Adregem ཐིཋྀ

@adregem.bsky.social

934 Followers 704 Following

Professional science writer. Unprofessional novelist. Mom with half an empty nest. Insomniac. She/her. That is not me in the picture.

It opens its fanged mouth and makes a noise somewhere between the wail of a grieving child and the sound the demon ghost lady made in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Nazis opened the Ark of the Covenant.
I drop the useless piece of rubber on the floor of the tunnel and indulge in the thrill of victory for about a second and a half before the Moth King wraps his shadowy arms around me.
I hate porting, but I’ve never been this glad to be whisked into a cold tempest of darkness and nausea.

I follow him back through the tunnel of thorns to the forever sinister-looking palace. He leads me into the throne room, where a few courtiers appear to be nursing hangovers. A vaguely female creature shaped like a mushroom blinks at me with wet, glazed eyes before laying her spotted head down on the wooden table close to a puddle of something I cannot and do not wish to identify. A tall man with skin like a birch tree lies sprawled and silent on the floor, half under one of the tables. I guess I missed the party.

Gray tabby cat on a chair next to a red tablecloth ready to pounce

Ocer muttered to himself quite a lot after leaving the Ardal, but he didn’t reveal his plans, either out loud or in any coherent form inside his mind. He was too dulled by alcohol to formulate comprehensive ideas.
His imagination drifted between vague alternatives. A monastery in the southern hills. A ravvener he’d heard of through the king, who might be able to fortify his next hiding place. All his options would require money, and his money was still in the Ardal.
His ruminations were dull, his panic agonizing. As the person responsible for it, I spent most of the journey curled up and miserable in a dark corner of his subconscious.

The smoke twisted, heaved, and turned into a shape, tightening and solidifying until it became like smooth, black glass encasing something dark and churning, like oil rising from a pit.
It had arms, I realized with horror, and a head was taking shape atop broad, masculine shoulders.
“Soryl,” Win said, drawing his sword. But still, I could not compel myself to run.
As the shape glided past the campfire, its heaving, shiny surface caught the flicker of orange flame. Behind us, the branches we’d tied our horses to groaned as the panicked animals tried to free themselves.
The thing had eyes now. They flicked between Win, me, and the horses.

Win snarled at the fortress as if beholding a dragon’s lair.
“Relax,” I said. “We made it. We’re almost done.”
He chuffed disbelievingly. “Hardly. Anyone can ride down a road for a few days. The hard part is getting in and out of that place. Getting *you* in and out of that place.”
I turned my horse down the road. “Tell that to my ass. It’s had just about as much of this saddle as it can handle.”
“Soryl’s ass,” Win said dutifully, “the hard part is getting in there.”

Human skulls with brain and bone anatomy from old Victorian era book titled A Pictorial Manikin, or Movable Atlas of the Human Body

Mom is in the seating area with two people I recognize from her book club. They’re drinking the Crooked Oak’s coffee and eating the Crooked Oak’s bacon and egg sandwiches.
“For fuck’s sake,” I mutter. I blow past them and before I can think too hard about what I’m about to do, I put my hand flat on the faery door and shove it. It closes with a satisfying click that I almost don’t hear over Mom’s gasp of horror.
“What are you doing?” she shrieks.
I take my hand off the door and watch in dismay as it swings open again.
“I was going to close the fucking thing,” I say.
“Why? Why would you want to do such a thing? This town has waited more than a century for someone to open that door!”
“You’re being dramatic. No one cared that much until last night.”

Joric tugged at his collar. “I realize it’s a bit … unconventional, as gifts go, what with the … uh … specifics …”
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “I don’t have anything like this. Thank you.”
He smiled crookedly.
How on earth had he chosen this of all things? She could think of no one else who could have seen so deeply into her heart. No one. Even Doctor Brook, who often asked her to assist in the surgery, would have thought the subject too improper for her feminine sensibilities.
She clutched the book to her chest and tried to find the right words for the moment. “I think I was about to scold you,” she said, which were not the right words at all. “But I can’t quite remember why.”
“For being impertinent,” he suggested. “And a right ass.”
“Oh, yes. That was it.

