Author: Hob Goodfellowe

The boy woke with a start. Oily, delicious smelling smoke was tickling around his nose and throat. He blinked blearily. With the blanket wrapped about his thin shoulders, he poked his head outside. The sky above was casting bold blue-grey light into the woods. “What?” he said, confused, not fully remembering where he was at…

There was a misty gloom outside the tent, though the boy had no idea if the hour were dawn, or dusk, or somewhere in between. He heard the lady and her horse talking. They seemed distant, as if they had moved away from the turf house where we was curled up under blankets, breathing the…

The next morning, he woke with a numbness in his limbs. He felt cold, despite the morning sun and radiance from hot ashes, and there was a sharp pain in his chest. He discovered a hard, rattling wheeze in his lungs when he spoke. “I don’t feel so well.” The young woman, Caewen, crouched over…

The next morning, he woke without any sense of life in his limbs. He felt cold, despite the morning sun and radiance from hot ashes. There was a sharp pain in his chest. “I don’t feel so well.” The young woman crouched over him. She put a hand on his forehead, and against his cheek….

“Oh,” she waved a hand and shifted herself so that she was sitting up against the flank of the big grey and black dapple horse. “Useful? Being nameless. Or, more to the point, if you don’t know your own true name… if you’ve never known a name of your own… well, it makes you like…

The woman had a look of puzzlement on her face, clouding to mingled curiosity and suspicion. “A shivering child alone in the woods. Are you ghost or flesh?” But before the boy could answer, the horse shook his head and smiled with sharp teeth in a very unhorselike way. A faint red light shone in…

The boy walked a long time in the darkness, tripping on roots, slipping down hillsides that were slick with leafy mould. The smells of the wet night drifted around him. Night-creatures raised their voices somewhere off in the woods. By chance, he came across a reedy pond so brimming with frogs that the sound was…

Gold light shot from the windows and open doors of the cottages that made up the main thoroughway of Wurmgloath. A few people were still out and about. Their movements were nervous. Each of them was a mere shape of darkness against the soft light behind. He walked on, passing squat buildings in haphazard rows….