Scouts

A standalone story fragment from the Eastsong Cycle (third epoch)

Of the seven, only three lost-folk scouts remained. Stunned and breathing heavy, they discovered their comrades in the faint predawn glow. Four broken bodies sprawled on the bare red-earth mountainside. They formed a rough arc around the bloodied bulk of a dreadbeak corpse.

The undersized wings and elongated neck of the monstrous avian bore dozens of scimitar scratches, while its beak and talons had ripped the dead men’s bison-hide armor to tatters.

“The Wright hates us,” the greyest of the surviving scouts pronounced bitterly. “Anywhere our folk try to build anew, terrible things find us.”

The subaltern gripped his scythe tight-knuckled and took in the ghastly sight of the slain bird. “If the Wright above hated us,” he said matter of fact, “thy mothers would be breaking fast with the sea serpents, and thy fathers would be toothpicks for some tundra-cat back in the frozen wastes. Then I’d be spared thy addled observations, leastways.”

Any other time, that might’ve elicited a snicker from the fresh-faced younger scout, but the lad kept quiet.

With his scythe, the subaltern indicated their fallen brethren. “Now, let’s be getting them returned to the dust, proper-like. And quick.”

Truth be told, today he wasn’t so sure the old fellow had it wrong.

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Note from the Author

Happy New Year, folks!

I’ve been under the weather, so it’s a slower start to the new year than I’d hoped for the Vaporous Realms. But we’ll keep posting snippets—maybe two to three per week. And the first episode of Kaelii’s Song will be published here sometime next week. For January, we’ve planned about one episode per week, four in total.

And we’ve decided to publish the Len the Wanderer ebook at the end of the month—tentatively, January 31. We’ll confirm that launch date closer to the time!