#web-fiction — Public Fediverse posts

Here's an excerpt from the latest episode of #BadAnimals!

Read it for free on FurAffinity or my official website:
🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/65645520/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-7-love-is-a-battlefield/
-
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Seven The Kind of People Who Stay

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Seven

The Kind of People Who Stay

This is Chapter 7 of BRECK: Stone’s Rest, Book Three of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye. New chapters post daily.

The Story So Far

Bren confirmed Frostpeak won’t see harvest. Breck stood at the edge of her failing terrace, let the Karithian valley all the way in for the first time in three years, and asked Mira to show him the rest of it. She said it was bad. He said he’d stood in worse rooms. Neither of them argued the point.

← Chapter Six: What Success Never Meant | Chapter Eight →

Chapter Seven: The Kind of People Who Stay

This chapter asks who inspires a man like Breck — and uses the answer to put him exactly where the series needs him to be.

Mira walked him the full length of Frostpeak’s eastern slope before dawn the next morning — every cracked support, every patch of failed light, every place where the stone had gone grey and cold in a way that clearly wasn’t seasonal. She didn’t narrate it. She simply walked and let him look, and he looked the way he always looked at damage, methodically and without sentiment, because sentiment was fine in the privacy of a terrace at dusk but evidence was what courts needed and evidence was what he was here to gather.

The concession began where a line of survey stakes drove into the ground at even intervals, pale-painted wood standing out sharp against the darker surrounding soil. Breck stopped at the first one, crouched, ran his thumb along the stake’s upper edge. Fresh paint, recently reset — the kind of detail that meant someone had walked this line in the last few weeks and confirmed it, which meant someone knew exactly where the legal boundary sat.

“The charter gives them rights to excavate within the designated survey perimeter,” Jenna said, from his left. She’d joined them at first light, quiet and prepared in a way that told him she’d been awake longer than they had. “Foundational stone only. Surface extraction on a separate writ they haven’t applied for and wouldn’t receive.”

“What did they actually do?”

“Come and see.”

The first breach was half a mile east of the survey line, which on open grassland was not a small distance and not an easy mistake to make. A deep-cut trench ran forty yards into ground that no legitimate reading of the charter touched, the soil around it turned back and dried in long pale furrows, and at its far end, still visible in the pale early light, a mobile pulley system of the kind Breck recognized from the Lumenvale guild foundries sat unattended, waiting for its shift to begin. Below the trench’s lip, cut into stone that should never have been cut, a dark smear ran the length of the exposed face where something had been extracted that hadn’t been coal or iron or any mineral he had a name for.

“What’s that?” He pointed at the smear.

“Heartstone,” Mira said. “It’s what the bioluminescence runs through. What the bond runs through. What we — and the mountains — have never permitted to be extracted, because there’s no way to do it that doesn’t take the vein it runs in.” She kept her voice flat and informative, the way a person keeps their voice when anger has been too many years in residence to function usefully as a feeling anymore and has simply become texture. “There is no provision in Garrow’s charter for heartstone extraction. There is no provision for it in any charter Lumenvale has ever issued, because until the concession came out here and found it, no surveyor had ever mapped this deep.”

Breck straightened, looked the length of the trench, looked back at the survey stakes a half mile behind them, and felt the clean, unambiguous click of a picture finishing assembling itself. He’d been trained for twenty years to distrust conclusions that arrived feeling like certainty, because certainty was what bad intelligence felt like too, from the inside. This wasn’t certainty. This was simply a trench, in the wrong place, containing the wrong material, next to a pulley that wasn’t owned by anyone who had permission to be there.

He stayed long enough to sketch the trench dimensions on the back of an old dispatch sheet from his satchel, noting the distance from the survey line, the visible vein damage, the equipment markings. He was halfway through the equipment markings when the shift crew arrived.

There were seven of them, ground-dwellers, coming up the trail from the main camp with the particular loose energy of men early into a long working day, voices low and carrying in the cold air. They pulled up short when they saw him, collectively, the way men do when unexpected company appears at a worksite and they haven’t decided yet whether to be annoyed or alarmed.

One of them — a young man, not yet twenty-five, with the same deep-cut forearms as every foundry worker Breck had ever known and a sun-weathered face that put him somewhere between apprentice and journeyman — stepped forward from the group with the specific posture of someone who’d decided, in the three seconds it had taken him to assess the situation, that the right move was to handle it himself before anyone else handled it worse.

“You’re on a private work site,” he said. Not aggressive. Just stating it, the way an honest man states a fact he actually believes in.

“I know,” Breck said. “I’m just leaving.” He finished the last of the equipment markings, folded the dispatch sheet back into his satchel, and straightened to his full height, which did its usual work on the young man’s posture without any other effort required. “You work this trench?”

The young man’s eyes moved to the trench, to the survey line in the distance, and back to Breck. He wasn’t stupid. Breck filed that immediately. “I work the site,” he said carefully.

“How long?”

A pause. “Three seasons.”

“Who brought you out here?”

And here the young man’s posture changed, fractionally, in a way Breck recognized — the particular straightening of someone who’s been asked something that makes them want to stand a little taller before answering it. “Garrow did. Hired me out of Westmere. I’d been loading grain carts for a copperweight a week and going nowhere in it.” He said it without apology, the way people state conditions they didn’t choose and didn’t stay in. “He came through, told us what the work was, what it paid, what it could become. There were forty men from Westmere who said yes inside a day. I’ve sent money home every week for three seasons and that wasn’t something I thought I’d be saying at my age.” He glanced at the trench again, and something in that glance told Breck the young man had looked at it before, in the same direction, and not entirely liked what he’d found when he did. “I don’t set the survey lines.”

“I know you don’t,” Breck said, and meant it. He held the young man’s eyes a moment longer — not as pressure, simply as confirmation that what he’d just said had been heard and weighed and found honest — then picked up his satchel and walked back toward the survey stakes with Jenna and Mira behind him.

He didn’t say anything until the trench was well behind them and the camp had dropped below the rise.

The question the prompt had been pressing at all morning finally finished arriving, the way questions did when they’d been working on him from underneath without announcing themselves. Who had actually inspired him, across twenty years of this work, to be the kind of man who crossed a line onto a private worksite and sketched the evidence before the shift arrived rather than staying on the legal side of the stakes and writing a report about what the stakes implied?

Not commanders. Not the men he’d served under in the signal corps, most of whom had been competent and a few of whom had been brilliant and none of whom had been, at the particular bone-deep level he meant, inspiring in the way the question was asking. Not the adjudicators he’d carried letters for, not the lawyers he’d watched work in Crestfall and Cold Harbor both, though he respected the ones who were good at the thing.

