#fantasyfiction — Public Fediverse posts

#WorldOfOntyre 10

I realize that if I were a director, developing a story would be like seeing the script, and drafting like witnessing the play performed.

For some reason, I’ve always struggled to describe that, but it suddenly struck me, an insight as mysterious as story.

There’s a huge difference between dialogue on a page with stage direction, and a set with actors performing.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 09

So many years and decisions since my “modern era” began in 2015. I stand by each one of them.

For instance, I considered capping Kovenlore’s length at 5 books, but also 9, or open-ended rather than 7. I literally debated that for years.

In fact, some of the foreshadowing for books that didn’t happen remains in the series through Book-5. After that, I knew it was ending.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 08

Come on, let’s ride the rails!

Actually, this is me seeking a location for a story. Thing is, it’s Pannulus so I can’t physically go there.

So, I travel via airship, boat, vehicle, or train in my mind while staring at the map blown-up on my desktop monitor. I “see” the places I’m considering.

In this case, there’s a short journey on a train early on, which is perfect.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 07

Am I busy? Oh yeah.

I’m finishing the targeted edit on Book-6, and will then immediately jump into the novella that’ll accompany it. As soon as that’s done, I’ll begin the process for publishing Book-5.

Meanwhile, I’m generating notes on a Pannulus Mystery, along with analyzing the issues with the one I drafted last Dec. when I had Covid. Oh, and there our novella romances…

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 06

When I began Kovenlore Chronicles, children weren’t on my radar. What did I know about writing kids? How could they possibly fit into my stories?

Yet, they did.

Maybe it was the horror of watching real adults mortgage their children’s futures? Or was it devaluing their education? Crimes against children, maybe? Epstein, anyone?

Children deserve respect, love, and a future.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 05

The targeted edit of this book in the Kovenlore Chronicles continues, and some of the chapters are taking a toll.

Following a character’s downward spiral is a little close to home for me.

Coupled with other pressures, this has been a challenge, but I refuse to let it get the better of me. Working hard to recover back then means having the strength to persevere.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 04

In Kovenlore Chronicles, many characters are attempting to fix what’s wrong in the nation after the country was allowed to slip away 50 years before.

The price is steep. “The untethered life,” as Glistenelle calls it, but also the ultimate sacrifice for some.

And all because the leaders of yesterday ignored the signs and the warnings.

How powerful, how useless, is hindsight.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

This Story Hour, Redfern Barrett and Deborah L. Davitt left our heads spinning with the vast potential of SFF! These four tales are all completely different, comparable only in their excellence. You can still watch! #Bookstodon #StoryHour2020 #ShortStories #ShortFiction #AuthorReading #FantasyFiction #ScienceFiction #SFF #DeborahLDavitt #RedfernBarrett https://youtu.be/6TIbLV927Yc

#WorldOfOntyre 03

As anxious and awkward as Riparia is, there are times when she’s rash thanks to allowing her outrage to get the better of her.

Yet, it’s often those times when she pushes through her anxiety that are most memorable. She doesn’t vanquish her angst, but instead finds the strength to push through it.

Anxious people don’t receive enough credit for what they do.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#PhantastikPrompts 03
Trust in the Forgotten in pictures

This turned into a project, but it was kinda fun. It’s Book-1 of the Kovenlore Chronicles told in images, but not quite to the end. I did, though, get closer than I expected.

It’s ten years since I drafted the novel, and two years since I published it, so I’ve accumulated (and adapted) a fair number of pictures over time.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #Bookstodon #FantasyFiction #Fantasy #ReadingCommunity #Readers #WorldOfOntyre

#WorldOfOntyre 02

I often think about book order, but at last needed to create this simple graphic for a blog post.

It shows two sequences for Kovenlore Chronicles. The “Reading Order” is the publishing order, and avoids one book spoiling another.

“Chronological Order” is self explanatory.

It might seem hard to believe, but Book-3 spoils Book-2 if read first, but it wouldn’t if rereading.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

Lookking for Fantasy or Romance books with a school theme? Contemporary, Paranormal, or UrbanFantasy, there's something for everyone!

Check out this BookFunnel event, 10 authors discounted their books just for you!

https://bf.sophiemaddon.com/2026backtoschool/a733eu63c2

#FantasyBooks #BackToSchool #SeptemberReads #Romance #RomanceReaders #BooksOnSale #DiscountBooks #UrbanFantasy #ParanormalRomance #ParanormalFiction #FantasyFiction

#WorldOfOntyre 01

So, Maniff’s half of Book-3…

I always wonder how many people think, “It’s about his search for “the unexpected, which is, of course, Riparia. Boring.”

That’s what he does, but it isn’t what his story is about. The end of the book makes that clear. After all, parts of it make me cry.

His arc also contains info critical to Books 4&5, and is him unmasked, unlike in Book-1.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 31

I love my sabertooth cats, which are first seen in Book-1, but I also adore mammoths. They’re mentioned. A character named Mammoth appears in Book-2.

Yeah, fine, but where are the mammoths?

It’s funny how what we desperately want included keeps slipping between the cracks—until it doesn’t.

Book-4 rectifies their absence, and it’s an unexpected character who sees them.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 30

When I overhauled my Carrdia worldbuilding in 2015, it went from resembling the Middle Ages to the Victorian Era, which led to an interesting decision.

I kept the old worldbuilding to start, and then I systematically dismantled it.

It isn’t a straight line. Instead, it’s an evolution, with the two coexisting for much of the series while paralleling a character’s evolution.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 29

Two characters are introduced on page one of Book-1 of the Kovenlore Chronicles, Trust in the Forgotten.

The first is Riparia Dellbane, the main character in the series, depending on how certain events result.

The second is Doppla, her horse, but Doppla is a lot more than that, as is shown through the book. If anyone could be called anxious Riparia’s counselor, it’s Doppla.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 28

There was a major event in my personal life yesterday that required I leave home in the morning. Upon returning, and exhausted after considerable driving, I managed to edit a chapter.

I managed it because I’d started the night before, and had chosen a short chapter to work on in anticipation.

As a result, and against the odds, I remain on schedule, and finally well rested.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 27

Practitioners, the Ministry’s preachers. Except, not.

In truth, they are sadistic torturers wielding fire who seek out those with magic, killing them outright, or taking them to Knoss to have their lifeforce added to the crypt vessel.

For a while, I also called them “the unseen” because their faces were hidden, but it was confusing so I went with the innocuous name only

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 26

I discovered that I was an INFJ in 2014. I cried. Before I made the discovery, I’d thought I was crazy, and was too often treated that way.

It had a profound impact on my writing, ushering in the “new age” where I changed how I wrote, what I wrote, and my worldbuilding in 2015.

It isn’t easy being an INFJ. In fact, it’s a lonely road in life, but at least I understand me.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 25

Depression is common for writers and INFJs. I’m both, and can’t take medication for it.

I used to suffered through it, but these days, I battle it, I do everything in my power to loosen its grip, and it works. Depressive episodes of weeks have become days.

Depression wants me to retreat. No thanks.

Editing, hiking, meditation, reading, walking, writing, yoga, I do it all.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 24

I just finished reading Fahrenheit 451 for the first time in five decades. The short novel is well remembered for burning books and suppressing knowledge.

Yet, what struck me was how people had lost interest, their attention spans virtually nil, their obsession sitting in front of screens and watching programs.

It required no imagination at all to translate it to today.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 23

Where I live used to be at the bottom of vast Glacial Lake Missoula during the 100 times it flooded and drained to the west.

I’m pretty excited about that. Geology is fascinating, but I’ve always been in love with the ice age.

That’s why Ontyre has mammoths and sabertooth cats, and even ice age gargoyles (it is otherworld fantasy, after all). It was the demand my school age self made.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 22

Looking back at January 2018:

• Began 1st year recovered from an 8-year illness
• 1st year working in 4 years.
• Started a writing journal (still going strong!)
• Struggling to continue Kovenlore Chronicles, I decided to change my MC to Riparia
• Drafted Riparia’s origin poem in one sitting
• Was colorizing the Tremjara map
• Oddly enough, it wasn’t a great month, or year, for writing

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 21

One thing that’s fascinating to me about my Kovenlore protagonist, Riparia, is that like a true introvert, what she thinks is often more interesting than what she says.

Her thoughts in a conversation are often biting, heartbreaking, or even witty.

Meanwhile, her spoken words are often awkward, yet at times she’s eloquent—if she doesn’t overthink what she’s going to say.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 20

In Book-1 of the Kovenlore Chronicles, Trust in the Forgotten, Riparia starts to feel cursed in that she keeps ending up underground.

The first occurs in a cavern like you’d expect a cavern to look, but in her cavern there are surprises, both living and not living.

I won’t spoil the instances that come later, but I will say that all 3 have an impact on the series.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 19

The most mysterious character in Kovenlore Chronicles might not be a person, but instead, a crow.

Mazatta the crow.

He’s introduced early in Book-2. Though he has the equally mysterious ability to speak, he never uses more than three words.

Often he speaks the truth, but it’s his human who misunderstands. Often he makes predictions, but they’re ignored. All with 3 words.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 18

Contrast.

Shades of gray make for great mystery, but for defining tension in a story, I like establishing the extremes.

How much easier it is, and more terrifying, to see callousness in the face of innocence. Think of Scrooge and Tiny Tim in a Christmas Carol.

Never underestimate the power of kindness, which evil hates, or the vulnerability that makes the unsociable uneasy.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 17

I’ve been developing a story on the side and now have 4K notes. This is preliminary, and there are few deep details, and no narratives.