Aneira’s already low mood dipped below sea level. “I was hoping for soothing words,” she said, tugging at her oppressively scratchy lace neckline. “Something like, ‘Your wedding was a delight, and your new husband is so handsome. And he adores you!’”
“That would be mostly disingenuous,” Reyna said over a mouthful of figs. “But he is handsome. I won’t say I’m not surprised. I’ve only ever seen him in a purple hood. I thought it was to cover up his troll face.”
Aneira resisted the urge to close her eyes and sigh. “I think it might be so he can walk around in public without parting the screaming throngs.”
“Which would also happen if he had a troll face,” Reyna pointed out.

The image changed again, but Fion had already lost track of the story. The air had become cloying. Mutterings had grown up around her like weeds. The older woman directly in front of her turned all the way around in her seat, her eyes burning with accusation.
Willem, unaffected by any of it, heaved a satisfied breath and crossed his legs, bumping his knee against Fion’s leg.
Fion contorted her body into a sideways position to detach herself from Willem’s touch, but now she was crowding Eliza, which seemed grossly unfair.
“I can’t,” she muttered. “Stay here with Emiline.” She stood and pushed her way past Willem, ignoring the pointed groans of every second row occupant between her and the aisle as they endured their fourth interruption in five minutes.
Fion stormed her way through the standing crowd into the empty upper half of the theater, and into the lobby.

Gray tabby cat sleeping on her back with one tooth showing

Her breath left her in an autonomous shriek, and her body crowded itself into the corner. Someone was sitting next to her.
She was sure this cab had been empty when she entered it.
The person in the neighboring seat doubled over, as if he was about to be sick, and Fion had a moment where she feared for her life and for her shoes, and possibly the hem of her skirt. Then, just as quickly, she realized who was occupying the shadow beside her, clutching his stomach, wheezing as though a punch in the gut had taken the breath out of him.
“Joric?”
He flailed one hand in a haphazard, sideways wave, which he possibly intended as a poor reassurance that his condition was quite satisfactory, thank you very much.

Mood board for the fantasy novel "Light Wielding and Other Mortal Magics."The moon behind the clouds; bats in a cave; a death's head moth, fog in the redwood forest; a lighthouse, cracked earth; a sword. Moth and mushroom details.

Mood board for the fantasy novel Losing You Backward: The interior of a Victorian era rail car; Victorians at a ball; an English street, gas lamps; a woman in a ball gown; clocks; an apothecary wall; a Victorian era seaside resort

Mood board for the fantasy novel Death & the Dreamer: the sky in a forest, a mossy angel statue, a distant castle, a vase of wilted flowers, a doorway to a castle, skulls in a necropolis, gravestones, a fireplace. Tropes: dark fantasy, morally gray protagonist, necromancy, forbidden magic, toxic love. Content warning: implied and off page non-graphic sexual abuse (male victims) and violence

Mood board for the sci-fi novel Miraculous Horrors: Helen of Troy; an abandoned railroad tunnel, a crossbow, cell division, soldiers marching in a muddy field, a hyena, a snowy palace, a man walking away in a field. Tropes: pursued protagonist; lovers to enemies; genetic engineering; cloning; resurrection; obsessive love; mind manipulation

He drew a long breath and laid both hands on the table. “On the nineteenth of Midwinter, it will snow on the Long Walk.”
She’d feared he was about to say something unpleasant, like he’d escaped from an asylum. Or he was a wanted criminal. Or worse, married. But that …“It doesn’t snow on the Long Walk, or anywhere in Fabel,” she said.
“On the nineteenth of Midwinter, it will. You will wake at first light to a racket, and when you look from the window in your bedchamber, you will see a coachman trying to dig his front wheel out of a snowdrift with the butt end of his rifle.”
Fion had only recently considered the possibility that Joric might really be able to see the future. Now that he was sitting across from her, describing some imagined tomorrow like a fortune teller at a traveling fair, it felt more ridiculous than it had in contemplation.

Aneira paced. What an awful, awful wedding night. Roger had never been much of a lover, and she hadn’t particularly enjoyed his company, but he’d never made her feel unwanted. Her wedding night with Roger had been many times over more exciting than her wedding night with the Lich, the kingdom’s most notorious villain.
At the very least, it should have been thrilling. Dashing villains were, after all, every woman’s secret fantasy. Weren’t they? She hadn’t really considered that villain might also mean neglectful and rude.

