Tom smiled and nodded with the applause, but when the meeting resumed he went right back to staring directly into the center of a donut. … Music in Tincture: Book 3, Chapter Eight: Cullah – Please Bring Me Shelter (CC BY-SA 4.0) Alterr – Small Group Applause (CC BY-NC 3.0) Scott Holmes – Origin II […]

Torches had never done Allgood much favor, but that they lit up a question or two in the good populace was useful. Two old branches lit the stench of thoroughfare just before the bar-house, the tips never extinguished thanks to some flammable green-black sludge the fiddle fingers had cooked up for otherwise pursuit. They stunk, […]

Even in that too-bright light of the morning, Abranyah always struggled to wake with it. She preferred to sleep as long as possible, but the sun would eventually prove to be an enemy—fuel for whatever device the barren was planning to kill you with today. This morning was of little difference, but the body rustling […]

An otherwise normal day in an otherwise normal life, time as it was. Tom had been fostering a general sense of unease for a while now, yet like a weird sort of depression, he had difficulty pinpointing its origin. … Music in Tincture: Book 3, Chapter Five: Cullah – Please Bring Me Shelter (CC BY-SA […]

The ways a body tends to crave its own undoing is a humanistic riddle that I no longer wish to endure. A short way to speak it, I suppose: my empathy muscles have atrophied. … Music in Tincture: Book 3, Chapter Four: Cullah – Please Bring Me Shelter (CC BY-SA 4.0) Kosta T – Red […]

Rhamuel kept folks on a spectrum of his own design, the range beginning somewhere around “tolerate,” and ending near “abject avoidance.” Abranyah once asked where the disdain found its origination point, but the tanker would only reply, “Everyone seems to give me a reason.” … Music in Tincture: Book 3, Chapter Three: Cullah – Please […]

This was the kind of fruitless nonsense that permeated The Scar—a seeming irregularity of principle and purpose to things. A body could rub a book to ash in their fingers. They could then take a step and trip over a heaping stack of books showing no more than frayed edges, dust, and that grainy kind […]

Old splinters whistle.  Everything across The Scar has aged long past the reek of decay, more so worn, faded, and abused by the transient miscellany that wandered through it over and over and over.  There was a weird beauty when the too-bright day went purple as night prepared, no windows left to cover, no reason […]

The tanker was always a curiosity for Rachel. “What are you looking for?” she asked. “You said you had an idea?” Arachal was bent over the front seats of his black Mustang and rifling through the glove compartment. “I do. I’m looking for—ah, here we are.” Withdrawing his long frame from the car, he held […]

Excerpted from: Revenants of War An Attempted Guide for Safe Warrant After The Whatever Much has been mired in speculation of the burnouts, most of it the mealy speech of a drunkard, or on occasion your humble author. People have actually visited the things, for Christ’s sake. Their jagged profile out on the horizon is […]