied him across the fire. The quality of her attention had changed — not sharper exactly, but deeper, the way a person listened when they recognized something they’d heard before in a different voice.

“And the work?” she asked. “In this quiet house. What would you do?”

Breck was quiet for a moment. Through the window, the first real light was touching the rooftops of Crestfall, turning the wet slate from black to the color of old pewter. Somewhere in the building above them, the first guests were beginning to stir — the creak of a floorboard, the sound of water poured from a pitcher.

“Something that stayed finished,” he said. “Whatever I made in the morning, I’d want it to still be made in the evening.” He turned the cup once more. “Courier work — you deliver and it’s delivered and tomorrow there’s another delivery. There’s no accumulation. Nothing you can stand back from and see.” He paused. “I’d want to make something that lasted.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know yet.” He said it plainly, without apology. “I know what I’m good at. I don’t know what I’d be good at if I stopped doing that.”

The innkeeper nodded slowly, as though this was among the more honest things she’d heard in some time. She rose to stir the fire, and the coals shifted and breathed orange, and the warmth in the room increased by a degree.

“The man who was here last night,” Breck said. “Corner table. Left side door.”

Her stirring slowed. Didn’t stop.

“Drav,” she said. The name came out flat, stripped of everything that wasn’t pure fact. “He’s been in Crestfall six months. Came with two others in the first week of autumn.”

“He work for the magistrate.”

“He works for whoever pays him.” She set the poker down carefully. “The magistrate pays him.”

“What does he do.”

“Whatever needs doing.” She turned back to face him. The warmth in her expression hadn’t gone exactly, but something had moved behind it — the way a fire looks when a cloud passes over the sun. “He’s not like the others. The others are loud. They drink and they push and you know exactly what you’re dealing with.” She paused. “Drav just — appears. When there’s a problem that needs to stop being a problem.”

“Like the miller.”

The fire crackled between them. Outside, the first cart of the morning was rolling down the main road, its iron-rimmed wheels loud on the wet cobblestone, and then it passed and the quiet came back.

“Like the miller,” she said.

Breck stood. He was a full head taller than her, maybe more, and in the low-ceilinged common room he filled the space above the hearthlight in a way that should have felt threatening and somehow didn’t — the stillness of him absorbing his own scale, the way large water absorbs weather.

“My document,” he said. “The clerk said morning.”

“The magistrate’s office opens at the second bell.” She looked at him steadily. “You could be on the north road before the third.”

“I could.”

She held his gaze for a moment. Then she turned back to the fire, and her hands resumed their work, and the subject was closed in the way that subjects closed between people who understood each other without requiring confirmation.

Breck put on his cloak, settled the satchel across his chest, and moved the bracelet once, the way he always did — checking it without knowing he was checking it, the old reflex, the one that lived below thought. It was pale in the firelight. Small against the worn leather of the strap.

He walked to the door and opened it onto the cold morning air, and Crestfall lay before him under its pewter sky, quiet and watchful and waiting to see what he would do.

He stood in the doorway for a moment, the fire at his back and the empty square ahead.

A quiet life. A stone house. South-facing. A dog.

Something that stayed finished.

He stepped out into the cold and pulled the door shut behind him.

Not toward the north road.

☕ Enjoyed this story? Writing Lumenvale is how I pay my bills. If these stories are worth something to you, a $1 Ko-fi keeps the forge burning — and tells me this world is worth continuing. 👉 Buy Chadwick a coffee

#PhantastikPrompts

9. Wenn du einen neuen Charakter entwickeln müsstest: Lieber Heiligenschein oder lieber Schuld an den Füßen?

Ich bin definitiv Team Schuld. Ich schreibe graue Charaktere. Schwarz-weiß-Malerei liegt mir gar nicht. Das ist definitiv zu langweilig. Charaktere müssen leiden und hin und wieder zweifelhafte Entscheidungen treffen müssen.

#phantastik #fantasy #darkfantasy
#literatur #bookstodon #autorenleben

Some doors are not opened.

They are found beneath holy places, waiting for the wrong person to become curious.

