Crushed so efficiently and profoundly, Eo couldn’t find the strength to fake himself even the smallest bit put together. So, he looked away from the other still, to the uncaring desert and its ancient, time-battered landscape. “We can go back.” Kasse was decided, gathering Eo’s frame into his arms. The navigator’s shuddering lament wouldn’t still […]

“Okay,” Kasse agreed succinctly, without elaborating on the clashing of his better sense and his blinding love. “We’ll go. This week, we’ll go.” What a hollow victory.

Over the course of three or four weeks, Kasse and Eoran had gone from barely surviving to actually living a life. In his sheer boredom, that adjunct soldier so tuned to the frequencies of stone had carved out the inside of their temporary home. He’d rendered small repositories into the burrstone walls to hold embers, […]

Eoran sat alongside the blaze of a rock-encircled fire, pitch eyes combing over the delicate and foxed pages of an old notebook he had found near the skeletons huddled by the darkness of the cavern’s exit. He stripped down to his skivvies long ago and made a mat from the assembled bits of his military […]

after a moment of silence, deepwater lungs upwelling, keeping Eoran’s holy trust closer to his heart than the beat that ran through it, Kasse stepped into the space in between.

Their path meandered along a thick-thin-thick invisible slithering descent, serpentine and hollow and hidden beneath their viscid step. While Kasse remained on the surface with the man he refused to let suffer, his utility mind crawled on its belly in the serried depths, searching searching searching until at long last   Kasse    fell    […]