Watch duty map showing the locations of the Chute and Mooney fires, July 22, 2:02 pm

A woman in a broad-brimmed hat with a cascade of blue ostrich feathers gave Fion a sideways appraisal and fanned herself, as if Fion’s appearance was responsible for the heatwave.
“I’m underdressed,” Fion said.
Every other person at the Grand Centre Theatre was treating the lantern show like an opera, including Eliza, who wore a wine red dress cut just high enough in the front to avoid a scandal, but not quite high enough in the back to do the same. Eliza’s overskirt was split in four places, revealing a layer of lace-trimmed cream-colored satin. She looked stunning, as she always did. In her pale peach tea dress, Fion felt like a brown sparrow next to a crested partridge.
She fought a mad desire to go home and change into something finer, or perhaps not change at all and just stay at home.

I allow myself a few more minutes of self-deprecation. No one is coming for me. I betrayed the Evernight to come here. I don’t have friends. I’ve only got me.
How do people escape from windowless cells in Hollywood? They wait until the guard brings dinner. They snatch the keys while he isn’t looking. Or they knock him over the head with a bone they pried from the decomposed corpse of the last guy who died in their cell.
Yep, I’m fucked.

Win and I stood at opposite ends of the tent and changed with our backs to each other. “You missed it again,” he said when I turned around.
I snorted. “I’ve heard it’s pretty easy to miss.”
He shook his bedroll out and tossed it on the leather floor of our tent, unfazed. “Lies. I’m telling you, it’s like a fucking monument.”
I folded my hands and gazed at the ceiling in mock supplication. “Goddess of Truth …” I said in my most reverent voice. “Make him shut the fuck up.”
“You gotta be grateful for what you’re given,” he said, grinning. “I don’t have magic, I’m not smart, and I can’t sing. But I do have a big—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I threw my bedroll down next to his.

“Between the two of us, we have all our collective memories,” Fion said. “Doesn’t it seem like one of us should remember that conversation?”
He swirled his glass and ignored the mind whispers telling him to drink fast and hearty, so this parting might not go so hard on his conscience. “I have no memory of discussing that with you, so perhaps it just wasn’t something we thought to do.”
“Or perhaps we never decided anything, because the ledger decided for us. Perhaps the ledger is because it has always been.”
Joric chuckled. “I bought it at a stationer’s. I don’t think it’s divine.”
“But writing the times down is something I would have thought of. I have thought of it. So why didn’t I do it? And what if I did it now, just to see what happens?”
“You won’t. There are too many unknowns, so you won’t.”

Aneira blinked. “But don’t you … I’m confused.”
“If you’re asking me if I plan to consummate our marriage, the answer is no. That won’t be necessary.”
If there had been a fire burning in the gloriously beautiful fireplace, the only sound in the room would have been the merry crackling of combusting logs, but it was too warm for fires, so the room filled instead with silent awkwardness.
“But … oh, you’re being gallant,” Aneira said. Gallant was good. Gallant was the opposite of cruel. “You really don’t have to be. I’m not a maid. I was married for two years to Roger, gods rest him, so I know how this works and what’s supposed to happen next and I think you should also know that I am not unwilling and in fact I find you quite handsome, despite all the scowling.”

I waste a whole afternoon in the mortal world, trading another one of the king’s dubiously acquired gold pieces for enough cash to buy a recurve bow and more arrows and steel points than I probably need.
The mist demon that took Leo carried a sword. It never occurred to me to learn how to use any other kind of weapon. I have no experience with a bow, unless you count the archery class I took in high school because it was the only PE class on offer that didn’t require any running.

Joric waded into the receding surf. Fion kicked her legs out to keep them out of the water, but the next wave was already darkening and rising into a whitecapped peak, and Joric was marching right into it. “Keep still,” he said. “If I drop you, I’ll have to save you.”
“Oh my gods,” Fion squealed.
Joric turned his body sideways to the surf, so she was facing the water. She sucked in a panicky breath and gave him a pleading look, but he only grinned and tipped his chin towards the approaching deluge.
The wave reached for them, its foamy white edge stretching into fingers, dragging the smoother, glossy blue-green water behind it. It hit Joric at the waist, but he was like a tree trunk in a storm, barely bending against the rush of frigid water.

Joric dissolved in the usual way, like a sandcastle at high tide.
The bow-fronted shop corner blanched and fell apart in blotches, and the racket of carriage wheels and hooves grew distant. A tranquil second passed.
The darkness shattered, and the resonant echoes of horseshoes striking the road turned rhythmic. Slower, but harder around the edges.
A train. Oh, shit.
Blobby spheres of light along a canopy of woody brown. A long row of blurry red geometry. Joric’s brain identified the interior of a corridor coach a half second before his thighs slammed into the hardwood top rail of one of the seats.

