Locations: The Hospital

Located on an artificial island along the Central river, the Hospital is a towering, glittering example of the world before. When things went bad, the Hospital was able to endure like no other infrastructure thanks to its location. Built as an example of human capability, the Hospital lived up to its reputation. Still. The world fell apart around it, and so the Hospital was able to survive and even move forward in a way the rest of the world simply couldn’t, that growth is abnormal and lopsided in many ways. The stories go that the Nurses Order rose up to take over the Hospital as the doctors and staff there fell apart. Sometimes literally. It is now the central hub for Nurse activity and where most Nurse training takes place. It is a center of learning, but does not distribute that learning freely no matter how that might better the world at large. This is a regular criticism of both the Hospital and the Nurses’ Order.

Orders and Organizations: The Exorcists

The Exorcist Order is a group of sworn Orphans. Officially, the Exorcist Order has considerably fewer public doctrine with the Families than, say, the Nurses’ Order on that of the Road Crews. At least one of the family, The Stonewalls, are on record stating that they don’t believe the Exorcists work is needed or legitimate. There are no such things as ghosts, after all. So there’s no real need for exorcists.

The Nurses Order has no official stance, exactly, but from the Hospital comes the occasional defense of the exorcist activities as ‘highly scientific, if not exactly explained as of yet.’ The jargon rarely goes over with the city officials in many towns, though, and as a result, exorcists tend to operate in secret to avoid not being able to operate at all.

Accounts of both ghostly experiences, haunting, and the success of exorcist activities exist in large numbers. Of course, a collection of anecdotes isn’t the same thing as fact.

Exorcist Characters

Radiant Night

Episode 1: The Golden Thread

The Families have always been at War.

We are Orphans.

The smoke lingered, mixing and mingling with the evening fog. It blew in after the killing was complete enough to remove most human life from the wasteland. This was farmland a generation before, but the conflict between the Brooks and the Lionroar grew aggressive enough to shift this far south. Now, the place was mud or broken, lifeless earth hard packed by horses, carts, and marching soldiers.  Soldiers massacre soldiers in this farmland. A hundred soldiers on thirty, and the results were about what you’d expect. Forty soldiers lay dead, or nearly so, the rest from either side scattered or withdrawn.

But there was life yet, beyond the things that grow from the iron-enriched soil and the bug eggs waiting inside all of us to hatch and become the crawling things that recycle us. Sister Water sensed human life left here yet, she felt the thin strands of silver that trail from a human soul so long as it hangs on to life. So, one by one, she searched for the strongest or the most tightly woven threads and followed them back to the dying. If a thread was too frazzled, thin, or perhaps stained by a life of cruelty she ignored them as they snapped or simply faded away.

Her duty wasn’t to save all of them. Technically, her duty wasn’t to save any of them.

Water followed a thick but fraying thread a meter or two into where the fracas reached its peak. She slid off her horse when it threatened to trample too many of the dead. From her saddle, she collected her kit and her sword. She had a gun, too, the leather of its holster remained as smooth as the day she bought it, with a ring of rust around the button that released it for drawing. It probably needed to be cleaned and oiled. It stayed in a holster on her hip. Following the thread again, she adjusted her gasmask, practical as much as a clear way to spot a Nurse on the battlefield. At the end of the thread she found a man too old to be in combat like this, holding his guts tight into his stomach cavity. As she approached, obvious as she was in a long coat marked with Nurse sigils and wearing the mask, he lifted a shaking arm and held a rusted revolver at her. Depending on which myths he ascribed to, he would have been wiser to leave the gun on the ground or else fire at her.

In her off hand, she slid her hand along his thread, touching it, then, tapped it once, and sending a shockwave along it to his soul. He dropped the gun and gagged, then sighed as the pain became a distant concern. She turned her hand and gasped the thread, wondering as she often did, if he could see it.

“Are you going to save me or what?”

“What will you do if I save you?”

He sat up a little straighter, feeling around for the gun he’d dropped, though his hand wasn’t moving in accord with his intent; he was numb and too close to death. “I’ll find the shit that tried to kill me and I’ll kill him!”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why? He tried to kill me: it’s survival!”

She sighed and sat her kit down, using her good hand to draw her sword. “So you’ll kill him, and someone will kill you and then someone will think to avenge you and kill someone else, and on and on it goes.”

“That’s just the way of people; I would think a Nurse would understand how war works.”

“Better than you think.”

“Look, this bleeding isn’t getting any better; you can’t just leave me to die.”

“You are correct.” The mask muffled her voice, and so when talking to the dying, it always felt like she shouted just to be heard. Now he heard the serious dip in her tenor, and felt the gravity of her words. “I cannot just leave you to die. That would be cruel.”

She snipped the thread, as always unsure if he even understood what was happening. He died easily and painlessly. For a moment, she thought she felt the flicker of a confused ghost, but it lasted only so long as the blink of an eye before it was gone. Anyway, if it had lingered, that was another Order’s duty, not hers.

She turned following the fading flickering of silver threads still present in the air and blinked. She’d have taken her mask off to rub her eyes, but that was dangerous. She looked again, scanning the threads, her attention drawn away from the scores of bodies, the overturned and burning carts, and the half-mad horse struggling to move on a broken leg. Without the threads, she’d have given into despair a long time ago. Half of her Order wound up that way anyway, but no one talked about it and interaction between Nurses was rare enough that they all pretended they didn’t know the odds against them.

Introspection didn’t have a place on the killing field.

Perhaps she’d imagined it, a trick of the light or exhaustion or any number of things that go wrong with fragile human senses. But no! There it was again, dancing among the fading silver threads, a tightly woven thread glinting gold, not silver.

She’d never seen anything like it before. No training suggested it was even a possibility, and it wasn’t in any of the hundred or so books she’d read in her training. Human souls trailed silver threads. That was the beginning and end of it.

So of course, with this impossibility ahead of her, Water followed in the direction of the gold thread.  The wind changed, blowing her coat against her with a sudden gust, tugging her long dark hair out of her collar. The gasmask blocked out scents in most cases, but the way the gust came in from the west and pushed back the mist as well as the gunpowder smoke, she thought it might be Violet, the Sweetly Scented Wind. It would have been pleasant, in another time, another place, to take her mask off and breath in the flower-scent. But rotting bodies smelled sweet too, and she choked in her throat to think of the foul combination of carrion and the Violet wind.

She narrowed her eyes, focused in on the golden thread, and followed, sick to her stomach now or not.

The path took her near the screaming horse, so she set her kit down near the ailing beast. “Shhh,” she said to it. “I can’t just tap your thread and help you sleep, friend. For that I’m sorry.” She knelt, opened her kit, and pulled out the folding drawers to find a small jar of tranquilizer and a large syringe inside. The animal cried again, and tried to get off its side, huffing hard in its panic. “Shhhh,” she stuck the needle in the bottle and drew a few milligrams, eyed the horse, a large practical steed, and then drew more. “Shhhh, poor beast. It must be getting hard to breathe on your side like that. Shhh. Be calm. I’ll help you.” She approached its head, petting it, its big black terrified eyes searched her mask, but did not bite her in its madness. Injected, the animal’s breathing slowed, and eventually its eyes closed. “There now.” She stepped back to her kit. “We have a little more time now that you’re sleeping, but not much before you crush your own lungs. What an awful way the gods fashioned you.” She palpated the leg, a front break, but not a terrible one. He could live past this. She first cut away the cart he was still attached to and pulled its remains away. Then, from her kit, she took out the bone-knitting compound many Nurses carried and carefully injected it into the animal’s leg. Nanites in a protein bath would flood the area, and then reknit the bone in under an hour. Many Nurses would have shot the animal and walked away. But not all. Bone-knit was expensive, but not rare within her Order, horses were expensive, and ones as strong and brave as this actually were rare. His leg would be heavier than the others for about a year or two, but he’d run again, and he’d run for her. She said sacred words and pressed a hand to his forehead, feeling warmth in her palm. Then she rose, gathered her kit and searched the air for the golden thread.

