The air is a greasy coat on the tongue, thick with the smell of roast pig. The sweetness of the meat mixes with damp rot. It is the taste of a feast held in an open grave.

  Every table from every house is crammed into the square. They groan with the spoils of the Elders' larder. Plundered cheese. Cured meats. The doors to the Elders' hall hang gutted from their hinges, the wood splintered, the entrance a gaping mouth.

  Gwendolyn stands on the top step. She waits. Just long enough for every eye to find her. Then her arms open, a slow embrace of the crowd. "A liberation. For the people!"

  A cheer answers her. It is a hollow sound that does not scare the crows from the rooftops.

  Then Reginald. A step behind her. He sees only the broken doors.

  They have torn apart Ursula's garden. Strings of pale, fleshy ghost pipe flowers hang from the rooftops. On the tables, clumps of corpse light fungus pulse with a sickly green heartbeat. It is a wrong light that persists, even in the afternoon sun. It paints a gangrenous sheen on the faces of the feasters, making the living look like the dead.

  They eat and drink, their laughter the sound of dirt hitting a coffin lid.

  Ward does not join the feast. He stands guard at the spit, turning the pig with a grim, focused duty. He directs two younger lads with a sharp jerk of his chin to see the meat is carved and shared fairly. One wipes his greasy hands on his trousers. The other's eyes keep drifting to the barrels of looted amber cider and spiced wine.

  Vera watches from the shadows of the smithy. Her arms crossed, unmoving. She does not eat. She does not drink.

  Grace laughs. It is a raw, ugly sound that holds no joy. Her fingers tear at a wheel of cheese, a frantic, desperate hunger. A few feet away, Rory is lost in the moment. He plays his fiddle, his face flushed with a joy so pure it feels like a lie. The tune is clumsy. It is terrible. It is the most honest sound in the square.

  I am a ghost at their feast. They drink and cheer through me. They are celebrating their own funeral.

  A little girl, no older than five, leaves her mother's side. She walks to me, her face smudged with dirt and jam. She holds out a headless white rose. Its stem is broken.

  I take the ruined flower from her hand. The broken stem is still damp, cold. I hold a piece of their ending.

  Gwendolyn steps onto the platform. Rory's fiddle plays on. She lets it. She waits. Her smile is patient, the kind a mother gives a child before taking the knife from its hand.

  A hundred conversations die at once. A hundred mugs are lowered to the tables.

  The fiddle's pace slows. Rory's posture shifts, his back straightening as he stops playing and starts listening.

  Her voice enters the quiet. A drop of honey in a cup of cold water.

  "The rot is gone," she says, her voice trembling. "We have cut the sickness from our own family. Now, we heal! Now, our children will know only joy!"

  Beside her, Reginald is a shadow. The light from her new fire does not touch him. He stares at the dirt at his feet, a man left outside in the cold she has banished.

  "To build this new world, we will burn the notice board!" Gwendolyn continues, her voice rising. "This square will no longer be a place of mourning. The stories that taught us to suffer are now forbidden. From this day forward, our only story will be one of joy!"

  Gwendolyn is swallowed by the cheering mob, and the noise rushes back in. Our table becomes a small, silent island in the middle of it.

  James's hand finds a knife. He carves a slice of roast pig, then places a small, steaming slice on Pip's plate. The boy watches the steel, not the meat.

  The name Eli is a pressure behind my teeth. I have to spit it out.

  "I was thinking," I say. The words are too loud in the small quiet of our table. "About that boy from Blackthorn. Eli."

  Evangeline's fingers freeze around a piece of bread, inches from her mouth. Her fingers uncurl. The bread falls to the plate with a soft thud.

  James stops carving. The knife in his hand goes still.

  The sound of the feast becomes a smear of noise. James sets the knife down, parallel to the edge of the table. A quiet sound on the wood. His voice is low, stripped of all colour. "You've never asked about him, Grandma. Not once."

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  I have just crossed a line I did not know existed. Nora's silence was a gift to them. I have just taken a hammer to it.

  He shakes his head. A small, sad smile touches his lips, but the muscles around his eyes stay slack and tired. "You never cared about anyone's family drama. You kept to your herbs and your books." His expression hardens, the last of the grandson gone, replaced by something colder, more watchful. "Why do you care now?"

  The roast pig in my mouth turns to stone.

  His question sucks the air from the space between us. I have no answer. I am an imposter, and the hunt is over.

  Evangeline shoves her plate forward a few inches. The scrape of ceramic on the rough wood is an ugly sound. A small movement with the force of a slammed door.

  James's face is a ruin. My hand moves. To smooth it. To fix it. It lands on his left knee.

  It finds something hard. Cold. Wrong.

  Wood.

  My hand recoils, but his reaction is faster. A flinch that is all pain. He shoves his chair back, away from my touch, from me. Evangeline's gasp is a small, sudden tear in the silence.

  James does not shout. He just looks at my hand, shaking in the empty air. The hand that should have known.

  Then he looks up at me, and the sorrow in his eyes is a physical force. His hand comes up to his face. He presses his thumb and forefinger into the corners of his eyes, a gesture of silent, crushing exhaustion.

  His voice is a quiet, dead thing. "You forgot."

  His words erase everything. The square, the table, his face. All of it becomes a flat, oily smudge. A thing I am no longer a part of. There is only empty space between us now.