It was people like that young man, actually. Not because of what they’d done, but because of the look in a person’s eyes when they understood they were standing in a situation that had been created dishonestly and were slowly deciding what they were going to do about it. Breck had seen that look a hundred times, in couriers who delivered orders they’d been given no context to evaluate, in locals who’d watched magistrates they trusted turn out to be men they didn’t, in clerks who kept honest records in systems that weren’t designed to want honest records. People who’d been handed a condition they didn’t choose and were working out, quietly, alone, without fanfare, whether they had the spine to do the honest thing once they’d identified what it was.

He couldn’t save all of them. He’d learned that. He probably couldn’t save Frostpeak. He was starting to learn that too, and the learning was costing him something different this time than the valley had, which meant it was teaching him something different.

But he could be the kind of man who showed up with a dispatch sheet and a pencil, who counted the distance from the survey stakes to the trench and wrote it down, who asked the young worker honest questions and heard honest answers and left him standing in a better-defined version of whatever decision he was already arriving at on his own. He couldn’t be the inspiration. He was never going to be the inspiration — he was the wrong shape for it, too abrasive, too quiet, too consistently disinclined to deliver the kind of speech that sent men home with fire in their chests. What he could be, and what he had apparently been choosing to be for long enough now that it had stopped feeling like a choice, was the kind of person who stayed.

He could stay here.

He looked at Jenna as they crossed back through the survey stakes and she read his face the same way she’d been reading him since the threshold station, with professional precision and no wasted words.

“You’ll need lodging,” she said. “I know a platform on Thunderstep’s second terrace that isn’t being used.”

“That’ll do,” Breck said.

He was going to need more dispatch sheets.

← Chapter Six: What Success Never Meant | Chapter Eight →

BRECK: Stone’s Rest is a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye — Book Three of the BRECK series, crossing from Lumenvale into Nomados. Chapter 7 of 20. New chapters post daily.

✦ Enjoyed this chapter? “The Kind of People Who Stay” closes the first arc of Book Three — a courier who has never once been the inspiration, standing in front of evidence that can’t be argued away, deciding he’s staying anyway. Browse the full series, follow for daily chapters, or share this with a reader who’s always been quietly inspired by the people who just don’t leave.

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Seven The Kind of People Who Stay

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Seven

The Kind of People Who Stay

This is Chapter 7 of BRECK: Stone’s Rest, Book Three of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye. New chapters post daily.

The Story So Far

Bren confirmed Frostpeak won’t see harvest. Breck stood at the edge of her failing terrace, let the Karithian valley all the way in for the first time in three years, and asked Mira to show him the rest of it. She said it was bad. He said he’d stood in worse rooms. Neither of them argued the point.

← Chapter Six: What Success Never Meant | Chapter Eight →

Chapter Seven: The Kind of People Who Stay

This chapter asks who inspires a man like Breck — and uses the answer to put him exactly where the series needs him to be.

Mira walked him the full length of Frostpeak’s eastern slope before dawn the next morning — every cracked support, every patch of failed light, every place where the stone had gone grey and cold in a way that clearly wasn’t seasonal. She didn’t narrate it. She simply walked and let him look, and he looked the way he always looked at damage, methodically and without sentiment, because sentiment was fine in the privacy of a terrace at dusk but evidence was what courts needed and evidence was what he was here to gather.

The concession began where a line of survey stakes drove into the ground at even intervals, pale-painted wood standing out sharp against the darker surrounding soil. Breck stopped at the first one, crouched, ran his thumb along the stake’s upper edge. Fresh paint, recently reset — the kind of detail that meant someone had walked this line in the last few weeks and confirmed it, which meant someone knew exactly where the legal boundary sat.

“The charter gives them rights to excavate within the designated survey perimeter,” Jenna said, from his left. She’d joined them at first light, quiet and prepared in a way that told him she’d been awake longer than they had. “Foundational stone only. Surface extraction on a separate writ they haven’t applied for and wouldn’t receive.”

“What did they actually do?”

“Come and see.”

The first breach was half a mile east of the survey line, which on open grassland was not a small distance and not an easy mistake to make. A deep-cut trench ran forty yards into ground that no legitimate reading of the charter touched, the soil around it turned back and dried in long pale furrows, and at its far end, still visible in the pale early light, a mobile pulley system of the kind Breck recognized from the Lumenvale guild foundries sat unattended, waiting for its shift to begin. Below the trench’s lip, cut into stone that should never have been cut, a dark smear ran the length of the exposed face where something had been extracted that hadn’t been coal or iron or any mineral he had a name for.

“What’s that?” He pointed at the smear.

“Heartstone,” Mira said. “It’s what the bioluminescence runs through. What the bond runs through. What we — and the mountains — have never permitted to be extracted, because there’s no way to do it that doesn’t take the vein it runs in.” She kept her voice flat and informative, the way a person keeps their voice when anger has been too many years in residence to function usefully as a feeling anymore and has simply become texture. “There is no provision in Garrow’s charter for heartstone extraction. There is no provision for it in any charter Lumenvale has ever issued, because until the concession came out here and found it, no surveyor had ever mapped this deep.”

Breck straightened, looked the length of the trench, looked back at the survey stakes a half mile behind them, and felt the clean, unambiguous click of a picture finishing assembling itself. He’d been trained for twenty years to distrust conclusions that arrived feeling like certainty, because certainty was what bad intelligence felt like too, from the inside. This wasn’t certainty. This was simply a trench, in the wrong place, containing the wrong material, next to a pulley that wasn’t owned by anyone who had permission to be there.

He stayed long enough to sketch the trench dimensions on the back of an old dispatch sheet from his satchel, noting the distance from the survey line, the visible vein damage, the equipment markings. He was halfway through the equipment markings when the shift crew arrived.

There were seven of them, ground-dwellers, coming up the trail from the main camp with the particular loose energy of men early into a long working day, voices low and carrying in the cold air. They pulled up short when they saw him, collectively, the way men do when unexpected company appears at a worksite and they haven’t decided yet whether to be annoyed or alarmed.

One of them — a young man, not yet twenty-five, with the same deep-cut forearms as every foundry worker Breck had ever known and a sun-weathered face that put him somewhere between apprentice and journeyman — stepped forward from the group with the specific posture of someone who’d decided, in the three seconds it had taken him to assess the situation, that the right move was to handle it himself before anyone else handled it worse.

“You’re on a private work site,” he said. Not aggressive. Just stating it, the way an honest man states a fact he actually believes in.

“I know,” Breck said. “I’m just leaving.” He finished the last of the equipment markings, folded the dispatch sheet back into his satchel, and straightened to his full height, which did its usual work on the young man’s posture without any other effort required. “You work this trench?”

The young man’s eyes moved to the trench, to the survey line in the distance, and back to Breck. He wasn’t stupid. Breck filed that immediately. “I work the site,” he said carefully.

“How long?”

A pause. “Three seasons.”

“Who brought you out here?”