Ryan is a freckled redhead who looks maybe nineteen. About fifteen minutes into our trek, I hear him busting with laughter and turn in time to watch his fist pass right through my left shoulder.
“You didn’t even feel that?” he exclaims.
“No,” I say, rubbing my shoulder, not because I did feel it but because it’s weird as hell when someone who can talk to you and walk next to you puts his hand all the way through your body.
He swings at me again. I dodge, scowling.
“I wouldn’t have really hit you,” he says.
I glare at him. “Please phase through someone else.”
“You’re not fun,” he grumbles.

Mood board for the sci-fi novel Miraculous Horrors: Helen of Troy; an abandoned railroad tunnel, a crossbow, cell division, soldiers marching in a muddy field, a hyena, a snowy palace, a man walking away in a field. Tropes: pursued protagonist; lovers to enemies; genetic engineering; cloning; resurrection; obsessive love; mind manipulation

“My brother. I’m looking for my brother. Leo Hale.” I fix my eyes on his chin. I’m now almost certain he has a face, but I have to piece it together one feature at a time since looking at it would mean making eye contact, and I would really like to not have to do that again.
He takes an audible breath. I can’t figure out why this strikes me as strange until I realize that breathing requires biology of some kind. Lungs. A ribcage. A need for oxygen. I try to reconcile this with the monster sitting in front of me.

Mood board for the fantasy novel Death & the Dreamer: the sky in a forest, a mossy angel statue, a distant castle, a vase of wilted flowers, a doorway to a castle, skulls in a necropolis, gravestones, a fireplace. Tropes: dark fantasy, morally gray protagonist, necromancy, forbidden magic, toxic love. Content warning: implied and off page non-graphic sexual abuse (male victims) and violence

Mood board for the fantasy novel Losing You Backward: The interior of a Victorian era rail car; Victorians at a ball; an English street, gas lamps; a woman in a ball gown; clocks; an apothecary wall; a Victorian era seaside resort

Mood board for the fantasy novel "Light Wielding and Other Mortal Magics."The moon behind the clouds; bats in a cave; a death's head moth, fog in the redwood forest; a lighthouse, cracked earth; a sword. Moth and mushroom details.

Win grumbled and folded his arms. Ignoring him, I closed my eyes and ran my hand slowly along the surface of my light jar.
There’s only the glass. Smooth and cool under my fingertips.
“It’ll take too long,” he complained.
My eyes flicked open. “It will if you break my concentration.”
“I’m glad I was born without magic because I could never be that fucking patient.”
“Yes. Clearly. Just let me do this, Win.”
He groaned again, with extra drama, and clamped his hand over his mouth as if that was the only way to guarantee his own silence.

My bedroom door opens with a violent bang. Victoria, Marco, and Ryan burst through it, swords out, but the fight is over. The sylph crumples into a glassy heap on the floor.
I expect her body to adhere to the mist theme and waft away, but that’s not what happens. Instead, she turns into a gross, lumpy, luminescent puddle.
“What was that all about?” Marco nudges a melting clod of sylph with the tip of his sword, as if late-night attacks from sylphs are fairly routine and he’s pleased he didn’t have to overly involve himself with this one.

A passing cloud engulfed the sun, turning the ambiance inside Books & Remedies from bright and welcoming to two factors below dreary.
Fion twisted the metal dials on the gas lamps, scowling. They were no substitute for sunshine.
She was in the darkest back corner of the shop, tending a stubborn oil lamp, when the bells chimed.
The door closed with a thunk, but no footsteps proceeded into the shop proper. Whoever had just walked in was lingering at the entrance, uncertain.

I huffed. “The point is, if someone out there knows what I am, it changes everything. I’m not sure it’s safe for you to stay with me anymore.”
“What?” A half-dozen emotions passed over his face, one after the other. “That’s the most backward thing I’ve ever heard you say. I’m your guard. Are you trying to tell me my job keeping you safe isn’t safe enough for me?”
“Yes. I mean …”
“You’re spooked. And you’re overreacting.”
Because his point needed illustrating, I guess, a deer burst through the line of trees separating us from the road, and I nearly hit my head on an overhanging branch.
I braced my hand on my chest and gasped.

man checks out woman with em dash, his comma, semi-colon, colon, and period girlfriend is annoyed

A ball at the end of Midsummer was the longest-running bad idea anyone had ever had. The hottest month of the year. Indoors, where not even a warm breeze could infiltrate the stifling press of humanity. Sweat was not a pleasing accessory for ball gowns and made even the most handsome, well-dressed gentlemen look boorish.
Eliza, who was rarely troubled by trifling things like hellish temperatures, swept into the room like a baroness. Fion trailed behind her, mouth wrenched into something more near to a grimace than a smile, and nearly collided with Willem Houghton.
He leaned close, his acrid cigar-breath damp against her ear. “My darling!” he cooed.
“No, I will not dance with you,” she said, backing away. “Or have a drink with you. Or talk to you.”