Few of the silver threads remained, and so the golden one was even easier to find. Half a meter, and she could touch the thread, leaving her fingers on it as she traced it to its source. First she saw a body or two unnaturally turned on their backs, with bloody palm prints on their chests and their shirts torn open. By the third body, she caught sight of the cause for the corpses’ strange staging as well as the thread’s owner. A boy almost too young to be at war, stooped over a dead man, pressing on his chest with bloody hands, trying to force the dead man to breathe. There were cases in which that sort of resuscitation worked. This was not one of them. Of course, this boy soldier couldn’t see the threads the way a Nurse could.

“It won’t work, he’s already gone.” She said.

“What the hell would you know about it?” The boy choked as he spoke, turning to look, and swallowing his irreverence with a gasp.

“Rather a lot, I suppose. His soul’s quit. It’s just a lump of inert matter now.” She followed the line of the boy’s thread, much more frayed here, near the source, than she’d first surmised. He was in a bad way, dying, and yet here he was, wasting his energy on others. “You will die soon without intervention.”

“You’re going to kill me? That’s what Nurses do, right? Sweep through and put the dying out of their misery?” The boy stood from the body he’d leaned over, and at his full height, even as hunched with pain as he was, she was sure he was not a boy. He was old enough to know what his body was for, but young enough that his dark skin was smooth and free of scars. He wore his black hair shaved close to the scalp like many men in the Brooks’ territory, and his jaw was fine. What she could see from his torn shirt, his arms and chest were fine too, with the slim musculature of a natural athlete and not a male peacock with bulging meat for display. He did not see her smirk behind her mask while she looked him over.

“Is that the myth around my Order today? It changes so often and by Family, that I cannot be bothered to keep up.” She sat her kit down and knelt to open it. “I’m going to save your life, if you let me. Tell me where you’re injured, because I cannot see it myself.”

He shook his head. “I’m not. I didn’t even get hit. The man fell and he grabbed at my leg, but I’m fine. I shook him away easily.”

She looked at him, squinting, she advanced on him. “Don’t be silly, I can see that you’re dying, possibly bleeding out where you stand. I just don’t see where.”

He shook his head. “I feel no pain I’m not… In…jured…” As he protested, he thumped his heart, smoothed his hands along his fine chest, only hesitating when he touched his hips. The color drained from his face, and his shock subsided, allowing him to feel his pain for the first time since his injury. He reached between his legs, putting his palm down on his inside thigh, and when he pulled his hand away, it was slick with bright red blood. “He stabbed me? On the ground, moments from death, he tried to drag me down with him. How did I not feel this?”

He slumped to the ground beside the dead man he could not bring back, and she dropped to a knee beside him. “Sometimes in the heat of things, some people ignore their own needs. It’s a rare thing. And a damn foolish thing for a soldier,” she added, tapping his thread so that he breathed easier, oh so slightly disconnected from his body by the jolt. “Lucky for you I came along, huh? To end your misery.”

“I don’t want to die.” His words were dreamy, his eyes focusing on the horizon.

“Few do.”

“I’ve child brothers at home that need my pay.”

Ah. One of those. He wasn’t telling a story, men in his condition were incapable of lying. She sighed. “I’m not going to kill you. You’re carrying on worse than the horse.” She pulled open his pant leg at the thigh to find a deep gash, one that had hit an artery, and by all accounts should have killed him already. She applied pressure with one hand, drawing out the finest stapler she had to pull the artery itself closed. The staples did one part, a dose of nanites did the rest. She calculated in her head her expenses this month and sighed while the little machines stitched shut his tissue in neat layers. “You keep breathing, you’ll be just fine.”

He nodded, sweating, but forced himself to breath more softly.

She said sacred words and put a palm on his forehead, feeling warmth between her skin and his. His eyes fluttered, and as she pulled her hand away, his brow glowed with an Order’s sacred symbol for just a moment. “I’ve marked you as mine. You are now freed of any responsibility to your Family and your talon. I am claiming your life for mine as I have saved you from death. You will be in service to me until such time as I release you, even up to and after the point of death if I so choose. This is the right granted to me by my Order and the accordance given to the Order by all of the Families. You are now bound to me.”

He blinked, processing her words, then went wide eye. “I, what?”

“I think it was rather clear, that’s the point of these oaths, you’ll have a written copy later, of course, to send back to your Family and people.” She stood up.

“You’re heartless.” He cursed at her, rising to his feet. He staggered, but did not fall. He should have, even in his healing condition; he should have been too weak to stand.

“It’s funny how often I’m told that. I never will understand the accusation, but maybe that’s on account of the heart we have removed during our induction ceremonies.”

He didn’t realize she was being sardonic. That rarely translated through the mask well, and few people outside of the Order could truly appreciate a Nurse’s sense of graveside humor. She sighed. “Call me what you like. That horse there is yours to ride for now.” The beast of a horse she’d treated earlier was on its legs now, moving slowly but calmly, called to her by the seal she’d put on its brow, as she had with the young man.

“My name is Water.” She told him.

He spat, and walked toward the horse, sullen and still dizzy from his blood loss.

***

To get anywhere from the fields of conflict, Water had to head south. North was Lionsroar territory, and not part of her route. The soil took on a lighter, sandier quality when a one traveled away from the border of Lionsroar territory and moved deeper into Brooks. The road they walked on had once been paved, and was now concrete cracked and overcome by the sandy soil. The sand was safer to walk on than the remnants of the road, but the horses didn’t care much for it, so they’d kept drifting back to any expanse of pavement they could find. That made the trip feel like a struggle, or at least, a pointless drifting that Water only had so much control over.

When she took a new name as a part of her studies, her mother said, “You should become Water, as a reminder that you only ever have so much control over where you flow.”

The man with the impossible golden thread rode in sullen silence. He wouldn’t give Water as much as a look let alone tell her his name.

So she spoke to the beast of a horse he now rode on, “Lucky. I think. Lucky suits you for a name as well as anything else.” She glanced from the horse to the man, but he may not have seen the change in her glance through the mask.  “He was close to death, but he survived, mostly because I was on my way looking for you. Lucky fits.”

The man shrugged. “You went out of your way to save me, or out of your way to save the horse?” Some of the sulk slipped away. His spine rolled up, his shoulders straightened, and she admired his lines while they rode.

“It isn’t out of my way. My way follows the threads.” She didn’t see them all the time, not exactly; she had to feel for them. She focused past him, to the gently twitching golden thread in his wake. It was as strange and beautiful as before, up close though, it had a glow to it. She’d seen the glow before even on silver threads, faintly, rarely, but could never account for it.

“You’re staring.”

“Oh? Oh. It’s nothing.” She looked away, to the road ahead, which is when she caught a glimpse of two threads tangled in the air a few meters away. Off the side of the road was high grass, at this time of year, it came easily up to man height, and so from here, there was no seeing to whom the threads belonged. “Get ready.” She told the man. “There may be bandits on the road up ahead, hiding in the grass.”

