El'Tash: Elliott's Story (part 1)

Warning: Graphic Violence

Part of our group is starting a Pathfinder campaign in an original setting of the DM's (Suleman's) creation. Here I shall record the events of the campaign from the perspective of my character, Elliott Durand.

     The air crackled and took on a static charge. A light breeze began to blow through the darkened chamber, though nothing stirred, too heavy to be moved by a simple brush of wind. Sparks danced along the metallic surfaces of the room, coalescing towards a focal point in the middle of the room. A moment later, reality itself seemed to tear apart as a roaring rift opened near the ceiling. From its flashing lights a dark, humanoid shape tumbled, crashing into the floor.

     “Owww…” the shape said, though the howling wind of the rift drowned the word out. After being unceremoniously dumped on the floor, the figure was left in total darkness as the rift vanished as suddenly as it appeared.

     Shuffling about, the figure rose to its feet. Its clothes rustled as its arms moved about, trying in vain to cast a spell.

That Road

This flash fiction story exploring second-person narrative was inspired by the car ride home from Context 2013. It has previously been entered into a contest and posted on MicroHorror.com.

And when I remember the future, we will follow that impassive road, weak with hunger and faint with thirst, with sore and blistered feet we will follow it to the very end.

We will begin not at the beginning, but at a crossroads. You will want to go right and I will want to go left. In the end we will go straight through. I will notice a swarm of vultures circling the streets of a Midwestern town. You will wonder aloud what could possibly attract so many of the carrion birds to the suburban locale. I will tell you that you don’t want to know.

Root Canal

Every year, come spring, it happened again. People thrown out on the street, their possessions littered around them as they scrambled to get outside Limits before sundown. Family portraits. Coffee tables. High school trophies. Cats. Baby monitors. The assorted detritus of middle class life, tossed up like driftwood after a Reinvestment Team decided they needed to appropriate their Real Estate Assets.