She bustled into the shopfront, leaving Joric alone with the kettle and her apologies, and spent the next quarter hour trying to explain to a customer why a tonic bitters made with extra gentian would be too horrid to drink. Unable to convince the infuriating man that he could not, in fact, well handle it, she made him a special concoction and charged him an extra penny. He left both triumphant and visibly peeved.
He’ll be back before I shut to complain I made it too bitter, she groused, but the shop was empty at last.

“You know you can’t buy things with gold anymore, right?” I say
“You can take it to a gold dealer and trade it for cash,” he replies, as if I should not find it at all strange that the monster king of the Evernight somehow has a remedial understanding of the American bullion market.
“Why would you just give this to me and let me go?” I’m pretty sure there are strings attached. Aren’t there always strings attached? I can take the gold and go, but everything I buy with it will be cursed. Like, the tank of gas I put in my car will turn out to be diesel. Or I’ll buy a bag of Doritos but it will be infested with pantry moths. I’ll get tickets to a Strokes concert, but then a rogue meteor will take out the stadium.

Joric slipped through the door, his gait slow and halting. Obviously in some discomfort after last night.
Fion refused to care. Instead, she busied herself at her workbench, smashing comfrey.
He slumped into the wing-backed chair next to the door and watched her pestle rise and fall with muted curiosity. Tiny green bits of comfrey flew from it, splattering the back of her hand.
She kept her cheek between her teeth to remind herself not to gaze at him. How dare he be so infuriatingly, disgustingly pretty.

It’s small, it’s small, it’s small, I chant in my head. It’s no match for a 120-pound woman with a 3-liter bottle of vodka. I take another step towards the bar, then another. Except for the pat-creak of my feet as they move over the wooden floorboards, the room is completely still.
I’ve almost reached the edge of the bar. I take a steadying breath and adjust my grip on the bottle. I’m about to round the corner and blindly swing at whatever might be crouching there when there’s an explosion of scrabbling sound, like when a dog is trying to run on hardwood floors. Underneath that panicked sound is something like a growl, but I swear I can hear words in it. Language. Indecipherable and foreign, but language.
Across the room, a patch of flowers bends as if something has just taken cover there.

“I have nothing to wear,” Fion said, though by the time the words I and have left her mouth, she already knew the rest of the sentence would be a poor defense.
“Perfect!” Eliza said. “That means I get to pick out your dress.”
The dress, naturally, was awful. Lemon yellow, with a scandalously low-cut bodice and a bustle that would pose a hazard to almost anything sitting on the edge of a table. Fion could imagine herself knocking over someone’s wine with her rear end and then tumbling out of her dress when she leaned over to pick it up.
“No,” she said. “Too bright. Too … attention- getting.”
“That’s what you want,” Eliza scoffed. “To get attention.”

Fion paused her frenetic dusting to scowl at her friend. “This isn’t funny, Eliza. I don’t think he’s right in the head.”
Eliza’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not necessarily a problem, is it?”
“How could it be anything but a problem?”
“Well, there are different ways of being not quite right in the head. Mrs. Fenmore compulsively buys teapots. She has sixty-seven of them. No one needs that many teapots. But Mrs. Fenmore also doesn’t go about stabbing people at random or stealing babies from their prams, so it’s a harmless sort of being not quite right in the head.”
That was … certainly a point. Of sorts. Fion let herself laugh. “I could also knock Mrs. Fenmore over by blowing on her. It’s different when the person who isn’t right in the head could easily overpower you."

She was not surprised to find her father standing in front of the locked door of her shop, breathing into his hands, a proud scowl scarring his ruddy face.
“Papa,” she said.
“Daughter,” he replied at the precise moment a snowball slammed into the back of his skull.
He whirled, but his assailant was already plunging away through the snow, the sleeves of her bright red coat shedding trails of white powder as she blundered through drifts taller than she was. She giggled as she fled, the sound muffled by the dirty white scarf wrapped tightly around her mouth and nose.

