Tag: episodic fiction

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.

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.

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.

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

She faded in from the night like a phantasm, clothed in all black save for the flowing cinnabar wrap layered around her neck, riding a pale horse that matched her porcelain-hued high cheeks. She moved at the unhurried pace of someone who had nowhere better to be and knew it. A large black bird rode the figure’s shoulder, its eyes reflecting in cerulean what little light the night sky had left to offer.

She might have beautiful at one time, Harlan thought to himself, but something had changed that — though he knew not if it was the tattoo he could only barely make out from the window that marred her face, or the dour expression she wore as she looked up and down the town’s streets.

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

The stranger stepped back into the gloaming of the desert and the last of the humid warmth sealed itself behind her. As she stepped over the threshold of the Old One’s ruins, those six sand-chiseled eyes watching her emerge from the shadows.

All six remained frozen in time until the wayward son emerged and they pushed past the stranger to embrace the son and brother they had lost.

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

The ultramarine-eyed stranger closed her eyes and breathed in, whether to garner courage or in regret for making such a promise, the pilgrim couldn’t decide. Perhaps she did it to center herself. It was not his place to know these things — he didn’t want to know. But he would not refuse such a promise of assistance, one normally reserved for those in a higher strata than he, as it had been sworn.

The stranger turned on her heel and marched towards the gaping black mouth of the ramshackle remains. Six dust-scratched eyes followed her passage as she stepped from gloam to gloom, the pilgrim’s daughter whispering a prayer that was only occasionally broken by the serpent’s kiss of sand over sand.

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

It came as a dervish, rising up from the alkali flats bathed in a wash of perpetual twilight; at first a flea on the horizon and growing larger as it drew closer. The shape was largely black with a touch of rich burgundy and loose cloth flapping in the wind, tassels dancing as gravity pulled downward against the wind. The air played tricks with sound, carrying over the sands a firm, but steady crunch of hooves grinding lime on hard pan.

It would be foolish to hail the newcomer, to wish the visitor well, for thieves walked these lands. The pilgrim and his kin had been warned about this, as they had been warned about the ruins near the aged well by which they sojourned. He didn’t issue a command to hide, for there was no place to hide in this barren place save for the well itself, which might be worse than the fluttering black ghost moving their direction on a pale horse. The pilgrim hoped the outrider would see their threadbare robes and worn, twisted-hemp sandals and understand it was custom for pilgrims to give most of their possessions away before their journey. He uttered a whispered curse for not waiting until the next caravan of faithful made the trek. He would have had the benefit of safety in numbers and then perhaps his son—

He let that thought go. What was done was done and wishing for something else was clinging to another illusion to shed when they reached Absalom. If — he reminded himself, not when — they arrived. If they reached the oasis city of this wretched land. He had already begun the process of removing his son from memory.