I lay down for bed and turn out the lamp, but I still can't sleep. It's the light behind my eyes that keeps me awake. The room may be pitch black, I may cover my eyes, squeeze them shut as tight as I can. It doesn't matter. There's still that light behind…

Damion stands at the edge of the woods, just inside the treeline. His attention is focused on the house 35 yards away, the house that is surrounded by a teeming mass of the living dead. He hears screams from inside, cries for help from the poor souls trap…

He is a tiny man. Under four feet tiny. Balding pate. Small eyes. Round, tortoiseshell glasses. Tattered brown suit. Nothing to look at, certainly, not that anyone is looking.

He glides through the crowd, clearing a path without word or gesture. People m…

There were things we worshiped before the new gods. Things of the dirt. Things of the dark. Things that moved and swarmed and crawled in the spaces beneath our feet. We feared them, even as they ignored us. To them, we were the worms. And less than worm…

As the shade drifts by one particularly large oak, its glow momentarily illuminates a small, bulbous husk. There's just time to see a seam in the husk pucker before the shade glides by, returning the husk to darkness.

But then, a low, sustained intake of…

Night clings to the forest like a shroud. The darkness is nearly absolute, the silhouettes of the trees only just a hair's-breadth deeper black.

The sounds of life are everywhere, however. The chirps of insects and the calls of nocturnal predators. Th…

Story is marked as mature

"Ain't natural, Karl."

"'Course not."

"Fog's 'sposed to burn up in sunlight, not pile up against the edge of a man's property like it's beatin' on a wall."

"Ever'body knows that, Carl."

"Yeah? Well somebody 'parently forgot to tell ol' man Hemp. Ain't n…

Chaz raises the weapon he holds in his left hand. He can feel the Weight of it dragging his arm back toward the earth, but it is that very same Weight that allows him to wield the hand cannon at all. When he first claimed the Kraken, when he first held th…

He pulls the knife across his own skin, lightly parting the flesh above his navel. Blood wells up but does not quite spill over. He uses the tip of the blade to complete the sweeping arc of a symbol that represents just one of his sins. There are dozens o…

We had no neighbors. That was by design. Dad didn't like people. I didn't much care for them myself. So it was our livestock that died first. Dad hadn't even had a chance to step off the porch with that second post before the cows started keeling over. Th…

Doom fell from the sky that next day. At least, that's where we assumed it came from. There were mutterings in that cloudless expanse -- and rumors of mutterings. We had listened to them all that night and assumed they were the last breaths of the god-t…

She is tied to a rack. The ropes at her wrists and ankles dig cruelly into her skin. Her fingers and toes have long since gone numb. She barely notices. This is as it should be.

Figures move in the shadows around her, checking her bonds, adjusting her ga…

The third post, well... the third post didn't actually exist. Not in any way that mattered. It was an idea, if you will -- a concept, a metaphor. It was a lynchpin of belief. It was, of course, all hot air and bluster and metaphor, a puff of wind as insub…