New short story up on Darkness and Good. Liana just posted one yesterday, too, so you get a double dose to make up for the fact that we hadn’t posted in two weeks O:)
When War Came To Town is a short story in my Powers cycle. If you’ve ever read my flash fic Forget, you’ll know the Powers cycle: a world where a set of superhero-like characters fight to maintain the balance of the world, with the mantle of the various Power roles passing on to new individuals when a previous one dies. There are a limited number of Powers, but one story I’m hoping to complete soonish deals with the exact number, so you’ll have to wait for that for details, but today’s story deals with one of the most recurring characters in the cycle, War, who is currently a red-haired woman of indeterminate age.
One day, when I have enough of the stories complete, I want to stick them all together in a collection that will be messy and overlapping and somewhat self-contradictory, because the entire point of the exercise is to emphasise the ways in which memory and perspective are often shifting, contradictory things, depending on who you ask and when – two people’s memories of an event will never quite tally, and neither will one person’s memories of an event immediately after it, and several years down the track.
So yes. Memory and War tend to be my recurring characters in this cycle 😉 Anyway, without further ado, When War Came To Town 🙂
When she rode into town on the demon horse, nobody knew it would happen. Sure, old Marley had just been ripped from his slumber in the room over the pub, dragged into the streets and flayed to within a half inch of death, but those kinds of things happened sometimes. All it took was a downturn in the economy, a few farms going sour, whispers in the wind of a witch, of black magic… No. That was sad, ludicrous even, to think that people really thought Marley was clever enough for magic, but it wasn’t It.
The bodies lining the street to see her, that was unexpected, the way they thrashed and elbowed and tromped, all try to catch a brush of finger over plate mail, or the sharp, crackling hair of the deep-black horse. Unexpected, but not It. If people had thought hard enough, they might have known she’d draw them to her, and it wouldn’t have been so unexpected. No. Not It.
Read the rest of the story at Darkness and Good.