“I don’t have any weapons.” He tightened his fists and lifted his chin, watching the horizon. His eyes narrowed, his teeth set, his sword hand felt for a pommel that wasn’t there.

“Maybe you won’t need one.” As she spoke, one of the threads vanished. “Tetete!” She urged the horse, dug her heels into the horse and rode in a hurry in the direction of the lingering thread. The young man huffed and followed along with considerably less urgency.

Water’s horse galloped around a bend, leaving Water to see a dead officer in battered golden armor.

“Lionsroar officer.” Hawk said, brow knit watching for other stragglers from the retreating army.

Before he was laid out, the delicate lines of a lioness roaring at the viewer pranced from his left shoulder to his right across broad black plates of his armor. Gilding of that quality would cost a farmer a year’s income. Now, thanks to his murderer, the lioness wept his blood from her screaming face. It was a wasteful display of bravado or wealth or both, and he clearly could have spent his money better on swordsmanship lessons. A few feet away, his killer sat slumped against a fence post breathing heavily, covered in his heart’s blood.

The stocky matronly woman in her late forties with grey hair and grey eyes wore pieces of the armor common among the Brooks. Bits she found here and there rather than a formal uniform. The Brooks marched into battle looking like angry laborers, but this was a tactic as much as the fanciful gilded armor of the Lionsroar soldiery. They screamed and hollered like the insane, they bit when they fought, everyone looked down on them, but everyone was frightened to face them en mass. She looked up at the Nurse. Her eyes went wide. “I’m not dying. I’ll get by madam. You needn’t waste your time on me.” She touched her temple, her solar plexus, and then her heart—a superstitious gesture. Water sighed.

The Nurse slid off her horse and took her kit. “What brings you to the battlefield? A woman who likes the sword with your prowess would do fine for herself in a city guard. Plenty of bloodshed, less massacres.”

“My son is simple minded, I was answering his conscription until he’s too old enough to decline. He’s a good boy, but big as an ox. Gentle though, you understand? Too gentle to hurt a fly. He wouldn’t have lasted a moment in that chaos. Too much stimulation and he lays down and wails and weeps. But he’s a good boy!”

Water frowned, but the expression remained hidden. “His father?”

The woman spat on the ground.

“You’re healthy enough, but you’ve run yourself to tatters.” Water knelt in front of the woman. “Where will you go?”

“Home to my boy? I’ll try to find a way to buy off the rest of his conscription. Somehow.”

“No need.” The young man rode up and slid down from Lucky. “At least, don’t worry about money. That sword’s worth three years an average soldier’s pay. That should more than pay off your son’s debt.” He retrieved a fine blade in a jeweled scabbard, though only garnets and amber. “What a waste, putting cheap jewels on a sword this nice. It brings down the price of the whole thing unless you’re selling it to an egotist.”

“Which is a valid strategy if you can manage it.” Water added.

The woman straightened up when offered the sword and scabbard. “Brooks ta Zhubi ta Mills Hawk, I know you! You were just a child last winter. What happened to you?” She smiled as brightly as she could manage, for as exhausted as she was.

Water noted the exchange, but busied herself mixing up water and sugar and a powdered ascorbic acid.

“Pa died, then mom ran off with a butcher, so I had to become a man.” He said straightening up, shoulders back, chin lifted.

The woman nodded, her mouth tight, her eyes downcast.

“Hawk. Brooks Hawk, huh? Well. Not anymore.” Water said under her breath, the woman looked to ask, and Water cut her off. “What about you? What’s your name, mother? And tell me, have you been a midwife for a living?”

“Brooks ta Zhubi ta Waterworks Mother Orchid.” She smiled as she breathed out her name and thought about the second question. “Not for a living, but a number of times as a civil servant. How is it that you knew that?”

Water motioned to a stitched wound on the woman’s arm. “I know that stitch. It’s very common among lay midwives. This changes a great deal.”

Hawk softened his posture and watched the women, Orchid tilted her head. “Tell me how?”

“If you’ve got this kind of talent, it’s a clean wound and a good stitch, take your son and your buy off money and declare yourself Orphan. You can travel with the money and the Nurses will take you in.”

“You can’t be sure.” Hawk huffed. “I’ve heard of people claiming Orphan then getting lost between cities abandoned by the Orders that won’t take them in after all.”

“Every story you hear must be true.” Water said wryly.

“Still, how can I be sure of all that, Nurse?”

Water sighed, handing Orchid the bottle. She fussed in her kit a moment. “I’m sure because Nurses need strong bodies, which your son has, and talent, which you have, and you can arrive with my recommendation.” She produced a sealed letter and passed it to Orchid.

The woman didn’t say anything at first.

“Either way, you need to restore your strength. Drink that, ride with us back to Zhubi. We’re headed there anyway.”

Orchid stood, slowly, and nodded. “I’ll think it over on the way, thank you for all the kindness.”

Water didn’t say anything. She went back to her horse.

***

Zhubi sat, fat and overflowing, the second largest city in Brooks territory. At the west gate, a handful of guards stood around, or sat on the ground playing cards. In Brooks territory, they walled their cities; the flat plains and proximity to their war-like neighbors to the north made walls a necessity. This was especially true for Zhubi as it is a spit from the contested border. But cities grow fast, and parts of the city spilled out past the original wall. If the people who spill out have money, it gets called a new district and a wall is put up around the spill. If the people who spill out are poor, they learned to make do and worked as an early warning system of approaching raiders. The walls around Zhubi varied in material but had a uniform, dark drabness about them regardless. As Water and her growing entourage rode up, the guards stood to attention. One, a thick, short woman missing an eye stepped forward with spear in hand. Of the guard, she was the only one who bothered with insignia of rank. Everyone else were guards because they were on the wall with weapons.

“What’s this, Orphan? What brings you to a Families’ city?”

Water brushed her fingers across her brow, a sign among Nurses that she was rolling her eyes behind her mask. This guard likely didn’t know that sign, and so didn’t catch the slight.

“I’m a Nurse. I’m here to trade services for goods. That’s my right and you wouldn’t want to be the one to violate my doctrine. No Family would protect you.” It was a bluff, of course. Occasionally smaller towns or communes would block her entry. In places where the Families’ influence was weak, Orphan doctrines were often dismissed. But living in Zhubi was like having the Brooks family head breathing right across your ear all the time.

The captain’s eye shifted to the side for a moment, checking with a guard to her right. The guard said nothing. The captain’s expression went blank, she looked up, her lips moved, but no words emerged. “I have a message for the local head of the Family. Are you going to let me through?”

“Hey.” Orchid called from where she sat with Hawk. “Zhubi Stonewall, right? I know your mother. How nice it is to see you looking so trim. Say, this Nurse here saved my life and little Hawk’s. Sure you can see the wisdom in letting her pass, huh? It’s your choice of course; you’re wise enough to understand all this.”

The dull-eyed bewilderment passed, and the captain nodded. “Yes. I know you, Orchid, and the boy.” She stepped back and to the side, the other guards following suit. “You’re fortunate you know locals and they can vouch for you, Orphan. We’ll be watching you.”

Water let the captain fire the final shot, and wordlessly urged her horse on through the gate and into the city’s outskirts.

Inside the wall, or walls, people split the city into districts by wealth and occupation. At least in Brooks territory, you identified yourself by the city you were from and then your given name. If you, like Hawk, were from a bigger city, you might also use the district where you worked or lived.

“I should be fine from here, Waterworks is near here and you want to head into Central if you have a message for the Family. That’s quite a way from here.” Orchid gave Water directions. Hawk sat silently on his horse, looking away from both women, likely in the direction of his district and his family.