It’s funny how one idea doesn’t lead to another, but instead branches into several others.

I MAY set it in the Great Magi Forest.

Meanwhile, here I go again, having decent, intelligent characters who are attracted to one another. •sigh•

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 16

Innocence.

Strangely, it’s something I examine quite often. Even Riparia, who’s suffered greatly in her life, is often naïve, in part owing to self-isolation.

Maybe I look at it because it’s difficult to find these days, or because mine was stolen at a young age, yet, oddly, not in some ways.

People may scoff at this, but I don’t think they would after reading the stories.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 15

Here’s something different…

I sometimes mention the stories waiting in the wings, but they can feel unreal at times.

For instance, Shadow in Winter, the novella I’ll publish in my 1st anthology. It’s the only story I’ve written in Draskrith, which is north of Pannulus.

It isn’t a pleasant place.

Here’s the opening to a teenage girl’s story, a girl with a gift…

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

#WorldOfOntyre 14

I’ve had enough of reprehensible people.

Yes, I write antagonists, and my characters have flaws, but I’m sick to my withering heart of deplorable people committing indefensible acts against one another.

Most of my characters are decent people. I refuse to dwell on characters who strive to reach the bottom first.

Is that unrealistic? Depends on who you’re measuring against.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Bookstodon

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Eighteen The Community Decides First

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Eighteen

The Community Decides First

This is Chapter 18 of BRECK: Stone’s Rest, Book Three of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye. New chapters post daily.

The Story So Far

The petition is filed, witnessed, dated. Frostpeak said ready in the thin scattered light past midnight, and Breck finally slept. The case file is five weeks into its journey toward Caine’s office. The extraction on the eastern face has been completed. What’s left is the waiting — and what the waiting looks like when it starts to move before the institution does.

← Chapter Seventeen: What He Sets Down at Night | Chapter Nineteen →

Chapter Eighteen: The Community Decides First

This chapter asks about a lesson recently learned that shifted a perspective — and finds it in the gap between what an institution confirms and what a community has already made real.

The first clan delegation arrived two days after the petition was filed, which was too fast to have been organized in response to the filing itself. Breck was eating breakfast on Thunderstep’s second terrace when Jenna found him and told him there were fourteen Peak-riders from a mountain he hadn’t been to — Gentlebrook, she said, three days east — standing at Frostpeak’s base approach with their stone-readers and a request to ascend.

“Did Daveron send for them?” Breck asked.

“Daveron says no.” She said it with the quality she brought to things that didn’t fit an existing category — not alarmed, not quite settled, working out which shelf it belonged on. “They say they heard.”

“Heard from whom.”

“From the stone.” She paused. “Which is either their explanation of how clan communication works at distance, or a literal account of Frostpeak communicating something outward through the deep stone network since the petition was filed. I’m not able to tell you which, with confidence.”

By midday there were four clan delegations. By evening, seven. They came without formal summons, without waiting for the Council to organize a response to their arrival, without the diplomatic protocol the convergence had required. They simply came, in the way communities moved when something important had already been decided below the level of official process and the official process was simply the last thing to know about it.

Breck stood at Frostpeak’s terrace edge in the evening light and watched the gathered clan members move across the lower terraces — stone-readers in pairs at every fault line, elders in quiet consultation, children brought by parents who’d made the journey specifically so that their children would be able to say, later, that they were there. Not a vigil, quite. More like the particular gathering that happens when a community recognizes a moment as historical before any institution has confirmed it as such.

He thought about the lesson that had been arriving for days, the one he hadn’t fully assembled yet because the pieces had been coming in one at a time instead of all together. He’d come to Nomados believing — in the specific, structural way he believed things he’d tested against sufficient evidence — that the mechanism he was building was a legal one. That the case file was the instrument. That what he was constructing, document by document and dispatch sheet by dispatch sheet, was an argument aimed at an institution, and the institution’s response was the thing that mattered.

He understood, watching the seventh clan delegation wind up the approach path with their stone-readers and their children, that he’d been right about the mechanism and wrong about the order of operations. Institutions did not create the things they confirmed. They ratified what the community had already decided to make real. The case file had done its work not by convincing Caine’s office of something the clans were waiting to be told was true, but by giving the clans something to point to — a formal record that said: this is the shape of the thing you already know. The law was the last step, not the first. The community had already decided. He’d been building them a monument to a conclusion they’d lived. The monument mattered — it was what survived, what traveled, what carried the thing past the people who’d lived it — but the deciding had happened here, in this ground, in the stone under everyone’s feet, long before he’d arrived with a pencil and a dispatch sheet.

That was the shifted thing. That was the lesson that had been working on him since the first clan delegation arrived before any formal notification could have reached them. He’d spent twenty years believing that the record was what made things real. The record was what made things permanent. The reality was already there, living and actual, in the people who walked the ground every day and knew what it cost and had been knowing it in the absence of any documentation at all. His job — the job he’d actually done, whatever Caine decided — was not to make the truth true. It was to make it durable.

The Westmere worker arrived the next morning, travel-worn, having come from the camp on foot rather than waiting for scheduled supply transport. He asked for Breck by name at the base approach, and Breck came down to meet him on the flat below the mountain rather than making him climb.

“The eastern operations are suspended,” the young man said, when Breck reached him. “Two days ago. Garrow announced it to the full camp — called it a precautionary operational pause pending the outcome of the Magisterium review.” He said it carefully, the way he said careful things. “That’s the official reason. The actual reason is that three of the eastern crew supervisors came to Garrow with the directive Hask issued, the one I gave you. They’d kept their own copies, as it turned out. Garrow looked at it and within four hours had Hask removed from site and had suspended the extraction. He told the camp that his site manager had been operating outside authorized parameters.”

Breck stood with that a moment, doing the arithmetic. Garrow cutting Hask loose before Caine’s response arrived was Garrow reading his own exposure correctly — the directive proved Hask had been running the eastern operation independently, which meant Garrow’s best available position was to establish, clearly and on record, that Hask had acted outside his authority and that Garrow had moved to address it the moment he knew. It wasn’t goodness. It was a man with a long career and a significant operation making the rational calculation about what he needed to be on the right side of before the institution weighed in. But the calculation produced a real outcome. The extraction was stopped.

“The supervisors who came to him,” Breck said. “They’d kept their own copies of the directive.”

The young man looked at him with the expression he’d had at the trench three weeks ago — something already decided, something being confirmed. “Three of them. Separately, without coordinating with each other. They didn’t know the others had done it until Garrow told them.” He paused. “I didn’t know either. I thought I was the only one who’d held onto it.”

Breck thought about the seven clan delegations on the terraces above him, arriving before any formal notification. He thought about three separate crew supervisors keeping private copies of a directive, independently, without knowing the others had done the same. He thought about the community deciding before the institution.

“You weren’t the only one,” he said. “You were just the first one to move.” He looked at the young man steadily. “Your name is in the file as the primary source. That stands regardless of what the supervisors did afterward. I want you to know that.”

The young man nodded, the same calibration-nod Tomson had given him and Daveron before that and the young man himself weeks ago on the ridge. The nod of a person confirming they’ve been heard by someone who wasn’t obligated to hear them.

Tomson came that evening.

Not as an elder performing a formal function. Not with ceremony or announcement. He walked up the approach path alone, in plain clothes rather than clan marking, and came to stand at the lower terrace where the gathered clan members had spread across the available stone in the quiet companionship of people keeping company with something important. He didn’t speak to Breck. He stood and looked at Frostpeak’s dim light for a long time, long enough that the last of the day’s warmth had gone and the cold was settling properly into the stone. Then he sat down, cross-legged, the way the clan stone-readers sat when they were doing a reading — except Tomson was not a stone-reader and was not doing a reading. He was simply sitting.

Breck didn’t say anything to him. Didn’t acknowledge his presence formally, didn’t make it into anything, because making it into something would cost it whatever it actually was. Tomson had come. That was the whole of it.

The terrace held through the night — clan members coming and going in quiet rotation, stone-readers taking shifts at the fault lines, children asleep in their parents’ laps between the dim heartbeat pulses of a mountain’s remaining light. Breck walked among them once, slowly, saying nothing, simply present. He thought about all the cases he’d worked alone, in all the towns between Crestfall and this mountain, the habit of solitude that had felt like focus and had been, in parts of it he was still figuring out the dimensions of, also its own kind of loss. He thought about what Yarrow had told him on the caravan. He thought about what Mira had said on the wind-ship about how a life got measured.

He thought he was, finally and specifically, doing what he’d actually come here to do.

← Chapter Seventeen: What He Sets Down at Night | Chapter Nineteen →

BRECK: Stone’s Rest is a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye — Book Three of the BRECK series, crossing from Lumenvale into Nomados. Chapter 18 of 20. New chapters post daily.

✦ Enjoyed this chapter? “The Community Decides First” continues Book Three of the BRECK series — seven clan delegations arriving before any official notification could have reached them, three supervisors with private copies of the same directive, and a skeptic who comes alone and sits down. Browse the full series, follow for daily chapters, or share this with a reader who’s learned that the institution is always the last to know.

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Fifteen What the Doubt Is For

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Fifteen

What the Doubt Is For

This is Chapter 15 of BRECK: Stone’s Rest, Book Three of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye. New chapters post daily.

The Story So Far

The case file is gone, in the hands of a dispatch runner headed east toward Caine’s office. Breck is back at Frostpeak. Bren said what she’s actually asking for — to be known, not saved. Breck is choosing stillness for the first time in twenty years of running from it. Hask has been quiet since the ridge. That quiet is its own kind of information.

