Tag: post-apocalyptic
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Patina – Chapter 65
The tracks lead downhill, through the widening trees. The Hunter panted softly, pulling his clothes tighter. He grimaced. He had missed them by just a few hours, judging from the state of the tracks. “Spirits,” he groaned, leaning on a nearby tree. On the one hand, he now very well knew where they were headed.…
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Patina – Chapter 64
One more thing that had changed, for Sadja, was she learned how to recognize when she was dreaming. Before, everything was confused. She went through her days like flipping book pages, most of them flowing before her eyes without really taking to memory what happened in each of them, and every one quite similar. Wake…
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Patina – Chapter 63
The moth-girl sniffed the fresh snow. Her nose wrinkled, following each of the scents as they departed in a thousand directions at once. Behind her, her brother held up a staff with many tinkling bones, rattling them and intoning prayers to ward the hungry ones off. It had worked well, so far. Their parents, armed…
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Patina – Chapter 62
She walks through the forest, and the forest is dark. Pale trees sprout from the damp black ground, grow thick and strong, their branches spread like veins, throbbing with crimson sap. Up above a golden light seeps through everything like a kind of vicious bile. And she walks on naked feet on the sharp blades…
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Patina – Chapter 61
The Hunter pulled himself up. He coughed and spat out a wad of bloody bile. His head swam and his body felt like it had been shattered and haphazardly put back together, without much care about the final result. His bones ached and his tendons felt like they could snap off at any moment. But…
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Patina – Chapter 60
The Hunter lowered his head, trying to collect himself. The things he had seen… between Verna’s experiment, her lies about Lenora, about the scope and effect of the Sere Rite had pulled apart the shield of certainty and purpose he’d been building around himself for the past six years. There was no saving her, no…
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Patina – Chapter 59
The Hunter rubbed his face, trying to see how much of himself was still there. For a given value of there. “How can you be here?” He frowned. “And what’s happened to my body?” “Your body is perfectly busy dying,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Which is one of the reasons why we don’t have much time.…
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Patina – Chapter 58
Among all the ways mankind had found to hinder the ever-encroaching forest and halt its Tide, in places even push it back, there were water, steel, and blood. The division between these three approaches led to the Order of Vestals with their use of Sight and holy water, the Venators and their strange rituals of…
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Patina – Chapter 57
You could have done a better job, Elissa berated herself, plunging herself deeper into the hot water. The pool welcomed her, the numbing pressure enveloping her naked body all around in a soothing embrace. She pressed her hands over her blindfold, trying to massage the pain away from her orbits – an aftereffect of the…
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Patina – Chapter 56
If Sadja ever got out of this, she did not want to see a rope ever again, in her entire life. She bit and wriggled as her captors carried her away, with some success, as she managed to make them bleed and scream, but little else. One of the men pulled out a knife and…
A. Montresor 