#fantasy #darkfantasy #epic #darkfiction #books #readers

Coming soon from the one & only Tracy Fahey: QUEENS OF THE CRONE AGE, a collection of stories in which Tracy once again takes inspiration from Irish folklore. Available for pre-order now from PS Publishing: https://pspublishing.co.uk/queens-of-the-crone-age-signed-hardcover-by-tracy-fahey-6837-p.asp

Read more 🧵⬇️

#horror #darkfantasy #folklore #folklorefiction #writers #writing #books #creativity #creativetoots #irishwriters #irishmythology

Coming soon from the one & only Tracy Fahey: QUEENS OF THE CRONE AGE, a collection of stories in which Tracy once again takes inspiration from Irish folklore. Available for pre-order now from PS Publishing: https://pspublishing.co.uk/queens-of-the-crone-age-signed-hardcover-by-tracy-fahey-6837-p.asp

Read more 🧵⬇️

#horror #darkfantasy #folklore #folklorefiction #writers #writing #books #creativity #creativetoots #irishwriters #irishmythology

Coming soon from the one & only Tracy Fahey: QUEENS OF THE CRONE AGE, a collection of stories in which Tracy once again takes inspiration from Irish folklore. Available for pre-order now from PS Publishing: https://pspublishing.co.uk/queens-of-the-crone-age-signed-hardcover-by-tracy-fahey-6837-p.asp

Read more 🧵⬇️

#horror #darkfantasy #folklore #folklorefiction #writers #writing #books #creativity #creativetoots #irishwriters #irishmythology

Coming soon from the one & only Tracy Fahey: QUEENS OF THE CRONE AGE, a collection of stories in which Tracy once again takes inspiration from Irish folklore. Available for pre-order now from PS Publishing: https://pspublishing.co.uk/queens-of-the-crone-age-signed-hardcover-by-tracy-fahey-6837-p.asp

Read more 🧵⬇️

#horror #darkfantasy #folklore #folklorefiction #writers #writing #books #creativity #creativetoots #irishwriters #irishmythology

Coming soon from the one & only Tracy Fahey: QUEENS OF THE CRONE AGE, a collection of stories in which Tracy once again takes inspiration from Irish folklore. Available for pre-order now from PS Publishing: https://pspublishing.co.uk/queens-of-the-crone-age-signed-hardcover-by-tracy-fahey-6837-p.asp

Read more 🧵⬇️

#horror #darkfantasy #folklore #folklorefiction #writers #writing #books #creativity #creativetoots #irishwriters #irishmythology

I know everyone is reeling from these latest entries, but it does get better. This is a dark story, but the happiness and hope is in our ability to change. Even with the Guardian.

#writing #reading #fiction #books #novels #horror #fantasy #darkfantasy #steampunk

https://patrickwmarshauthor.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/beware-the-ills-part-42/

Residuals (John Leahy)

https://sevenstorypublishing.com/2026/05/08/residuals-john-leahy/

Beware the Ills: Part 42

My hands start digging again, only they’re calmer and slower. I need to contemplate my next four moves. Haukter must be killed, he’s the chief threat. He hit me from far away. No one has ever done that before. The confrontation in front of the Ills, where I crushed his chest with my hilt and bled him, must’ve been a ruse to lower my defenses and expectations. He was building my confidence.

Awfully smart.

The hole grows even bigger. You could fit me inside now. It’s a nice place for you, Blue. It’s away from the mountains, memories, stalking Ills, and cold graveyards. We’re too far from the rock empty part of shore for the invaders to notice your grave. You won’t have to notice them either; it’ll always be a luminous empty shore for you to watch.

It’s a good spot, Blue.

His body feels lighter than his frame would imply. I’m still weak from Haukter’s poison. I drag him to the frosty edge and tilt him over into the hole. He falls and the trees shutter slightly. The snow falls on him inside his grave. It looks peaceful, a natural serenade. His body tightens up inside the hole. It’s a little too small for him.

He still looks frail inside his grave.

