Blog

Below is the first page of my work in progress, The Blizzard and The Sieve.

Let me know what your impressions are by going to my Contact page. Thank you.

Heartwood

At the end of this iteration, the ritual of redemptive violence became the wheel upon which humanity was broken, braided and ultimately buried. If they were given another chance, it’s unlikely that they would live any other way. Condemned by their nature, humans took it upon themselves to address the indignities and injustices that plagued their waking lives and haunted their innermost thoughts. In their desperation they carved meaning and morals out of the void, mercifully unaware she was waiting with open arms and maw. Over time, ape-folk, as they called themselves, grew so preoccupied with why they were alive that they forgot how to live.

Few things better affirmed their existence than satisfying an irrepressible urge to witness someone else’s suffering. They glorified grief, made spectacles of revenge and left nothing in their wake save for a garden of ash and bones. Such was the way of the world. Yet, one of these tender wretches dared to crawl out of a pit of their own making and in doing so, if this illustrious tribunal sees fit to grant it, also cultivated fertile ground for a fresh start.

***

The earth trembled beneath a caravan full of celebratory travelers migrating north from the Carpathian plateau. Their destination—an isolated, timber-bound town known to the locals as Bardow. As it was every year on Apprentice Day in this little slice of nowhere, echoes of their honey sweet and syncopated melodies heralded their welcomed arrival. Refusing to navigate through the treacherous eastern forest, the traveling-folk instead meandered around rolling emerald hills and fallow farms dotted with cabins, barns and workshops. Hiding in an unassuming homestead nearest to the forest’s threshold lived the famed master carpenter Bogdan Marime and his apprentice Casimir, who failed to craft a masterpiece in time for the festival that transcended the towering expectations built around him by Bogdan and his beloved creations.