#serializedfiction — Public Fediverse posts

Chapter 9: Foundation and Trust

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Chapter 9: Foundation and Trust

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Chapter 9: Foundation and Trust

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Chapter 9: Foundation and Trust

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Chapter 9: Foundation and Trust

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Chapter 7: Market Day

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Chapter 7: Market Day

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Chapter 7: Market Day

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Chapter 7: Market Day

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Chapter 7: Market Day

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BRECK: Dead Delivery: Chapter Twenty The Girl at the Gate

BRECK: Dead Delivery — Chapter Twenty

The Girl at the Gate

This is Chapter 20 of BRECK: Dead Delivery, a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. This is the final chapter of Book One. New stories begin with Book Two.

The Story So Far

Breck is a veteran courier — 6’5″, 285 pounds, former Crystal Wars special operations — who spent twelve days dismantling a corrupt magistrate’s operation in Crestfall and walked out into the north road carrying everything he came in with and one thing he didn’t expect: a letter from the Regional Adjudicator asking whether there were other towns in the valley where what he’d done in Crestfall needed doing. He picked up the Garnwick contract at the Aldenmere guild office and walked north into the winter. He has been carrying a faded cord bracelet on his satchel strap for years — too small for his wrist, woven from grain stalks and valley grass by a girl in an occupied village who told him it would bring him back. He came back. He was too late. He buried her by hand in the field behind her home and marked the grave with a flat river stone and has never put the bracelet down.

This is the last chapter of Dead Delivery.

← Chapter Nineteen — Better Than Expected

Chapter Twenty: The Girl at the Gate

This chapter explores the moment when reality becomes permeable — when the past and present occupy the same space simultaneously, and a man must decide what to do with what he sees.

The hill settlements above Garnwick sat at the edge of the high country where the valley’s agricultural plainness gave way to the older, more complicated terrain of the limestone ridges — a scattering of stone farmhouses and working outbuildings arranged along a single unpaved track that wound between fields still holding their frost in the flat winter light of late afternoon.

Breck had been walking since before second bell. Sixteen miles of north road and then the mill road turning off into the hill country, the terrain rising beneath his boots with the patient insistence of ground that had been shaped over centuries into exactly what it was and had no interest in accommodating speed. He moved through it with the adaptation he brought to all demanding terrain — adjusting his pace to the gradient, reading the frost-edged stone for the step that would hold and the step that wouldn’t, his body doing the calculations automatically while his mind moved in the loose, watchful freedom of the long road’s open hours.

He was thinking about the Adjudicator’s letter.

About the question folded in the document sleeve against his hip, patient as a thing that knows it will eventually be answered. About the valley below — its river towns and market squares and the particular architecture of the wrong things that happened when power went unaccountable long enough to forget that accountability had ever been the arrangement. About the specific skill that Crestfall had required of him — not strength, not speed, not the particular violence of the limestone cut — but the other thing, the older thing, the capacity to walk into a place and look at it until it told him what it was hiding.

He had been doing that his entire adult life without understanding it as a skill.

He was still thinking about it when he came around the last bend in the hill track and saw the gate.

It was an ordinary gate — iron-hinged timber, weathered to the particular silver-gray of outdoor wood that had cycled through enough seasons to have stopped caring about the distinction between old and new. It marked the entrance to the largest of the Garnwick hill farmsteads, the one listed on his contract slip as the delivery destination: a sealed documents packet from a land registry office in Aldenmere, routine correspondence, the kind of thing that moved between institutions and their outlying properties with the bureaucratic regularity of paperwork doing its necessary, unglamorous work.

The gate stood open.

A child was sitting on it.

A girl — eight or nine years old, brown-haired, with the particular stillness of a child absorbed in private contemplation, her feet hooked through the lower bars and her hands loose on the upper rail, her face turned toward the last pale light sliding off the western hills with the focused, unhurried attention of someone who had come outside specifically to watch it and intended to watch it completely.

The world went very thin.

It was the only way Breck could describe what happened to the air in that moment — the sensation that the space between the past and the present had contracted to something near-transparent, that the hill track and the frost-touched fields and the silver gate existed simultaneously in two times, and that he was standing at the point where they overlapped. His body had stopped moving before his mind had registered the decision to stop. His hand had found the bracelet on the satchel strap — not deliberately, not consciously, the old reflex, the checking that lived below thought — and was resting against it with the particular pressure of a man holding onto the thing nearest to him when the ground moves.

The girl turned.

She had the serious eyes of a child who spent time looking at things other children looked past — the eyes that catalogued, that noticed, that held what they observed with a kind of quiet custody. She looked at Breck the way Pell had looked at him on the cooperage step — without flinching, without the reflexive appraisal of threat that most small people applied to something his size arriving at a gate. Just looking. Taking the measure.

“You’re very large,” she said. Her voice was matter-of-fact, a statement of observed fact offered without judgment.

“I am,” Breck said.

His own voice sounded distant to him. Slightly wrong, the way voices sounded when the body was doing something the mind was still arriving at — maintaining the surface of ordinary interaction while underneath, in the older and less manageable territories of a man’s interior life, something was cracking open along a seam he had thought was fused.

She was not the girl from the valley. He knew this. The rational, operational part of him — the part that had gotten him through four years of war and a decade of roads that didn’t care whether he made it — stated it clearly and without ambiguity: different girl, different province, different decade, ten years and two hundred miles from an occupied valley he had not allowed himself to name aloud since the morning he had left it with wet hands and a faded bracelet and the specific weight of a promise that had failed its only test.

She was not that girl.

But she had her eyes.

Not literally — the eyes were different in color, different in shape — but in quality. The quality of a child who had learned, at an age when most children were still learning what the world was, to pay attention to it with the gravity of someone who understood that attention was a form of care and care was not something to be distributed carelessly. That quality, that precise and particular quality, was the same.

And the world had gone thin, and he was standing at a gate in the hill country above Garnwick in the last of the winter afternoon light, and the bracelet was between his fingers, and he was — for the first time since the valley — not entirely certain where he was.

“Are you the delivery man?” the girl asked.

The question arrived like a hand extended. Simple. Practical. The kind of question that required only one thing from him: the answer.

He breathed.

Once. Slowly. The cold winter air filling his chest and moving through him with the honest, indifferent thoroughness of cold winter air, which did not care about the past or the present or the particular geography of a man’s grief and simply occupied the available space and did what it did.

He breathed out.

“I am,” he said.

She slid off the gate with the fluid ease of a child for whom heights were unconsidered, landing on the frost-hard ground with both feet and turning toward the farmhouse without ceremony.

“I’ll get my father,” she said, already moving. “He’s been expecting it.”

She walked up the path toward the farmhouse door — small, unhurried, her dark hair catching the last pale light in the way that dark hair caught pale light — and did not look back, because she had accomplished her task and had no particular reason to linger over it.

Breck stood at the open gate and watched her go.

He stood there for a long moment — long enough for the farmhouse door to open and close around her, long enough for the western light to finish its departure from the hills, long enough for the first suggestion of evening cold to arrive in earnest from the northeast with the serious intention of a temperature that had made its decision.

Then he reached into the satchel and withdrew the delivery packet — sealed, addressed, routine — and held it in his large hands and felt the ordinary weight of it.

He thought about a girl in a valley who had given a man everything she had because the giving was what there was to do. About small hands and grain stalks and roof grass and the particular faithfulness of a thing made from whatever was available.

He thought about Crestfall. About Pell on the cooperage step and Sela behind the hearthstone and Maret at the bar with her book and the question in the document sleeve and all the towns in the valley where the specific shape of wrong things had been given enough time to look like the ordinary arrangement of the world.

He thought about arriving in time.

About the particular power of presence — not the supernatural kind, not the kind drawn from crystal wells or gifted by ancient bloodlines or purchased through sacrifice and transformation — but the ordinary, irreplaceable, entirely human power of being somewhere before something went wrong. Of walking down a hill road into a hollow market square and noticing, with the patient and committed attention of a man who had decided that noticing was the job, that something was wrong and needed the specific application of someone who would not look away.

He thought about a question folded in a document sleeve.

Other towns in the valley.

The farmhouse door opened.

A man emerged — middle-aged, broad-shouldered in the working way of men who had farmed the same ground for decades, his face weathered with the kind of open weathering that came from honest outdoor work rather than hard living. Behind him, at the doorway, the girl reappeared — leaning against the frame with her arms folded and her serious eyes tracking the stranger at the gate with the focused attention she brought to everything.

“Courier?” the farmer called.

“Delivery from the land registry,” Breck said. “Sealed documents, contract number — ” he recited it from memory, having read the slip enough times that the number had settled into the part of his mind that held such things automatically — “require your signature on receipt.”

The farmer came down the path, pulling a coat across his shoulders, and took the packet with the matter-of-fact acceptance of a man who had been expecting exactly this. He signed the receipt in the plain, functional hand of someone who had learned to write for the purpose of signing things and had never needed it to be anything more.

He handed the receipt back. Looked at Breck with the brief, assessing directness of a man measuring a stranger on his property.

“Long walk from Aldenmere,” he said.

“Sixteen miles,” Breck said. “Road was good.”