And here the young man’s posture changed, fractionally, in a way Breck recognized — the particular straightening of someone who’s been asked something that makes them want to stand a little taller before answering it. “Garrow did. Hired me out of Westmere. I’d been loading grain carts for a copperweight a week and going nowhere in it.” He said it without apology, the way people state conditions they didn’t choose and didn’t stay in. “He came through, told us what the work was, what it paid, what it could become. There were forty men from Westmere who said yes inside a day. I’ve sent money home every week for three seasons and that wasn’t something I thought I’d be saying at my age.” He glanced at the trench again, and something in that glance told Breck the young man had looked at it before, in the same direction, and not entirely liked what he’d found when he did. “I don’t set the survey lines.”

“I know you don’t,” Breck said, and meant it. He held the young man’s eyes a moment longer — not as pressure, simply as confirmation that what he’d just said had been heard and weighed and found honest — then picked up his satchel and walked back toward the survey stakes with Jenna and Mira behind him.

He didn’t say anything until the trench was well behind them and the camp had dropped below the rise.

The question the prompt had been pressing at all morning finally finished arriving, the way questions did when they’d been working on him from underneath without announcing themselves. Who had actually inspired him, across twenty years of this work, to be the kind of man who crossed a line onto a private worksite and sketched the evidence before the shift arrived rather than staying on the legal side of the stakes and writing a report about what the stakes implied?

Not commanders. Not the men he’d served under in the signal corps, most of whom had been competent and a few of whom had been brilliant and none of whom had been, at the particular bone-deep level he meant, inspiring in the way the question was asking. Not the adjudicators he’d carried letters for, not the lawyers he’d watched work in Crestfall and Cold Harbor both, though he respected the ones who were good at the thing.

It was people like that young man, actually. Not because of what they’d done, but because of the look in a person’s eyes when they understood they were standing in a situation that had been created dishonestly and were slowly deciding what they were going to do about it. Breck had seen that look a hundred times, in couriers who delivered orders they’d been given no context to evaluate, in locals who’d watched magistrates they trusted turn out to be men they didn’t, in clerks who kept honest records in systems that weren’t designed to want honest records. People who’d been handed a condition they didn’t choose and were working out, quietly, alone, without fanfare, whether they had the spine to do the honest thing once they’d identified what it was.

He couldn’t save all of them. He’d learned that. He probably couldn’t save Frostpeak. He was starting to learn that too, and the learning was costing him something different this time than the valley had, which meant it was teaching him something different.

But he could be the kind of man who showed up with a dispatch sheet and a pencil, who counted the distance from the survey stakes to the trench and wrote it down, who asked the young worker honest questions and heard honest answers and left him standing in a better-defined version of whatever decision he was already arriving at on his own. He couldn’t be the inspiration. He was never going to be the inspiration — he was the wrong shape for it, too abrasive, too quiet, too consistently disinclined to deliver the kind of speech that sent men home with fire in their chests. What he could be, and what he had apparently been choosing to be for long enough now that it had stopped feeling like a choice, was the kind of person who stayed.

He could stay here.

He looked at Jenna as they crossed back through the survey stakes and she read his face the same way she’d been reading him since the threshold station, with professional precision and no wasted words.

“You’ll need lodging,” she said. “I know a platform on Thunderstep’s second terrace that isn’t being used.”

“That’ll do,” Breck said.

He was going to need more dispatch sheets.

← Chapter Six: What Success Never Meant | Chapter Eight →

BRECK: Stone’s Rest is a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye — Book Three of the BRECK series, crossing from Lumenvale into Nomados. Chapter 7 of 20. New chapters post daily.

✦ Enjoyed this chapter? “The Kind of People Who Stay” closes the first arc of Book Three — a courier who has never once been the inspiration, standing in front of evidence that can’t be argued away, deciding he’s staying anyway. Browse the full series, follow for daily chapters, or share this with a reader who’s always been quietly inspired by the people who just don’t leave.

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Seven The Kind of People Who Stay

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Seven

The Kind of People Who Stay

This is Chapter 7 of BRECK: Stone’s Rest, Book Three of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye. New chapters post daily.

The Story So Far

Bren confirmed Frostpeak won’t see harvest. Breck stood at the edge of her failing terrace, let the Karithian valley all the way in for the first time in three years, and asked Mira to show him the rest of it. She said it was bad. He said he’d stood in worse rooms. Neither of them argued the point.

← Chapter Six: What Success Never Meant | Chapter Eight →

Chapter Seven: The Kind of People Who Stay

This chapter asks who inspires a man like Breck — and uses the answer to put him exactly where the series needs him to be.

Mira walked him the full length of Frostpeak’s eastern slope before dawn the next morning — every cracked support, every patch of failed light, every place where the stone had gone grey and cold in a way that clearly wasn’t seasonal. She didn’t narrate it. She simply walked and let him look, and he looked the way he always looked at damage, methodically and without sentiment, because sentiment was fine in the privacy of a terrace at dusk but evidence was what courts needed and evidence was what he was here to gather.

The concession began where a line of survey stakes drove into the ground at even intervals, pale-painted wood standing out sharp against the darker surrounding soil. Breck stopped at the first one, crouched, ran his thumb along the stake’s upper edge. Fresh paint, recently reset — the kind of detail that meant someone had walked this line in the last few weeks and confirmed it, which meant someone knew exactly where the legal boundary sat.

“The charter gives them rights to excavate within the designated survey perimeter,” Jenna said, from his left. She’d joined them at first light, quiet and prepared in a way that told him she’d been awake longer than they had. “Foundational stone only. Surface extraction on a separate writ they haven’t applied for and wouldn’t receive.”

“What did they actually do?”

“Come and see.”

The first breach was half a mile east of the survey line, which on open grassland was not a small distance and not an easy mistake to make. A deep-cut trench ran forty yards into ground that no legitimate reading of the charter touched, the soil around it turned back and dried in long pale furrows, and at its far end, still visible in the pale early light, a mobile pulley system of the kind Breck recognized from the Lumenvale guild foundries sat unattended, waiting for its shift to begin. Below the trench’s lip, cut into stone that should never have been cut, a dark smear ran the length of the exposed face where something had been extracted that hadn’t been coal or iron or any mineral he had a name for.

“What’s that?” He pointed at the smear.

“Heartstone,” Mira said. “It’s what the bioluminescence runs through. What the bond runs through. What we — and the mountains — have never permitted to be extracted, because there’s no way to do it that doesn’t take the vein it runs in.” She kept her voice flat and informative, the way a person keeps their voice when anger has been too many years in residence to function usefully as a feeling anymore and has simply become texture. “There is no provision in Garrow’s charter for heartstone extraction. There is no provision for it in any charter Lumenvale has ever issued, because until the concession came out here and found it, no surveyor had ever mapped this deep.”

Breck straightened, looked the length of the trench, looked back at the survey stakes a half mile behind them, and felt the clean, unambiguous click of a picture finishing assembling itself. He’d been trained for twenty years to distrust conclusions that arrived feeling like certainty, because certainty was what bad intelligence felt like too, from the inside. This wasn’t certainty. This was simply a trench, in the wrong place, containing the wrong material, next to a pulley that wasn’t owned by anyone who had permission to be there.

