A Thing Immortal
After seeing her mother murdered, then being passed from outlaw to outlaw like a disposable plaything, a girl finds herself the slave of a brutal mountain man. Trapped by mystical wards carved into the trees surrounding the mountain man's shack, she has no hope of escape. But then comes the day an old gunfighter with skin as pale as bone and eyes the color of wildflowers rides up the mountain on a painted horse.
The old gunslinger gazed up at the night sky, billions of stars staring back at him as he waited for sleep to take him. An odd feeling rolled over him. The night was eerily silent, still as death. No breeze, no insects chirping or singing. No lonesome owl calling out for companionship. Hamish Frost realized he was frozen, unable to move. The old man didn’t recall having lain down, nor even having made camp for the evening. Yet there he was, lying on the grassy plains, staring up at an ocean of stars. The milky, spiral nebulae hovered over him, swirling like a slow-spinning pinwheel, seeming so close he could almost reach up and scrape the stars with his fingertips or swat away a streaking comet.
As he watched, the constellations above began to rearrange themselves. Stars slid across the sky, miraculously avoiding collision as they repositioned themselves. Condensing and coalescing, the stars took on form and volume until a new shape appeared. Striding through the sky above him, a sparkling woman made entirely of star-stuff stood alone against a black void. Between her breasts, a single pulsing star flared and burned with the brightness of the midday sun.
I’m having a vision, he realized.
A fevre dream of horror and myth.
seriously dark stuff
reminiscent of early Stephen King
the story kept exceeding my expectations