Filling the dirt’s much easier. It only takes a short amount of time till the dark dust has covered him completely. The top of his grave looks exactly like overturned earth and nothing else. I don’t like it. It’s not clean, but filthy, and unkempt. It doesn’t honor him at all. If there were rocks near me, I would outline the spot. Of course, who would come to look for him? I already know where his grave will be. Only his father knew of him, and I killed his father.

His father, I will leave him a piece of his father.

The snow still drifts the same cloudy pattern. The daylight falls quietly like silk. I lay the silver Untaro fur across the overturned dirt. Much better, much better. I use some small pieces of sharpened wood to pin the fur into the ground. They’re tight enough for the cloak to stay still in the wildest of winds. The grave looks pleasant. The snow picks up as I stare at it. It’s growing colder, too. My breath hangs like smoke in front of my eyes. My back feels light without fur. I’ll miss the protection. My black armor looks oblong without the cloak. The black spike on my left shoulder looks uneven in comparison to the rest of my plated armor.

No matter though, it wouldn’t be right to use it.

I stare at the grave, nothing moves, nothing happens. I have to leave, though, I don’t want to. I have to leave, Blue, but I don’t want to. At least I can leave you with a piece of your father. I can do that for you.

I run.

Haukter will be around. I don’t know when, or where. I don’t know. I don’t really care either. I will kill him. The trees bow before me dark and black. I’m cutting through them as I run. It’ll take me a little while to reach the Diamond Town, even in a full sprint. The time seems like a minor epoch, but I will maintain my run. Blue ran me halfway across the island with a shredded back. Quite a distance, it’s a remarkable thing. I’ll kill them, Blue. I will kill Haukter. The paths between the trees are becoming cloudy as the sun blooms the new frost. The sun rarely shines like this so early in the day. 

How did he hit me?

I knew he was strong. I knew he ate men and Ills. I even suspected he intimidated Blue, and in an open confrontation with him would’ve won. The invaders will be a match for Haukter if I should fail. The man with the spear was powerful, he may have made Haukter nervous, but he still would’ve been defeated. I haven’t had a competition like this since I first started fighting in the forest.

Haukter, a minor transgression, has been groomed into a major inconvenience.

How he became this strong, I don’t know. He’s a complete and utter mystery to me. There are no mysteries on this island. I’ve had to know everything. It keeps the Ills and invaders at bay. It could be in Haukter’s culture to survive? The ability to learn in new and foreign environments, those tendencies would be good to know. Too bad I killed his entire clan and kin. Sometimes, my long-term strategies are rather faulty. Who would have known there’d be something in his blood that would make him so tedious and tenacious?

You fools in the city, you have no idea what awaits you. The Ills could also kill them; quite easily in fact, the townsfolk would be no match for them. I left the conversation with the prince rather abruptly. I did not kill him, or his bodyguards.

I hope he understands what my mercy meant.

I’ll be releasing my novel Beware the Ills in segments every Friday. You can find out more about the book right here, or check out Amazon’s info. I love this book. Happy to simply share it. 

#PhantastikPrompts

8. Handelst du manchmal mit deinen Charakteren aus, wie es in ihrer Geschichte weitergeht?

Permanent. Hin und wieder übernehmen sie einfach das Kommando. 😅 Allerdings setze ich mich als böser Sadistenautor durch, wenn es um Character Deaths geht. Ja, was muss, das muss. Da brauchen sie gar nicht um ihr Überleben zu betteln. 😈

#phantastik #fantasy #darkfantasy
#literatur #bookstodon #autorenleben

My sister is dead 😒
But I didn't kill her. 😳

The Queen's infamous Sisterhood couldn't care less. 😈

They've been watching me.. 👁️
and it's time to make their move.​​​​​​​ 😱 🥵

#SisterSeekers spins the first threads of an intense and epic tale where the trials of a #DarkElf test her resolve to rise from the depths of fear and hatred tearing her down.

https://etaski.com/series/sister-seekers

#DarkFantasy #EpicFantasy #EroticDark #BookSale #Drow #DnD @mastodonbooks #Books #Writing @Literbook