He stayed long enough to sketch the trench dimensions on the back of an old dispatch sheet from his satchel, noting the distance from the survey line, the visible vein damage, the equipment markings. He was halfway through the equipment markings when the shift crew arrived.

There were seven of them, ground-dwellers, coming up the trail from the main camp with the particular loose energy of men early into a long working day, voices low and carrying in the cold air. They pulled up short when they saw him, collectively, the way men do when unexpected company appears at a worksite and they haven’t decided yet whether to be annoyed or alarmed.

One of them — a young man, not yet twenty-five, with the same deep-cut forearms as every foundry worker Breck had ever known and a sun-weathered face that put him somewhere between apprentice and journeyman — stepped forward from the group with the specific posture of someone who’d decided, in the three seconds it had taken him to assess the situation, that the right move was to handle it himself before anyone else handled it worse.

“You’re on a private work site,” he said. Not aggressive. Just stating it, the way an honest man states a fact he actually believes in.

“I know,” Breck said. “I’m just leaving.” He finished the last of the equipment markings, folded the dispatch sheet back into his satchel, and straightened to his full height, which did its usual work on the young man’s posture without any other effort required. “You work this trench?”

The young man’s eyes moved to the trench, to the survey line in the distance, and back to Breck. He wasn’t stupid. Breck filed that immediately. “I work the site,” he said carefully.

“How long?”

A pause. “Three seasons.”

“Who brought you out here?”

And here the young man’s posture changed, fractionally, in a way Breck recognized — the particular straightening of someone who’s been asked something that makes them want to stand a little taller before answering it. “Garrow did. Hired me out of Westmere. I’d been loading grain carts for a copperweight a week and going nowhere in it.” He said it without apology, the way people state conditions they didn’t choose and didn’t stay in. “He came through, told us what the work was, what it paid, what it could become. There were forty men from Westmere who said yes inside a day. I’ve sent money home every week for three seasons and that wasn’t something I thought I’d be saying at my age.” He glanced at the trench again, and something in that glance told Breck the young man had looked at it before, in the same direction, and not entirely liked what he’d found when he did. “I don’t set the survey lines.”

“I know you don’t,” Breck said, and meant it. He held the young man’s eyes a moment longer — not as pressure, simply as confirmation that what he’d just said had been heard and weighed and found honest — then picked up his satchel and walked back toward the survey stakes with Jenna and Mira behind him.

He didn’t say anything until the trench was well behind them and the camp had dropped below the rise.

The question the prompt had been pressing at all morning finally finished arriving, the way questions did when they’d been working on him from underneath without announcing themselves. Who had actually inspired him, across twenty years of this work, to be the kind of man who crossed a line onto a private worksite and sketched the evidence before the shift arrived rather than staying on the legal side of the stakes and writing a report about what the stakes implied?

Not commanders. Not the men he’d served under in the signal corps, most of whom had been competent and a few of whom had been brilliant and none of whom had been, at the particular bone-deep level he meant, inspiring in the way the question was asking. Not the adjudicators he’d carried letters for, not the lawyers he’d watched work in Crestfall and Cold Harbor both, though he respected the ones who were good at the thing.

It was people like that young man, actually. Not because of what they’d done, but because of the look in a person’s eyes when they understood they were standing in a situation that had been created dishonestly and were slowly deciding what they were going to do about it. Breck had seen that look a hundred times, in couriers who delivered orders they’d been given no context to evaluate, in locals who’d watched magistrates they trusted turn out to be men they didn’t, in clerks who kept honest records in systems that weren’t designed to want honest records. People who’d been handed a condition they didn’t choose and were working out, quietly, alone, without fanfare, whether they had the spine to do the honest thing once they’d identified what it was.

He couldn’t save all of them. He’d learned that. He probably couldn’t save Frostpeak. He was starting to learn that too, and the learning was costing him something different this time than the valley had, which meant it was teaching him something different.

But he could be the kind of man who showed up with a dispatch sheet and a pencil, who counted the distance from the survey stakes to the trench and wrote it down, who asked the young worker honest questions and heard honest answers and left him standing in a better-defined version of whatever decision he was already arriving at on his own. He couldn’t be the inspiration. He was never going to be the inspiration — he was the wrong shape for it, too abrasive, too quiet, too consistently disinclined to deliver the kind of speech that sent men home with fire in their chests. What he could be, and what he had apparently been choosing to be for long enough now that it had stopped feeling like a choice, was the kind of person who stayed.

He could stay here.

He looked at Jenna as they crossed back through the survey stakes and she read his face the same way she’d been reading him since the threshold station, with professional precision and no wasted words.

“You’ll need lodging,” she said. “I know a platform on Thunderstep’s second terrace that isn’t being used.”

“That’ll do,” Breck said.

He was going to need more dispatch sheets.

← Chapter Six: What Success Never Meant | Chapter Eight →

BRECK: Stone’s Rest is a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye — Book Three of the BRECK series, crossing from Lumenvale into Nomados. Chapter 7 of 20. New chapters post daily.

✦ Enjoyed this chapter? “The Kind of People Who Stay” closes the first arc of Book Three — a courier who has never once been the inspiration, standing in front of evidence that can’t be argued away, deciding he’s staying anyway. Browse the full series, follow for daily chapters, or share this with a reader who’s always been quietly inspired by the people who just don’t leave.

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Seven The Kind of People Who Stay

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Seven

The Kind of People Who Stay

This is Chapter 7 of BRECK: Stone’s Rest, Book Three of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye. New chapters post daily.

The Story So Far

Bren confirmed Frostpeak won’t see harvest. Breck stood at the edge of her failing terrace, let the Karithian valley all the way in for the first time in three years, and asked Mira to show him the rest of it. She said it was bad. He said he’d stood in worse rooms. Neither of them argued the point.

← Chapter Six: What Success Never Meant | Chapter Eight →

Chapter Seven: The Kind of People Who Stay

This chapter asks who inspires a man like Breck — and uses the answer to put him exactly where the series needs him to be.

Mira walked him the full length of Frostpeak’s eastern slope before dawn the next morning — every cracked support, every patch of failed light, every place where the stone had gone grey and cold in a way that clearly wasn’t seasonal. She didn’t narrate it. She simply walked and let him look, and he looked the way he always looked at damage, methodically and without sentiment, because sentiment was fine in the privacy of a terrace at dusk but evidence was what courts needed and evidence was what he was here to gather.

The concession began where a line of survey stakes drove into the ground at even intervals, pale-painted wood standing out sharp against the darker surrounding soil. Breck stopped at the first one, crouched, ran his thumb along the stake’s upper edge. Fresh paint, recently reset — the kind of detail that meant someone had walked this line in the last few weeks and confirmed it, which meant someone knew exactly where the legal boundary sat.