  The world loses its sound. The noise of the feast vanishes, replaced by a sudden pressure in my ears.

  No. Not now. Not this.

  My hand flies to my chest. The air I draw no longer smells of roast pig. It is cold. It stinks of wet earth, and the sharp, chemical bite of phosphorus just before it ignites…

  I am running through the swamp. The air is a wet rag on my face. Grief is a sickness, a fever that promises me my son, Max, is just ahead, through the mud.

  I pull a small, reluctant hand through the sucking mud. James.

  He stops, pulling me back. "Are we going to find Daddy today, Grandma?" His voice is a clean thing in all this filth. A stupid, fragile hope.

  "Yes," I say to the grey sky, unable to meet his eyes. "We'll find him."

  We are on the forbidden road when the world tears. A sound like wet canvas ripping.

  Something moves in the reeds. A piece of the swamp's own rot given legs. It stumbles, a ruin of weeping flesh held together by too many joints.

  The grandmother dissolves. Only the animal in me is left, and it wants to run.

  But the creature's eyes, its mismatched human eyes, are not on me. They are fixed on the small, warm thing at my side. On James.

  It lunges.

  "Run!" The word is a raw thing torn from my throat. James is a small, still point of terror.

  I shove him behind me.

  My breath catches. My teeth grind, the sound loud in my skull. Then it releases, a slow, cold stream.

  The animal in my chest goes still. The alchemist's hands find my satchel. My mind is already at work. Corpse-light. Bog gas. Reagents.

  The creature is closing, its high, thin wail the sound of an infant in a grown man's chest.

  My hands, trembling, tear at the clasps of my satchel. A half-remembered formula surfaces. My fingers find the shapes of a pouch and a vial. Powdered iron. Phosphorus oil.

  I yank the cork free with my teeth, spitting it into the mud. I pour the viscous oil onto the iron dust in my palm. It hisses, a small, angry snake of smoke spiralling into the air.

  The reaction is accelerating. I have seconds.

  The creature's ruined jaw hangs open, a mouth that will swallow his future.

  I throw the smoking paste. Not at it. The target is a bubble of bog gas rising from the sludge to its left.

  The world goes white.

  The flash is followed by a deafening crump that feels like a fist slamming into my chest, driving the air from my lungs.

  A wall of heat hits my face, smelling of burned rot and green fire.

  The creature shrieks, stumbling back. Its eyes are smoking.

  It worked.

  "Now!" I scream, grabbing James's hand. We run.

  But he resists.

  A switch flips in me. The fear is gone. Replaced by a raw, ugly impatience. A child. Playing games. I have no time.

  "Keep up!" I snarl, yanking his arm with a force that should move a boy his size.

  I pull harder.

  The sound is wrong. A drag, a lurch, a wet slap. A single boot.

  I turn, ready to see a tear-streaked, stubborn face.

  But his face has gone slack, all the colour drained from it, his mouth a small, silent O of discovery. His eyes are fixed below.

  I follow his stare.

  Down his torso, to his legs.

  One leg kicks and kicks at the mud. The other is a mangled ruin of shredded tissue. The white point of a bone shines in the murk. Blood pulses from a severed artery in thick, red ropes.

  My bomb.

  I did this.

  The memory crumbles. The ghost of the swamp recedes, leaving a cold slick on my skin. The feast is a distant, meaningless sound.

  James's face is a careful arrangement of love. The smile is in the right place, but the muscles beneath are stone. His eyes are wet. "I think you've had enough excitement for one day, Grandma," he says, each word placed gently, as if they might break me.

  The anger leaves Evangeline's shoulders. They slump. Her hand, which had been resting on the table, moves. It finds Pip's small hand, her fingers closing around his. A tight grip. Her eyes do not leave James.

  He meets her eyes. A slow, tired nod.

  James stands, his shoulders slumping. "Come on, Grandma. I'll walk you home."

  He escorts me from the table, his hand a gentle, protective touch on my arm. Evangeline and Pip are a tight, defensive unit behind us, Pip's small hand clutching the back of his mother's skirt.

  We have barely taken three steps when the air goes still and heavy, the kind that comes before a killing frost. A shadow falls over our small, broken family. Too vast and sudden for a cloud.

  A man walks up the path from the swamp.

  Rory's fiddle note sours and stops. Grace's laughter is severed mid-breath. The joy on every face curdles and dies.

  All sound in the square is cut, as if by a blade. The silence that follows is a held breath, a hundred lungs seizing at once. It is broken only by a high-pitched ping as a string on Rory's fiddle snaps.

  Every head turns as one, a field of wheat scythed in a single motion.

  He stops at the edge of the square, his presence a physical pressure that makes my old bones ache.

  The unforgiving light of the afternoon catches the texture of his cloak. Not leather. Not wool.

  Skin.

  ? Featured Web Novel

  ?????? Alchemist of the Wilds: An Ex-Assassin's Guide to Cozy Brews ??????

  by AT Valentine

  Lianthorn Belladonna could have been so many things. An artist, a mage, a gardener. Instead, his family sealed his future, trapping him in a life of scheming, poison, and murder.

  He’s through with it.

  all his skills.

  Lianthorn abandoned everything he’d ever known to gain his freedom. Now, to flourish in his new life, he’ll have to learn a whole new way of living and maybe, just maybe, discover the recipe for happiness along the way.