My sister is dead 😒
But I didn't kill her. 😳

The Queen's infamous Sisterhood couldn't care less. 😈

They've been watching me.. 👁️
and it's time to make their move.​​​​​​​ 😱 🥵

#SisterSeekers spins the first threads of an intense and epic tale where the trials of a #DarkElf test her resolve to rise from the depths of fear and hatred tearing her down.

https://etaski.com/series/sister-seekers

#DarkFantasy #EpicFantasy #EroticDark #BookSale #Drow #DnD @mastodonbooks #Books #Writing @Literbook

My sister is dead 😒
But I didn't kill her. 😳

The Queen's infamous Sisterhood couldn't care less. 😈

They've been watching me.. 👁️
and it's time to make their move.​​​​​​​ 😱 🥵

#SisterSeekers spins the first threads of an intense and epic tale where the trials of a #DarkElf test her resolve to rise from the depths of fear and hatred tearing her down.

https://etaski.com/series/sister-seekers

#DarkFantasy #EpicFantasy #EroticDark #BookSale #Drow #DnD @mastodonbooks #Books #Writing @Literbook

My sister is dead 😒
But I didn't kill her. 😳

The Queen's infamous Sisterhood couldn't care less. 😈

They've been watching me.. 👁️
and it's time to make their move.​​​​​​​ 😱 🥵

#SisterSeekers spins the first threads of an intense and epic tale where the trials of a #DarkElf test her resolve to rise from the depths of fear and hatred tearing her down.

https://etaski.com/series/sister-seekers

#DarkFantasy #EpicFantasy #EroticDark #BookSale #Drow #DnD @mastodonbooks #Books #Writing @Literbook

My sister is dead 😒
But I didn't kill her. 😳

The Queen's infamous Sisterhood couldn't care less. 😈

They've been watching me.. 👁️
and it's time to make their move.​​​​​​​ 😱 🥵

#SisterSeekers spins the first threads of an intense and epic tale where the trials of a #DarkElf test her resolve to rise from the depths of fear and hatred tearing her down.

https://etaski.com/series/sister-seekers

#DarkFantasy #EpicFantasy #EroticDark #BookSale #Drow #DnD @mastodonbooks #Books #Writing @Literbook

BRECK: Dead Delivery: Chapter Two

BRECK: Dead Delivery

Chapter Two — The Best Thing To Do

Prompt: Which is the best thing to do in your city? Tags: dailyprompt | Breck | Crestfall | Dead Delivery | Lumenvale

The boy was still on the cooperage step when Breck crossed the square.

He’d been there an hour ago when Breck had gone into the inn, and he was there now, in the same position — elbows on knees, chin forward, watching the road with the kind of patience that didn’t belong on a twelve-year-old’s face. It was an old patience. The kind you didn’t grow naturally. The kind that got pressed into you from outside until it took the shape of whoever had done the pressing.

Breck stopped in front of him.

The boy looked up without flinching. That was notable too. Most children flinched when something Breck’s size stopped moving near them. This one just adjusted his gaze and waited, the way a much older person would, someone who had learned that flinching didn’t change outcomes.

“Cooperage closed?” Breck asked.

“Half days now.” The boy’s voice was even. “Since spring.”

“Your father’s?”

“Was.”

Breck let that sit for a moment. The word was doing a lot of work in a short sentence. He didn’t push it.

“I’m looking for the best thing to do in Crestfall,” he said. “Arrived this morning. Stuck until tomorrow. Someone in the inn pointed me toward the river walk.”

The boy looked at him for a long moment. Measuring something.

“The river walk’s fine,” he said. “If you like mud.”

“What would you suggest instead.”

The boy’s eyes moved — not to Breck’s face, but to the magistrate’s office at the far end of the square. A quick flick, reflexive, the kind of look a person threw at something they were trying not to look at. He caught himself doing it and looked back down at his boots.

“Best thing to do in Crestfall,” he said quietly, “is finish your business and leave before market close.”

“Why market close.”

The boy said nothing. He’d said everything he intended to say. The rest of it lived in the space between the words and Breck could either read it or not, and either way the boy wasn’t going to be the one who said it out loud in the open square in the middle of the afternoon.

Breck nodded once. Moved on.