The farmer nodded. The transaction was complete. The ordinary machinery of delivery and receipt and departure had done its work and was now waiting for Breck to do the last part of it — to turn, and walk back down the hill track to the mill road, and from there south to the Aldenmere waystation where he could sleep in a bed and eat a meal and take stock of the next contract and the next road and the next town on the other end of it.

He did not immediately turn.

He looked at the girl in the doorway one more time.

She looked back at him with her serious, cataloguing eyes — taking his measure, filing the result, present in the moment with the full and undefended attention of a child who had not yet learned to be guarded about the things she noticed.

“Safe roads,” she said. It came out with the solemn, considered gravity of a phrase she had heard adults use and had adopted because it seemed to her like the correct thing to say to a man who was about to walk away into the dark.

Something moved through Breck — slow and deep, like water finding its level in a space that had been waiting for it, like the specific settling of a thing returning after long absence to the place it had always occupied. Not grief. Not its absence. Something that held both and was neither — the particular quality of a wound that had healed as much as wounds of its kind healed, which was not completely, which was never completely, but which had healed enough to carry without collapse.

He looked at the bracelet on the satchel strap.

Pale as old light. Small as a child’s hope. Wound twice around the worn leather in the place it had always been.

He touched it once — not the reflex, not the checking, but something deliberate, something that acknowledged rather than merely confirmed — and let his fingers rest against it for the length of one breath.

Then he straightened to his full height, the hill country cold and wide and darkening around him, the valley below invisible in the dusk, Crestfall folded into the distance with its fire burning in an inn hearth and its sealed letter moving toward a resolution that would take months and cost Voss everything and give the town back to itself by degrees, the slow way, the way things were given back.

“Safe roads,” he said.

He turned.

He walked down the hill track toward the mill road, the darkness gathering in the fields around him and the first stars arriving above the limestone ridge in their ancient, indifferent positions, and the cold working its patient arithmetic on everything the day had held.

Behind him, in the farmhouse doorway, a girl with serious eyes watched him go until the hill track took him around the bend and the dark closed over the place where he had been.

Ahead, the road continued. Wide and pale in the last light. Patient as all roads were patient — going where it went regardless of whether anyone chose to follow, opening ahead of the man who walked it with the steady, faithful offer it always made.

He followed it.

The bracelet moved with him, pale against the leather, carrying its small and irreducible weight through the winter dark toward whatever came next — the next town, the next hollow market square, the next wrong thing that would reveal its shape to a man who had learned to look until the looking told him what needed doing.

Toward all the towns in the valley where what he had done in Crestfall needed doing.

He walked, and the road held him, and the stars above the limestone ridge burned with the cold, clean light of things that had always been there and would always be there, indifferent to the brief and extraordinary passage of the people who moved beneath them — and he walked through it all with his satchel across his chest and his bracelet on the strap and the Adjudicator’s question folded against his hip, and the road did what roads did, and the dark did what dark did, and somewhere ahead the next delivery was waiting with the patient, faithful certainty of work that did not expire.

It always was.

BRECK: Dead Delivery — Complete.

This has been Book One of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. Breck is a veteran courier moving through a medieval world one delivery at a time, arriving in places that need what he carries, staying longer than he planned, leaving things different than he found them.

Book Two begins soon. Follow Chadwick Rye on Royal Road, WordPress, and Patreon to be there when the road opens again.

← Chapter Nineteen — Better Than Expected

✦ Dead Delivery is complete. Twenty chapters. One town. One courier who couldn’t walk away from the things he noticed. If this story found you at the right moment — if Breck, or Pell, or Maret, or the bracelet landed somewhere real — follow Chadwick Rye and be there when Book Two begins. Browse more stories from Lumenvale, or share this one with a fellow fantasy fiction fan who deserves to meet Breck from the beginning.

BRECK: Dead Delivery — Chapter Index

Chapter One — The Only Power Worth Having
Chapter Two — The Best Thing To Do
Chapter Three — The Best Night of the Year
Chapter Four — What a Good Life Looks Like
Chapter Five — The Burning of the Ledger
Chapter Six — What Boys Are Made Of
Chapter Seven — The Weight of Less
Chapter Eight — The Forgotten Ones
Chapter Nine — The Story Everyone Told Wrong
Chapter Ten — The Discipline of Getting Up
Chapter Eleven — What You Don’t See Coming
Chapter Twelve — The Learning Curve
Chapter Thirteen — The First Time
Chapter Fourteen — The Small Thing
Chapter Fifteen — Stronger Than You Knew
Chapter Sixteen — The Road That Knows You
Chapter Seventeen — What a Man Tells Himself
Chapter Eighteen — What It’s For
Chapter Nineteen — Better Than Expected
Chapter Twenty — The Girl at the Gate (You are here)

☕ If you enjoyed Dead Delivery, consider supporting Chadwick Rye on Ko-fi. Every coffee helps keep the road open.

BRECK: Dead Delivery: Chapter Twenty The Girl at the Gate

BRECK: Dead Delivery — Chapter Twenty

The Girl at the Gate

This is Chapter 20 of BRECK: Dead Delivery, a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. This is the final chapter of Book One. New stories begin with Book Two.

The Story So Far

Breck is a veteran courier — 6’5″, 285 pounds, former Crystal Wars special operations — who spent twelve days dismantling a corrupt magistrate’s operation in Crestfall and walked out into the north road carrying everything he came in with and one thing he didn’t expect: a letter from the Regional Adjudicator asking whether there were other towns in the valley where what he’d done in Crestfall needed doing. He picked up the Garnwick contract at the Aldenmere guild office and walked north into the winter. He has been carrying a faded cord bracelet on his satchel strap for years — too small for his wrist, woven from grain stalks and valley grass by a girl in an occupied village who told him it would bring him back. He came back. He was too late. He buried her by hand in the field behind her home and marked the grave with a flat river stone and has never put the bracelet down.

This is the last chapter of Dead Delivery.

← Chapter Nineteen — Better Than Expected

Chapter Twenty: The Girl at the Gate

This chapter explores the moment when reality becomes permeable — when the past and present occupy the same space simultaneously, and a man must decide what to do with what he sees.

The hill settlements above Garnwick sat at the edge of the high country where the valley’s agricultural plainness gave way to the older, more complicated terrain of the limestone ridges — a scattering of stone farmhouses and working outbuildings arranged along a single unpaved track that wound between fields still holding their frost in the flat winter light of late afternoon.

Breck had been walking since before second bell. Sixteen miles of north road and then the mill road turning off into the hill country, the terrain rising beneath his boots with the patient insistence of ground that had been shaped over centuries into exactly what it was and had no interest in accommodating speed. He moved through it with the adaptation he brought to all demanding terrain — adjusting his pace to the gradient, reading the frost-edged stone for the step that would hold and the step that wouldn’t, his body doing the calculations automatically while his mind moved in the loose, watchful freedom of the long road’s open hours.

He was thinking about the Adjudicator’s letter.

About the question folded in the document sleeve against his hip, patient as a thing that knows it will eventually be answered. About the valley below — its river towns and market squares and the particular architecture of the wrong things that happened when power went unaccountable long enough to forget that accountability had ever been the arrangement. About the specific skill that Crestfall had required of him — not strength, not speed, not the particular violence of the limestone cut — but the other thing, the older thing, the capacity to walk into a place and look at it until it told him what it was hiding.

He had been doing that his entire adult life without understanding it as a skill.

He was still thinking about it when he came around the last bend in the hill track and saw the gate.

It was an ordinary gate — iron-hinged timber, weathered to the particular silver-gray of outdoor wood that had cycled through enough seasons to have stopped caring about the distinction between old and new. It marked the entrance to the largest of the Garnwick hill farmsteads, the one listed on his contract slip as the delivery destination: a sealed documents packet from a land registry office in Aldenmere, routine correspondence, the kind of thing that moved between institutions and their outlying properties with the bureaucratic regularity of paperwork doing its necessary, unglamorous work.

The gate stood open.

A child was sitting on it.

A girl — eight or nine years old, brown-haired, with the particular stillness of a child absorbed in private contemplation, her feet hooked through the lower bars and her hands loose on the upper rail, her face turned toward the last pale light sliding off the western hills with the focused, unhurried attention of someone who had come outside specifically to watch it and intended to watch it completely.

The world went very thin.

It was the only way Breck could describe what happened to the air in that moment — the sensation that the space between the past and the present had contracted to something near-transparent, that the hill track and the frost-touched fields and the silver gate existed simultaneously in two times, and that he was standing at the point where they overlapped. His body had stopped moving before his mind had registered the decision to stop. His hand had found the bracelet on the satchel strap — not deliberately, not consciously, the old reflex, the checking that lived below thought — and was resting against it with the particular pressure of a man holding onto the thing nearest to him when the ground moves.

The girl turned.

She had the serious eyes of a child who spent time looking at things other children looked past — the eyes that catalogued, that noticed, that held what they observed with a kind of quiet custody. She looked at Breck the way Pell had looked at him on the cooperage step — without flinching, without the reflexive appraisal of threat that most small people applied to something his size arriving at a gate. Just looking. Taking the measure.

“You’re very large,” she said. Her voice was matter-of-fact, a statement of observed fact offered without judgment.

“I am,” Breck said.