← Chapter Fourteen: What He Used to Run From | Chapter Sixteen →

Chapter Fifteen: What the Doubt Is For

This chapter asks what to do with negative thoughts — and answers with the only method that’s ever actually worked for a man who knows better than to pretend the thoughts are wrong.

Jenna found him at dawn on the third morning after his return to Frostpeak and told him, with the economy she brought to information that required immediate attention, that Hask had been seen at the base of the mountain’s approach path the evening before. Not with a message and a single runner the way Garrow’s formal communications moved. With six men and supply packs weighted for a stay.

“He came up last night?” Breck asked.

“No. They set camp at the base. Which means they came up this morning, or they come up soon.”

He had twenty minutes, maybe thirty, before whoever was on the path reached the terrace. He spent most of them gathering his narrow crew — Jenna already present, Tomson’s man Rell who’d been stationed on Thunderstep’s second terrace since the Council convergence and whom Breck had spent the past week quietly confirming was exactly as reliable as Tomson’s management of his own people suggested, and the two younger Peak-riders from Frostpeak’s own clan who slept on the mountain regardless of what ground-dwellers were or weren’t doing on her flanks. Five total. Against six plus Hask.

“I’m not looking for a fight,” Breck told them, before the path delivered what it was about to deliver. “I’m looking for witnesses. Whatever happens on this terrace in the next hour, it happens in front of people whose account of it goes in the case file addendum. Do nothing unless I say so or unless someone moves on one of us directly. If someone moves directly, contain it. Don’t answer it.”

Rell looked at him with the expression of a man reassessing a civilian. “You’ve done this before.”

“Different settings,” Breck said. “Same principle.”

Hask was not what he’d expected, which was always useful information in itself. Medium build, economical, with a foreman’s instinct for reading structural problems at a glance — he walked onto the terrace and assessed its layout, the positions of Breck’s five, the mountain’s fading light running in its dim irregular pulse across the stone, with the same unhurried professionalism Garrow had shown in the map room, except where Garrow’s attention had been open and deliberate, Hask’s was sealed. Whatever he was calculating, he wasn’t offering the calculation.

He stopped a careful ten feet from Breck, hands loose at his sides, six men fanning into positions that were not quite flanking and were absolutely flanking.

“Mr. Breck,” he said. “I’m here on behalf of the Garrow concession to provide notice that extraction operations on the eastern site will continue at full capacity through the end of the charter’s current authorized period. Which ends in four weeks.” He paused. “Your case file, assuming it reaches Caine’s office, will take six to eight weeks to receive an initial response under standard Magisterium procedure. I assume you’re aware of that timeline.”

“I’m aware,” Breck said.

“Then you’ll understand that by the time anyone in Lumenvale determines the appropriate response to your deposition, the extraction phase will have been completed, documented, and closed out. Whatever ruling eventually comes down would apply to future activity, not activity that’s already finished.” He said it the way a man states something he knows is true and has had some time to make his peace with knowing. “I’m not here to threaten anything. I’m here to make sure you understand the operational timeline so there are no surprises.”

Breck let that settle the way he always let true things settle — fully, without trying to push it back before it had finished arriving. Every word of it was accurate. He’d known it was accurate since page forty-seven, since Mira’s chamber, since Bren said weeks, not seasons. The negative thoughts had been there all along, not as intrusions but as structural facts he’d been managing around since the letter was sealed: you may be too late, the timeline may not hold, the machinery you’re trying to move may simply be too slow for the urgency at its other end. He’d known all of it. He’d moved anyway, because the alternative was doing nothing on the grounds that doing something might not be enough, which was a category of reasoning he’d watched cost people everything in every hard situation he’d ever stood in.

He had a specific way of dealing with thoughts like that. Not suppression — he’d tried suppression at twenty-three in a Karithian valley and it didn’t hold, it never held, it simply deferred the weight to a moment when the man carrying it was least equipped to bear it. Not argument — you couldn’t argue a fact into falsehood by wanting it to be different. What he did, and what he’d developed, through accumulated loss and accumulated patience, into something close to a reliable practice, was acknowledge the thought as what it was: information. Real information about a real possibility. And then ask, without flinching from the possibility, what the useful move was given that it might be true.

The thought you may be too late asked for a useful move. The useful move was not to be less late than he was.

“Thank you for the notice,” Breck said. “I’ll need your name and your role in the concession’s organizational structure for the case file addendum covering this visit.”

Hask looked at him for a moment that contained several recalibrations. “Davan Hask. Site Manager, Garrow Eastern Concession.”

“And the six men you brought.”

“Workers. Support staff.”

“Their names, please.”

A long pause. The six men shifted collectively in the way of people who’ve abruptly understood that a situation they were treating as the exertion of informal pressure has been reclassified, by the person on the other end of it, as a formal proceeding. Hask looked at Breck with an expression that moved through several stages quickly and arrived at something that wasn’t quite respect but was adjacent to it, in the way of a man who’d expected an easier audience.

“You’re not going to fight the timeline,” Hask said. It wasn’t quite a question.

“I’m not going to fight the timeline,” Breck agreed. “I’m going to use every day of it. Starting with this morning. Names, please.”

Hask gave them. Breck wrote them down, along with the time, the specific location, the exact wording of the notice as he’d received it, Rell and Jenna as witnessing parties, the supply packs that indicated an intended duration of stay. When he finished, he looked back up at Hask.

“The notice is received and documented. Extraction operations continuing after this point do so with the case file’s addendum noting that the concession’s site manager personally confirmed to a Magisterium courier on this date that operations would continue through the authorized period regardless of the pending deposition.” He held Hask’s eyes. “That addendum goes to Caine today, ahead of any response to the primary file.”

“That changes nothing about the timeline,” Hask said.

“It changes the record,” Breck said. “The timeline’s the timeline. The record’s something I can actually affect, which makes it the useful move.” He pocketed the dispatch sheet. “Tell Garrow the deposition covers the directive his site manager issued to the eastern crew supervisors three weeks ago under an alternative site designation that doesn’t match any permit in his charter. Garrow may want to have a conversation with someone about that before Caine’s first response arrives.”

Something moved in Hask’s face that was not the professional calibration he’d walked in with. The directive. He hadn’t known Breck had the directive. That was visible, in the small and controlled way of a man who’d made a career of not showing things and was showing something now despite himself — not panic, but the particular internal reckoning of someone who’d just discovered that the shape of a situation he thought he understood was considerably different from what he’d been working with.

He left without another word, and took his six men back down the path with him, and Breck stood at the terrace edge and watched them go with the doubt still present, still fully acknowledged, still accurately describing a real constraint on everything he was trying to do. The timeline was what it was. The machinery was what it was. He couldn’t make Caine respond faster, couldn’t extend Frostpeak’s weeks, couldn’t change the distance between where the case file was and where it needed to be.

What he could do was be less wrong, every day, about the things within his actual reach. He could document. He could witness. He could make the record as complete and as hard to argue with as a human being with a pencil and a dispatch sheet could make it.

Behind him, Bren had come to stand at the terrace edge without Breck having heard him arrive. He had Breck’s way, the boy did, of being present in a space without announcing it — the quiet of someone who’d spent his whole life listening rather than filling silence.

“What did he want,” Bren asked.

“To give me something true to worry about,” Breck said. “And I do. And I’m not going to stop.”

Bren was quiet a moment. “Is that the same as being okay?”

Breck thought about that more carefully than the boy might have expected. “It’s the closest thing I have to it,” he said. “Most days it’s enough.”

← Chapter Fourteen: What He Used to Run From | Chapter Sixteen →

BRECK: Stone’s Rest is a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye — Book Three of the BRECK series, crossing from Lumenvale into Nomados. Chapter 15 of 20. New chapters post daily.

✦ Enjoyed this chapter? “What the Doubt Is For” continues Book Three of the BRECK series — a foreman who says nothing untrue, a man who knows better than to pretend the worry is wrong, and the only method for negative thoughts that’s ever actually held. Browse the full series, follow for daily chapters, or share this with a reader who’s learned that acknowledging the fear and stopping are not the same move.

Read my Steampunk Horror Story “Work”

Ant and Fig knew they’d seen everything at least once before, even if it was always nailed, sealed, and hammered into a wooden crate. The two men had been employed at the piers together for six years. They knew a highway of treasure had passed beneath their fingertips and gloves as they lifted, twisted, pulled, pried, and wrenched boxes off the various boats. The two men lived in Largo, a large merchant town nestled against a green shore of velvet hills. All goods, items, relics, trinkets, ornaments, antiques, or objects being sent to the country first passed through this idyllic seaside town where wind chimes constantly played on patio windows. Both men were constantly busy. It was a good thing. Time passed quicker. 

They hated their jobs. 

Ant and Fig looked like each other. They were pale, greasy, and rough looking. Each wore a pair of overalls with rips in the knees. Each wore a red bandana to soak up sweat and keep the sea salt out of their eyes. Both smoked. If you watched them carefully, the claws of smoke creeping out of their lips and nose were identical as well. The only difference between the two of them was their size. Ant was shorter. Fig was taller. People always asked if they were brothers.

Neither cared enough to correct them.

Ant and Fig had been in Nibeah their entire lives. It was an elegant looking city with stone buildings and cobblestone streets. Windmills with bellies of gears turned between shadows and sunlight. Quiet bridges over canals and windows of stained glass echoed laughter and singing in the streets. There was money in the town thanks to the constant merchants running their wares across the water and sky. There was also an airship dock, so the winds were noisy with the groaning propellers of zeppelins and their whistles.

