BlackInkWords

 The priests had said prayer would save his mother, so Osar prayed for a year and a day. Dawn til dusk, beseeching shadow and sunlight. Oft late past the darkening hour he’d bowed his head and grovelled, bargained, begged. He had devoted himself to Dionas the Golden God. But Dionas hadn’t heard the prayers, or worse, refused to answer them. Even the gods couldn’t cure cancer. Osar wrenched another weed from the overturned earth. And for all of his devotion what did he have to show for it? A grave dug by his own hands and a dead woman to fill it. The Golden God might have been the city’s patron and its father, but O

     "Are we being followed, father?"      "No, Astartes, we are not being followed."      "How can you be sure? You didn't even look!" Astartes whined. Struggling to turn in the saddle behind his father, Astartes craned his neck to look back through the night. The dirt track meandered this way and that, winding through the Emberfen Forest. The path was hard to make out amongst the muddy browns of the woodland, made all the more difficult by the thick canopy obscuring the glow of the stars and moon overhead.      Nicolas shook his head, scratching idly at his flame-red moustache. "Don't let your eyes play tricks on you, son…there's no