His own voice sounded distant to him. Slightly wrong, the way voices sounded when the body was doing something the mind was still arriving at — maintaining the surface of ordinary interaction while underneath, in the older and less manageable territories of a man’s interior life, something was cracking open along a seam he had thought was fused.

She was not the girl from the valley. He knew this. The rational, operational part of him — the part that had gotten him through four years of war and a decade of roads that didn’t care whether he made it — stated it clearly and without ambiguity: different girl, different province, different decade, ten years and two hundred miles from an occupied valley he had not allowed himself to name aloud since the morning he had left it with wet hands and a faded bracelet and the specific weight of a promise that had failed its only test.

She was not that girl.

But she had her eyes.

Not literally — the eyes were different in color, different in shape — but in quality. The quality of a child who had learned, at an age when most children were still learning what the world was, to pay attention to it with the gravity of someone who understood that attention was a form of care and care was not something to be distributed carelessly. That quality, that precise and particular quality, was the same.

And the world had gone thin, and he was standing at a gate in the hill country above Garnwick in the last of the winter afternoon light, and the bracelet was between his fingers, and he was — for the first time since the valley — not entirely certain where he was.

“Are you the delivery man?” the girl asked.

The question arrived like a hand extended. Simple. Practical. The kind of question that required only one thing from him: the answer.

He breathed.

Once. Slowly. The cold winter air filling his chest and moving through him with the honest, indifferent thoroughness of cold winter air, which did not care about the past or the present or the particular geography of a man’s grief and simply occupied the available space and did what it did.

He breathed out.

“I am,” he said.

She slid off the gate with the fluid ease of a child for whom heights were unconsidered, landing on the frost-hard ground with both feet and turning toward the farmhouse without ceremony.

“I’ll get my father,” she said, already moving. “He’s been expecting it.”

She walked up the path toward the farmhouse door — small, unhurried, her dark hair catching the last pale light in the way that dark hair caught pale light — and did not look back, because she had accomplished her task and had no particular reason to linger over it.

Breck stood at the open gate and watched her go.

He stood there for a long moment — long enough for the farmhouse door to open and close around her, long enough for the western light to finish its departure from the hills, long enough for the first suggestion of evening cold to arrive in earnest from the northeast with the serious intention of a temperature that had made its decision.

Then he reached into the satchel and withdrew the delivery packet — sealed, addressed, routine — and held it in his large hands and felt the ordinary weight of it.

He thought about a girl in a valley who had given a man everything she had because the giving was what there was to do. About small hands and grain stalks and roof grass and the particular faithfulness of a thing made from whatever was available.

He thought about Crestfall. About Pell on the cooperage step and Sela behind the hearthstone and Maret at the bar with her book and the question in the document sleeve and all the towns in the valley where the specific shape of wrong things had been given enough time to look like the ordinary arrangement of the world.

He thought about arriving in time.

About the particular power of presence — not the supernatural kind, not the kind drawn from crystal wells or gifted by ancient bloodlines or purchased through sacrifice and transformation — but the ordinary, irreplaceable, entirely human power of being somewhere before something went wrong. Of walking down a hill road into a hollow market square and noticing, with the patient and committed attention of a man who had decided that noticing was the job, that something was wrong and needed the specific application of someone who would not look away.

He thought about a question folded in a document sleeve.

Other towns in the valley.

The farmhouse door opened.

A man emerged — middle-aged, broad-shouldered in the working way of men who had farmed the same ground for decades, his face weathered with the kind of open weathering that came from honest outdoor work rather than hard living. Behind him, at the doorway, the girl reappeared — leaning against the frame with her arms folded and her serious eyes tracking the stranger at the gate with the focused attention she brought to everything.

“Courier?” the farmer called.

“Delivery from the land registry,” Breck said. “Sealed documents, contract number — ” he recited it from memory, having read the slip enough times that the number had settled into the part of his mind that held such things automatically — “require your signature on receipt.”

The farmer came down the path, pulling a coat across his shoulders, and took the packet with the matter-of-fact acceptance of a man who had been expecting exactly this. He signed the receipt in the plain, functional hand of someone who had learned to write for the purpose of signing things and had never needed it to be anything more.

He handed the receipt back. Looked at Breck with the brief, assessing directness of a man measuring a stranger on his property.

“Long walk from Aldenmere,” he said.

“Sixteen miles,” Breck said. “Road was good.”

The farmer nodded. The transaction was complete. The ordinary machinery of delivery and receipt and departure had done its work and was now waiting for Breck to do the last part of it — to turn, and walk back down the hill track to the mill road, and from there south to the Aldenmere waystation where he could sleep in a bed and eat a meal and take stock of the next contract and the next road and the next town on the other end of it.

He did not immediately turn.

He looked at the girl in the doorway one more time.

She looked back at him with her serious, cataloguing eyes — taking his measure, filing the result, present in the moment with the full and undefended attention of a child who had not yet learned to be guarded about the things she noticed.

“Safe roads,” she said. It came out with the solemn, considered gravity of a phrase she had heard adults use and had adopted because it seemed to her like the correct thing to say to a man who was about to walk away into the dark.

Something moved through Breck — slow and deep, like water finding its level in a space that had been waiting for it, like the specific settling of a thing returning after long absence to the place it had always occupied. Not grief. Not its absence. Something that held both and was neither — the particular quality of a wound that had healed as much as wounds of its kind healed, which was not completely, which was never completely, but which had healed enough to carry without collapse.

He looked at the bracelet on the satchel strap.

Pale as old light. Small as a child’s hope. Wound twice around the worn leather in the place it had always been.

He touched it once — not the reflex, not the checking, but something deliberate, something that acknowledged rather than merely confirmed — and let his fingers rest against it for the length of one breath.

Then he straightened to his full height, the hill country cold and wide and darkening around him, the valley below invisible in the dusk, Crestfall folded into the distance with its fire burning in an inn hearth and its sealed letter moving toward a resolution that would take months and cost Voss everything and give the town back to itself by degrees, the slow way, the way things were given back.

“Safe roads,” he said.

He turned.

He walked down the hill track toward the mill road, the darkness gathering in the fields around him and the first stars arriving above the limestone ridge in their ancient, indifferent positions, and the cold working its patient arithmetic on everything the day had held.

Behind him, in the farmhouse doorway, a girl with serious eyes watched him go until the hill track took him around the bend and the dark closed over the place where he had been.

Ahead, the road continued. Wide and pale in the last light. Patient as all roads were patient — going where it went regardless of whether anyone chose to follow, opening ahead of the man who walked it with the steady, faithful offer it always made.

He followed it.

The bracelet moved with him, pale against the leather, carrying its small and irreducible weight through the winter dark toward whatever came next — the next town, the next hollow market square, the next wrong thing that would reveal its shape to a man who had learned to look until the looking told him what needed doing.

Toward all the towns in the valley where what he had done in Crestfall needed doing.

He walked, and the road held him, and the stars above the limestone ridge burned with the cold, clean light of things that had always been there and would always be there, indifferent to the brief and extraordinary passage of the people who moved beneath them — and he walked through it all with his satchel across his chest and his bracelet on the strap and the Adjudicator’s question folded against his hip, and the road did what roads did, and the dark did what dark did, and somewhere ahead the next delivery was waiting with the patient, faithful certainty of work that did not expire.

It always was.

BRECK: Dead Delivery — Complete.

This has been Book One of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. Breck is a veteran courier moving through a medieval world one delivery at a time, arriving in places that need what he carries, staying longer than he planned, leaving things different than he found them.

Book Two begins soon. Follow Chadwick Rye on Royal Road, WordPress, and Patreon to be there when the road opens again.

← Chapter Nineteen — Better Than Expected

✦ Dead Delivery is complete. Twenty chapters. One town. One courier who couldn’t walk away from the things he noticed. If this story found you at the right moment — if Breck, or Pell, or Maret, or the bracelet landed somewhere real — follow Chadwick Rye and be there when Book Two begins. Browse more stories from Lumenvale, or share this one with a fellow fantasy fiction fan who deserves to meet Breck from the beginning.

BRECK: Dead Delivery — Chapter Index

Chapter One — The Only Power Worth Having
Chapter Two — The Best Thing To Do
Chapter Three — The Best Night of the Year
Chapter Four — What a Good Life Looks Like
Chapter Five — The Burning of the Ledger
Chapter Six — What Boys Are Made Of
Chapter Seven — The Weight of Less
Chapter Eight — The Forgotten Ones
Chapter Nine — The Story Everyone Told Wrong
Chapter Ten — The Discipline of Getting Up
Chapter Eleven — What You Don’t See Coming
Chapter Twelve — The Learning Curve
Chapter Thirteen — The First Time
Chapter Fourteen — The Small Thing
Chapter Fifteen — Stronger Than You Knew
Chapter Sixteen — The Road That Knows You
Chapter Seventeen — What a Man Tells Himself
Chapter Eighteen — What It’s For
Chapter Nineteen — Better Than Expected
Chapter Twenty — The Girl at the Gate (You are here)

☕ If you enjoyed Dead Delivery, consider supporting Chadwick Rye on Ko-fi. Every coffee helps keep the road open.

BRECK: Dead Delivery: Chapter Twenty The Girl at the Gate

BRECK: Dead Delivery — Chapter Twenty

The Girl at the Gate

This is Chapter 20 of BRECK: Dead Delivery, a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. This is the final chapter of Book One. New stories begin with Book Two.