“Thank you mother. I hope you’ll consider my recommendation.”

“I will.” Orchid smiled. “Should we meet on the road again, I will be your ally.”

Water drummed her fingers on the side of her mask, a gesture other Nurses took to mean she was grinning behind her mask. “Then I hope we won’t meet on the road again, I’m nothing but trouble.”

Orchid laughed, her eyes crinkled at the corners in the pleasant way of older people who know how to be happy. Then she waved and made her way off to tend to her son.

Water checked on Hawk. He slid off his horse and looked at the ground. “They’ve got some trustworthy stables this way.” Water nodded, steering her horse to follow, but stayed mounted. The cobblestone was rough, freshly laid down so not worn down by foot traffic. This district had enough money to repave its roads.

“How far is Central? Shouldn’t we ride?”

“There’s several guard posts between here and Central, and they charge for horse traffic but not for foot traffic. So it’s up to you.”

Water slid from her horse, and Hawk stepped away to deal with the stable owner.

Water took her kit from her horse. She watched as children gathered around the corner of a building to stare at her and dare each other to get a closer look. In moments like this, she wished she was a terrible beast under her mask, just so she could lift it suddenly and frighten children with no courage.

“That’s not a healthy way of thinking.” Water said.

“What’s that?” Hawk returned as she spoke to herself.

“That was out loud. Wasn’t meant to be.”

He looked at her funny, and then motioned down the cleanest, largest street. “This will take us toward Central and through the biggest market district. You’ll want to eat eventually, I’m sure.”

“I remember the market from the last time I road through. I had no reason to go to Central, so this leaves me in your hands.” She gestured him ahead. She hefted her kit and flipped her jacket so that her machete was clearly visible. It was illegal to wear such a large blade in public in Horseleather, but expected for Nurses in Brooks. It was complicated, keeping track.

“I’ve never been into Central. Most people haven’t. They might not let me in.”

“They’ll let you in.” Water lifted her chin and chuckled. “Things have changed for you, Zhubi Hawk, you might as well take to enjoying it.”

“Can you even still call me that?”

Water shrugged. A fry pan sizzled off to her left as they walked by an open air stir-fry shop, her fingers twitched and her hand reached to lift her mask, to smell of browning meat and steaming vegetables. “Later.” She promised herself. “Later.”

“What was that?” Hawk looked back to her?

“Nothing. Look, you’ll no longer carry the family name, but any other name you like you can keep. You haven’t sworn to a doctrine, so you don’t have to cut all ties if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to.” He said flatly, then brushed past her to stop at a counter a few shops down. He seemed to know the cook and exchanged coin for meat with him. A moment later, he took a skewer of fried meat and waved. By then, Water caught up.

“Do you eat?”

“Not as mortals do, no.” She brushed her fingers across her brow.

“That’s no way to attract a man.” Hawk grinned, his mood shifted to accommodate for the thick, smokey meat and its rich savory flavor. “You don’t know what you’re missing. There’s no greater street food on the continent than this. And it’s so good for you. My grandfather lived to a hundred on street food alone.”

She shook her head. “You grandmother didn’t cook?”

“I am from a long line of terrible cooks.” He said and laughed. He had beautiful teeth and full lips, and when he smiled his face illuminated as if his blood was golden instead of ruddy.

“I’ll eat later.” She considered him a moment. “There’s no expectation that you should cook for me, if you were worried.”

Some of the humor left his expression and she regretted it. He fell into step beside her.

“What are you going to do now?”

“Deliver the notice of your situation to a Family representative. It causes a lot of fuss on the front end, but I’m told it saves a lot of trouble later along the way.  We could just ride off, that’s my right. Consider this a gesture.”

“And what after?”

She looked at him; he watched the clouds pass by on a slow wind overhead as they followed the street. “I do my job, you do work for me for pay.”

“I’ll be paid?”

“Of course, you aren’t a slave. I thought I explained that.”

He shook his head, she hadn’t or he didn’t remember.

As they grew closer to Central she expected to see older, finer buildings and displays of wealth. To the contrary, the homes and buildings here appeared older yes, but in disrepair. Some were empty and appeared abandoned, or simply falling apart. “Nice area.”

“Outside Central is bad. Inside of Central is bad in a different way.”

They passed a few guard posts that eyed her, but did not stop her along the way. Once at the edge of Central, the guards watched her with tight jaws and decided scowls.

“I haven’t seen a pleasant guard since we arrived.”

Hawk shrugged. “They’re good people, loyal to the previous Custodian. When he died five years back under suspicious circumstances, the Family’s inner circle castrated the guard. Then the Custodian’s brother married into organized crime, and named his new wife Custodian. Her interests do not run parallel to the guards’.”

“They’re the law in a city where the authority is criminal.” Water shook her head. “Unpleasant.”

Inside the inner wall that protected Central even from other citizens of Zhubi, the buildings were even older than those outside of it, and every bit as poorly cared for. Central’s ‘new elite’ attempted to manage the decay. Several of the buildings Water passed had false plaster facades garishly decorated to appear like well-appointed homes and affluent businesses. But the designers of these false fronts lacked taste, so far as Water was concerned. They leaned toward bright colors out of harmony, and noisy, lazily applied patterns. The lights too bright and too many, they illuminated every flaw in the plaster and uncared for sidewalks. Loud tinny music poured from several businesses and the best speaker their record players could bear. Pleasure boys and working women stood in alcoves and at alley entrances hawking their services to passersby. Many looked sick, or at least beyond the point of self-care, with greasy hair and hollow cheeks. This whole district only looked good from a distance.

“It wasn’t like this even six years ago,” Hawk said. “Everything changed when Wheels took over.” The eponymous Wheels’ place stood out. Even among the gaudy falsely fronted, many-colored buildings, Wheels’ place stood out.

It was once a narrow brick home with a dozen bedrooms or more; the sort of place that had a formal dining room and a sitting room and a library all separately. It sat above  the other buildings on a hill, and was the only pre-cataclysm structure in Zhubi; a fitting place for the city’s Custodian to live. Wheels added her own touches, though. She paid someone to recreate numerous cars, motorcycles, and other pre-cataclysm vehicles. They didn’t work. Almost no one bothered with cars for a generation at least; they were hard to maintain and there wasn’t a lot of gasoline to go around.

The evening warmed with the breeze from the irritated river near Zhubi. As result, several of Wheels’ gang lounged about on the steps, stretched out on the hoods of cars, laid on motorcycles, or lazed on the stone stairs leading to the house.

The layabouts roused as Water approached with Hawk. They exchanged looks, and a thin wiry sort hopped up then rushed into the building. Water took to thinking of him as Spike. He looked like a ‘Spike.’

Water unfastened her belt, and stood at the base of the stairs looking up. Hawk leaned on a decorative Bentley Tourer. The green paint peeled from the doors, and the leather of the roof rotted away. “Why aren’t we going in?” Hawk asked.

“Because she’s coming out.” Water nodded to the door.

Wheels was the sort of woman who had been born average in all ways. She wasn’t especially tall or short, her build was average and unremarkable. She had a face that left no impression on its own. Still, she left memories in other ways. She was now a lady of means and airs, and she stood with her tits out and her shoulders back like she was born high class.  Though in truth she wasn’t that far removed from her criminal roots. She made no effort to hide her gang affiliated facial tattoos, and kept her hair shaved except for fringe hanging into her eyes. However, she wore a gown made of fine silk with too much décolletage for her build and that dragged on the ground because it simply wasn’t fitted right. She wore jewelry, favoring flash and shine over the large clean lines favored by the more refined citizens of Zhubi and Brooks territory at large.

