Category: writing

  • Episode 5: Elsewhen II, Part 1

    Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction.

    Jump to the new table of contents to read earlier content.

    Important!

    After this episodic post for Vengeance, My Heart, the serial gothic western novel is migrating to a new home on the companion site at ravensweald.art. That site is designed for a distraction-free reading experience, with reader-focused improvements to enhance the reading experience with you, the reader, in mind. The series will read more like a book and less like it was shoehorned into a series of blog posts. In fact, this post is live over there as soon as you can see this one, and you might want to give it a gander for an improved experience. For best results, be sure to view it through your preferred browser. It will render just nicely in the mobile Jetpack browser, but you’ll miss out on the typographic modifications I’ve embedded in the site to let you read the fiction in a way that best suits your whims and preferences.

    To repeat: The series will continue over at it’s new home at ravensweald.art. I have not abandoned it.

    Now, on with the story…

    My boots needed resoling. I’d been telling myself that since Harrow’s Creek and had done nothing about it, which was either laziness or a quiet faith that the road would end before the leather did. Too bad the road was winning the battle.

    (more…)

  • casting runes — 28apr26

    hagalaz
    reseeding begins
    in another spring
    giving over to
    ephemeral stones
    buried within
    a transient beauty

    A rune poem, based on an Elder Futhark rune selected at random.

    Today’s rune is hagalaz, which has a core meaning of “hail”, which was associated with potential, transformation, renewal and change; hail is imagined a seed from which change will arise. Hagalaz is also seen as representative of things beyond our control: a clash between fire and ice.

    Please visit my Elder Futhark pages at sceadugenga.com for additional interpretations of the runes based on multiple references and personal reflection.

  • Episode 4: Elsewhen, Part 4

    Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.

    The Dusk hit her like a hand — the perpetual bruised light of the wastes pressing against her eyes after the cave’s absolute dark. She blinked heavy eyes against the light and groaned as she lifted her head to look at who had spoken.

    Above her, on a flat stone at the mesa’s edge…

    Dee.

    (more…)

  • stone flames flicker

    time to lay my head
    across cool ground and
    watch the stone flames
    flicker

    black feathers fallen
    and i lay here blanketed
    under long lifetimes
    of snow

  • weve gone to stone

    weve gone to stone
    to stone we go to
    sit with trees all
    alone, weve gone
    to ground & gone
    to home under the,
    under the oak alone

    blind weve gone
    and also the blind to
    see the winter winds
    to dance the moon
    under her skins
    pale the endless
    song.

  • Episode 4: Elsewhen, Part 3

    Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.

    Somewhere in the dark, what was about to happen — simply began.

    All attentions shifted. Hers. The crow’s. The women’s voices, too, surrendered to sudden silence while the air in the cave grew both damp and heavy, weighing her down with a new emerging wrongness rising from within the darkness. The space turned in on itself and the fresh scent of water turned to sour and stagnation.

    It did not arrive. It was simply present, the way the water had been present before she found it — already there, belonging to the space, waiting for her perception to catch up with what the space already knew. Across the spring. Near it. The bioluminescence on the cave walls throwing its faint cerulean into the dark between them, and in that dark, a familiar shape pouring forth from shadow.

    (more…)

  • wood-mad

    become the wode
    be as sunspecked stone
    a pond as the frozen
    while antlers tied
    at ribbons red...

    i let turnings go
    hearts carve to spades
    wergeld flows to bone
    our bloodstained hands
    kiss press of oak

    there is only knowing
    when those everythings
    have been known

  • we call

    it is of voluntary derangement
    in the where of eyes suture eyes
    and mouth fed on dirt from
    under ash, bone and oak

    dare you the wood at night?

    past the broken homes and
    vast underhalls gone to echo
    where have their songs gone?

    you only have to sit in
    shadow to know and

    we call it other

  • casting runes — 23apr26

    nauthiz
    some bonds lack ropes
    no chains nor jailer keys
    a razor's liminal edge
    betwixt a world and me

    A rune poem, based on an Elder Futhark rune selected at random.

    Today’s rune is nauthiz, which has a core meaning of “need”. Alternative translations have been “hardship” or “constraint”. Among other interpretations, nauthiz is seen as a indicative of a transition or transformation, a period of learning or strengthening of resilience, lacking, change, and impermanence — inclusive of other related concepts.

    Please visit my Elder Futhark pages at sceadugenga.com for additional interpretations of the runes based on multiple references and personal reflection.

  • Campfire Sessions — 22apr26

    Campfire
    Photo by Ville Palmu on Unsplash

    We haven’t sat for a while, them and I.

    At first, it wasn’t for lack of trying. I would go to the usual place, sit down and wait for the fire to light itself. It remained stubbornly unlit. Without fire to draw them, nothing was drawn. I might have taken it upon myself to light the flames but, in the strange rules of the place when it comes to starting fires, I am entirely ignorant.

    (more…)