Ant and Fig were stuck working late on the northern docks. The night shift was difficult to work. The water was one long sheet of ink in the gloom, with just the boat and lights to serve as beacons for their eyes. It was the end of fall, where the air was slowly getting turned over by a frosty dial. The lines of wooden steps, planks, and pillars were iced in random spots. If you slipped and fell into the water, the night sky would make you think you’re caught between two oblivions. 

Ant and Fig worked in a small shack on the edge of the pier poking out into the deep. It had been a quiet night. They were reading newspapers and letting a few cigarettes wither at their lips. They didn’t talk. They knew the same things. They thought the same things. What was the point in speaking? All that mattered was them hearing the foghorn of the lighthouse sound. They could find that siren’s song in their sleep if they had to.

It was close to 3:00 am when they finally got a ship crawling into the harbor on the still, dark waves. The sounds of the city were quiet. There were no blacksmiths hammering, gears twisting, or street performers summoning laughs and whistles on the boardwalks. The air smelt of cinnamon and yeast as the bakers made their first bout of delicacies in the few orange squares illuminated against a backdrop of black windows. A horn blew further up the docks. Ant and Fig opened the door of the dock house and walked onto the narrow pier, which jutted like a knife into the lapping water. A barge with a flat face and long wheelhouse was approaching them. A solitary lantern dangled from a post on its bow. The rest of the ship was empty of any light or movement. The ship looked abandoned. 

“Is that a riverboat? What’s it doing here?” Ant said. 

“Your guess is as good as mine. It’s an old one too, doesn’t even have railings along the hull,” Fig said. He pointed a large hand at the flat nose of the ship. It was no doubt a vessel for hauling sand or some piled material, but this ship was empty of any crumbled mountain. Ant turned and walked back to the dock house and lit a red lantern. It was a signal for the horse and wagon to make the trek down to them. 

“Well, I hope they don’t have a ton of cargo, I mean it must all be inside the hull,” Ant said. Fig threw a pair of thick ropes onto the deck of the boat and jumped down. Something was rancid on the ship. The odor grew heavier the closer you got to the wheelhouse. Fig got a heavy whiff of it. 

“You’re going to wake them up this time. I did it last time. I don’t like doing it,” Ant said, jumping aboard and lighting a smoke. 

“Fine, let’s just wait for the horses to get here,” Fig said.

Eventually an older man with a long cloud for a beard walked towards them smoking a pipe beneath a black hat. His name was Rufus, and he was the stable master for the docks. He’d known Ant and Fig their entire lives. 

“Horses won’t come down here for some reason, something’s got them spooked. They even tried to jump in the water,” Rufus said. 

“Well, that’s bad, how are we going to get the goods off? We’ll have to wait until morning,” Ant said. 

“Have you boys even talked to the captain yet? Maybe they don’t even have anything and just need to park,” Rufus said.

“It stinks. It stinks badly,” Fig replied. 

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve gotten stinky wares onto the docks. You boys better talk to someone onboard and get this straightened out,” Rufus said.

It took a few minutes for Fig to work up the courage to knock on the round door of the flat building stretched across the empty deck. It was cold and hollow against his rough hand. A scratching sound echoed inside the cabin. It made Fig jump back a second and steady his hand on the round doorknob, which was grimy brown from salt and rust.

“Hello? Anybody in there? You just reached Nibeah. You’re at the northern pier. Come on out so we can get you checked-in,” Fig said. A wave jostled the boat upwards. The ocean was trying to warn him.

“Hello? I’m going to come inside. I just work for the docks.” Fig turned the handle. It took some strength. Dust had frozen the bulkhead in place. Fig pushed on the door with his shoulder. After a few seconds it popped open. Fig fell into the room, banging his knee on the floor.

“You, you guys better get down here. Get down here now!” Fig screamed, crawling backwards like a crab onto the bow. Ant sprinted down the deck and lifted his friend up by the armpits. The door stared back at them. The lantern was turned on its side and threw some light into the cabin. Ant slowly approached the door and used his foot to steady the wobbling light. Ant lifted it up above his head with a gasp. The entire cabin was etched in dried blood. Benches, tables, ropes, fishing gear, bunks, bulkheads, the floor, even the candles locked into their fixtures were covered in this crimson smear. It was as if a giant vein had run the length of the building, then been split in one wild slash. 

“What, what happened? Where is everyone?” Ant said.

Then it moved.

There was a hiss like a cat, but with more muscle and mass. It wasn’t until the form dashed between both men out the doorway that they could decipher any details. All they could see was some sort of fluid body with slimy skin. The shape’s arms were exaggerated and dragging on the floor, which was ripped apart thanks to the bits of gray bone spiking out of its shimmering flesh. Its head was that of an octopus. It had silver tentacles for hair, along with two red eyes with pulsating flaps. Its mouth looked human. A cloak, a satchel with a pair of books, and some legs with shredded pants hung off its rubbery body. 

Before either man could turn to look at each other in amazement, the creature jumped off the deck and onto the dock in a few snarling bounds. Rufus, who was standing in the center of its path, could barely turn before the monster’s long arms slashed outwards splitting his torso from his legs like wire through clay. There was a wet plopping of tissue. His body thrashed around as his upper-half tried to attach to his lower-half. His howling scream made the nightstand still until shock got the better of him and he went eternally silent.

“Get back!” A voice said. It came from above the deck on the wheelhouse roof. There was a man standing there in the moonlight. He was tall, thin, with unblemished skin and sandy brown hair cut into a bowl. He was wearing some sort of priest’s outfit, with a white collar and dark raincoat with baggy sleeves and enormous hood. His entire outfit appeared to change colors in the rolling night. He didn’t want to be seen completely. In his right hand was an enormous silver gun with a wide barrel and gears poking out of its chambers. It had a pearl handle, which curled into the stranger’s sleeve. 

He raised the weapon into the air and clicked the trigger. Light thrashed the darkness in bits of sparks and fire. A blue flare curled into the sky above the dock and burst above it like a dying star. The creature froze and snarled backwards. It was already halfway towards the shore.

“You stay put!” The man yelled.

He was off the roof and onto the line of wooden planks before Ant or Fig could speak. He moved as a piece of the night, like the creature did. 

“Watch out! Stay back!” He yelled. He loaded a few golden bullets into his gun with his sleeve. There was another hiss. The fiend had turned back towards the man. It swung its shadowy tendril of an arm at him. At the end of it, the bones had formed into a crude hammer. The man spun his coat over his right shoulder and braced for the impact. The cloth suddenly hardened into a golden shield. The bone and magic collided, throwing metallic thunder into the air and tossing the sea into a one-second tempest.

Ant and Fig were both knocked off their feet. 

“Come on! Come on!” The man yelled. He pulled his shield away from the living brick. The monster’s coil snapped back. The air cackled to it. The man fired twice from his pistol. The monster jumped, sending both shots into empty air. It twirled violently and severed its own arm throwing the organic flail through the air. The man once again threw his coat up and smashed into the missile. The impact shattered the dock. Shrapnel cut the air. Some of them hit Ant and Fig, who were frozen in awe.

It wasn’t every day that monsters and gods threw fire at each other.

The creature dashed further from the man. The attack was to distract him and slow him down. The man hunched over and coughed up some blood. It looked unreal in the dim and dark of the moon and torchlight. He shook his head and took to one knee. He leveled the gun at the shape. The monster was approaching the buildings at the end of the pier. A small crowd had gathered to watch the ruckus. The flare had woken them up.

“Goddammit!” The man said with a wheeze. He hit a red gear planted alongside the oblong chamber of his firearm. Fire cut the air in a perfect line. A beam of white light opened from the atoms around the barrel and engulfed the dock. It narrowed as it spread in a fine, sharp laser. It struck the abomination in the back of its head. The momentum from the blast tossed its body into the water and onto the dock in inky chunks. 

“Got it,” the man said. He collapsed onto his stomach. 

Ant and Fig didn’t move. Fig was holding Ant by the shoulders. They were practically hugging one another. They were about to speak when the man wheezed and slowly stood up. He pulled the hood over his young face and stretched out beneath his coat. A few bones and joints cackled. He’d been hurt before. 

“What do you guys do?” he asked in an older voice. It was bold and rough. It didn’t match the softness of his youthful appearance.

“What, what?” Ant said. 

“Did you not hear me? What do you guys do for a living?” He shook the gun free of the water that had sprayed during the fight. 

“We, uh, work on the docks,” Ant said. 

“I realize that. But what do you do? What does your job entail?” 

A few people screamed at the other end of the dock. The monster’s rubbery parts were trying to reconnect. The man sighed. He would have to burn the leftovers.

“We move boxes. We unload them and load them. That’s it,” Fig said.

The man lifted his gun and looked down the square sight jutting out from the still steaming nozzle. He sighed and started walking towards the monster’s sour and ambitious remains.

“That sounds nice,” he said.

#blogging #books #darkFantasy #darkfantasy #epicFantasy #fantasy #fantasyBlog #fantasyFiction #fiction #gothicFantasy #grimdark #horror #horrorFantasy #indieAuthor #magicalRealism #medievalFantasy #monsters #newChapter #novels #ongoingStory #onlineNovel #readOnline #reading #steampunk #storySeries #supernaturalFiction #webFiction #weeklyStory #writing

Read my Steampunk Horror Story “Work”

Ant and Fig knew they’d seen everything at least once before, even if it was always nailed, sealed, and hammered into a wooden crate. The two men had been employed at the piers together for six years. They knew a highway of treasure had passed beneath their fingertips and gloves as they lifted, twisted, pulled, pried, and wrenched boxes off the various boats. The two men lived in Largo, a large merchant town nestled against a green shore of velvet hills. All goods, items, relics, trinkets, ornaments, antiques, or objects being sent to the country first passed through this idyllic seaside town where wind chimes constantly played on patio windows. Both men were constantly busy. It was a good thing. Time passed quicker. 