“No.” Wheels said as soon as she finished posing at the top of the stair.

“Pardon me?” Water called up, shouting through the gasmask.

“I said no. You’re coming here to deliver some letter claiming one of mine, and I say no.”

Water looked toward Hawk and back up to Wheels. “I see. So you’re willing to break the doctrine on behalf of the Brooks Family without consulting them?”

“I don’t gotta consult them.” She spat, crossing her arms under her bust and leaning back with her chin up. She must have imagined she looked like a movie star. “I know my husband lets me do what I like. And I like our boy Brooks Hawk. So you can’t have him.”

Now, the young man knitted his brow and looked up. “I’m sorry, Madam Custodian, but have we ever even met? How do you know me?”

“You’re special, kid, so shut it. You’re staying here.”

“Kid.” Hawk muttered but looked back down to his shoes.

“He’s been marked and claimed, he’s mine. He’s physically incapable of being too far from me, and I have travel to do. I’m sure you wouldn’t also want to restrain a Journey Nurse. The Order would have thoughts about that.”

“I don’t care a lick. Not about you or your Order. Scram. The kid stays here and you aren’t welcome in Central anymore.” She pointed to the gates out of the district. Her gang now shifted up to their feet. Outside of the gate, she saw guards shuffle in, though not in any particular hurry.

“He’s marked and claimed.” She repeated, motioning to Hawk, the seal of her order suddenly glowed white on his brow. “Do you know what that seal even is? You’ve seen it, you’ve heard of it, but do you know what it is or how it works?”

It was, perhaps, a touch flashy, but it worked. Wheels dropped her arms and narrowed her eyes. One of her false lashes stuck out on the side, the glue was coming loose.

“Nanites.” She went on, as she’d gotten no answer. “His body is flooded with them. Nanites are tiny super computers, really, the sort of which you might have developed if your families hadn’t been stuck in war for generations.  They urge him to find me. They glow when his position with my Order is threatened. They heal his wounds if he’s injured in the line of duty to the Order and our doctrine, and most importantly, they produce LOST Gas if need be.”

Everyone had a sort of ancestral memory of the yellow death. Lost still killed dozens every year when the wind carried it into Brooks and Lionsroar territory from the unapproachable west. Everyone knew it was one of the worst ways to die, and what ended started the cataclysm.

“You’re a liar.”

“I’m not.” Water set down her kit. “Haven’t you ever wondered why it is Nurses can get by in such a ruthless war-torn world and remain in numbers enough to be effective? How we are strong enough to stand up to all five Families?” She buttoned her long heavy jacket and whipped it off, folding it neatly over an arm. “We have science, Madam. We have technology. Things that you have turned into decorations or abandoned all together.” She motioned to the antique car art. “And so, if I say that I can turn a nice young man into a walking, retching, dying distribution method for mustard gas if I don’t get what I want, do you really want to test me?”

Hawk went ashen, choking on words he didn’t dare say.

Wheels seethed, her nostrils flared out and she stammered. ‘Spike’ moved up behind Wheels and said something in her ear.

“You want to play those sorts of games?” She finally said through tight teeth.

“Sulfurs and potassium is in the human body? More than enough to kill everyone in any direction for a district or two. Have you ever seen a vesicant chemical work its destruction on human flesh? It looks like the skin is boiling as it blisters. And even if the blisters don’t kill you, you’ll die slowly and cruelly of cancer.”

“Fine! Goddamn it!” She stopped, coughed, closed her eyes, and started again. “GD it! Get out, both of you! Zhubi Hawk is Orphan. He’s all yours. Just get out of my sight!” She shrieked as she pointed repeatedly at the gate out of Central. Water lost sight of Spike, and she frowned behind her mask. She leaned down to collect her kit, then motioned and walked with even steady steps toward the gate.

The guard moved out of her way as she approached, some of them smirked. One of them surreptitiously patted her or the back as she passed by. She said nothing.

Hawk stayed quiet until they were well out of Central, and finally stopped, just stopped. “You’re going to kill me? Just like that? Why even save my life?”

She glanced around, then shook her head. She motioned ahead of her, and then tucked into an alcove between abandoned buildings. “I wouldn’t do it, even if it came to it.”

“You can do it, though? You can turn me into the yellow death?”

She looked around again, lowering her voice. “Hell, I don’t know. Theoretically? It’s just one of the tools they give us for intense negotiation. Usually I’d say I could turn myself into walking death, but this seemed more on point.”

“Are you…” He stared at her for a long while, and then slapped his palm to his forehead. “Fuck sake, you’re serious! You the most amazing liar I’ve ever met.”

She whispered urgently. “I didn’t say I couldn’t do, just that I’m not really sure how or if it would really work. It’s theory. Look, mark me, if this EVER comes up again, you’re going to have to put on that same exact look of terror. You got me? You’ve got to sell it if you don’t want both of us killed. You get me?”

He sobered and nodded. “I’ll do my best. I’m not the liar you are.”

“I’m not a liar. I’m selective with information. Anyway, the mask does most of the work.” She gestured to it. “I need a bath. After that we can head out of town.”

“I’d like to see my brothers first, is that okay?”

She considered, then nodded. “Of course. You lead the way.”

They wound their way through Zhubi’s streets, he told her about this shop, that street, the old man who lived in that apartment he’d known as a child, or the district where his mother had run off to when she’d abandoned them. The place was all bricks, she thought. Bricks, frustrated guards, children with skin the color of healthy tree bark, and coal ash.

They entered the Mills district and Hawk’s anecdotes became even more animated. This had once been full of factories that processed the pines that woodsmen dragged in. It still produced most of the lumber used in Brooks, though families of millers had moved in and diversified the place with little family homes tucked between lumber factories and a handful of general stores.

“We’re just around the corner here.” He gestured excitedly.

“How old are the boys?”

“Cat is 16, he’s practically a man in his own right. Very responsible. And Sparrow’s about 12. He’s at that fun age were he’s really become a person, but is still full of energy and enthusiasm. He’s boundless, never tired, always going.” Hawk crowed like a proud father, and Water nodded, understanding.

“It’s weird though, it isn’t so late. There should be lights in the kitchen, I was hoping one of the boys had dinner on.”

Water considered that, scanning the shadows that clung to the family home. She narrowed her eyes, focusing, but saw no flicker of threads from inside the house. Through walls, it was hit or miss, it might not have meant anything, but still. “Be cautious, Hawk. I have a bad feeling.”

He laughed at her and strode into the house, pushing the door out of his way. “Boys! Where’s my dinner?”

He got no answer, and went further in. He stopped, back to her, at an entrance between the front room and the kitchen. “Sweet Winds.” He whispered, and staggered back out of the door way.

She’d seen a man stricken before, and didn’t wait, pushing past him to head into the room.

When soldiers murdered each other, it was a part of a pattern of human nature. Water didn’t like war, but at least she understood its needless place in the course of human history. Seeing children slaughtered was another thing entirely. A thing no one, not nurse or soldier or exorcist or gangster should ever get used to. There was Sparrow and Cat splayed across the kitchen floor. Someone snuck it and caught the little boy off guard, taking him out easily with a knife somewhere unseen, but the blood pooled under his body told Water a great deal. Cat had, naturally, sprung up to defend his brother, but he was a boy, and his attacker was a talented monster. It wasn’t a fair fight.

“Are they…?”

