Category: Ash & Thorn — Vengeance, My Heart

  • 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.

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  • Episode 4: Elsewhen, Part 2

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

    The dark within was unsullied by Dusk. It stood apart from the twilight standing without.

    The understanding was immediate and absolute. It came before her eyes drank in the faint bioluminescence rising from the stone walls beyond the entrance, casting a faint, ghostly cerulean into a dark that drank in light with a fullness. It came before the smell of water betrayed its location within the hollow space between the stone. The burden that rested on her neck since the shootout at the camp three or five days before, was simply absent. Not lifted. Gone — the yoke had never existed, never had been slung across her neck, never pushed her body to the ground.

    It was in stillness that she stood just within the threshold dividing the entrance between the gloaming and this new, fresh darkness, letting the feeling wash over her in waves.

    She crossed over in fullness.

    (more…)

  • Episode 4: Elsewhen, Part 1

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

    It was with an explosive frantic fluttering that the quail broke from the scrub, barely registered before the gun’s thunder broke the twilight calm, before any thought of the bird came to the fore.

    Only after the bird had dropped to the twisting shadows of the mesa, had the stranger known she had made a kill. There was no magic in the act, although it might have seemed so had anyone witnessed the event.

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  • Episode 3: What Walks On, Part 4

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

    As she made her way to where the crow perched, it was clear that Fallow was not the only equine casualty of the shootout. One other lay dead on the outrider’s side of the camp and the other two had panicked at the noise. The stranger could see the silhouette of one against the backdrop of the last of the failing light. It was looking back at camp, but seemed disinterested in returning. Of the other horse, there was no trace.

    Dee was resting her back against the base of some mesquite once the stranger found her. She was pressing one hand firmly against her thigh, blood staining her fingers dark to match the growing shadows. Her other hand rested near the holster without quite reaching it. Her gun was not in the holster and it took the stranger a moment before she spotted the revolver in the gloaming, left almost under the wain.

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  • Episode 3: What Walks On, Part 3

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

    Dee turned to the stranger and nodded to the gun at her hip.

    “That’s a fine bit of hardware you’re carrying around,” she said. “Old. The kind that means something. They don’t make them like that anymore.” She tilted her head and took a sip from her flask. “Lone woman on the road, carrying a piece like that around… Eventually somebody’s gonna make you an offer on it.”

    She took another nod at the flask, spit into the fire and watched the whiskey flare up into a darkening twilight as it kissed the flame.

    “Might as well be me.”

    (more…)

  • Episode 3: What Walks On, Part 2

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

    The man who had taken the hare from the stranger spit the carcass and seared it over the flames. The stranger noticed the woman who had poured the coffee was too close a resemblance to be anything but the man’s daughter and watched her cut up root vegetables and put them into a small kettle of boiling water. It would not amount to much, but it was luxurious fare for those used to the road and even a small tin cup of the stuff was better than hardtack and stale water sitting in a skin all day.

    She was lean, but not a sinewy, spindly leanness. Her father did well enough doing whatever he did to keep her modestly fed.

    A young man sat in the family’s wain, hat pulled low over his eyes, a long gun cradled in his arms. He seemed to be napping for a watch against the roaming desert nightgaunts that liked to nest near the mesas when true night decided to stop for a visit. Probably the older man’s son.

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  • Episode 3: What Walks On, Part 1

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

    The wind carried them to her.

    At first there were the smells — burning mesquite lilted on the air, teasing tendrils caught in faint, then ever stronger plumes. Then musk of horse mixed with the odor of unwashed bodies of travelers, sour on the currents, tantalizing with the promise of something more than mirage.

    Fallow caught the smells too, turning her ears forward, the tempo of her gait increasing by the smallest fraction of a beat. She whinnied as if to tell the stranger that there was a camp ahead of them, in case the signs were missed by her rider. Camp meant people. And where there were people, there might be horses. And other horses might mean feed.

    Of the crow, there was no sign. It had gone its own way some time ago as it was wont to do — somewhere ahead of her in the scrub, she reckoned, in the mesquite along the mesa’s foot. The stranger hardly gave the matter more than the briefest of thoughts.

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  • Episode 2: What Remains, Part 4

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

    The stranger was at the spring before the light changed.

    What passed for dawn in mesa country under the Dusk was less an arrival than a slow reluctant brightening, the darkness thinning at the edges without fully committing to anything else. The temperature had dropped further in the night and the sage at the mesa’s foot was stiff with cold, the leaves silver-grey and sharp-smelling when she stripped them from the stems. She worked quickly, her breath visible, her hands certain about what they were doing in the way hands get certain about things the mind has stopped needing to supervise.

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  • Episode 2: What Remains, Part 3

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

    The Necessary was quiet when she returned and one of the lanterns had sputtered out, adding to the dim. Cressida had Caldwell in a chair by the bar, his jaw held gingerly in one hand, his eyes suggesting he was present but still taking inventory of the situation.

    The crow was on the bar. It watched Caldwell with the detached attention of something that has seen this kind of thing before and found it neither alarming nor particularly interesting.

    “Room,” the stranger said to Cressida.

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  • Episode 2: What Remains, Part 2

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

    The stranger cautiously mounted the stairs leading to the batwing doors of the saloon named The Necessary, according to the shingle still partially chained to the lintel overshadowing the entrance. The sign rotated in lazy circles on the remaining chain.

    As the gloaming became an abstract night, a handful of lanterns cast shadows on to the boardwalk outside, dancing horned demons thrown across on the rough-hewn planks at her feet.

    Stepping inside, the stranger noticed the two lanterns burning low cast a grotesquerie of shadows bent around at angles, making the interior a space twisting in on itself. The bar was intact, clean and polished. The mirror running along the length of the bar behind it had not been fared so well — a crack ran the full span of silvered glass, splitting every reflection in two pieces that refused to align across the broken divide.

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