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…
A Charm for the Nameless Child #8
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…
Planing and forward movement
Just a quick post today. I’m going to do my best to start updating more regularly. This is as much for me as it is for anyone else. I’m starting to plan out my ideas about moving forward. Continue editing and posting A Charm for the Nameless Child. This is my immediate project. I’m in…
Life is Change
And changeful. And changing. Anyone who has been reading my work for the last few years will likely know that I’ve been close to burn out for quite some time. I was working as an academic and the enormous weight of workload and expectations was getting to be too much. I found it hard not…
A Charm for the Nameless Child #7
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…
A Charm for the Nameless Child #6
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….
A Charm for the Nameless Child #5
“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…
A Charm for the Nameless Child #4
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…
A Charm for the Nameless Child #3
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…
A Charm for the Nameless Child #2
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….