Snippet

A friend of mine feels I should be posting snippets of my writing projects on this blogsite. While that was not my original intent, I have a tendency to humor him. Beware though, text entries, such as the one below, will be excerpts from rough drafts and may or may not appear in the final copy. The work will, more often than not, emit an undefinable odor that will cause your nose to curl up in a desperate attempt to imitate a pigs snout. (Ok, pigs are cute, but you get the idea.)

Excerpt from Book 1.


They floated up, wisps of mist from the rain soaked ground. The essences of a long forgotten and hurriedly forged graveyard, they were the victims of plague and worse. Their never marked gravesites long ago forsaken by family, if indeed any remained. Entire bloodlines had vanished into the spongy, unblessed soil, taken root and grown a crop of desperate need.

Not a prayer had ever passed lips above their charred bones.

Awake, for now, beneath the moonless sky, they wasted no time as they wove their way between the trees and thick undergrowth, through the darkness of the forest to the paler black of the unlit dirt and gravel roads with their muddy puddles and water logged truck tracks.

Their homes were here, they sought them out. Every house preserved, their shells unchanged. Each building taken over by families who claimed to be descendants of the original settlers, but were in truth second families with no real claim to the land. They held no kinship to those who had come before and watched now, unseen, from the cold side of the windowpane.

It was the second family possessions that cluttered the rooms, a scattering of first family belongings among them to lend legitimacy. The names of the first families were forgotten, their purpose for settling here a deeply guarded secret that no historian would ever dislodge.

Sadness clouded the hearts of the misty ones as they left the houses, no longer theirs, with their hidden secrets and followed the road to the other end of the village. A ghostly fog, they ringed the edge of the official cemetery.

Sanctified ground, they could not enter. Each gravesite marked, neatly cared for. Each life remembered, even if only artificially.

A roar, unheard by mortal ears, reverberated on the wind and echoed off the trees, its psychic pressure pushing hard against the wisps and pinning them up against the invisible cemetery wall, then releasing them as the wave ebbed and faded. The wisps gathered together as one and flew down the street in a rush of wind, back to their forgotten plots.

The son of the Patron called. They must obey. They were bound to him by long ago ritual that could not be broken.