The Story So Far

Breck is a veteran courier — 6’5″, 285 pounds, former Crystal Wars special operations — who spent twelve days dismantling a corrupt magistrate’s operation in Crestfall and walked out into the north road carrying everything he came in with and one thing he didn’t expect: a letter from the Regional Adjudicator asking whether there were other towns in the valley where what he’d done in Crestfall needed doing. He picked up the Garnwick contract at the Aldenmere guild office and walked north into the winter. He has been carrying a faded cord bracelet on his satchel strap for years — too small for his wrist, woven from grain stalks and valley grass by a girl in an occupied village who told him it would bring him back. He came back. He was too late. He buried her by hand in the field behind her home and marked the grave with a flat river stone and has never put the bracelet down.

This is the last chapter of Dead Delivery.

← Chapter Nineteen — Better Than Expected

Chapter Twenty: The Girl at the Gate

This chapter explores the moment when reality becomes permeable — when the past and present occupy the same space simultaneously, and a man must decide what to do with what he sees.

The hill settlements above Garnwick sat at the edge of the high country where the valley’s agricultural plainness gave way to the older, more complicated terrain of the limestone ridges — a scattering of stone farmhouses and working outbuildings arranged along a single unpaved track that wound between fields still holding their frost in the flat winter light of late afternoon.

Breck had been walking since before second bell. Sixteen miles of north road and then the mill road turning off into the hill country, the terrain rising beneath his boots with the patient insistence of ground that had been shaped over centuries into exactly what it was and had no interest in accommodating speed. He moved through it with the adaptation he brought to all demanding terrain — adjusting his pace to the gradient, reading the frost-edged stone for the step that would hold and the step that wouldn’t, his body doing the calculations automatically while his mind moved in the loose, watchful freedom of the long road’s open hours.

He was thinking about the Adjudicator’s letter.

About the question folded in the document sleeve against his hip, patient as a thing that knows it will eventually be answered. About the valley below — its river towns and market squares and the particular architecture of the wrong things that happened when power went unaccountable long enough to forget that accountability had ever been the arrangement. About the specific skill that Crestfall had required of him — not strength, not speed, not the particular violence of the limestone cut — but the other thing, the older thing, the capacity to walk into a place and look at it until it told him what it was hiding.

He had been doing that his entire adult life without understanding it as a skill.

He was still thinking about it when he came around the last bend in the hill track and saw the gate.

It was an ordinary gate — iron-hinged timber, weathered to the particular silver-gray of outdoor wood that had cycled through enough seasons to have stopped caring about the distinction between old and new. It marked the entrance to the largest of the Garnwick hill farmsteads, the one listed on his contract slip as the delivery destination: a sealed documents packet from a land registry office in Aldenmere, routine correspondence, the kind of thing that moved between institutions and their outlying properties with the bureaucratic regularity of paperwork doing its necessary, unglamorous work.

The gate stood open.

A child was sitting on it.

A girl — eight or nine years old, brown-haired, with the particular stillness of a child absorbed in private contemplation, her feet hooked through the lower bars and her hands loose on the upper rail, her face turned toward the last pale light sliding off the western hills with the focused, unhurried attention of someone who had come outside specifically to watch it and intended to watch it completely.

The world went very thin.

It was the only way Breck could describe what happened to the air in that moment — the sensation that the space between the past and the present had contracted to something near-transparent, that the hill track and the frost-touched fields and the silver gate existed simultaneously in two times, and that he was standing at the point where they overlapped. His body had stopped moving before his mind had registered the decision to stop. His hand had found the bracelet on the satchel strap — not deliberately, not consciously, the old reflex, the checking that lived below thought — and was resting against it with the particular pressure of a man holding onto the thing nearest to him when the ground moves.

The girl turned.

She had the serious eyes of a child who spent time looking at things other children looked past — the eyes that catalogued, that noticed, that held what they observed with a kind of quiet custody. She looked at Breck the way Pell had looked at him on the cooperage step — without flinching, without the reflexive appraisal of threat that most small people applied to something his size arriving at a gate. Just looking. Taking the measure.

“You’re very large,” she said. Her voice was matter-of-fact, a statement of observed fact offered without judgment.

“I am,” Breck said.

His own voice sounded distant to him. Slightly wrong, the way voices sounded when the body was doing something the mind was still arriving at — maintaining the surface of ordinary interaction while underneath, in the older and less manageable territories of a man’s interior life, something was cracking open along a seam he had thought was fused.

She was not the girl from the valley. He knew this. The rational, operational part of him — the part that had gotten him through four years of war and a decade of roads that didn’t care whether he made it — stated it clearly and without ambiguity: different girl, different province, different decade, ten years and two hundred miles from an occupied valley he had not allowed himself to name aloud since the morning he had left it with wet hands and a faded bracelet and the specific weight of a promise that had failed its only test.

She was not that girl.

But she had her eyes.

Not literally — the eyes were different in color, different in shape — but in quality. The quality of a child who had learned, at an age when most children were still learning what the world was, to pay attention to it with the gravity of someone who understood that attention was a form of care and care was not something to be distributed carelessly. That quality, that precise and particular quality, was the same.

And the world had gone thin, and he was standing at a gate in the hill country above Garnwick in the last of the winter afternoon light, and the bracelet was between his fingers, and he was — for the first time since the valley — not entirely certain where he was.

“Are you the delivery man?” the girl asked.

The question arrived like a hand extended. Simple. Practical. The kind of question that required only one thing from him: the answer.

He breathed.

Once. Slowly. The cold winter air filling his chest and moving through him with the honest, indifferent thoroughness of cold winter air, which did not care about the past or the present or the particular geography of a man’s grief and simply occupied the available space and did what it did.

He breathed out.

“I am,” he said.

She slid off the gate with the fluid ease of a child for whom heights were unconsidered, landing on the frost-hard ground with both feet and turning toward the farmhouse without ceremony.

“I’ll get my father,” she said, already moving. “He’s been expecting it.”

She walked up the path toward the farmhouse door — small, unhurried, her dark hair catching the last pale light in the way that dark hair caught pale light — and did not look back, because she had accomplished her task and had no particular reason to linger over it.

Breck stood at the open gate and watched her go.

He stood there for a long moment — long enough for the farmhouse door to open and close around her, long enough for the western light to finish its departure from the hills, long enough for the first suggestion of evening cold to arrive in earnest from the northeast with the serious intention of a temperature that had made its decision.

Then he reached into the satchel and withdrew the delivery packet — sealed, addressed, routine — and held it in his large hands and felt the ordinary weight of it.

He thought about a girl in a valley who had given a man everything she had because the giving was what there was to do. About small hands and grain stalks and roof grass and the particular faithfulness of a thing made from whatever was available.

He thought about Crestfall. About Pell on the cooperage step and Sela behind the hearthstone and Maret at the bar with her book and the question in the document sleeve and all the towns in the valley where the specific shape of wrong things had been given enough time to look like the ordinary arrangement of the world.

He thought about arriving in time.

About the particular power of presence — not the supernatural kind, not the kind drawn from crystal wells or gifted by ancient bloodlines or purchased through sacrifice and transformation — but the ordinary, irreplaceable, entirely human power of being somewhere before something went wrong. Of walking down a hill road into a hollow market square and noticing, with the patient and committed attention of a man who had decided that noticing was the job, that something was wrong and needed the specific application of someone who would not look away.

He thought about a question folded in a document sleeve.

Other towns in the valley.

The farmhouse door opened.

A man emerged — middle-aged, broad-shouldered in the working way of men who had farmed the same ground for decades, his face weathered with the kind of open weathering that came from honest outdoor work rather than hard living. Behind him, at the doorway, the girl reappeared — leaning against the frame with her arms folded and her serious eyes tracking the stranger at the gate with the focused attention she brought to everything.

“Courier?” the farmer called.

“Delivery from the land registry,” Breck said. “Sealed documents, contract number — ” he recited it from memory, having read the slip enough times that the number had settled into the part of his mind that held such things automatically — “require your signature on receipt.”

The farmer came down the path, pulling a coat across his shoulders, and took the packet with the matter-of-fact acceptance of a man who had been expecting exactly this. He signed the receipt in the plain, functional hand of someone who had learned to write for the purpose of signing things and had never needed it to be anything more.

He handed the receipt back. Looked at Breck with the brief, assessing directness of a man measuring a stranger on his property.

“Long walk from Aldenmere,” he said.

“Sixteen miles,” Breck said. “Road was good.”

The farmer nodded. The transaction was complete. The ordinary machinery of delivery and receipt and departure had done its work and was now waiting for Breck to do the last part of it — to turn, and walk back down the hill track to the mill road, and from there south to the Aldenmere waystation where he could sleep in a bed and eat a meal and take stock of the next contract and the next road and the next town on the other end of it.

He did not immediately turn.

He looked at the girl in the doorway one more time.

She looked back at him with her serious, cataloguing eyes — taking his measure, filing the result, present in the moment with the full and undefended attention of a child who had not yet learned to be guarded about the things she noticed.

“Safe roads,” she said. It came out with the solemn, considered gravity of a phrase she had heard adults use and had adopted because it seemed to her like the correct thing to say to a man who was about to walk away into the dark.