They hated their jobs. 

Ant and Fig looked like each other. They were pale, greasy, and rough looking. Each wore a pair of overalls with rips in the knees. Each wore a red bandana to soak up sweat and keep the sea salt out of their eyes. Both smoked. If you watched them carefully, the claws of smoke creeping out of their lips and nose were identical as well. The only difference between the two of them was their size. Ant was shorter. Fig was taller. People always asked if they were brothers.

Neither cared enough to correct them.

Ant and Fig had been in Nibeah their entire lives. It was an elegant looking city with stone buildings and cobblestone streets. Windmills with bellies of gears turned between shadows and sunlight. Quiet bridges over canals and windows of stained glass echoed laughter and singing in the streets. There was money in the town thanks to the constant merchants running their wares across the water and sky. There was also an airship dock, so the winds were noisy with the groaning propellers of zeppelins and their whistles.

Ant and Fig were stuck working late on the northern docks. The night shift was difficult to work. The water was one long sheet of ink in the gloom, with just the boat and lights to serve as beacons for their eyes. It was the end of fall, where the air was slowly getting turned over by a frosty dial. The lines of wooden steps, planks, and pillars were iced in random spots. If you slipped and fell into the water, the night sky would make you think you’re caught between two oblivions. 

Ant and Fig worked in a small shack on the edge of the pier poking out into the deep. It had been a quiet night. They were reading newspapers and letting a few cigarettes wither at their lips. They didn’t talk. They knew the same things. They thought the same things. What was the point in speaking? All that mattered was them hearing the foghorn of the lighthouse sound. They could find that siren’s song in their sleep if they had to.

It was close to 3:00 am when they finally got a ship crawling into the harbor on the still, dark waves. The sounds of the city were quiet. There were no blacksmiths hammering, gears twisting, or street performers summoning laughs and whistles on the boardwalks. The air smelt of cinnamon and yeast as the bakers made their first bout of delicacies in the few orange squares illuminated against a backdrop of black windows. A horn blew further up the docks. Ant and Fig opened the door of the dock house and walked onto the narrow pier, which jutted like a knife into the lapping water. A barge with a flat face and long wheelhouse was approaching them. A solitary lantern dangled from a post on its bow. The rest of the ship was empty of any light or movement. The ship looked abandoned. 

“Is that a riverboat? What’s it doing here?” Ant said. 

“Your guess is as good as mine. It’s an old one too, doesn’t even have railings along the hull,” Fig said. He pointed a large hand at the flat nose of the ship. It was no doubt a vessel for hauling sand or some piled material, but this ship was empty of any crumbled mountain. Ant turned and walked back to the dock house and lit a red lantern. It was a signal for the horse and wagon to make the trek down to them. 

“Well, I hope they don’t have a ton of cargo, I mean it must all be inside the hull,” Ant said. Fig threw a pair of thick ropes onto the deck of the boat and jumped down. Something was rancid on the ship. The odor grew heavier the closer you got to the wheelhouse. Fig got a heavy whiff of it. 

“You’re going to wake them up this time. I did it last time. I don’t like doing it,” Ant said, jumping aboard and lighting a smoke. 

“Fine, let’s just wait for the horses to get here,” Fig said.

Eventually an older man with a long cloud for a beard walked towards them smoking a pipe beneath a black hat. His name was Rufus, and he was the stable master for the docks. He’d known Ant and Fig their entire lives. 

“Horses won’t come down here for some reason, something’s got them spooked. They even tried to jump in the water,” Rufus said. 

“Well, that’s bad, how are we going to get the goods off? We’ll have to wait until morning,” Ant said. 

“Have you boys even talked to the captain yet? Maybe they don’t even have anything and just need to park,” Rufus said.

“It stinks. It stinks badly,” Fig replied. 

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve gotten stinky wares onto the docks. You boys better talk to someone onboard and get this straightened out,” Rufus said.

It took a few minutes for Fig to work up the courage to knock on the round door of the flat building stretched across the empty deck. It was cold and hollow against his rough hand. A scratching sound echoed inside the cabin. It made Fig jump back a second and steady his hand on the round doorknob, which was grimy brown from salt and rust.

“Hello? Anybody in there? You just reached Nibeah. You’re at the northern pier. Come on out so we can get you checked-in,” Fig said. A wave jostled the boat upwards. The ocean was trying to warn him.

“Hello? I’m going to come inside. I just work for the docks.” Fig turned the handle. It took some strength. Dust had frozen the bulkhead in place. Fig pushed on the door with his shoulder. After a few seconds it popped open. Fig fell into the room, banging his knee on the floor.

“You, you guys better get down here. Get down here now!” Fig screamed, crawling backwards like a crab onto the bow. Ant sprinted down the deck and lifted his friend up by the armpits. The door stared back at them. The lantern was turned on its side and threw some light into the cabin. Ant slowly approached the door and used his foot to steady the wobbling light. Ant lifted it up above his head with a gasp. The entire cabin was etched in dried blood. Benches, tables, ropes, fishing gear, bunks, bulkheads, the floor, even the candles locked into their fixtures were covered in this crimson smear. It was as if a giant vein had run the length of the building, then been split in one wild slash. 

“What, what happened? Where is everyone?” Ant said.

Then it moved.

There was a hiss like a cat, but with more muscle and mass. It wasn’t until the form dashed between both men out the doorway that they could decipher any details. All they could see was some sort of fluid body with slimy skin. The shape’s arms were exaggerated and dragging on the floor, which was ripped apart thanks to the bits of gray bone spiking out of its shimmering flesh. Its head was that of an octopus. It had silver tentacles for hair, along with two red eyes with pulsating flaps. Its mouth looked human. A cloak, a satchel with a pair of books, and some legs with shredded pants hung off its rubbery body. 

Before either man could turn to look at each other in amazement, the creature jumped off the deck and onto the dock in a few snarling bounds. Rufus, who was standing in the center of its path, could barely turn before the monster’s long arms slashed outwards splitting his torso from his legs like wire through clay. There was a wet plopping of tissue. His body thrashed around as his upper-half tried to attach to his lower-half. His howling scream made the nightstand still until shock got the better of him and he went eternally silent.

“Get back!” A voice said. It came from above the deck on the wheelhouse roof. There was a man standing there in the moonlight. He was tall, thin, with unblemished skin and sandy brown hair cut into a bowl. He was wearing some sort of priest’s outfit, with a white collar and dark raincoat with baggy sleeves and enormous hood. His entire outfit appeared to change colors in the rolling night. He didn’t want to be seen completely. In his right hand was an enormous silver gun with a wide barrel and gears poking out of its chambers. It had a pearl handle, which curled into the stranger’s sleeve. 

He raised the weapon into the air and clicked the trigger. Light thrashed the darkness in bits of sparks and fire. A blue flare curled into the sky above the dock and burst above it like a dying star. The creature froze and snarled backwards. It was already halfway towards the shore.

“You stay put!” The man yelled.

He was off the roof and onto the line of wooden planks before Ant or Fig could speak. He moved as a piece of the night, like the creature did. 

“Watch out! Stay back!” He yelled. He loaded a few golden bullets into his gun with his sleeve. There was another hiss. The fiend had turned back towards the man. It swung its shadowy tendril of an arm at him. At the end of it, the bones had formed into a crude hammer. The man spun his coat over his right shoulder and braced for the impact. The cloth suddenly hardened into a golden shield. The bone and magic collided, throwing metallic thunder into the air and tossing the sea into a one-second tempest.

Ant and Fig were both knocked off their feet. 

“Come on! Come on!” The man yelled. He pulled his shield away from the living brick. The monster’s coil snapped back. The air cackled to it. The man fired twice from his pistol. The monster jumped, sending both shots into empty air. It twirled violently and severed its own arm throwing the organic flail through the air. The man once again threw his coat up and smashed into the missile. The impact shattered the dock. Shrapnel cut the air. Some of them hit Ant and Fig, who were frozen in awe.

It wasn’t every day that monsters and gods threw fire at each other.

The creature dashed further from the man. The attack was to distract him and slow him down. The man hunched over and coughed up some blood. It looked unreal in the dim and dark of the moon and torchlight. He shook his head and took to one knee. He leveled the gun at the shape. The monster was approaching the buildings at the end of the pier. A small crowd had gathered to watch the ruckus. The flare had woken them up.

“Goddammit!” The man said with a wheeze. He hit a red gear planted alongside the oblong chamber of his firearm. Fire cut the air in a perfect line. A beam of white light opened from the atoms around the barrel and engulfed the dock. It narrowed as it spread in a fine, sharp laser. It struck the abomination in the back of its head. The momentum from the blast tossed its body into the water and onto the dock in inky chunks. 

“Got it,” the man said. He collapsed onto his stomach. 

Ant and Fig didn’t move. Fig was holding Ant by the shoulders. They were practically hugging one another. They were about to speak when the man wheezed and slowly stood up. He pulled the hood over his young face and stretched out beneath his coat. A few bones and joints cackled. He’d been hurt before. 

“What do you guys do?” he asked in an older voice. It was bold and rough. It didn’t match the softness of his youthful appearance.

“What, what?” Ant said. 

“Did you not hear me? What do you guys do for a living?” He shook the gun free of the water that had sprayed during the fight. 