Leopard-like creature with claws and teeth drawn in shades of gray and blue

The wind is dry and hot, and each random, dirt-filled gust sponges the tears right out of my eyeballs. Jahnari’s cloak helps keep some of the grit away, but it flaps around me like a banner, and despite her reassurances, I feel like the most obvious person in Obviousland.
If this was a real desert, there would at least be a couple of saguaros or a Joshua tree for me to scurry between, but the Twilight Lands are as empty as the Dawn Lord’s promises.
My gut shakes as if the Moth King’s tiny demons are having a bowling tournament inside it. My brain is giving me so many reasons to panic that I’m kind of amazed my feet are still moving.

Her eyes went straight to Joric, like bees to a rose. If the rose was several days past snipping in a vase half-full of dirty water, and the bees were merely visiting it out of pity.
He was slumped over a table, one hand still curled around a half-empty glass of ale, apparently unconscious.
She hovered next to the bar, leaden. “You know that bloke?” the barkeep asked.
“Not really,” Fion replied.
“Well, that bloke you don’t know has been making himself a nuisance.”

She didn’t need a man to walk her home. She knew exactly where to put her knee if some unscrupulous person approached her, Willem or otherwise. But walking next to Joric in the evening air felt nice. Accepting his company was not the same thing as accepting his protection.
“You didn’t find the show to your liking?” Fion asked.
One corner of his mouth twitched. “Not especially.”
“It was rather … sensational, I suppose.”
“And rubbish,” Joric agreed.
He was silent after that. Ruminati

Gray tabby cat sleeping with a paw under her face

I’d almost talked myself into another murder when I spotted a pulsing, groping change in the continuity of the Ardal’s wards, like something slug-like crept across the walls, leaving behind a slime of deep, purple magic.
When I reached the gummy, root-like edge of the ravvener spell, I tracked its patchwork progress until I found its architect.
The ravvener had dull, brown hair and a rangy build. He was as unremarkable as a groundsman or a stonemason, dressed in the drab colors of a working man. Though his clothes were finer than the homespun linen worn by commoners, they lacked the flourishes most sorcerers garbed themselves in. I supposed it did him no good to be known as a ravvener.

“Hi there,” I say, relieved to be encountering an ordinary forest creature.
“Hi there,” says the fox, pulling itself onto its hind legs.
Okay, not an ordinary forest creature.
I unsheathe my sword. My heart overreacts with a flutter and a burst of speed. It’s just a fox. A talking, standing-up fox, but a fox. What could it possibly do to me?
“There’s no need for that,” it says, eyeing my sword, its lips pulled back from sharp, white teeth. “You are not to be harmed.”
“I’m not?” For a second I forget I’m talking to a small, furry, somehow bipedal predator. “Who told you that? Why?”

Phone screenshot with woman holding a bouquet of lilacs and caption:

Things I crave as a girl with an undead necromantic occupant:

1. Recently dead corpses
2. People I can turn into corpses
3. Beer

function Curse {
let ending;
if (FionBreaksCurse) {
ending = "Happy";
return ending;
} else {
LoopEndlessly;
}
}

Sorry losers and haters but the WITCH HUNT perpeturated by the Embarassing & Corrupt Loser THE MOTH KING will be met with CONSEQUENCES the likes of which few have seen he should have made a "deal" with me, your favorite LORD OF THE DAWN!! Thank you for your attention to this matter

“Okay so say I believe shapeshifting is for real.”
“Do you?”
“You kind of haven’t left me with a choice. I either have to believe it, or I have to believe some whackjob conspiracy theory in line with John F. Kennedy was really killed by an elaborate plot inside the US government, or the twin towers were knocked down as a part of an elaborate scheme to give us an excuse to declare war, or that the pyramids were built by aliens.”
Simon feigned shock. “Weren’t they?”
“That’s just what I’m talking about,” I grumbled.

Our parting brought fresh tears to my eyes, and I couldn’t even say why. I stared after him, drying my cheeks with the back of my dirty hand.
South of Wex, we stopped at an overgrown graveyard full of decomposing stone markers. I wiped the dust from the face of a weeping effigy and cleared the weeds away from her feet.
A cold wind rattled the trees, and Win took my hand.