“The charter gives them rights to excavate within the designated survey perimeter,” Jenna said, from his left. She’d joined them at first light, quiet and prepared in a way that told him she’d been awake longer than they had. “Foundational stone only. Surface extraction on a separate writ they haven’t applied for and wouldn’t receive.”

“What did they actually do?”

“Come and see.”

The first breach was half a mile east of the survey line, which on open grassland was not a small distance and not an easy mistake to make. A deep-cut trench ran forty yards into ground that no legitimate reading of the charter touched, the soil around it turned back and dried in long pale furrows, and at its far end, still visible in the pale early light, a mobile pulley system of the kind Breck recognized from the Lumenvale guild foundries sat unattended, waiting for its shift to begin. Below the trench’s lip, cut into stone that should never have been cut, a dark smear ran the length of the exposed face where something had been extracted that hadn’t been coal or iron or any mineral he had a name for.

“What’s that?” He pointed at the smear.

“Heartstone,” Mira said. “It’s what the bioluminescence runs through. What the bond runs through. What we — and the mountains — have never permitted to be extracted, because there’s no way to do it that doesn’t take the vein it runs in.” She kept her voice flat and informative, the way a person keeps their voice when anger has been too many years in residence to function usefully as a feeling anymore and has simply become texture. “There is no provision in Garrow’s charter for heartstone extraction. There is no provision for it in any charter Lumenvale has ever issued, because until the concession came out here and found it, no surveyor had ever mapped this deep.”

Breck straightened, looked the length of the trench, looked back at the survey stakes a half mile behind them, and felt the clean, unambiguous click of a picture finishing assembling itself. He’d been trained for twenty years to distrust conclusions that arrived feeling like certainty, because certainty was what bad intelligence felt like too, from the inside. This wasn’t certainty. This was simply a trench, in the wrong place, containing the wrong material, next to a pulley that wasn’t owned by anyone who had permission to be there.

He stayed long enough to sketch the trench dimensions on the back of an old dispatch sheet from his satchel, noting the distance from the survey line, the visible vein damage, the equipment markings. He was halfway through the equipment markings when the shift crew arrived.

There were seven of them, ground-dwellers, coming up the trail from the main camp with the particular loose energy of men early into a long working day, voices low and carrying in the cold air. They pulled up short when they saw him, collectively, the way men do when unexpected company appears at a worksite and they haven’t decided yet whether to be annoyed or alarmed.

One of them — a young man, not yet twenty-five, with the same deep-cut forearms as every foundry worker Breck had ever known and a sun-weathered face that put him somewhere between apprentice and journeyman — stepped forward from the group with the specific posture of someone who’d decided, in the three seconds it had taken him to assess the situation, that the right move was to handle it himself before anyone else handled it worse.

“You’re on a private work site,” he said. Not aggressive. Just stating it, the way an honest man states a fact he actually believes in.

“I know,” Breck said. “I’m just leaving.” He finished the last of the equipment markings, folded the dispatch sheet back into his satchel, and straightened to his full height, which did its usual work on the young man’s posture without any other effort required. “You work this trench?”

The young man’s eyes moved to the trench, to the survey line in the distance, and back to Breck. He wasn’t stupid. Breck filed that immediately. “I work the site,” he said carefully.

“How long?”

A pause. “Three seasons.”

“Who brought you out here?”

And here the young man’s posture changed, fractionally, in a way Breck recognized — the particular straightening of someone who’s been asked something that makes them want to stand a little taller before answering it. “Garrow did. Hired me out of Westmere. I’d been loading grain carts for a copperweight a week and going nowhere in it.” He said it without apology, the way people state conditions they didn’t choose and didn’t stay in. “He came through, told us what the work was, what it paid, what it could become. There were forty men from Westmere who said yes inside a day. I’ve sent money home every week for three seasons and that wasn’t something I thought I’d be saying at my age.” He glanced at the trench again, and something in that glance told Breck the young man had looked at it before, in the same direction, and not entirely liked what he’d found when he did. “I don’t set the survey lines.”

“I know you don’t,” Breck said, and meant it. He held the young man’s eyes a moment longer — not as pressure, simply as confirmation that what he’d just said had been heard and weighed and found honest — then picked up his satchel and walked back toward the survey stakes with Jenna and Mira behind him.

He didn’t say anything until the trench was well behind them and the camp had dropped below the rise.

The question the prompt had been pressing at all morning finally finished arriving, the way questions did when they’d been working on him from underneath without announcing themselves. Who had actually inspired him, across twenty years of this work, to be the kind of man who crossed a line onto a private worksite and sketched the evidence before the shift arrived rather than staying on the legal side of the stakes and writing a report about what the stakes implied?

Not commanders. Not the men he’d served under in the signal corps, most of whom had been competent and a few of whom had been brilliant and none of whom had been, at the particular bone-deep level he meant, inspiring in the way the question was asking. Not the adjudicators he’d carried letters for, not the lawyers he’d watched work in Crestfall and Cold Harbor both, though he respected the ones who were good at the thing.

It was people like that young man, actually. Not because of what they’d done, but because of the look in a person’s eyes when they understood they were standing in a situation that had been created dishonestly and were slowly deciding what they were going to do about it. Breck had seen that look a hundred times, in couriers who delivered orders they’d been given no context to evaluate, in locals who’d watched magistrates they trusted turn out to be men they didn’t, in clerks who kept honest records in systems that weren’t designed to want honest records. People who’d been handed a condition they didn’t choose and were working out, quietly, alone, without fanfare, whether they had the spine to do the honest thing once they’d identified what it was.

He couldn’t save all of them. He’d learned that. He probably couldn’t save Frostpeak. He was starting to learn that too, and the learning was costing him something different this time than the valley had, which meant it was teaching him something different.

But he could be the kind of man who showed up with a dispatch sheet and a pencil, who counted the distance from the survey stakes to the trench and wrote it down, who asked the young worker honest questions and heard honest answers and left him standing in a better-defined version of whatever decision he was already arriving at on his own. He couldn’t be the inspiration. He was never going to be the inspiration — he was the wrong shape for it, too abrasive, too quiet, too consistently disinclined to deliver the kind of speech that sent men home with fire in their chests. What he could be, and what he had apparently been choosing to be for long enough now that it had stopped feeling like a choice, was the kind of person who stayed.

He could stay here.

He looked at Jenna as they crossed back through the survey stakes and she read his face the same way she’d been reading him since the threshold station, with professional precision and no wasted words.

“You’ll need lodging,” she said. “I know a platform on Thunderstep’s second terrace that isn’t being used.”

“That’ll do,” Breck said.

He was going to need more dispatch sheets.

← Chapter Six: What Success Never Meant | Chapter Eight →

BRECK: Stone’s Rest is a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye — Book Three of the BRECK series, crossing from Lumenvale into Nomados. Chapter 7 of 20. New chapters post daily.

