• The Wistful Witness
    "Cut it." The command hung in the cold air. Caleb stood still. His hand trembled. The sword in his grip was heavy. It was old. It was cold. The steel was black. The edge was thin. He held it tight. His knuckles were white. He was a soldier. He had no name in the ledger. He was a tool. He was a wall. He was a shadow. "Again," the captain said. The captain was tall. He wore blue. His coat was...
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  • The Pale Bridge
    I woke not with a gasp but with the slow, viscous settling of dust in the marrow of my bones, the air in the small stone cell thick with the scent of wet limestone and the metallic tang of old blood that seemed to seep up from the flagstones themselves, a smell that was less an odor than a physical weight pressing against the inside of my skull, and as I raised my head, the first thing I saw...
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  • The Pale Altar
    The mud under your boots is not the brown, rich earth of a garden but a pale, slick substance that clings to the soles like wet plaster, and you are running, or trying to run, through a forest where the trees have no leaves and the branches twist like broken fingers reaching for a sky that has forgotten how to be blue. You are carrying a basket on your back, and the basket is heavy, heavier...
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  • The Distant Machine
    The ink bled into the paper, a slow hemorrhage of black against the cream, as I pressed my quill against the grain. It was a Tuesday, or perhaps a Wednesday. The days had lost their edges, blurring into a single, unbroken grey expanse where the rain did not fall so much as exist, a constant, damp suspension in the air of the city. I am writing this to you, Mr. Ashworth, not because I expect a...
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  • The Golden Song
    The rain fell in sheets. Ward sat on the wet stone. He was a guard. His armor was dented. It smelled of rust. He held a bowl. It was clay. Inside was porridge. Oatmeal. Thick. Gray. He did not eat. He watched the water drip. Drip. Drip. The castle walls loomed. Black. Towering. They swallowed the sky. Ward was small. He was tired. His bones ached. The pain was deep. It lived in his marrow. It...
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  • The Wistful Petal
    The ink bleeds. It soaks into the grain of the parchment. Dark. Wet. A bruise forming. You press the nib. The tip snaps. A tiny shard of steel flies. It lands on the desk. It does not make a sound. You stare at the broken nib. It is useless now. A fragment. A tooth pulled from a mouth. You look up. The room is white. The walls are white. The floor is white. The paper is white. Your hands are...
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  • The Pale Tower
    The glass didn’t shatter with a sound so much as it surrendered, a sudden, violent exhalation of pressure that left a jagged, weeping wound in the center of the observation deck, raining fine, glittering dust across the sterile white tiles where I stood with my hands bound by the magnetic cuffs, staring at the reflection of my own hollowed-out face in the remaining pane. We had been working on...
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  • The Wistful Silence
    The rain had been falling on the roof of St. Jude’s Hospital for three days without a break, a persistent, grey drumming that seemed to vibrate through the floorboards and into the marrow of Margaret’s bones, creating a low, throbbing hum that she had long since stopped hearing consciously but which now sat in her chest like a second, slower heartbeat, a rhythm that dictated the pace of her...
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  • The Faded Quadrant
    The blood is not yours, yet it dyes the white cotton of your shirt a shade of rust that smells of old pennies and wet earth, and as you stand in the center of the living room, the floorboards groaning under the weight of your stillness, you realize that the violence has not just ended but has been absorbed into the very grain of the wood, the plaster of the walls, and the heavy velvet curtains...
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  • The Golden Harbor
    The fog did not lift. It thickened. It pressed against the stone walls of the Abbey like a living thing, cold and wet, smelling of rot and old salt. Margaret stood in the scriptorium. Her hands trembled. Not from the cold. From the ink. The ink was black. The ink was deep. It pooled in the well of her hand. She dipped the quill. She did not write. She stared. The scriptorium was silent. The...
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