Without – excerpt 1

There was a smell around the base of the old house. It smelled like old vinegar, faint and enormously unpleasant. Kneeling in the dirt by the window, he ran his finger through a patch of soil near the grimy glass that looked down into an unfinished basement, sniffing. He didn’t know what could make a smell like that, but it set his teeth grinding against each other and he had to choke back a mouthful of saliva to settle his gorge. Turning his head to the side he reached up to push a shock of green and blue back out of his view and looked across the street at the old woman and younger man made silhouettes by the setting sun just behind the peak of a green shingled roof.

The woman, her face like carved wood, nodded once and a few wisps of faded yellow hair descended from her elaborate braid to dance in front of eyes that could outdo carved ice. The man with her looked barely out of his teens, he was shaking. He nodded as well, his hands balled up into fists.

Here’s hoping you people aren’t full of shit.

Straightening up, he walked to the front door, feeling the leather squeal across his shoulders. A recently painted white circle on the forearm, with a red cross over it, glistened in the light. The spikes on the right caught the red glare of the sun as his boots tapped against the front stairs. He reached a hand and pressed the doorbell.

Seconds passed. The sun continued to set, shadows deepening around the porch and trellis, a rosebush wrapped around the white-painted wood. The sound of someone throwing a chain and undoing a lock came, followed by the door opening a crack.

“Yes?” A woman’s face, slightly pale, dark brown eyes dilated in the shadow thrown by the edge of the door. “Can I help you?”

“I’m sure you can.” The deep rumbling of his voice, not wholly his at the moment. “I’ve come to speak with your tenants in the basement.”

“I don’t have any tenants. You must have the wrong…” He didn’t wait for her to complete the sentence and shut the door in his face. Instead, he pivoted and delivered a kick to the center of the wood above the mail slot, splintering it in half. The impact sent the woman crashing to the floor in a haze of curly black hair, and he stepped into the room while the chain fell, door fragment and all.

“Oh, did I say tenants? I meant bloodsucking monstrosities.”

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Black Sun – The Days We Lost

Tsarn son of Koth and her mate Stell was born healthy. He was an unremarkable child, typically sallow of skin and squalling. His mother and father were unaccustomed to how loud infants can be To their credit, they learned to cope, Stell often rising in the night to bring the child to his mother’s breast.

Both of their families were long dwellers, generations spent living in the valley between the iron mountains and the crack in the ground where the old war had rent the land apart. Others of their people had long since left, but they remained, managing to scratch life out of soil that had never been accustomed to anything growing in it.  Sand, fused glass, even chunks of volcanic debris littered the thin layer of soil that owed its very existence to year upon year of their persistence. Still, they had managed to make it fertile enough to support them, and while their lives were hard and short, spent squatting in the seething ochre light that baked the ground they were content enough. They were conquerors, forcing life out of dust and grime and burning sun.

Water came infrequently. Koth told her son that the water was brought to them, and would likely have explained more had he cared, but he did not. His was a world of catching small insects under relentless waves of light and heat, then a world of carving trenches for planting hour after hour.

Fanthallavar

Thus Begins The Tale of Einar, Son of Egil the Foolhardy, known as Dreamslayer

When the sword finally shattered, the shock of it running up the bones of my forearms like the first pain I’d ever felt, I drove the jagged remains of the blade into a greenish throat and seized the hammer from the corpse before it had a chance to fall. I then resumed my work. When the haft of the maul finally groaned and cracked apart, I was forced to use it as a club until an ambitious creature with hide like a cobblestone road, huge and angry, saw his chance to crush me once and for all. He got close enough that I could throw the splintering remains like a spear into his eye. He fell and I stole his axe.
It was quite an axe.