✦ Enjoyed this chapter? “The Kind of People Who Stay” closes the first arc of Book Three — a courier who has never once been the inspiration, standing in front of evidence that can’t be argued away, deciding he’s staying anyway. Browse the full series, follow for daily chapters, or share this with a reader who’s always been quietly inspired by the people who just don’t leave.

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Seven The Kind of People Who Stay

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Seven

The Kind of People Who Stay

This is Chapter 7 of BRECK: Stone’s Rest, Book Three of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye. New chapters post daily.

The Story So Far

Bren confirmed Frostpeak won’t see harvest. Breck stood at the edge of her failing terrace, let the Karithian valley all the way in for the first time in three years, and asked Mira to show him the rest of it. She said it was bad. He said he’d stood in worse rooms. Neither of them argued the point.

← Chapter Six: What Success Never Meant | Chapter Eight →

Chapter Seven: The Kind of People Who Stay

This chapter asks who inspires a man like Breck — and uses the answer to put him exactly where the series needs him to be.

Mira walked him the full length of Frostpeak’s eastern slope before dawn the next morning — every cracked support, every patch of failed light, every place where the stone had gone grey and cold in a way that clearly wasn’t seasonal. She didn’t narrate it. She simply walked and let him look, and he looked the way he always looked at damage, methodically and without sentiment, because sentiment was fine in the privacy of a terrace at dusk but evidence was what courts needed and evidence was what he was here to gather.

The concession began where a line of survey stakes drove into the ground at even intervals, pale-painted wood standing out sharp against the darker surrounding soil. Breck stopped at the first one, crouched, ran his thumb along the stake’s upper edge. Fresh paint, recently reset — the kind of detail that meant someone had walked this line in the last few weeks and confirmed it, which meant someone knew exactly where the legal boundary sat.

“The charter gives them rights to excavate within the designated survey perimeter,” Jenna said, from his left. She’d joined them at first light, quiet and prepared in a way that told him she’d been awake longer than they had. “Foundational stone only. Surface extraction on a separate writ they haven’t applied for and wouldn’t receive.”

“What did they actually do?”

“Come and see.”

The first breach was half a mile east of the survey line, which on open grassland was not a small distance and not an easy mistake to make. A deep-cut trench ran forty yards into ground that no legitimate reading of the charter touched, the soil around it turned back and dried in long pale furrows, and at its far end, still visible in the pale early light, a mobile pulley system of the kind Breck recognized from the Lumenvale guild foundries sat unattended, waiting for its shift to begin. Below the trench’s lip, cut into stone that should never have been cut, a dark smear ran the length of the exposed face where something had been extracted that hadn’t been coal or iron or any mineral he had a name for.

“What’s that?” He pointed at the smear.

“Heartstone,” Mira said. “It’s what the bioluminescence runs through. What the bond runs through. What we — and the mountains — have never permitted to be extracted, because there’s no way to do it that doesn’t take the vein it runs in.” She kept her voice flat and informative, the way a person keeps their voice when anger has been too many years in residence to function usefully as a feeling anymore and has simply become texture. “There is no provision in Garrow’s charter for heartstone extraction. There is no provision for it in any charter Lumenvale has ever issued, because until the concession came out here and found it, no surveyor had ever mapped this deep.”

Breck straightened, looked the length of the trench, looked back at the survey stakes a half mile behind them, and felt the clean, unambiguous click of a picture finishing assembling itself. He’d been trained for twenty years to distrust conclusions that arrived feeling like certainty, because certainty was what bad intelligence felt like too, from the inside. This wasn’t certainty. This was simply a trench, in the wrong place, containing the wrong material, next to a pulley that wasn’t owned by anyone who had permission to be there.

He stayed long enough to sketch the trench dimensions on the back of an old dispatch sheet from his satchel, noting the distance from the survey line, the visible vein damage, the equipment markings. He was halfway through the equipment markings when the shift crew arrived.

There were seven of them, ground-dwellers, coming up the trail from the main camp with the particular loose energy of men early into a long working day, voices low and carrying in the cold air. They pulled up short when they saw him, collectively, the way men do when unexpected company appears at a worksite and they haven’t decided yet whether to be annoyed or alarmed.

One of them — a young man, not yet twenty-five, with the same deep-cut forearms as every foundry worker Breck had ever known and a sun-weathered face that put him somewhere between apprentice and journeyman — stepped forward from the group with the specific posture of someone who’d decided, in the three seconds it had taken him to assess the situation, that the right move was to handle it himself before anyone else handled it worse.

“You’re on a private work site,” he said. Not aggressive. Just stating it, the way an honest man states a fact he actually believes in.

“I know,” Breck said. “I’m just leaving.” He finished the last of the equipment markings, folded the dispatch sheet back into his satchel, and straightened to his full height, which did its usual work on the young man’s posture without any other effort required. “You work this trench?”

The young man’s eyes moved to the trench, to the survey line in the distance, and back to Breck. He wasn’t stupid. Breck filed that immediately. “I work the site,” he said carefully.

“How long?”

A pause. “Three seasons.”

“Who brought you out here?”

And here the young man’s posture changed, fractionally, in a way Breck recognized — the particular straightening of someone who’s been asked something that makes them want to stand a little taller before answering it. “Garrow did. Hired me out of Westmere. I’d been loading grain carts for a copperweight a week and going nowhere in it.” He said it without apology, the way people state conditions they didn’t choose and didn’t stay in. “He came through, told us what the work was, what it paid, what it could become. There were forty men from Westmere who said yes inside a day. I’ve sent money home every week for three seasons and that wasn’t something I thought I’d be saying at my age.” He glanced at the trench again, and something in that glance told Breck the young man had looked at it before, in the same direction, and not entirely liked what he’d found when he did. “I don’t set the survey lines.”

“I know you don’t,” Breck said, and meant it. He held the young man’s eyes a moment longer — not as pressure, simply as confirmation that what he’d just said had been heard and weighed and found honest — then picked up his satchel and walked back toward the survey stakes with Jenna and Mira behind him.

He didn’t say anything until the trench was well behind them and the camp had dropped below the rise.

The question the prompt had been pressing at all morning finally finished arriving, the way questions did when they’d been working on him from underneath without announcing themselves. Who had actually inspired him, across twenty years of this work, to be the kind of man who crossed a line onto a private worksite and sketched the evidence before the shift arrived rather than staying on the legal side of the stakes and writing a report about what the stakes implied?

Not commanders. Not the men he’d served under in the signal corps, most of whom had been competent and a few of whom had been brilliant and none of whom had been, at the particular bone-deep level he meant, inspiring in the way the question was asking. Not the adjudicators he’d carried letters for, not the lawyers he’d watched work in Crestfall and Cold Harbor both, though he respected the ones who were good at the thing.