The river walk was indeed mud, but it ran behind the main street’s rear yards and gave him a clean line of sight to the backs of buildings he couldn’t assess from the front. He walked it slowly, hands loose at his sides, the satchel strap easy across his chest. The bracelet caught a pale slip of light through the cloud cover and he didn’t look at it.

What he was building was a picture. He’d been building pictures his whole working life — during the war it had been enemy positions, supply lines, the shape of a camp’s routine at dawn versus dusk. Now it was smaller work but the same instinct. You looked at a place long enough and it told you what it was hiding.

Crestfall was hiding fear.

Not the sharp kind, not the kind that came from immediate danger. This was the settled, long-term variety — the kind that had been present so long it had become indistinguishable from normal life. The shuttered cooperage. The half-empty market. The inn with the broken signboard that no one had fixed, not because they couldn’t afford to but because it had stopped mattering. These weren’t the marks of poverty. The stone buildings were sound. The granary was full. The roads were maintained. Someone was being paid to maintain them, which meant money was moving through Crestfall — just not down to the people who lived here.

He came around the back of the market and found the woman he’d watched packing her stall early. She was loading bolts of undyed wool into a handcart, working fast, not looking up.

“You pack early,” he said.

She startled anyway. Not at the words — at the size of him appearing at the edge of her vision. She pressed a hand flat against her sternum and exhaled.

“Market closes at the third bell,” she said. Her voice was careful. Measured.

“Sign on the square post says fifth bell.”

Her hands kept moving, lifting and stacking. “Sign’s old.”

“Who changed the hours.”

She stopped. Looked at him properly for the first time — taking in the courier satchel, the road-worn cloak, the stillness of him. Trying to determine what category of problem he represented. He let her look. He had nothing to hide and he wasn’t in a hurry and sometimes patience was the most disarming thing a large man could demonstrate.

“You’re a courier,” she said finally.

“Delivering for a valley landowner. Reply document tomorrow morning. I’ve got time.”

“Then spend it at the inn.” She went back to loading. “The ale’s decent and the fire’s warm and there’s nothing out here worth your attention.”

“Eleven stalls,” Breck said. “Market square that size should run thirty. Cooperage running half days since spring. Inn signboard broken since — ” he looked at the weathering on the post she’d just passed — “at least last winter.” He paused. “That’s a lot of things not getting fixed in a town with sound buildings and a full granary.”

She stopped again. This time she didn’t start again.

The wool lay half-loaded in the cart. The river moved behind the rear yards, gray and quiet. Somewhere across the square a door closed, the sound carrying in the flat afternoon air.

“What do you want,” she said. It wasn’t quite hostile. It was the voice of someone who had been asked to hope before and had learned what hoping cost.

“I told you. Best thing to do in Crestfall.”

She turned to face him fully. She was perhaps forty, with a broad capable face and hands that matched his in their working roughness, if not in their scale. Her eyes were steady, the way the boy’s had been — that same quality of stillness, like something that moved easily once had made a decision to stop moving.

“Best thing,” she said, “is what everyone does. Pay your tariff, keep your receipts, don’t ask why the rate went up again, and don’t be in the square after the third bell when the magistrate’s men do their evening collection.”

“How long has the rate been climbing.”

“Three years.”

“And before the magistrate’s men do the evening collection — what happens to people who aren’t where they’re supposed to be.”

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she picked up the last bolt of wool, set it in the cart, and pulled the canvas cover across it.

“There was a miller,” she said, not looking at him. “Good man. Family. He asked questions like yours at a town meeting fourteen months ago.” She smoothed the canvas flat, tucking the edges. “He doesn’t mill anymore.”

“Where is he.”

“Gone.” She took the cart handles. “Just gone. The way things go here.” She met his eyes one more time, and what was in hers wasn’t quite a plea and wasn’t quite a warning. It was something in between — the look of a person dropping a stone into dark water, not expecting it to change anything, doing it anyway because the stone had to go somewhere.

Then she walked her cart around the back of the building and was gone.

Breck stood at the edge of the empty market for a moment. The square was clearing out around him — the last few stallholders packing, moving quickly, heads down. The third bell was still an hour away by his reckoning, which meant the fear of it ran well ahead of the thing itself.

