Tag: writing
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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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On writing every day (for two months)
The Muse likes sweat. This is a saying I adhere to. It means that, at least in my own experience, inspiration strikes about two hours after I set my rump on a chair and began slaving away at the keyboard. I want to tell you a few more things about that. When I first began…
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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…
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Patina – Chapter 55
This was going to be the end of his career. The Hunter limped forward, holding onto a cane, his knife, the only weapon he still had, sheathed in his belt. He had lost and burned enough blood for a month, and he’d need a long time to completely recover; no more spells and tricks for…
A. Montresor 