She looked between them, seeing the barest tatters of the boys’ threads. Both of them. Their threads were silver, she noted, but only briefly. “They’re with us for now.” She dropped her kit between them, rolling up her sleeves.

“Who would do this?” She saw a sort of glow out of the corner of her eye, and turned. Hawk’s thread was easily manifest for her to see, glowing a vibrant gold more like a mandala then the simple tell of life she expected.

Instead of answering, she nodded to the wall behind Hawk. In the boys’ blood it read, “Your choice now, Zhubi Hawk. For each day you are outside these city walls, we’ll kill two children. You have many cousins. We know. Kill the witch if you have to. Choice is yours.” This was not the first letter in blood the culprit had written, and the thread around Hawk erupted in a light that about blinded Water. She looked away, turning her attention to stabilize the boys.

“I’ll kill them.”

“Which ones?”

“All of them.”

Water nodded. “Seems you’re fated to at this point.” She threw her kit open, first drawing out a coma inducing drug. It would buy her enough time to figure out what to do next. “I can’t go with you.”

“Then I can’t go. You’ve seen to that.”

She glanced over her shoulder at him. “I’m not following you into a slaughter when I should be here treating patients. Beside the fact that would be a very political move for a Nurse to make, don’t you think?”

“I’m bound to you, you selfish woman! I can’t go that far, you said yourself!”

She shook her head. “I release you, Zhubi Hawk.” The seal on his brow glowed and then faded. “Go bloody your sword, just get out of my hair!”

“You…” He didn’t ask anything else, instead, he ran from the house, hand on the heel of his sword. He’d likely die, and she’d never know what that golden thread meant, but then, she looked down at the boys she treated, and any conflict in her mind over Hawk’s fate vanished.

She couldn’t save them all, and felt no pressure to save those who lived by the sword, even when they were right to do so.

After an injection into each, the boys fell into an artificial slumber, their breathing even more shallow than the dying. She was about out of time, and conflict returned.

Sparrow was cool to the touch, he’d been dying longer, a wound in his back having left him to bleed out. Cat’s wounds were more numerous, he’d been stabbed multiple times. Both boys would need serious treatment and immediately. She was only one person.

She had to choose one, and her stomach knotted up.

The Hard Questions:

Which boy will Water abadon?

What member of Wheels’ gang gets away from Hawk?

Will Orchid leave Zhubi and take her son outside of the grasp (and safety) of the Brooks?

All of these questions and more will be answered in Episode 2: What the Exorcist Saw. Stay tuned! And remember, if you you want to help this story grow, get in on the discussion, and influence the answer to those questions, check out my Patreon for this experiment in storytelling!

Telepathic Communication and Stephen King

Let’s say time travel was possible. Let’s say with the use of time travel, evil book-haters (your ‘proud non-readers’) could erase the memories of every book you’ve ever read from your brain.

If I had one book I would miss the most? It would probably be Stephen King’s On Writing. It may or may not be the best writing book out there. You may or may not even like Stephen King. But somehow this book hit me right at the beginning of a time when I seriously considered becoming a writer and it simply stuck in my head. Stories from King’s childhood blend with ideas on writing, his maturation and growth into an adult and professional writer teach valuable lessons about the realities of publishing, (as true as they were at the time, of course.) There’s also some weird, teaching moments that stick in my head.

Like how writing is telepathy.

Now, you should read the book, because King explains it better than I ever possibly could. Here’s my short version. Writing is a solitary practice where you sit alone in a room and bang away at keys, muttering to yourself, and moaning how no one understands you. But what you put on the page is telepathy. I write these words, evoking images and ideas, and somewhere, possibly on the other side of the planet, those images and ideas pop into your head. Voila! Telepathy!

I wonder how different King’s view of writings would be if he’d had the internet the whole time. (Oh, by the way, turns out he’s now ON TWITTER! If you twitter, you should follow him, because he’s kind of a brilliant crafty guy still full of great ideas.)

See, as a writer now, I’m writing alone in a room, but I’m also out in a vast network of readers, writers, and the occasional evil book-hater. Though, probably not at the same time or else I get NOTHING done. I can communicate with reviewers, agents, but most importantly, I can communicate with my readers directly. And depending on the road I’m walking, I can generate feedback immediately. I can gauge responses as I work. There’s a risk there, of course, in over exposing an audience. (That’s something I’ve addressed in other chaos fiction in different ways.) What I think is really interesting, with tools like Patreon, I can even take challenges from readers as I’m writing. In this way, the telepathy is now a two way street. I imagine a rubber ball, I hear from my readers what color they picture it as, the rubber ball becomes that color in my writing, and voila! Interactive, two way telepathy.

Orders and Organizations: Nurses

The Order of Nurses are an organization of sworn Orphans (meaning that you have no Family allegiances.) Like all Orders, they have a specific doctrine, an agreement with the heads of the Five Families to determine where their rights begin and end and how to stay out of conflict with the families.

Their mission is largely one of mercy, as they’ve spent the last millennium or so collecting and building as well as advancing medical technology while the rest of the known world collapsed under the stress of constant conflict.

Order Locations

The Hospital

Nurse Characters

Sister Water,

World Info: The Five Families

The Stonewall Family

Info goes here.

The Brooks Family

Shares a border with Lionsroar. Their people prefer close cropped hair styles. The capital city of the Brooks Family is Zhubi.

The Lionsroar Family

Info goes here.

The Horseleather Family

Info goes here.

The Rosedies Family

Info goes here.

Best Practices, Getting Started

Advice, rules on writing, guidelines, demands at gun point… It’s only going to get you so far.

The straight up truth is this: you get better at writing by writing and reading.

That’s it. You can read techniques and advice and inspiration and tricks of the trade all day ever day, and yay you’re reading, which counts, but none of those magic tricks are going to work out better for you than gettin’ down and actually get intimate with the process. That means butt-in-seat and eyes-on-words.

So you’ll have to sort out for yourself what you’re going to be writing. (Or we can talk about it more later!) But what should you be reading? Everything, anything. Good, bad, in your genre, not in your genre, fiction and non fiction and poetry (FOR DOG SAKE read some poetry. Or listen to it read well if you don’t know how to scan.) Just make sure you’re branching out. There’s something for you to learn in any book, article, or even blog post you put your eyes on, even if it’s just ‘I will never ever do that in MY writing.’ Don’t read the same stuff over and over, don’t cling to one author, or one nationality, or one language or (Dog forbid) one genre! Likewise, if you only read nonfiction? Yeah… that’s going to show up in your writing. Just like everything else, luv, diversity or it’s crap.

Want more specifics to get started, okay!

Writing Advice. The practice of the craft, totally worth reading about so long as you don’t let yourself read these things instead of writing. Start here. Chuck Wendig’s The Kick-Ass Writer is easily digestible writing advice. Actually a thousand bits of digestible writing advice. It is brilliant and helpful and this guy is an inspiration for me personally. If you want a taste before you get his book, go poke around at his website TerribleMinds because it is SO good. He engages, he educates, he profanes in ways you didn’t even realize were possible. Fair warning, SO MUCH NAUGHTY LANGUAGE. That’s how you use the language, though, so even if you don’t personally cuss, you have to admire the way he’s experimenting and bends the language to his own needs is magical. Even if it’s usually poop-based magic.