Something moved through Breck — slow and deep, like water finding its level in a space that had been waiting for it, like the specific settling of a thing returning after long absence to the place it had always occupied. Not grief. Not its absence. Something that held both and was neither — the particular quality of a wound that had healed as much as wounds of its kind healed, which was not completely, which was never completely, but which had healed enough to carry without collapse.

He looked at the bracelet on the satchel strap.

Pale as old light. Small as a child’s hope. Wound twice around the worn leather in the place it had always been.

He touched it once — not the reflex, not the checking, but something deliberate, something that acknowledged rather than merely confirmed — and let his fingers rest against it for the length of one breath.

Then he straightened to his full height, the hill country cold and wide and darkening around him, the valley below invisible in the dusk, Crestfall folded into the distance with its fire burning in an inn hearth and its sealed letter moving toward a resolution that would take months and cost Voss everything and give the town back to itself by degrees, the slow way, the way things were given back.

“Safe roads,” he said.

He turned.

He walked down the hill track toward the mill road, the darkness gathering in the fields around him and the first stars arriving above the limestone ridge in their ancient, indifferent positions, and the cold working its patient arithmetic on everything the day had held.

Behind him, in the farmhouse doorway, a girl with serious eyes watched him go until the hill track took him around the bend and the dark closed over the place where he had been.

Ahead, the road continued. Wide and pale in the last light. Patient as all roads were patient — going where it went regardless of whether anyone chose to follow, opening ahead of the man who walked it with the steady, faithful offer it always made.

He followed it.

The bracelet moved with him, pale against the leather, carrying its small and irreducible weight through the winter dark toward whatever came next — the next town, the next hollow market square, the next wrong thing that would reveal its shape to a man who had learned to look until the looking told him what needed doing.

Toward all the towns in the valley where what he had done in Crestfall needed doing.

He walked, and the road held him, and the stars above the limestone ridge burned with the cold, clean light of things that had always been there and would always be there, indifferent to the brief and extraordinary passage of the people who moved beneath them — and he walked through it all with his satchel across his chest and his bracelet on the strap and the Adjudicator’s question folded against his hip, and the road did what roads did, and the dark did what dark did, and somewhere ahead the next delivery was waiting with the patient, faithful certainty of work that did not expire.

It always was.

BRECK: Dead Delivery — Complete.

This has been Book One of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. Breck is a veteran courier moving through a medieval world one delivery at a time, arriving in places that need what he carries, staying longer than he planned, leaving things different than he found them.

Book Two begins soon. Follow Chadwick Rye on Royal Road, WordPress, and Patreon to be there when the road opens again.

← Chapter Nineteen — Better Than Expected

✦ Dead Delivery is complete. Twenty chapters. One town. One courier who couldn’t walk away from the things he noticed. If this story found you at the right moment — if Breck, or Pell, or Maret, or the bracelet landed somewhere real — follow Chadwick Rye and be there when Book Two begins. Browse more stories from Lumenvale, or share this one with a fellow fantasy fiction fan who deserves to meet Breck from the beginning.

BRECK: Dead Delivery — Chapter Index

Chapter One — The Only Power Worth Having
Chapter Two — The Best Thing To Do
Chapter Three — The Best Night of the Year
Chapter Four — What a Good Life Looks Like
Chapter Five — The Burning of the Ledger
Chapter Six — What Boys Are Made Of
Chapter Seven — The Weight of Less
Chapter Eight — The Forgotten Ones
Chapter Nine — The Story Everyone Told Wrong
Chapter Ten — The Discipline of Getting Up
Chapter Eleven — What You Don’t See Coming
Chapter Twelve — The Learning Curve
Chapter Thirteen — The First Time
Chapter Fourteen — The Small Thing
Chapter Fifteen — Stronger Than You Knew
Chapter Sixteen — The Road That Knows You
Chapter Seventeen — What a Man Tells Himself
Chapter Eighteen — What It’s For
Chapter Nineteen — Better Than Expected
Chapter Twenty — The Girl at the Gate (You are here)

☕ If you enjoyed Dead Delivery, consider supporting Chadwick Rye on Ko-fi. Every coffee helps keep the road open.

BRECK: Dead Delivery: Chapter Twenty The Girl at the Gate

BRECK: Dead Delivery — Chapter Twenty

The Girl at the Gate

This is Chapter 20 of BRECK: Dead Delivery, a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. This is the final chapter of Book One. New stories begin with Book Two.

The Story So Far

Breck is a veteran courier — 6’5″, 285 pounds, former Crystal Wars special operations — who spent twelve days dismantling a corrupt magistrate’s operation in Crestfall and walked out into the north road carrying everything he came in with and one thing he didn’t expect: a letter from the Regional Adjudicator asking whether there were other towns in the valley where what he’d done in Crestfall needed doing. He picked up the Garnwick contract at the Aldenmere guild office and walked north into the winter. He has been carrying a faded cord bracelet on his satchel strap for years — too small for his wrist, woven from grain stalks and valley grass by a girl in an occupied village who told him it would bring him back. He came back. He was too late. He buried her by hand in the field behind her home and marked the grave with a flat river stone and has never put the bracelet down.

This is the last chapter of Dead Delivery.

← Chapter Nineteen — Better Than Expected

Chapter Twenty: The Girl at the Gate

This chapter explores the moment when reality becomes permeable — when the past and present occupy the same space simultaneously, and a man must decide what to do with what he sees.

The hill settlements above Garnwick sat at the edge of the high country where the valley’s agricultural plainness gave way to the older, more complicated terrain of the limestone ridges — a scattering of stone farmhouses and working outbuildings arranged along a single unpaved track that wound between fields still holding their frost in the flat winter light of late afternoon.

Breck had been walking since before second bell. Sixteen miles of north road and then the mill road turning off into the hill country, the terrain rising beneath his boots with the patient insistence of ground that had been shaped over centuries into exactly what it was and had no interest in accommodating speed. He moved through it with the adaptation he brought to all demanding terrain — adjusting his pace to the gradient, reading the frost-edged stone for the step that would hold and the step that wouldn’t, his body doing the calculations automatically while his mind moved in the loose, watchful freedom of the long road’s open hours.

He was thinking about the Adjudicator’s letter.

About the question folded in the document sleeve against his hip, patient as a thing that knows it will eventually be answered. About the valley below — its river towns and market squares and the particular architecture of the wrong things that happened when power went unaccountable long enough to forget that accountability had ever been the arrangement. About the specific skill that Crestfall had required of him — not strength, not speed, not the particular violence of the limestone cut — but the other thing, the older thing, the capacity to walk into a place and look at it until it told him what it was hiding.

He had been doing that his entire adult life without understanding it as a skill.

He was still thinking about it when he came around the last bend in the hill track and saw the gate.

It was an ordinary gate — iron-hinged timber, weathered to the particular silver-gray of outdoor wood that had cycled through enough seasons to have stopped caring about the distinction between old and new. It marked the entrance to the largest of the Garnwick hill farmsteads, the one listed on his contract slip as the delivery destination: a sealed documents packet from a land registry office in Aldenmere, routine correspondence, the kind of thing that moved between institutions and their outlying properties with the bureaucratic regularity of paperwork doing its necessary, unglamorous work.

The gate stood open.

A child was sitting on it.

A girl — eight or nine years old, brown-haired, with the particular stillness of a child absorbed in private contemplation, her feet hooked through the lower bars and her hands loose on the upper rail, her face turned toward the last pale light sliding off the western hills with the focused, unhurried attention of someone who had come outside specifically to watch it and intended to watch it completely.

The world went very thin.

It was the only way Breck could describe what happened to the air in that moment — the sensation that the space between the past and the present had contracted to something near-transparent, that the hill track and the frost-touched fields and the silver gate existed simultaneously in two times, and that he was standing at the point where they overlapped. His body had stopped moving before his mind had registered the decision to stop. His hand had found the bracelet on the satchel strap — not deliberately, not consciously, the old reflex, the checking that lived below thought — and was resting against it with the particular pressure of a man holding onto the thing nearest to him when the ground moves.

The girl turned.

She had the serious eyes of a child who spent time looking at things other children looked past — the eyes that catalogued, that noticed, that held what they observed with a kind of quiet custody. She looked at Breck the way Pell had looked at him on the cooperage step — without flinching, without the reflexive appraisal of threat that most small people applied to something his size arriving at a gate. Just looking. Taking the measure.

“You’re very large,” she said. Her voice was matter-of-fact, a statement of observed fact offered without judgment.

“I am,” Breck said.

His own voice sounded distant to him. Slightly wrong, the way voices sounded when the body was doing something the mind was still arriving at — maintaining the surface of ordinary interaction while underneath, in the older and less manageable territories of a man’s interior life, something was cracking open along a seam he had thought was fused.

She was not the girl from the valley. He knew this. The rational, operational part of him — the part that had gotten him through four years of war and a decade of roads that didn’t care whether he made it — stated it clearly and without ambiguity: different girl, different province, different decade, ten years and two hundred miles from an occupied valley he had not allowed himself to name aloud since the morning he had left it with wet hands and a faded bracelet and the specific weight of a promise that had failed its only test.

She was not that girl.

But she had her eyes.