It was people like that young man, actually. Not because of what they’d done, but because of the look in a person’s eyes when they understood they were standing in a situation that had been created dishonestly and were slowly deciding what they were going to do about it. Breck had seen that look a hundred times, in couriers who delivered orders they’d been given no context to evaluate, in locals who’d watched magistrates they trusted turn out to be men they didn’t, in clerks who kept honest records in systems that weren’t designed to want honest records. People who’d been handed a condition they didn’t choose and were working out, quietly, alone, without fanfare, whether they had the spine to do the honest thing once they’d identified what it was.

He couldn’t save all of them. He’d learned that. He probably couldn’t save Frostpeak. He was starting to learn that too, and the learning was costing him something different this time than the valley had, which meant it was teaching him something different.

But he could be the kind of man who showed up with a dispatch sheet and a pencil, who counted the distance from the survey stakes to the trench and wrote it down, who asked the young worker honest questions and heard honest answers and left him standing in a better-defined version of whatever decision he was already arriving at on his own. He couldn’t be the inspiration. He was never going to be the inspiration — he was the wrong shape for it, too abrasive, too quiet, too consistently disinclined to deliver the kind of speech that sent men home with fire in their chests. What he could be, and what he had apparently been choosing to be for long enough now that it had stopped feeling like a choice, was the kind of person who stayed.

He could stay here.

He looked at Jenna as they crossed back through the survey stakes and she read his face the same way she’d been reading him since the threshold station, with professional precision and no wasted words.

“You’ll need lodging,” she said. “I know a platform on Thunderstep’s second terrace that isn’t being used.”

“That’ll do,” Breck said.

He was going to need more dispatch sheets.

← Chapter Six: What Success Never Meant | Chapter Eight →

BRECK: Stone’s Rest is a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye — Book Three of the BRECK series, crossing from Lumenvale into Nomados. Chapter 7 of 20. New chapters post daily.

✦ Enjoyed this chapter? “The Kind of People Who Stay” closes the first arc of Book Three — a courier who has never once been the inspiration, standing in front of evidence that can’t be argued away, deciding he’s staying anyway. Browse the full series, follow for daily chapters, or share this with a reader who’s always been quietly inspired by the people who just don’t leave.

Here's an excerpt from the latest episode of #BadAnimals!

Read it for free on FurAffinity or my official website:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/65187657/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-6-pink-pony-club/?sid=535

#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction

Here's an excerpt from the latest episode of #BadAnimals!

Read it for free on FurAffinity or my official website:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/65187657/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-6-pink-pony-club/?sid=535

#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction

Here's an excerpt from the latest episode of #BadAnimals!

Read it for free on FurAffinity or my official website:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/65187657/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-6-pink-pony-club/?sid=535

#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction

Here's an excerpt from the latest episode of #BadAnimals!

Read it for free on FurAffinity or my official website:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/65187657/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-6-pink-pony-club/?sid=535

#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction

He's eighteen inches. You can't handle him! Read BAD ANIMALS Episode 5:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64955994/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-5-lets-dance/?sid=535
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

He's eighteen inches. You can't handle him! Read BAD ANIMALS Episode 5:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64955994/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-5-lets-dance/?sid=535
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

He's eighteen inches. You can't handle him! Read BAD ANIMALS Episode 5:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64955994/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-5-lets-dance/?sid=535
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

He's eighteen inches. You can't handle him! Read BAD ANIMALS Episode 5:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64955994/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-5-lets-dance/?sid=535
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

Two outlaws. One stolen truck. Read BAD ANIMALS Episode 4:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64650272/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-4-the-sweet-escape/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

Two outlaws. One stolen truck. Read BAD ANIMALS Episode 4:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64650272/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-4-the-sweet-escape/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

Two outlaws. One stolen truck. Read BAD ANIMALS Episode 4:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64650272/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-4-the-sweet-escape/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

Two outlaws. One stolen truck. Read BAD ANIMALS Episode 4:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64650272/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-4-the-sweet-escape/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

Two outlaws. One stolen truck. Read BAD ANIMALS Episode 4:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64650272/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-4-the-sweet-escape/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

Rocky always dreamed of being in the comics. Now he's in a wanted poster. Read BAD ANIMALS Episode 3:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64409657/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-3-dead-or-alive/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

Rocky always dreamed of being in the comics. Now he's in a wanted poster. Read BAD ANIMALS Episode 3:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64409657/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-3-dead-or-alive/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

Rocky always dreamed of being in the comics. Now he's in a wanted poster. Read BAD ANIMALS Episode 3:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64409657/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-3-dead-or-alive/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

Rocky always dreamed of being in the comics. Now he's in a wanted poster. Read BAD ANIMALS Episode 3:

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64409657/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-3-dead-or-alive/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

He's just playing opossum...right? Read BAD ANIMALS No. 2!

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64238390/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-2-play-opossum/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

He's just playing opossum...right? Read BAD ANIMALS No. 2!

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64238390/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-2-play-opossum/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

He's just playing opossum...right? Read BAD ANIMALS No. 2!

🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64238390/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/comic/bad-animals-2-play-opossum/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryWriting #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

Reworked the landing page text on my horror fiction site a bit. I still need to pretty up the header, but I think I'm moving in the right direction.

#geminiprotocol - gemini://ferenbrooke.com/index.gmi

#indieweb - https://ferenbrooke.com/index.html

#horror #horrorlit #weirdfiction #webfiction #shortstory

Reworked the landing page text on my horror fiction site a bit. I still need to pretty up the header, but I think I'm moving in the right direction.

#geminiprotocol - gemini://ferenbrooke.com/index.gmi

#indieweb - https://ferenbrooke.com/index.html

#horror #horrorlit #weirdfiction #webfiction #shortstory

Reworked the landing page text on my horror fiction site a bit. I still need to pretty up the header, but I think I'm moving in the right direction.

#geminiprotocol - gemini://ferenbrooke.com/index.gmi

#indieweb - https://ferenbrooke.com/index.html

#horror #horrorlit #weirdfiction #webfiction #shortstory

Reworked the landing page text on my horror fiction site a bit. I still need to pretty up the header, but I think I'm moving in the right direction.

#geminiprotocol - gemini://ferenbrooke.com/index.gmi

#indieweb - https://ferenbrooke.com/index.html

#horror #horrorlit #weirdfiction #webfiction #shortstory

Reworked the landing page text on my horror fiction site a bit. I still need to pretty up the header, but I think I'm moving in the right direction.

#geminiprotocol - gemini://ferenbrooke.com/index.gmi

#indieweb - https://ferenbrooke.com/index.html

#horror #horrorlit #weirdfiction #webfiction #shortstory

My passion project is live! BAD ANIMALS is a web serial about found family on the wrong side of the law.

READ IT NOW:
🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64022257/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/series/badanimals/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

My passion project is live! BAD ANIMALS is a web serial about found family on the wrong side of the law.