That was efficient, he thought. You didn’t need to be everywhere at once if you’d made people afraid of everywhere at once.

He turned and looked at the magistrate’s office. Fresh mortar. Town seal above the door. A building that had been maintained while everything around it quietly fell apart.

He adjusted the satchel strap across his chest. His delivery was done. His reply document would be ready in the morning. He had a room at the inn and a fire and decent ale waiting for him and a road north that would take him out of all of this by noon tomorrow.

The bracelet was pale against the worn leather of the strap. Pale and small and saying nothing.

He picked up his feet and walked toward the inn. He needed to eat. He needed to think. And he needed to find out who the miller was and where gone actually meant.

In that order.

☕ Enjoyed this story? Writing Lumenvale is how I pay my bills. If these stories are worth something to you, a $1 Ko-fi keeps the forge burning — and tells me this world is worth continuing. 👉 Buy Chadwick a coffee

#PhantastikPrompts

7. Stell dir vor, deine Geschichte wird verfilmt: Wer würde den Soundtrack dazu beisteuern, wenn du dir das aussuchen dürftest?

Marco Beltrami oder Alexandre Desplat. Wer ihn definitiv nicht machen darf ist Hans Zimmer und seine ganzen Lehrlinge wie Harry Gregson Williams. Die sind im Grunde Schuld, dass Hollywood-Soundtracks heutzutage alle gleich klingen.

#phantastik #fantasy #darkfantasy
#literatur #bookstodon #autorenleben

Evil Dead Burn Trailer https://trailers.zouluvo.com/evil-dead-burn/

#EvilDeadBurn #SouheilaYacoub #HunterDoohan #LucianeBuchanan #TandiWright #ErrollShand #MaudeDavey #GeorgePullar #GretaVanDenBrink #VictoryNdukwe #KeanuKarim #SebastienVanicek #FlorentBernard #SamRaimi #RobTapert #GhostHousePictures #ScreenGems #NewLineCinema #HorrorMovie #Deadites #Necronomicon #Supernatural #Demon #ScaryMovie #Bloody #Gore #Thriller #DarkFantasy #2026Movies #HorrorFans

Walka Braci Wilczej Krwi

Legenda Artoriasa Krąży Nad Nimi

Stróże Otchłani

🎧 https://youtu.be/LEq2iVd1wSc

🎶 Playlista z Pozostałymi Utworami Rosenkreuz Voices

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuPsm3OYj2u3ua79ZozR7sPoqNdDSEfLb

#DarkSouls #DarkSouls3 #AIArt #music #RosenkreuzVoices #darkfantasy

Kapłan, Który Chciał Przewyższyć Bogów

Nieopanowany Głód

Pożeracz Bogów

Aldrich Święty z Głębin

🎧 https://youtu.be/WJrjUuO00Iw

🎶 Playlista Z Wszystkimi Utworami

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuPsm3OYj2u3ua79ZozR7sPoqNdDSEfLb&si=DCTEZiIufhoVKybL

#darksouls #darksouls3 #AIArt #music #darkfantasy #games #RosenkreuzVoices

#PhantastikPrompts

6. Gibt es etwas, wo du sagen würdest: Darin hat dein Protagonist in seiner Welt einen bleibenden Eindruck hinterlassen, über den andere auch vielleicht später noch sprechen?

Edward ist ein Unsterblicher wegen dem London in einem Inferno zerstört wird. Ich würde sagen, das ist ein bleibender Eindruck. 😅

#phantastik #fantasy #darkfantasy
#literatur #bookstodon #autorenleben

Nie Jedna Osoba

Jest Ich Wielu

W Służbie Jednego

Głębia Wola

🎧 https://youtu.be/b0zLpJVz4bQ

🎶 Playlista Z Pozostałymi Utworami

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuPsm3OYj2u3ua79ZozR7sPoqNdDSEfLb&si=rBCyH5XvchS9ukCP

#darksouls #darksouls3 #AIArt #music #darkfantasy #RosenkreuzVoices