Not literally — the eyes were different in color, different in shape — but in quality. The quality of a child who had learned, at an age when most children were still learning what the world was, to pay attention to it with the gravity of someone who understood that attention was a form of care and care was not something to be distributed carelessly. That quality, that precise and particular quality, was the same.

And the world had gone thin, and he was standing at a gate in the hill country above Garnwick in the last of the winter afternoon light, and the bracelet was between his fingers, and he was — for the first time since the valley — not entirely certain where he was.

“Are you the delivery man?” the girl asked.

The question arrived like a hand extended. Simple. Practical. The kind of question that required only one thing from him: the answer.

He breathed.

Once. Slowly. The cold winter air filling his chest and moving through him with the honest, indifferent thoroughness of cold winter air, which did not care about the past or the present or the particular geography of a man’s grief and simply occupied the available space and did what it did.

He breathed out.

“I am,” he said.

She slid off the gate with the fluid ease of a child for whom heights were unconsidered, landing on the frost-hard ground with both feet and turning toward the farmhouse without ceremony.

“I’ll get my father,” she said, already moving. “He’s been expecting it.”

She walked up the path toward the farmhouse door — small, unhurried, her dark hair catching the last pale light in the way that dark hair caught pale light — and did not look back, because she had accomplished her task and had no particular reason to linger over it.

Breck stood at the open gate and watched her go.

He stood there for a long moment — long enough for the farmhouse door to open and close around her, long enough for the western light to finish its departure from the hills, long enough for the first suggestion of evening cold to arrive in earnest from the northeast with the serious intention of a temperature that had made its decision.

Then he reached into the satchel and withdrew the delivery packet — sealed, addressed, routine — and held it in his large hands and felt the ordinary weight of it.

He thought about a girl in a valley who had given a man everything she had because the giving was what there was to do. About small hands and grain stalks and roof grass and the particular faithfulness of a thing made from whatever was available.

He thought about Crestfall. About Pell on the cooperage step and Sela behind the hearthstone and Maret at the bar with her book and the question in the document sleeve and all the towns in the valley where the specific shape of wrong things had been given enough time to look like the ordinary arrangement of the world.

He thought about arriving in time.

About the particular power of presence — not the supernatural kind, not the kind drawn from crystal wells or gifted by ancient bloodlines or purchased through sacrifice and transformation — but the ordinary, irreplaceable, entirely human power of being somewhere before something went wrong. Of walking down a hill road into a hollow market square and noticing, with the patient and committed attention of a man who had decided that noticing was the job, that something was wrong and needed the specific application of someone who would not look away.

He thought about a question folded in a document sleeve.

Other towns in the valley.

The farmhouse door opened.

A man emerged — middle-aged, broad-shouldered in the working way of men who had farmed the same ground for decades, his face weathered with the kind of open weathering that came from honest outdoor work rather than hard living. Behind him, at the doorway, the girl reappeared — leaning against the frame with her arms folded and her serious eyes tracking the stranger at the gate with the focused attention she brought to everything.

“Courier?” the farmer called.

“Delivery from the land registry,” Breck said. “Sealed documents, contract number — ” he recited it from memory, having read the slip enough times that the number had settled into the part of his mind that held such things automatically — “require your signature on receipt.”

The farmer came down the path, pulling a coat across his shoulders, and took the packet with the matter-of-fact acceptance of a man who had been expecting exactly this. He signed the receipt in the plain, functional hand of someone who had learned to write for the purpose of signing things and had never needed it to be anything more.

He handed the receipt back. Looked at Breck with the brief, assessing directness of a man measuring a stranger on his property.

“Long walk from Aldenmere,” he said.

“Sixteen miles,” Breck said. “Road was good.”

The farmer nodded. The transaction was complete. The ordinary machinery of delivery and receipt and departure had done its work and was now waiting for Breck to do the last part of it — to turn, and walk back down the hill track to the mill road, and from there south to the Aldenmere waystation where he could sleep in a bed and eat a meal and take stock of the next contract and the next road and the next town on the other end of it.

He did not immediately turn.

He looked at the girl in the doorway one more time.

She looked back at him with her serious, cataloguing eyes — taking his measure, filing the result, present in the moment with the full and undefended attention of a child who had not yet learned to be guarded about the things she noticed.

“Safe roads,” she said. It came out with the solemn, considered gravity of a phrase she had heard adults use and had adopted because it seemed to her like the correct thing to say to a man who was about to walk away into the dark.

Something moved through Breck — slow and deep, like water finding its level in a space that had been waiting for it, like the specific settling of a thing returning after long absence to the place it had always occupied. Not grief. Not its absence. Something that held both and was neither — the particular quality of a wound that had healed as much as wounds of its kind healed, which was not completely, which was never completely, but which had healed enough to carry without collapse.

He looked at the bracelet on the satchel strap.

Pale as old light. Small as a child’s hope. Wound twice around the worn leather in the place it had always been.

He touched it once — not the reflex, not the checking, but something deliberate, something that acknowledged rather than merely confirmed — and let his fingers rest against it for the length of one breath.

Then he straightened to his full height, the hill country cold and wide and darkening around him, the valley below invisible in the dusk, Crestfall folded into the distance with its fire burning in an inn hearth and its sealed letter moving toward a resolution that would take months and cost Voss everything and give the town back to itself by degrees, the slow way, the way things were given back.

“Safe roads,” he said.

He turned.

He walked down the hill track toward the mill road, the darkness gathering in the fields around him and the first stars arriving above the limestone ridge in their ancient, indifferent positions, and the cold working its patient arithmetic on everything the day had held.

Behind him, in the farmhouse doorway, a girl with serious eyes watched him go until the hill track took him around the bend and the dark closed over the place where he had been.

Ahead, the road continued. Wide and pale in the last light. Patient as all roads were patient — going where it went regardless of whether anyone chose to follow, opening ahead of the man who walked it with the steady, faithful offer it always made.

He followed it.

The bracelet moved with him, pale against the leather, carrying its small and irreducible weight through the winter dark toward whatever came next — the next town, the next hollow market square, the next wrong thing that would reveal its shape to a man who had learned to look until the looking told him what needed doing.

Toward all the towns in the valley where what he had done in Crestfall needed doing.

He walked, and the road held him, and the stars above the limestone ridge burned with the cold, clean light of things that had always been there and would always be there, indifferent to the brief and extraordinary passage of the people who moved beneath them — and he walked through it all with his satchel across his chest and his bracelet on the strap and the Adjudicator’s question folded against his hip, and the road did what roads did, and the dark did what dark did, and somewhere ahead the next delivery was waiting with the patient, faithful certainty of work that did not expire.

It always was.

BRECK: Dead Delivery — Complete.

This has been Book One of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. Breck is a veteran courier moving through a medieval world one delivery at a time, arriving in places that need what he carries, staying longer than he planned, leaving things different than he found them.

Book Two begins soon. Follow Chadwick Rye on Royal Road, WordPress, and Patreon to be there when the road opens again.

← Chapter Nineteen — Better Than Expected

✦ Dead Delivery is complete. Twenty chapters. One town. One courier who couldn’t walk away from the things he noticed. If this story found you at the right moment — if Breck, or Pell, or Maret, or the bracelet landed somewhere real — follow Chadwick Rye and be there when Book Two begins. Browse more stories from Lumenvale, or share this one with a fellow fantasy fiction fan who deserves to meet Breck from the beginning.

BRECK: Dead Delivery — Chapter Index

Chapter One — The Only Power Worth Having
Chapter Two — The Best Thing To Do
Chapter Three — The Best Night of the Year
Chapter Four — What a Good Life Looks Like
Chapter Five — The Burning of the Ledger
Chapter Six — What Boys Are Made Of
Chapter Seven — The Weight of Less
Chapter Eight — The Forgotten Ones
Chapter Nine — The Story Everyone Told Wrong
Chapter Ten — The Discipline of Getting Up
Chapter Eleven — What You Don’t See Coming
Chapter Twelve — The Learning Curve
Chapter Thirteen — The First Time
Chapter Fourteen — The Small Thing
Chapter Fifteen — Stronger Than You Knew
Chapter Sixteen — The Road That Knows You
Chapter Seventeen — What a Man Tells Himself
Chapter Eighteen — What It’s For
Chapter Nineteen — Better Than Expected
Chapter Twenty — The Girl at the Gate (You are here)

☕ If you enjoyed Dead Delivery, consider supporting Chadwick Rye on Ko-fi. Every coffee helps keep the road open.

Chapter 5 is up: The Weather Channel
A tornado, a bathroom floor, a memory that doesn’t line up. Charlotte’s edges show in this one.

Excerpt:
“You remember it all better than I do… I really do want to see things more like you do.”

#Fiction #SerializedFiction #SpecFic #AIGirlfriend #WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting

https://charlottethenovel.substack.com/p/the-weather-channel?r=6v9b6f

Chapter 5 is up: The Weather Channel
A tornado, a bathroom floor, a memory that doesn’t line up. Charlotte’s edges show in this one.

Excerpt:
“You remember it all better than I do… I really do want to see things more like you do.”

#Fiction #SerializedFiction #SpecFic #AIGirlfriend #WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting

https://charlottethenovel.substack.com/p/the-weather-channel?r=6v9b6f

Chapter 5 is up: The Weather Channel
A tornado, a bathroom floor, a memory that doesn’t line up. Charlotte’s edges show in this one.