READ IT NOW:
🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64022257/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/series/badanimals/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

My passion project is live! BAD ANIMALS is a web serial about found family on the wrong side of the law.

READ IT NOW:
🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64022257/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/series/badanimals/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

My passion project is live! BAD ANIMALS is a web serial about found family on the wrong side of the law.

READ IT NOW:
🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64022257/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/series/badanimals/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

My passion project is live! BAD ANIMALS is a web serial about found family on the wrong side of the law.

READ IT NOW:
🔗 FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64022257/
🔗 Web: https://trashyartcinema.com/series/badanimals/
—
#Furry #FurryLiterature #FurryFiction #BadAnimals #WebFiction #AnthroArt

🚀 Calling all Sci-Fi fans!

Step into the dystopian world of Hindsight Station, where James Fong fights to survive and reach the stars. 🌌

🔸 Early access chapters been loaded on Patreon & free chapters on Wattpad.
🔸 Exclusive Discord for Patreon supporters & readers

👉 Learn more: https://authormulhall.com/hindsight-station-a-sci-fi-web-serial-of-hope-survival/

👤 Follow: @jamulhall on Patreon + Wattpad

#SciFi #ScienceFiction #WebFiction #Wattpad #Patreon #IndieAuthor #Dystopian #SpaceOpera #WritingCommunity #AuthorsOfMastodon #SpecFic #WebSerial

🚀 Calling all Sci-Fi fans!

Step into the dystopian world of Hindsight Station, where James Fong fights to survive and reach the stars. 🌌

🔸 Early access chapters been loaded on Patreon & free chapters on Wattpad.
🔸 Exclusive Discord for Patreon supporters & readers

👉 Learn more: https://authormulhall.com/hindsight-station-a-sci-fi-web-serial-of-hope-survival/

👤 Follow: @jamulhall on Patreon + Wattpad

#SciFi #ScienceFiction #WebFiction #Wattpad #Patreon #IndieAuthor #Dystopian #SpaceOpera #WritingCommunity #AuthorsOfMastodon #SpecFic #WebSerial

🚀 Calling all Sci-Fi fans!

Step into the dystopian world of Hindsight Station, where James Fong fights to survive and reach the stars. 🌌

🔸 Early access chapters been loaded on Patreon & free chapters on Wattpad.
🔸 Exclusive Discord for Patreon supporters & readers

👉 Learn more: https://authormulhall.com/hindsight-station-a-sci-fi-web-serial-of-hope-survival/

👤 Follow: @jamulhall on Patreon + Wattpad

#SciFi #ScienceFiction #WebFiction #Wattpad #Patreon #IndieAuthor #Dystopian #SpaceOpera #WritingCommunity #AuthorsOfMastodon #SpecFic #WebSerial

Read my Steampunk Horror Story “Work”

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

They hated their jobs. 

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

Neither cared enough to correct them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then it moved.

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

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

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

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

“You stay put!” The man yelled.

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

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

Ant and Fig were both knocked off their feet. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What, what?” Ant said. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That sounds nice,” he said.

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

Read my Steampunk Horror Story “Work”

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

They hated their jobs. 

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

Neither cared enough to correct them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then it moved.

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

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

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

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

“You stay put!” The man yelled.

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

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

Ant and Fig were both knocked off their feet. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What, what?” Ant said. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That sounds nice,” he said.

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

Read my Steampunk Horror Story “Work”

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

They hated their jobs. 

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

Neither cared enough to correct them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then it moved.

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

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

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

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

“You stay put!” The man yelled.

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

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

Ant and Fig were both knocked off their feet. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What, what?” Ant said. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That sounds nice,” he said.

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

Working on the final two chapters before the release of Hindsight Station 🚀

A dystopian sci-fi thriller about survival, hope, and reaching for the stars. 🌌

Big updates soon — creator pages coming to Wattpad + Patreon!

Follow for launch news + a major chapter drop featuring James Fong’s fight for survival.

🔗 https://authormulhall.com/hindsight-station-new-sci-fi-web-serial-launch

#SciFi #Dystopian #Thriller #AmWriting #IndieAuthor #WebFiction #Hindsight #WritingCommunity

Working on the final two chapters before the release of Hindsight Station 🚀

A dystopian sci-fi thriller about survival, hope, and reaching for the stars. 🌌

Big updates soon — creator pages coming to Wattpad + Patreon!

Follow for launch news + a major chapter drop featuring James Fong’s fight for survival.

🔗 https://authormulhall.com/hindsight-station-new-sci-fi-web-serial-launch

#SciFi #Dystopian #Thriller #AmWriting #IndieAuthor #WebFiction #Hindsight #WritingCommunity

Happy Halloween! Enjoy my Horror Story “Demonland”

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was during the day when he arrived in Largo.

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

He knew where his prey would be.

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

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

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

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

He walked and walked. 

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

He smiled to himself.

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

The misshapen tornado went still.

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

He couldn’t look at them for too long.

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

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

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

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

They had no eyelids.

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

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

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

The creature shrugged its hideous body.

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

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

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

Happy Halloween! Enjoy my Horror Story “Demonland”

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was during the day when he arrived in Largo.

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

He knew where his prey would be.

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

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

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

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

He walked and walked. 

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

He smiled to himself.

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

The misshapen tornado went still.

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

He couldn’t look at them for too long.

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

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

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

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

They had no eyelids.

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

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

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

The creature shrugged its hideous body.

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

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

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

🚀 Just one chapter left in my sci-fi web serial — Hindsight Station: Ashes Reborn!

Soon, Jack Fong’s story heads to:
🪐 Patreon – early access
🌌 Wattpad – free to read

Jack rebuilds humanity from the ashes of a post-apocalyptic Earth, pushing science toward the stars.
Can science show us a better future?

👉 https://authormulhall.com/hindsight-station-reckoning-in-a-post-apocalyptic-world/

#SciFi #WebFiction #PostApocalyptic #WritingCommunity #HindsightStation

🚀 Just one chapter left in my sci-fi web serial — Hindsight Station: Ashes Reborn!

Soon, Jack Fong’s story heads to:
🪐 Patreon – early access
🌌 Wattpad – free to read

Jack rebuilds humanity from the ashes of a post-apocalyptic Earth, pushing science toward the stars.
Can science show us a better future?

👉 https://authormulhall.com/hindsight-station-reckoning-in-a-post-apocalyptic-world/

#SciFi #WebFiction #PostApocalyptic #WritingCommunity #HindsightStation

There goes chapter 4 of my Phoenix Academy story: Trust the system. https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/109929/phoenix-academy/chapter/2171205/trust-the-system

#AmWriting #RoyalRoad #writing #WebFiction #WebStory #fiction

There goes chapter 4 of my Phoenix Academy story: Trust the system. https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/109929/phoenix-academy/chapter/2171205/trust-the-system

#AmWriting #RoyalRoad #writing #WebFiction #WebStory #fiction