Read Broadly. Also? Read women. Most people getting started don’t even realize how few women they’ve read compared to male authors. Most people wouldn’t even consider looking at the gender of the author unless they had a reason to. So, I’m giving you a reason! Currently, publishing leans very heavily toward praising male writers and tossing women writers into a genre ghetto to be profited off of, but rarely elevated or celebrated. Women have a harder time getting published, getting advertising money, or good shelving or reviews. (I’m not gonna debate this stuff, a hundred other authors have already gone over this phenomenon.) The important thing is this: you probably don’t have access to the same amazing women writers as you have access to amazing men writers.  Which means to read broadly, to listen to women’s voices, and learn from them, you’re going to have to put in extra work to find women writers.

And what is true of women writers? Is a million times more true for writers of color. You need to listen to the voices, stories, and language use of people of color. You really really do. It’ll make you a better writer and a better person because it will broaden your world view and that makes you a better writer.

Start with Octavia Butler. Really. Please. Go and read her to get started. As much of her work as you can get your hands on. THEN come back and I’ll have more recommendations for you. Or you can find more authors from all over on your own!

Read articles and stories by queer writers! Read articles and stories by trans* authors! Understand that the binaries many of us are raised with aren’t the only options. ESPECIALLY IF YOU WRITE FANTASY AND SCI FI! Here’s 41 YA titles by and about Trans* people. Don’t let the YA thing chase you off. It’s a term that doesn’t mean much anyway.  As for queer authors? Well, you may already be reading them, but go back and say, read Fight Club now that you know it’s author is gay. (If you haven’t read it before, and you’re over 17, you probably don’t need to, there are plenty of other options for queer reading!) Need more? Sure! CJ Cherryh, Audre Lord, Caitlin Kiernan as well as Alice Sheldon who’s expression is complicated and who’s stories are great.

Read books by authors who don’t speak English as a first language or at least speak it as one of many. Authors who don’t speak English as their primary language or are polyglots have such a beautiful take on language and really make a lot of demands of the language. I often find Umberto Ecco, for example, reads right on the line between prose and poetry because there is such a musicality to every sentence. It’s also kinda tough. But try it anyway.

There! Get out there! Read. We’ll talk about sitting down and writing next time. Yay!

Episode 1 Teaser

The Families have always been at War.

We are Orphans.

The smoke lingered, mixing and mingling with the evening fog. It blew in after the killing was complete enough to remove most human life from the wasteland. This was farmland a generation before, but the conflict between the Brooks and the Lionroar grew aggressive enough to shift this far south. Now, the place was mud or broken, lifeless earth hard packed by horses, carts, and marching soldiers.  Soldiers massacre soldiers in this farmland. A hundred soldiers on thirty, and the results were about what you’d expect. Forty soldiers lay dead, or nearly so, the rest from either side scattered or withdrawn.

But there was life yet, beyond the things that grow from the iron-enriched soil and the bug eggs waiting inside all of us to hatch and become the crawling things that recycle us. Sister Water sensed human life left here yet, she felt the thin strands of silver that trail from a human soul so long as it hangs on to life. So, one by one, she searched for the strongest or the most tightly woven threads and followed them back to the dying. If a thread was too frazzled, thin, or perhaps stained by a life of cruelty she ignored them as they snapped or simply faded away.

Her duty wasn’t to save all of them. Technically, her duty wasn’t to save any of them.

Water followed a thick but fraying thread a meter or two into where the fracas reached its peak. She slid off her horse when it threatened to trample too many of the dead. From her saddle, she collected her kit and her sword. She had a gun, too, the leather of it’s holster remained as smooth as the day she bought it, with a ring of rust around the button that released it for drawing. It probably needed to be cleaned and oiled. It stayed in a holster on her hip. Following the thread again, she adjusted her gasmask, practical as much as a clear way to spot a Nurse on the battlefield. At the end of the thread she found a man too old to be in combat like this, holding his guts tight into his stomach cavity. As she approached, obvious as she was in a long coat marked with Nurse sigils and wearing the mask, he lifted a shaking arm and held a rusted revolver at her. Depending on which myths he ascribed to, he would have been wiser to leave the gun on the ground or else fire at her.

In her off hand, she slid her hand along his thread, touching it, then, tapped it once, and sending a shockwave along it to his soul. He dropped the gun and gagged, then sighed as the pain became a distant concern. She turned her hand and gasped the thread, wondering as she often did, if he could see it.

“Are you going to save me or what?”

“What will you do if I save you?”

He sat up a little straighter, feeling around for the gun he’d dropped, though his hand wasn’t moving in accord with his intent; he was numb and too close to death. “I’ll find the shit that tried to kill me and I’ll kill him!”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why? He tried to kill me: it’s survival!”

She sighed and sat her kit down, using her good hand to draw her sword. “So you’ll kill him, and someone will kill you and then someone will think to avenge you and kill someone else, and on and on it goes.”

“That’s just the way of people; I would think a Nurse would understand how war works.”

“Better than you think.”

“Look, this bleeding isn’t getting any better; you can’t just leave me to die.”

“You are correct.” The mask muffled her voice, and so when talking to the dying, it always felt like she shouted just to be heard. Now he heard the serious dip in her tenor, and felt the gravity of her words. “I cannot just leave you to die. That would be cruel.”

She snipped the thread, as always unsure if he even understood what was happening. He died easily and painlessly. For a moment, she thought she felt the flicker of a confused ghost, but it lasted only so long as the blink of an eye before it was gone. Anyway, if it had lingered, that was another Order’s duty, not hers.

She turned following the fading flickering of silver threads still present in the air and blinked. She’d have taken her mask off to rub her eyes, but that was dangerous. She looked again, scanning the threads, her attention drawn away from the scores of bodies, the overturned and burning carts, and the half-mad horse struggling to move on a broken leg. Without the threads, she’d have given into despair a long time ago. Half of her Order wound up that way anyway, but no one talked about it and interaction between Nurses was rare enough that they all pretended they didn’t know the odds against them.

Introspection didn’t have a place on the killing field.

Perhaps she’d imagined it, a trick of the light or exhaustion or any number of things that go wrong with fragile human senses. But no! There it was again, dancing among the fading silver threads, a tightly woven thread glinting gold, not silver.

She’d never seen anything like it before. No training suggested it was even a possibility, and it wasn’t in any of the hundred or so books she’d read in her training. Human souls trailed silver threads. That was the beginning and end of it.

So of course, with this impossibility ahead of her, Water followed in the direction of the gold thread.  The wind changed, blowing her coat against her with a sudden gust, tugging her long dark hair out of her collar. The gasmask blocked out scents in most cases, but the way the gust came in from the west and pushed back the mist as well as the gunpowder smoke, she thought it might be Violet, the Sweetly Scented Wind. It would have been pleasant, in another time, another place, to take her mask off and breath in the flower-scent. But rotting bodies smelled sweet too, and she choked in her throat to think of the foul combination of carrion and the Violet wind.

She narrowed her eyes, focused in on the golden thread, and followed, sick to her stomach now or not.