“We, uh, work on the docks,” Ant said. 

“I realize that. But what do you do? What does your job entail?” 

A few people screamed at the other end of the dock. The monster’s rubbery parts were trying to reconnect. The man sighed. He would have to burn the leftovers.

“We move boxes. We unload them and load them. That’s it,” Fig said.

The man lifted his gun and looked down the square sight jutting out from the still steaming nozzle. He sighed and started walking towards the monster’s sour and ambitious remains.

“That sounds nice,” he said.

#blogging #books #darkFantasy #darkfantasy #epicFantasy #fantasy #fantasyBlog #fantasyFiction #fiction #gothicFantasy #grimdark #horror #horrorFantasy #indieAuthor #magicalRealism #medievalFantasy #monsters #newChapter #novels #ongoingStory #onlineNovel #readOnline #reading #steampunk #storySeries #supernaturalFiction #webFiction #weeklyStory #writing

Read my Steampunk Horror Story “Work”

Ant and Fig knew they’d seen everything at least once before, even if it was always nailed, sealed, and hammered into a wooden crate. The two men had been employed at the piers together for six years. They knew a highway of treasure had passed beneath their fingertips and gloves as they lifted, twisted, pulled, pried, and wrenched boxes off the various boats. The two men lived in Largo, a large merchant town nestled against a green shore of velvet hills. All goods, items, relics, trinkets, ornaments, antiques, or objects being sent to the country first passed through this idyllic seaside town where wind chimes constantly played on patio windows. Both men were constantly busy. It was a good thing. Time passed quicker. 

They hated their jobs. 

Ant and Fig looked like each other. They were pale, greasy, and rough looking. Each wore a pair of overalls with rips in the knees. Each wore a red bandana to soak up sweat and keep the sea salt out of their eyes. Both smoked. If you watched them carefully, the claws of smoke creeping out of their lips and nose were identical as well. The only difference between the two of them was their size. Ant was shorter. Fig was taller. People always asked if they were brothers.

Neither cared enough to correct them.

Ant and Fig had been in Nibeah their entire lives. It was an elegant looking city with stone buildings and cobblestone streets. Windmills with bellies of gears turned between shadows and sunlight. Quiet bridges over canals and windows of stained glass echoed laughter and singing in the streets. There was money in the town thanks to the constant merchants running their wares across the water and sky. There was also an airship dock, so the winds were noisy with the groaning propellers of zeppelins and their whistles.

Ant and Fig were stuck working late on the northern docks. The night shift was difficult to work. The water was one long sheet of ink in the gloom, with just the boat and lights to serve as beacons for their eyes. It was the end of fall, where the air was slowly getting turned over by a frosty dial. The lines of wooden steps, planks, and pillars were iced in random spots. If you slipped and fell into the water, the night sky would make you think you’re caught between two oblivions. 

Ant and Fig worked in a small shack on the edge of the pier poking out into the deep. It had been a quiet night. They were reading newspapers and letting a few cigarettes wither at their lips. They didn’t talk. They knew the same things. They thought the same things. What was the point in speaking? All that mattered was them hearing the foghorn of the lighthouse sound. They could find that siren’s song in their sleep if they had to.

It was close to 3:00 am when they finally got a ship crawling into the harbor on the still, dark waves. The sounds of the city were quiet. There were no blacksmiths hammering, gears twisting, or street performers summoning laughs and whistles on the boardwalks. The air smelt of cinnamon and yeast as the bakers made their first bout of delicacies in the few orange squares illuminated against a backdrop of black windows. A horn blew further up the docks. Ant and Fig opened the door of the dock house and walked onto the narrow pier, which jutted like a knife into the lapping water. A barge with a flat face and long wheelhouse was approaching them. A solitary lantern dangled from a post on its bow. The rest of the ship was empty of any light or movement. The ship looked abandoned. 

“Is that a riverboat? What’s it doing here?” Ant said. 

“Your guess is as good as mine. It’s an old one too, doesn’t even have railings along the hull,” Fig said. He pointed a large hand at the flat nose of the ship. It was no doubt a vessel for hauling sand or some piled material, but this ship was empty of any crumbled mountain. Ant turned and walked back to the dock house and lit a red lantern. It was a signal for the horse and wagon to make the trek down to them. 

“Well, I hope they don’t have a ton of cargo, I mean it must all be inside the hull,” Ant said. Fig threw a pair of thick ropes onto the deck of the boat and jumped down. Something was rancid on the ship. The odor grew heavier the closer you got to the wheelhouse. Fig got a heavy whiff of it. 

“You’re going to wake them up this time. I did it last time. I don’t like doing it,” Ant said, jumping aboard and lighting a smoke. 

“Fine, let’s just wait for the horses to get here,” Fig said.

Eventually an older man with a long cloud for a beard walked towards them smoking a pipe beneath a black hat. His name was Rufus, and he was the stable master for the docks. He’d known Ant and Fig their entire lives. 

“Horses won’t come down here for some reason, something’s got them spooked. They even tried to jump in the water,” Rufus said. 

“Well, that’s bad, how are we going to get the goods off? We’ll have to wait until morning,” Ant said. 

“Have you boys even talked to the captain yet? Maybe they don’t even have anything and just need to park,” Rufus said.

“It stinks. It stinks badly,” Fig replied. 

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve gotten stinky wares onto the docks. You boys better talk to someone onboard and get this straightened out,” Rufus said.

It took a few minutes for Fig to work up the courage to knock on the round door of the flat building stretched across the empty deck. It was cold and hollow against his rough hand. A scratching sound echoed inside the cabin. It made Fig jump back a second and steady his hand on the round doorknob, which was grimy brown from salt and rust.

“Hello? Anybody in there? You just reached Nibeah. You’re at the northern pier. Come on out so we can get you checked-in,” Fig said. A wave jostled the boat upwards. The ocean was trying to warn him.

“Hello? I’m going to come inside. I just work for the docks.” Fig turned the handle. It took some strength. Dust had frozen the bulkhead in place. Fig pushed on the door with his shoulder. After a few seconds it popped open. Fig fell into the room, banging his knee on the floor.

“You, you guys better get down here. Get down here now!” Fig screamed, crawling backwards like a crab onto the bow. Ant sprinted down the deck and lifted his friend up by the armpits. The door stared back at them. The lantern was turned on its side and threw some light into the cabin. Ant slowly approached the door and used his foot to steady the wobbling light. Ant lifted it up above his head with a gasp. The entire cabin was etched in dried blood. Benches, tables, ropes, fishing gear, bunks, bulkheads, the floor, even the candles locked into their fixtures were covered in this crimson smear. It was as if a giant vein had run the length of the building, then been split in one wild slash. 

“What, what happened? Where is everyone?” Ant said.

Then it moved.

There was a hiss like a cat, but with more muscle and mass. It wasn’t until the form dashed between both men out the doorway that they could decipher any details. All they could see was some sort of fluid body with slimy skin. The shape’s arms were exaggerated and dragging on the floor, which was ripped apart thanks to the bits of gray bone spiking out of its shimmering flesh. Its head was that of an octopus. It had silver tentacles for hair, along with two red eyes with pulsating flaps. Its mouth looked human. A cloak, a satchel with a pair of books, and some legs with shredded pants hung off its rubbery body. 

Before either man could turn to look at each other in amazement, the creature jumped off the deck and onto the dock in a few snarling bounds. Rufus, who was standing in the center of its path, could barely turn before the monster’s long arms slashed outwards splitting his torso from his legs like wire through clay. There was a wet plopping of tissue. His body thrashed around as his upper-half tried to attach to his lower-half. His howling scream made the nightstand still until shock got the better of him and he went eternally silent.

“Get back!” A voice said. It came from above the deck on the wheelhouse roof. There was a man standing there in the moonlight. He was tall, thin, with unblemished skin and sandy brown hair cut into a bowl. He was wearing some sort of priest’s outfit, with a white collar and dark raincoat with baggy sleeves and enormous hood. His entire outfit appeared to change colors in the rolling night. He didn’t want to be seen completely. In his right hand was an enormous silver gun with a wide barrel and gears poking out of its chambers. It had a pearl handle, which curled into the stranger’s sleeve. 

He raised the weapon into the air and clicked the trigger. Light thrashed the darkness in bits of sparks and fire. A blue flare curled into the sky above the dock and burst above it like a dying star. The creature froze and snarled backwards. It was already halfway towards the shore.

“You stay put!” The man yelled.

He was off the roof and onto the line of wooden planks before Ant or Fig could speak. He moved as a piece of the night, like the creature did. 

“Watch out! Stay back!” He yelled. He loaded a few golden bullets into his gun with his sleeve. There was another hiss. The fiend had turned back towards the man. It swung its shadowy tendril of an arm at him. At the end of it, the bones had formed into a crude hammer. The man spun his coat over his right shoulder and braced for the impact. The cloth suddenly hardened into a golden shield. The bone and magic collided, throwing metallic thunder into the air and tossing the sea into a one-second tempest.

Ant and Fig were both knocked off their feet. 

“Come on! Come on!” The man yelled. He pulled his shield away from the living brick. The monster’s coil snapped back. The air cackled to it. The man fired twice from his pistol. The monster jumped, sending both shots into empty air. It twirled violently and severed its own arm throwing the organic flail through the air. The man once again threw his coat up and smashed into the missile. The impact shattered the dock. Shrapnel cut the air. Some of them hit Ant and Fig, who were frozen in awe.

It wasn’t every day that monsters and gods threw fire at each other.

