The Chez Dispenser
-
taste the fall.
You can taste the fall: that brittle, clean chill on the too-blue edge of a late-autumn dawn, half-gleaming in your throat and lungs. Beyond the grasping branches laced in the withered fire of dying leaves, you can see thin clouds… Continue reading
-
gorm the witchfinder: gormless.
It hadn’t really been his name yet – just what people called him. There wasn’t a definition there, a set of beliefs and perspectives and experiences to attach to it, to make it his. It was just a sound that… Continue reading
-
gorm the witchfinder: fracture.
Faith doesn’t shatter – it fractures, a bit at a time. Cracks will lurch and twist and snarl their way into tangled starbursts along the surface; eventually, they will reach deeper. Only when the foundation is truly rotted through, held… Continue reading
-
gorm the witchfinder: sanctimony.
The woman is sat, wounded, against a godawful altar – a haphazard stack of bloodied bones and wood, arranged to perilously support an open, thin tome. The book shivers and twitches like a living thing, the pages whipping back and… Continue reading
-
the bad old soldier and the brand new world.
It doesn’t seem right, he thinks. The moment deserves more than a light drizzle and an old man shivering in his tent in the forest. It ought to be storming. The skies ought to be swelling with the weight of… Continue reading
-
trick mirror.
What he doesn’t seem to understand, as the streetlights blaze by us, fake stars hanging low, too low–what he doesn’t seem to see is the trap he’s laid for himself. He talks about plans for the future, jobs he might… Continue reading
-
peacekeeper.
Koyalev Ilgazred squints at the half-polished guardsman’s badge in her hand, then dips a cloth in some alcohol and resumes scrubbing. She can’t see her reflection yet, so she – The badge disappears under her pillow as she hears the… Continue reading
-
wrath, fear, and debt.
One of the regulars at the place tosses him a half-apple in exchange for a story, and the old man obliges. The apple is nice – he takes a thinking bite, considering her request. “I heard tell of a king,… Continue reading
-
absence.
This particular bend of the river always soothes him; he finds time every day to break away from guarding the trading post to sit on the bank, watching the water burble by. It’s a gentle scene, accentuated by the nearly… Continue reading
-
lucid.
It’s a foggy morning; mist wreathes the dead trees around him, clinging to the forest floor. He can taste the wintry chill in the air as he wanders down the trail, hands in his pockets. Acoustic guitar music, slow and… Continue reading
The Chez Dispenser 