fiction

[digitaldiscipline]

The world had moved on, he had heard the old man say. A desperate précis hung behind his eyes like a scrim of thin winter clouds - tattered, icy, and bitterly ephemeral. All the light had fallen out of the livid, bland technomancy. Talk, and even the last, failing breath of the dark man's lackey carried no more weight than the thin wisp of ash from a fire gone cold.

Shaking the dust from his cuffs and turning to the day's last light, he looked at the town below. A handful of lights, all the baleful, reddish glow of a tainted well for a source were all that kept it from being more of the muffled, jagged blackness that made up the countryside. A thin, tangy reek of garlic and some earthier smell wafted up the slope, carried on the back of a cat's-paw fog. None moved below at this hour, whether from exhaustion, drink, or fear of the night's infinite demons.

He found himself unable to say if he was among them or not - either demon or the afraid.