The creature dashed further from the man. The attack was to distract him and slow him down. The man hunched over and coughed up some blood. It looked unreal in the dim and dark of the moon and torchlight. He shook his head and took to one knee. He leveled the gun at the shape. The monster was approaching the buildings at the end of the pier. A small crowd had gathered to watch the ruckus. The flare had woken them up.

“Goddammit!” The man said with a wheeze. He hit a red gear planted alongside the oblong chamber of his firearm. Fire cut the air in a perfect line. A beam of white light opened from the atoms around the barrel and engulfed the dock. It narrowed as it spread in a fine, sharp laser. It struck the abomination in the back of its head. The momentum from the blast tossed its body into the water and onto the dock in inky chunks. 

“Got it,” the man said. He collapsed onto his stomach. 

Ant and Fig didn’t move. Fig was holding Ant by the shoulders. They were practically hugging one another. They were about to speak when the man wheezed and slowly stood up. He pulled the hood over his young face and stretched out beneath his coat. A few bones and joints cackled. He’d been hurt before. 

“What do you guys do?” he asked in an older voice. It was bold and rough. It didn’t match the softness of his youthful appearance.

“What, what?” Ant said. 

“Did you not hear me? What do you guys do for a living?” He shook the gun free of the water that had sprayed during the fight. 

“We, uh, work on the docks,” Ant said. 

“I realize that. But what do you do? What does your job entail?” 

A few people screamed at the other end of the dock. The monster’s rubbery parts were trying to reconnect. The man sighed. He would have to burn the leftovers.

“We move boxes. We unload them and load them. That’s it,” Fig said.

The man lifted his gun and looked down the square sight jutting out from the still steaming nozzle. He sighed and started walking towards the monster’s sour and ambitious remains.

“That sounds nice,” he said.

#blogging #books #darkFantasy #darkfantasy #epicFantasy #fantasy #fantasyBlog #fantasyFiction #fiction #gothicFantasy #grimdark #horror #horrorFantasy #indieAuthor #magicalRealism #medievalFantasy #monsters #newChapter #novels #ongoingStory #onlineNovel #readOnline #reading #steampunk #storySeries #supernaturalFiction #webFiction #weeklyStory #writing

Happy Halloween! Enjoy my Horror Story “Demonland”

He’d tracked it across the entire countryside. It wasn’t easy. He could only find its footsteps at night when there was enough moonlight breaking through the clouds. A luminescent rip in a bag of grain. When he first started hunting them, he could read their prints along trees, roads, houses, pillars, castles, and even kings and queens as they slept. Recently, they had gotten better at hiding them. They weren’t overtly unique compared to other tracks. They looked like horse-marks, only narrower, as if their feet had been stretched in some bestial torture chamber.

The thing he was hunting was the laughter in the well, the shadow in the lantern light, and the devilry scratched in every underworld text.

The trail ended in a city on the edge of the continent where the sea met a mile-long stretch of docks and piers. It was called Largo. It was a mix of medieval and modern machines. Steam powered trains dissected the city in bridges and tunnels. They constantly spit exhaust into the sky in mechanical puffs. Large mansions, with glowing stain-glass windows gobbled-up the streets. Every homeowner wanted their wealth to rival a cathedral.

This opulent merchant town was a great host for this parasite to burrow into. Money and superficiality were the perfect breeding ground for this monster. The hunter didn’t even have to wait for night to know it was here.

He’d been hunting them for the last ten years. When he was child, he was taken into the mountains by some elders. They showed him how to fire a silver bullet into the nozzle of a wine bottle. They showed him how to recognize their demon teeth dangling out from the sea of faces in a busy marketplace. But most of all, the training in the highlands prepared him to kill humans, since they were almost always made to be puppets.

The hunter was tall, blond, and blue-eyed. He wore a black ministry robe to avoid being mugged on the highways. His gun, an oversized pistol with a small steam engine built onto the handle, was tucked beneath his robes. His bullets needed the steam-burst velocity to hit his prey, which could run up the side of a building and leap across the roof in just three blinks of the eye.

It was during the day when he arrived in Largo.

The sky and air had the crisp coolness of being next to the sea. You could taste salt around you and in the clouds. Largo was a remarkably clean city, with hundreds of ordinances and curfews to keep the cobblestones free of people and things. When he arrived in the city, he immediately went to the pub to eavesdrop. After a few hours feigning one pint of ale, he heard rumors of a little girl, the daughter of a famous art dealer, who was so talented at painting she could make anything in the world look beautiful.

He knew where his prey would be.

The girl and her family lived in the largest house in Largo. It was a high point on the brown, shingled horizon. When he arrived at the home in the afternoon, he knocked on the door with the metal tip of his gun. It echoed throughout the house. Nobody answered. The windows were dark and almost dusty. No servants had been around in some time. After a few more minutes, he picked the lock and shuffled inside. 

The house was freezing, a byproduct of his prey. There were no candles, torches, lights, or mirrors in the home. Every giant room was stale and cobweb friendly.

After hours of looking, he noticed some light peeking out of the basement door at the back of the kitchen. He clicked the safety on his gun. The latch was supposed to be silent, but the cold air made it snap. Something heavy shifted in the basement.

He pushed the door open with his left hand. He had a slight quiver to it. Despite the years of hunting, he was still nervous when in the belly of the monster. The stairway stretched ahead of him with a single lantern beaming. A curled and captured sun. He shuffled down the stairs quietly; making sure his boots weren’t colliding with the lips of the steps. 

He walked and walked. 

Each time he thought he reached the bottom of the stairs and corresponding door; they’d spread out again in a plunging tunnel. The light wouldn’t change either. It was locked in this illusion. He sighed. The trap was triggered. It already knew he was here. He pulled out his silencer, a small steel barrel with secret language etched on it and tightened it around his muzzle. He fired one burst into the evading door. It split open. A chunk of phantasmal ice. Threads spilled out, along with a black mist. He protected his face with his sleeve and sat back down. In a few seconds, the real door appeared. A bit of blood beneath a scab.

He smiled to himself.

Beyond the door was a hallway with pictures along it. Lanterns divided each picture. On the other end of the hallway was an orchestra of growls and snorts. Two shapes were scurrying and running into each other. They were on chains, which were spiked and blood wet. The metal snapped with tension as the two forms sensed his presence. He fired once, dropping the first face in the gloom. The other creature crawled onto the wall like a cockroach. It dived at him. He fell back avoiding the charge, throwing the figure over him. Claws and teeth thrashed for his face. He closed his eyes and thought of the mountains. The rocky air stopped him from panicking as his nose and lip split-in-two. He fired his gun into the space above his chest. 

The misshapen tornado went still.

He coughed blood and stood over the two forms. The lanterns started to die behind him. There were voices in the pictures. He heard music playing, and a little girl laughing. He wiped his face. They were the girl’s parents, he was sure. They’d been skinned and remade, only with strips of string instead of veins running through their bodies. Their faces were rotted. Clothes mixed with skin. They were half-finished dolls.

He couldn’t look at them for too long.

The hunter did not want to waste any more time. The traps and obstacles were mounting. He charged down the hallway. The various paintings of different landscapes along the walls came alive in waves, bolts, fires, and winds. A splash of water knocked him off his feet. Lightning scorched his shoulder in a curled bolt. Fire burnt hair along his neck. Gales blistered his eyes in random, invisible walls.

How many traps had it left for him? What was so important? What was it protecting?

After a few more painful moments he was through the hallway door. It opened to a massive studio, with a vast window looking out onto the water behind the city. A giant stage, armored with art supplies and sketches sprawled across the room. At one end of it, a little blond girl with a red beret painted furiously over a man-sized canvas. The girl didn’t even notice him. She was filthy and thin. On the other end of the stage, was his prey.

It looked like a man, especially with the gray hood and cloak hanging over its broad form. The cloth was pulled tight. There were spikes and miscellaneous points behind it. The monster was hunched over, thanks to its hoofs and inverted knees. Its face was pale and long. A curtain of fangs dangled from a wide grin. It had two red eyes narrowed out over where its nose would be. 

They had no eyelids.

He pointed his gun at it. The girl didn’t turn around. She was too afraid to look anywhere.

“Can it wait, human?” A voice in the room spoke. It was a low and deep devil-echo. It spoke telepathically. It had too many teeth to manipulate a tongue.

“Why?” he replied, squinting one eye at the demon.

The creature shrugged its hideous body.

“Because even I would like to look beautiful,” it said.

It is TRADITION that I share Demonland on Halloween. I have been doing this on and off for years. This is one of my favorite stories, and it fits the mood of the holiday effortlessly. I love sharing it. Demonland is from my collection of short stories Monsters, Monsters, Everywhere. Everything about this story is very much me as a storyteller. Monsters in situations with emotional complexity and human motivations. Yup, that is me alright.

#author #blogging #books #darkFantasy #darkfantasy #epicFantasy #fantasy #fantasyBlog #fantasyFiction #fiction #gothicFantasy #grimdark #horror #horrorFantasy #indieAuthor #magicalRealism #medievalFantasy #monsters #newChapter #novels #ongoingStory #onlineNovel #patrickWMarsh #readOnline #reading #shortStory #steampunk #storySeries #supernaturalFiction #supportIndieWriters #webFiction #weeklyStory #writing

Happy Halloween! Enjoy my Horror Story “Demonland”

He’d tracked it across the entire countryside. It wasn’t easy. He could only find its footsteps at night when there was enough moonlight breaking through the clouds. A luminescent rip in a bag of grain. When he first started hunting them, he could read their prints along trees, roads, houses, pillars, castles, and even kings and queens as they slept. Recently, they had gotten better at hiding them. They weren’t overtly unique compared to other tracks. They looked like horse-marks, only narrower, as if their feet had been stretched in some bestial torture chamber.