The path took her near the screaming horse, so she set her kit down near the ailing beast. “Shhh,” she said to it. “I can’t just tap your thread and help you sleep, friend. For that I’m sorry.” She knelt, opened her kit, and pulled out the folding drawers to find a small jar of tranquilizer and a large syringe inside. The animal cried again, and tried to get off its side, huffing hard in its panic. “Shhhh,” she stuck the needle in the bottle and drew a few milligrams, eyed the horse, a large practical steed, and then drew more. “Shhhh, poor beast. It must be getting hard to breathe on your side like that. Shhh. Be calm. I’ll help you.” She approached its head, petting it, its big black terrified eyes searched her mask, but did not bite her in its madness. Injected, the animal’s breathing slowed, and eventually its eyes closed. “There now.” She stepped back to her kit. “We have a little more time now that you’re sleeping, but not much before you crush your own lungs. What an awful way the gods fashioned you.” She palpated the leg, a front break, but not a terrible one. He could live past this. She first cut away the cart he was still attached to and pulled its remains away. Then, from her kit, she took out the bone-knitting compound many Nurses carried and carefully injected it into the animal’s leg. Nanites in a protein bath would flood the area, and then reknit the bone in under an hour. Many Nurses would have shot the animal and walked away. But not all. Bone-knit was expensive, but not rare within her Order, horses were expensive, and ones as strong and brave as this actually were rare. His leg would be heavier than the others for about a year or two, but he’d run again, and he’d run for her. She said sacred words and pressed a hand to his forehead, feeling warmth in her palm. Then she rose, gathered her kit and searched the air for the golden thread.

Few of the silver threads remained, and so the golden one was even easier to find. Half a meter, and she could touch the thread, leaving her fingers on it as she traced it to its source. First she saw a body or two unnaturally turned on their backs, with bloody palm prints on their chests and their shirts torn open. By the third body, she caught sight of the cause for the corpses’ strange staging as well as the thread’s owner. A boy almost too young to be at war, stooped over a dead man, pressing on his chest with bloody hands, trying to force the dead man to breathe. There were cases in which that sort of resuscitation worked. This was not one of them. Of course, this boy soldier couldn’t see the threads the way a Nurse could.

“It won’t work, he’s already gone.” She said.

“What the hell would you know about it?” The boy choked as he spoke, turning to look, and swallowing his irreverence with a gasp.

“Rather a lot, I suppose. His soul’s quit. It’s just a lump of inert matter now.” She followed the line of the boy’s thread, much more frayed here, near the source, than she’d first surmised. He was in a bad way, dying, and yet here he was, wasting his energy on others. “You will die soon without intervention.”

“You’re going to kill me? That’s what Nurses do, right? Sweep through and put the dying out of their misery?” The boy stood from the body he’d leaned over, and at his full height, even as hunched with pain as he was, she was sure he was not a boy. He was old enough to know what his body was for, but young enough that his dark skin was smooth and free of scars. He wore his black hair shaved close to the scalp like many men in the Brooks’ territory, and his jaw was fine. What she could see from his torn shirt, his arms and chest were fine too, with the slim musculature of a natural athlete and not a male peacock with bulging meat for display. He did not see her smirk behind her mask while she looked him over.

“Is that the myth around my Order today? It changes so often and by Family, that I cannot be bothered to keep up.” She sat her kit down and knelt to open it. “I’m going to save your life, if you let me. Tell me where you’re injured, because I cannot see it myself.”

He shook his head. “I’m not. I didn’t even get hit. The man fell and he grabbed at my leg, but I’m fine. I shook him away easily.”

She looked at him, squinting, she advanced on him. “Don’t be silly, I can see that you’re dying, possibly bleeding out where you stand. I just don’t see where.”

He shook his head. “I feel no pain I’m not… In…jured…” As he protested, he thumped his heart, smoothed his hands along his fine chest, only hesitating when he touched his hips. The color drained from his face, and his shock subsided, allowing him to feel his pain for the first time since his injury. He reached between his legs, putting his palm down on his inside thigh, and when he pulled his hand away, it was slick with bright red blood. “He stabbed me? On the ground, moments from death, he tried to drag me down with him. How did I not feel this?”

He slumped to the ground beside the dead man he could not bring back, and she dropped to a knee beside him. “Sometimes in the heat of things, some people ignore their own needs. It’s a rare thing. And a damn foolish thing for a soldier,” she added, tapping his thread so that he breathed easier, oh so slightly disconnected from his body by the jolt. “Lucky for you I came along, huh? To end your misery.”

“I don’t want to die.” His words were dreamy, his eyes focusing on the horizon.

“Few do.”

“I’ve child sisters at home that need my pay.”

Ah. One of those. He wasn’t telling a story, men in his condition were incapable of lying. She sighed. “I’m not going to kill you. You’re carrying on worse than the horse.” She pulled open his pant leg at the thigh to find a deep gash, one that had hit an artery, and by all accounts should have killed him already. She applied pressure with one hand, drawing out the finest stapler she had to pull the artery itself closed. The staples did one part, a dose of nanites did the rest. She calculated in her head her expenses this month and sighed while the little machines stitched shut his tissue in neat layers. “You keep breathing, you’ll be just fine.”

He nodded, sweating, but forced himself to breath more softly.

She said sacred words and put a palm on his forehead, feeling warmth between her skin and his. His eyes fluttered, and as she pulled her hand away, his brow glowed with an Order’s sacred symbol for just a moment. “I’ve marked you as mine. You are now freed of any responsibility to your Family and your talon. I am claiming your life for mine as I have saved you from death. You will be in service to me until such time as I release you, even up to and after the point of death if I so choose. This is the right granted to me by my Order and the accordance given to the Order by all of the Families. You are now bound to me.”

He blinked, processing her words, then went wide eye. “I, what?”

“I think it was rather clear, that’s the point of these oaths, you’ll have a written copy later, of course, to send back to your Family and people.” She stood up.

“You’re heartless.” He cursed at her, rising to his feet. He staggered, but did not fall. He should have, even in his healing condition; he should have been too weak to stand.

“It’s funny how often I’m told that. I never will understand the accusation, but maybe that’s on account of the heart we have removed during our induction ceremonies.”

He didn’t realize she was being sardonic. That rarely translated through the mask well, and few people outside of the Order could truly appreciate a Nurse’s sense of graveside humor. She sighed. “Call me what you like. That horse there is yours to ride for now.” The beast of a horse she’d treated earlier was on its legs now, moving slowly but calmly, called to her by the seal she’d put on its brow, as she had with the young man.

“My name is Water.” She told him.

He spat, and walked toward the horse, sullen and still dizzy from his blood loss.

What a Tease!

This is a teaser, with the full episode to be posted on or abouts the 15th of this month! Just to give you a taste, if I were going to end the episode here, I’d include questions like:

• Why won’t the Brooks give the man up? What do they know about him Water doesn’t?

• What happens when someone tried to run away and break a Nurse’s claim over their life? How bad does it get?

• Who saw Water slay the man who pointed a gun at her, and what do they want to do about it?

Don’t start thinking up answers yet! The questions may change by the time the whole episode is written.  This is just to give an idea how this is going to work. Want to hear more? Get involved? Be a part of making choices and changing the story? Check out full explanation of this experiment over at my Patreon site when it goes live.

Character: Sister Water

Sister Water by Jenna Fowler

Sister Water is a journyest Nurse, meaning she’s gone through extensive training and worked along side a more experienced Nurse for a year or more. Now she’s out on her own following the doctrine and any personal oaths she may serve.

Specialties: Water is a natural at spotting and tracing soul threads in an immediate area, but is pretty rubbish at tracing them over great distances. She’d never make much of a tracker as a result. She, like two thirds of the Nurses’ Order, can’t see ghosts very well and catches glimpse only very rarely.

Medically, Water was trained nanite technology at which she eventually specialized. She has several experimental nanites in testing, but nothing documented yet as ‘safe for use.’

Oaths: She has not taken a Do No Harm oath. That is not particularly unusual. Neither does she practice the Total End philosophy. At least, not exclusively.

More about Sister Water as it becomes true.

Watch This Space

Before too long, free fiction, world building, and writing advice for you from me.