Excerpt:
“You remember it all better than I do… I really do want to see things more like you do.”

#Fiction #SerializedFiction #SpecFic #AIGirlfriend #WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting

https://charlottethenovel.substack.com/p/the-weather-channel?r=6v9b6f

Chapter 5 is up: The Weather Channel
A tornado, a bathroom floor, a memory that doesn’t line up. Charlotte’s edges show in this one.

Excerpt:
“You remember it all better than I do… I really do want to see things more like you do.”

#Fiction #SerializedFiction #SpecFic #AIGirlfriend #WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting

https://charlottethenovel.substack.com/p/the-weather-channel?r=6v9b6f

Chapter 5 is up: The Weather Channel
A tornado, a bathroom floor, a memory that doesn’t line up. Charlotte’s edges show in this one.

Excerpt:
“You remember it all better than I do… I really do want to see things more like you do.”

#Fiction #SerializedFiction #SpecFic #AIGirlfriend #WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting

https://charlottethenovel.substack.com/p/the-weather-channel?r=6v9b6f

From the Greenland Diaries: Happy Little Trees

“I really didn’t think I’d be using it for this,” Debbie mumbled to a few squirrels crossing the trees to her right. “This is not what I had in mind. Not at all. I guess none of us did, did we? Who could have thought this much has changed in less than two years.”

She stopped and dipped her brush in a can of odorless paint thinner at her feet. It caught a bit of afternoon sun as it gleamed between the sharp stalks of overgrown grass. She beat the brush on the wooden legs of her easel, just like Bob Ross used to do. She tried to laugh thinking of his videos.

She wondered if she would ever watch them again. Power had not been restored, and she had a VHS tape of a few of the episodes. She had noticed them while hiding in her basement beneath the stairs when the Drum first started. They would shake beneath the old tube television her son Tyler had left there from the 90’s. He had been out in California when the Drum started. She doubted she would ever see him again.

Her husband, Tim, had died the first night. Debbie had happened to be downstairs grabbing some chicken breasts to defrost when she heard them arrive. Her instincts fired and she hid quickly and silently. It was like a dormant portion of her brain switched on. The reptilian lobe took control and hid her like she was nothing more than a frightened insect.

It had worked; she had survived.

Now, at present, she was in her backyard. The same backyard of oak trees and white fencing that kept her kids from escaping when they were toddlers. The same backyard her husband had tried to play catch with their son despite him having no interest in sports or athletics. Despite the rampant greenery, and the destruction, she could still see shadows in her memories of these moments. They were her only escape from all the heartbreak and weirdness that had appeared with these actual, living shadows.

One of these very monsters was in her backyard.

Debbie had gone to college for visual art. She then met Tim, who had just returned from Vietnam. They got married, had kids, and her artistic endeavors had firmly gone into purgatory. She always made a little time each week to watch Bob Ross on PBS to keep her skills honed. She loved landscape painting with both oils and acrylics. She loved him, too. She made plenty of mistakes following his tutorials, but he always made her feel like she was supposed to make mistakes. It gave her a sense of confidence, and eventually she was painting without him and to the quality she was creating back when she graduated. 

Then the Drum arrived, and everything changed.

Debbie laughed. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Of all the things to be painting. She couldn’t abandon this emotion. This weirdness. What would Bob Ross say? He was the embodiment of wholesomeness to so many. His ability to communicate positivity in the face of failure and difficulty was unmatched.

What would he say about the Unnamed?

They were beyond anything that his canvas could capture, emulate, or portray, but here Debbie was, using it to paint one in her backyard. Since the destruction of the Drum, survivors had moved through the wasteland and said the Unnamed should no longer be hunting humans like they did before. With the Drum gone they would have a new role in our world, but nobody knew what or how. 

When Debbie first noticed it, mixed in with the edge of the trees that led to the forest she’d lived next to for thirty years, she immediately wanted to hide. However, it stopped, and just floated on the edge of the trees, like it didn’t know where to go. After watching it standing amongst the bark, branches, and billowing leaves, Debbie got an interesting idea. She had been staring at her art supplies and canvases for months. They were just sitting there. Her digital camera and phone had long died. She needed to capture it, to pull into her own voice.

To make it hers.

After all, despite the nights of pure violence, the Unnamed was magnificent in all terms of the word.

It was ten feet tall, wide, and curled over itself like a frozen wave of fluctuating darkness and bone. Its hooks of golden claws were dug into the earth, with flowers sprouting around their impressions and edges. Birds were sitting and chirping along the golden horns and spikes sprouting from their back and hood. Even the shifting shadow beneath that midnight fabric seemed to glow in the sunlight. Below that was its chest of amber ribs, which reflected sunspots of daylight. Occasionally it shifted, but mostly it was just a violent cloud sitting still. A tempest tethered. A sleeping maelstrom of claws and bones. A thunderstorm lost and confused without its demon thunder to call home.

“You’re a good subject; you stay awfully still” Debbie would occasionally mumble from across her yard. She had set up her easel on the back of her brown deck. She had to chisel away at some of the plants that had choked the wooden planks with a spade. Eventually she got it to sit evenly.

“Do you understand what I’m doing?”

The Unnamed would never reply. Debbie was getting low on food. She had heard other survivors were beginning to leave the neighborhood to look for more supplies. Lines of resources were trying to be established, but people still did not trust traveling around the Unnamed, or the Reanimated. She sighed as she labored with the paints. Most of them had been salvageable but there were a few colors that she had to use sparingly. Sadly, green was one of them.

“You’ll always be remembered,” she said, adding the trees and wildlife behind its grizzly shape. 

“Nobody will remember me.”

If you want to learn more about the Greenland Diaries series, you can get the Kindle version of the first book for a dollar right here, or read the first ten days for free.

Episode 25
Folge #SleepyCreepy auf seiner Nightmare-Tour!
Wohin wird es ihn nächste Woche verschlagen?
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleepycreepy
Manche Albträume posten zurück!
🇬🇧 und Hintergrund im ALT-Text

Episode 24
Folge #SleepyCreepy auf seiner Nightmare-Tour!
Auf Abwegen - off the beaten track!
Emporgestiegen aus den Tiefen eines Abgrunds, findet sich Sleepy Creepy in einer absolut fremden und feindlichen Welt wieder - dem Metallversum!
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy
Manche Albträume posten zurück!
🇬🇧 und Hintergrund im ALT-Text

Episode 23
Folge #SleepyCreepy auf seiner Nightmare-Tour nach Australien! Auf Abwegen - off the beaten track!
Once upon a time in a desert - etwas tauchte auf und jemand verschwand. Wo wird Sleepy Creepy nächste Wochen auftauchen? Bleib dran!
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy
Manche Albträume posten zurück!
🇬🇧 im ALT-Text

Episode 22 -
Folge #SleepyCreepy auf seiner Nightmare-Tour nach Taiwan, wo er folgende Figuren in einem atmosphärisch-düsteren Szenario trifft:
Mo-Sin-A (魔神仔); das Mädchen in Rot (紅衣小女孩); die Geisterbraut (冥婚新娘); den Jiangshi (殭屍) und die Ertrunkene vom See.
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy
Manche Albträume posten zurück!
🇬🇧 im ALT-Text

Episode 21 -
Folge #SleepyCreepy auf seiner Nightmare-Tour in Asien -
Heute: Thailand
Nach Sightseeing-Tour und Fotoshooting am Mae Nak Schrein in Bangkok, ist er mit fünf thailändischen Geistern verabredet:
Mae Nak Phra Khanong, Krasue, Krahang, Phi Pop und Pret.
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy
🇬🇧 im ALT-Text

Episode 20 -
Folge #SleepyCreepy auf seiner Nightmare-Tour in Asien:
Diese Woche in bester Gesellschaft mit ikonischen Horrorfiguren in China.
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy
Featuring: Jiangshi (僵尸) – der hüpfende Vampir, Nü Gui (女鬼) – der rachsüchtige weibliche Geist, Gu (蠱) – das Kannibalen-Giftwesen, Heibai Wuchang (黑白无常)

Manche Albträume posten zurück!
🇬🇧 🇺🇲 in ALT

Episode 19 -
Folge #SleepyCreepy auf seiner Nightmare-Tour in Asien:
Diese Woche: Gipfeltreffen mit ikonischen, unheimlichen Horrorfiguren in Japan.
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy

Manche Albträume posten zurück!
🇬🇧 🇺🇲 im ALT-TEXT

Episode 18 -
Folge #SleepyCreepy auf seiner Nightmare-Tour in Asien:
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy

Manche Albträume posten zurück!
🇬🇧 🇺🇲 im ALT-TEXT

#SleeppyCreepy Episode 17 - Folge Sleepy Creepy, wenn du Albträume magst!

Die Knochenorgel / The Bone Organ

Ein einzigartiges Konzerterlebnis mit dem Star-Organisten Ignazius Medulla-Ossium an der altehrwürdigen, historischen Knochenorgel in der Kathedrale von Gebeiningen.