The thing he was hunting was the laughter in the well, the shadow in the lantern light, and the devilry scratched in every underworld text.

The trail ended in a city on the edge of the continent where the sea met a mile-long stretch of docks and piers. It was called Largo. It was a mix of medieval and modern machines. Steam powered trains dissected the city in bridges and tunnels. They constantly spit exhaust into the sky in mechanical puffs. Large mansions, with glowing stain-glass windows gobbled-up the streets. Every homeowner wanted their wealth to rival a cathedral.

This opulent merchant town was a great host for this parasite to burrow into. Money and superficiality were the perfect breeding ground for this monster. The hunter didn’t even have to wait for night to know it was here.

He’d been hunting them for the last ten years. When he was child, he was taken into the mountains by some elders. They showed him how to fire a silver bullet into the nozzle of a wine bottle. They showed him how to recognize their demon teeth dangling out from the sea of faces in a busy marketplace. But most of all, the training in the highlands prepared him to kill humans, since they were almost always made to be puppets.

The hunter was tall, blond, and blue-eyed. He wore a black ministry robe to avoid being mugged on the highways. His gun, an oversized pistol with a small steam engine built onto the handle, was tucked beneath his robes. His bullets needed the steam-burst velocity to hit his prey, which could run up the side of a building and leap across the roof in just three blinks of the eye.

It was during the day when he arrived in Largo.

The sky and air had the crisp coolness of being next to the sea. You could taste salt around you and in the clouds. Largo was a remarkably clean city, with hundreds of ordinances and curfews to keep the cobblestones free of people and things. When he arrived in the city, he immediately went to the pub to eavesdrop. After a few hours feigning one pint of ale, he heard rumors of a little girl, the daughter of a famous art dealer, who was so talented at painting she could make anything in the world look beautiful.

He knew where his prey would be.

The girl and her family lived in the largest house in Largo. It was a high point on the brown, shingled horizon. When he arrived at the home in the afternoon, he knocked on the door with the metal tip of his gun. It echoed throughout the house. Nobody answered. The windows were dark and almost dusty. No servants had been around in some time. After a few more minutes, he picked the lock and shuffled inside. 

The house was freezing, a byproduct of his prey. There were no candles, torches, lights, or mirrors in the home. Every giant room was stale and cobweb friendly.

After hours of looking, he noticed some light peeking out of the basement door at the back of the kitchen. He clicked the safety on his gun. The latch was supposed to be silent, but the cold air made it snap. Something heavy shifted in the basement.

He pushed the door open with his left hand. He had a slight quiver to it. Despite the years of hunting, he was still nervous when in the belly of the monster. The stairway stretched ahead of him with a single lantern beaming. A curled and captured sun. He shuffled down the stairs quietly; making sure his boots weren’t colliding with the lips of the steps. 

He walked and walked. 

Each time he thought he reached the bottom of the stairs and corresponding door; they’d spread out again in a plunging tunnel. The light wouldn’t change either. It was locked in this illusion. He sighed. The trap was triggered. It already knew he was here. He pulled out his silencer, a small steel barrel with secret language etched on it and tightened it around his muzzle. He fired one burst into the evading door. It split open. A chunk of phantasmal ice. Threads spilled out, along with a black mist. He protected his face with his sleeve and sat back down. In a few seconds, the real door appeared. A bit of blood beneath a scab.

He smiled to himself.

Beyond the door was a hallway with pictures along it. Lanterns divided each picture. On the other end of the hallway was an orchestra of growls and snorts. Two shapes were scurrying and running into each other. They were on chains, which were spiked and blood wet. The metal snapped with tension as the two forms sensed his presence. He fired once, dropping the first face in the gloom. The other creature crawled onto the wall like a cockroach. It dived at him. He fell back avoiding the charge, throwing the figure over him. Claws and teeth thrashed for his face. He closed his eyes and thought of the mountains. The rocky air stopped him from panicking as his nose and lip split-in-two. He fired his gun into the space above his chest. 

The misshapen tornado went still.

He coughed blood and stood over the two forms. The lanterns started to die behind him. There were voices in the pictures. He heard music playing, and a little girl laughing. He wiped his face. They were the girl’s parents, he was sure. They’d been skinned and remade, only with strips of string instead of veins running through their bodies. Their faces were rotted. Clothes mixed with skin. They were half-finished dolls.

He couldn’t look at them for too long.

The hunter did not want to waste any more time. The traps and obstacles were mounting. He charged down the hallway. The various paintings of different landscapes along the walls came alive in waves, bolts, fires, and winds. A splash of water knocked him off his feet. Lightning scorched his shoulder in a curled bolt. Fire burnt hair along his neck. Gales blistered his eyes in random, invisible walls.

How many traps had it left for him? What was so important? What was it protecting?

After a few more painful moments he was through the hallway door. It opened to a massive studio, with a vast window looking out onto the water behind the city. A giant stage, armored with art supplies and sketches sprawled across the room. At one end of it, a little blond girl with a red beret painted furiously over a man-sized canvas. The girl didn’t even notice him. She was filthy and thin. On the other end of the stage, was his prey.

It looked like a man, especially with the gray hood and cloak hanging over its broad form. The cloth was pulled tight. There were spikes and miscellaneous points behind it. The monster was hunched over, thanks to its hoofs and inverted knees. Its face was pale and long. A curtain of fangs dangled from a wide grin. It had two red eyes narrowed out over where its nose would be. 

They had no eyelids.

He pointed his gun at it. The girl didn’t turn around. She was too afraid to look anywhere.

“Can it wait, human?” A voice in the room spoke. It was a low and deep devil-echo. It spoke telepathically. It had too many teeth to manipulate a tongue.

“Why?” he replied, squinting one eye at the demon.

The creature shrugged its hideous body.

“Because even I would like to look beautiful,” it said.

It is TRADITION that I share Demonland on Halloween. I have been doing this on and off for years. This is one of my favorite stories, and it fits the mood of the holiday effortlessly. I love sharing it. Demonland is from my collection of short stories Monsters, Monsters, Everywhere. Everything about this story is very much me as a storyteller. Monsters in situations with emotional complexity and human motivations. Yup, that is me alright.

#author #blogging #books #darkFantasy #darkfantasy #epicFantasy #fantasy #fantasyBlog #fantasyFiction #fiction #gothicFantasy #grimdark #horror #horrorFantasy #indieAuthor #magicalRealism #medievalFantasy #monsters #newChapter #novels #ongoingStory #onlineNovel #patrickWMarsh #readOnline #reading #shortStory #steampunk #storySeries #supernaturalFiction #supportIndieWriters #webFiction #weeklyStory #writing

The Hearing Trumpet

https://library.hrmtc.com/2024/11/04/the-hearing-trumpet/

The Hearing Trumpet

https://library.hrmtc.com/2024/11/04/the-hearing-trumpet/

As promised, @brandoncrilly and Katherine Quevedo kept things cool this week! They both read beautifully observed stories with very human thoughts and feelings (some of which belonged to tree creatures and carousel animals). You can still watch! #StoryHour2020 #ShortStories #AuthorReading #SFF #ScienceFiction #FantasyFiction #BrandonCrilly #KatherineQuevedo https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=838271504414230

This week, keep cool with Story Hour. Returning favorites Brandon Crilly and Katherine Quevedo can help! They are very cool. Wednesday, 7:00 p.m. PST/PDT. Join us! #Authors #StoryHour2020 #ShortStories #AuthorReading #BrandonCrilly #KatherineQuevedo #SFF #FantasyFiction https://www.storyhour2020.com/

#NotNews24 | #UnbreaklingEarlyEveningDoughnutNotNews... #NotNearly24... #OftenLess... #FrequentlyFewer...

Has #Anyone mentioned #JKRowling yet...? << #SideEye >>

"She's #StillLike the #DanBrown of #FantasyFiction..."

🧙⚔️🤖:wolfparty:🤖⚔️🧙 | ☕️🦹🍩🦄🍩🦹☕

https://vmst.io/@PSiReN/109834442360956610

#EuropeanServer #BeingEuropean #ServingIT #StillServingIT #InPerpetuity #NoAgeVerificationRequired #YourAgeVerificationApp #BustedFlush #ExploringDeath #WhateverHappenedTo #vmst #NoOneCares #CauseOfDeath #FalseEquivalence #TheWomblesOfWimbleshire #GoingRural #InSpanish #InJapanese #TheInternetIsStillOn #StillWorkingAsIntended #AsIntended #NatureBeingNatural #Naturalish #MyDataIsMyData #MyDataIsStillMyData #WaitroseYutaniCorp #ContainsZeroPercentMastodonSocial #TopTierTooting #WhootToot #BirthdayMonth #ExploringDeath #SomewhatOverQualified #SomewhatDigital #MostlyNonBinaryWorld #AsIntended #今すぐ #WaitroseYutaniCorp #WaitroseYutaniCorpsCooperative

#NotNews24 | #UnbreaklingEarlyEveningDoughnutNotNews... #NotNearly24... #OftenLess... #FrequentlyFewer...

Has #Anyone mentioned #JKRowling yet...? <<#SideEye>>

"She's #StillLike the #DanBrown of #FantasyFiction..."

🧙⚔️🤖🐺🤖⚔️🧙 | ☕️🦹🍩🐻🍩🦹☕

https://vmst.io/@PSiReN/109834442360956610