Loading ...April 11th, 2009 at 5:25 am (Fantasy, Incomplete)
“We have a problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Ossun’s gone missing.”
I lifted my head slightly to look out at the span of orange-twilight sky beyond the tent flap, and squinted at the painful light. I was spending too much time sleeping in the tent. It was the damn savanna heat. “What do you mean? Eaten by a lion? What?”
Loading ...April 5th, 2008 at 2:52 pm (Fantasy, Incomplete)
Sing, poor Elvasa, sing like the wind across the dunes, sing to the bones of your father, and carry him with you all your life, until your children bear up your own bones unto the winds…
The song died away, drifting slowly away across the red evening darkness towards the blue edging upon the horizon and becoming lost in eternity. The gathered tribe drifted away, the ritual completed as Elvasa admired the shining ivory blade he now held, turning the thin crescent over to admire each side of the weapon…and to remember…
“Your father is with you now forever,” the old bone-singer’s voice broke into his reverie, and Elvasa looked up from the new blade into his milk-white eyes. The voice trembled with age, but there was still strength and tenor in it, subtle shadings of skill that remained eternally young lurking beyond the aged flesh. He wondered how the old man knew where to look without eyesight.
Loading ...February 9th, 2008 at 4:27 pm (Horror, Incomplete)
You can’t have the lights on, it must be dark — your eyes must be blinded. That’s the only way to find them, because you can’t see them. They move at the speed of light, never standing still long enough for any fleshy human optics to glimpse, running through the wires. But you can hear them, humming and oscillating in the dark.
That’s why it has to be dark. They claim when one of your senses is lost, your other senses compensate. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sure seems you can hear better when your eyes aren’t distracted by light and color, shape and motion. You become more attentive to your the signals your ears are sending you.
Loading ...June 29th, 2006 at 10:13 pm (Fantasy, Incomplete)
Night had crept cold around the mountain, wrapping the air in an icy blanket and sucking the day’s heat from the barren stones on the heights. Thorsur slapped his numb fingers against his thick, bare arms and breathed a cloud of white from between clenched teeth. It did little to warm him on this night.
He sat in a crevice long ago formed from rock slabs fallen off the mountain side, without the warmth of a forbidden fire, and stared down into the dark valley below. Somewhere in that black mass was a forest, cloaked by night, and his village, visible only as inviting, burning-orange sparks in the enveloping darkness around it. High above, the night was clear, the stars shone blue and white, glittering crisply in a sky that seemed brighter than the land below, a dark blue opposed to inky black.