fiction

  • 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

    taste the fall.
  • 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: gormless.
  • 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: fracture.
  • 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

    gorm the witchfinder: sanctimony.
  • 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

    the bad old soldier and the brand new world.
  • 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

    absence.
  • 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

    lucid.
  • the end of the end.

    The professor flipped the switch and saved the world. Continue reading

    the end of the end.
  • last shift.

    WARD 9, the sign above the door reads. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Continue reading

    last shift.