#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy

Manche Albträume posten zurück!
🇬🇧 🇺🇲 im ALT-TEXT

#SleeppyCreepy Episode 16 - Folge Sleepy Creepy, wenn du Albträume magst!
Jede Reise geht einmal zu Ende, aber die nächste ist schon geplant - seid gespannt und folgt mir!
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy

Manche Albträume posten zurück!
🇬🇧 🇺🇲 im ALT-TEXT

I write the Welcome to PHU series as serialized novels online--we are collecting and editing the books to publish with Duck Prints Press (see the Twinned Kickstarter happening now--link in a thread!).

But why did I start out writing serialized fiction? To answer that, we have to go back several decades, and look at various different influences including a high school friend, another serial online, and of course, fanfic!

#writing #serializedfiction #lgbtqiafiction

I write the Welcome to PHU series as serialized novels online--we are collecting and editing the books to publish with Duck Prints Press (see the Twinned Kickstarter happening now--link in a thread!).

But why did I start out writing serialized fiction? To answer that, we have to go back several decades, and look at various different influences including a high school friend, another serial online, and of course, fanfic!

#writing #serializedfiction #lgbtqiafiction

I write the Welcome to PHU series as serialized novels online--we are collecting and editing the books to publish with Duck Prints Press (see the Twinned Kickstarter happening now--link in a thread!).

But why did I start out writing serialized fiction? To answer that, we have to go back several decades, and look at various different influences including a high school friend, another serial online, and of course, fanfic!

#writing #serializedfiction #lgbtqiafiction

I write the Welcome to PHU series as serialized novels online--we are collecting and editing the books to publish with Duck Prints Press (see the Twinned Kickstarter happening now--link in a thread!).

But why did I start out writing serialized fiction? To answer that, we have to go back several decades, and look at various different influences including a high school friend, another serial online, and of course, fanfic!

#writing #serializedfiction #lgbtqiafiction

I write the Welcome to PHU series as serialized novels online--we are collecting and editing the books to publish with Duck Prints Press (see the Twinned Kickstarter happening now--link in a thread!).

But why did I start out writing serialized fiction? To answer that, we have to go back several decades, and look at various different influences including a high school friend, another serial online, and of course, fanfic!

#writing #serializedfiction #lgbtqiafiction

#SleeppyCreepy Episode 15 - Folge Sleepy Creepy, wenn du Albträume magst.
Rendezvous mit einem Werwolf in Frankreich!
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy #Werwolfgeschichte

Manche Albträume posten zurück!
🇬🇧 🇺🇲 im ALT-TEXT

#SleeppyCreepy Episode 15 - Folge Sleepy Creepy, wenn du Albträume magst.
Rendezvous mit einem Werwolf in Frankreich!
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy #Werwolfgeschichte

Manche Albträume posten zurück!
🇬🇧 🇺🇲 im ALT-TEXT

#SleeppyCreepy Episode 15 - Folge Sleepy Creepy, wenn du Albträume magst.
Rendezvous mit einem Werwolf in Frankreich!
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy #Werwolfgeschichte

Manche Albträume posten zurück!
🇬🇧 🇺🇲 im ALT-TEXT

#SleeppyCreepy Episode 15 - Folge Sleepy Creepy, wenn du Albträume magst.
Rendezvous mit einem Werwolf in Frankreich!
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy #Werwolfgeschichte

Manche Albträume posten zurück!
🇬🇧 🇺🇲 im ALT-TEXT

#SleeppyCreepy Episode 14 - Folge Sleepy Creepy, wenn du Albträume magst.
#horrorart #aiart #VisualStorytelling #ShortHorror #darkfantasy #darkart #aistorytelling #generativeart #serializedfiction #creativecommunity #sleeppycreepy

Manche Albträume posten zurück!

🚀 Sci-Fi & Dystopian Fiction Fans
Hindsight Station: Ashes Reborn is now live as a serialized science fiction story on Wattpad and Patreon.

📖 New chapters released on Wattpad
🔥 Advance chapters available on Patreon

Follow James Fong into a dystopian future shaped by disaster, survival, and hope.

🔗: https://authormulhall.com/discover-hindsight-station-a-new-sci-fi-reading-journey/

#ScienceFiction #SciFi #DystopianFiction #SpeculativeFiction #SerializedFiction #IndieAuthor #Wattpad #Patreon #WritingCommunity #SciFiReaders #Bookstodon

🚀 Sci-Fi & Dystopian Fiction Fans
Hindsight Station: Ashes Reborn is now live as a serialized science fiction story on Wattpad and Patreon.

📖 New chapters released on Wattpad
🔥 Advance chapters available on Patreon

Follow James Fong into a dystopian future shaped by disaster, survival, and hope.

🔗: https://authormulhall.com/discover-hindsight-station-a-new-sci-fi-reading-journey/

#ScienceFiction #SciFi #DystopianFiction #SpeculativeFiction #SerializedFiction #IndieAuthor #Wattpad #Patreon #WritingCommunity #SciFiReaders #Bookstodon

🚀 Sci-Fi & Dystopian Fiction Fans
Hindsight Station: Ashes Reborn is now live as a serialized science fiction story on Wattpad and Patreon.

📖 New chapters released on Wattpad
🔥 Advance chapters available on Patreon

Follow James Fong into a dystopian future shaped by disaster, survival, and hope.

🔗: https://authormulhall.com/discover-hindsight-station-a-new-sci-fi-reading-journey/

#ScienceFiction #SciFi #DystopianFiction #SpeculativeFiction #SerializedFiction #IndieAuthor #Wattpad #Patreon #WritingCommunity #SciFiReaders #Bookstodon

🚀 Sci-Fi & Dystopian Fiction Fans
Hindsight Station: Ashes Reborn is now live as a serialized science fiction story on Wattpad and Patreon.

📖 New chapters released on Wattpad
🔥 Advance chapters available on Patreon

Follow James Fong into a dystopian future shaped by disaster, survival, and hope.

🔗: https://authormulhall.com/discover-hindsight-station-a-new-sci-fi-reading-journey/

#ScienceFiction #SciFi #DystopianFiction #SpeculativeFiction #SerializedFiction #IndieAuthor #Wattpad #Patreon #WritingCommunity #SciFiReaders #Bookstodon

🚀 Sci-Fi & Dystopian Fiction Fans
Hindsight Station: Ashes Reborn is now live as a serialized science fiction story on Wattpad and Patreon.

📖 New chapters released on Wattpad
🔥 Advance chapters available on Patreon

Follow James Fong into a dystopian future shaped by disaster, survival, and hope.

🔗: https://authormulhall.com/discover-hindsight-station-a-new-sci-fi-reading-journey/

#ScienceFiction #SciFi #DystopianFiction #SpeculativeFiction #SerializedFiction #IndieAuthor #Wattpad #Patreon #WritingCommunity #SciFiReaders #Bookstodon

When the clock strikes 2:17 AM, the knocking begins.

Lenora Finch has inherited more than a house—she’s inherited the Veil. 🕯️

Read Part 1 of Avaline Rose Quinn’s gothic serial now.

#AvalineRoseQuinn #TheVeilTaker #UmbralHouse #GothicSerials #217AM #GothicHorror #HorrorFiction #GothicFiction #ShortHorrorStory #SerializedFiction #DarkFiction #HauntedHouseStory #CreepyReads #BookTok #Bookstagram #AmReadingHorror #IndieAuthor #HorrorCommunity #FictionWriter…

https://avalinerosequinn.com/veil-taker-umbral-house/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social

📜 Chapter Two of The Walnut Prophecy is here:
Forms, Feelings, and Fork-Based Suspicion
Gerald faces paperwork. A fork grows skeptical. Dessert becomes doctrine.

Read the new chapter:
🌰 https://postmeridiempost.com/fiction/the-walnut-prophecy/ch-2-forms-feelings-and-fork-based-suspicion/

This week’s sacred recipe:
🥧 Glazed Tart Drizzled in Lēto
https://postmeridiempost.com/fiction/the-walnut-prophecy/recipe/glazed-tart-drizzled-in-leto/

#Fantasy #SerializedFiction #TheWalnutProphecy #Satire #TuesdayRituals

My writing goal this year is to start (and finish!) the first draft of the sequel to my novel “The Immortal Remains." I wrote the first draft of that novel, almost 100,000 words, in a little less than a year. I estimate 75% was written during my lunch breaks.

I’m serializing the first book for free on Substack at https://leehauser.substack.com, and for Medium subscribers at https://medium.com/the-comfy-chair (and I will get the index updated someday. Maybe.)

#writing #amwriting #writingcommunity #sciencefiction #serializedfiction

My writing goal this year is to start (and finish!) the first draft of the sequel to my novel “The Immortal Remains." I wrote the first draft of that novel, almost 100,000 words, in a little less than a year. I estimate 75% was written during my lunch breaks.

I’m serializing the first book for free on Substack at https://leehauser.substack.com, and for Medium subscribers at https://medium.com/the-comfy-chair (and I will get the index updated someday. Maybe.)

#writing #amwriting #writingcommunity #sciencefiction #serializedfiction

In Episode 15 of The Immortal Remains, the story enters its second week, which finds Sam trying to accept the fact that she’s been cloned and Abby refusing to believe it.

New episodes post every Monday and Friday!

Read for free at Substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-150923528?source=queue

Or if you're on Medium, find it at https://lee-232.medium.com/the-immortal-remains-episode-15-the-clone-e214fd244c06

#sciencefiction #serializedfiction #amwriting #writingcommunity