Knucklebones stepped one leathery bare foot into the plastic pool, bright and faded colors both rippling under the liquid. Filth bloomed in arcs from his foot, dirt and barren clouding the chemicals. He wrinkled an ancient looking triangle that sat cen...

King’s office was surprisingly empty for a man of his resources. There was no special reason for it—he was in charge of it all, the whole enterprise, but cared little for the more obvious of comforts or distraction. … Music in Tincture: Book 3,

We are always starving. It sort of goes with the territory—this being hungry in every odd tick of the day. An empty belly and its degrees of unpleasantness is better than any watch or sundial, and no further calculations on mood need interject.

Tom smiled and nodded with the applause, but when the meeting resumed he went right back to staring directly into the center of a donut. … Music in Tincture: Book 3, Chapter Eight: Cullah – Please Bring Me Shelter (CC BY-SA 4.

Torches had never done Allgood much favor, but that they lit up a question or two in the good populace was useful. Two old branches lit the stench of thoroughfare just before the bar-house, the tips never extinguished thanks to some flammable green-bla...

Even in that too-bright light of the morning, Abranyah always struggled to wake with it. She preferred to sleep as long as possible, but the sun would eventually prove to be an enemy—fuel for whatever device the barren was planning to kill you with tod...

An otherwise normal day in an otherwise normal life, time as it was. Tom had been fostering a general sense of unease for a while now, yet like a weird sort of depression, he had difficulty pinpointing its origin. … Music in Tincture: Book 3,

The ways a body tends to crave its own undoing is a humanistic riddle that I no longer wish to endure. A short way to speak it, I suppose: my empathy muscles have atrophied. … Music in Tincture: Book 3, Chapter Four: Cullah – Please Bring Me Shelter (C...

Rhamuel kept folks on a spectrum of his own design, the range beginning somewhere around “tolerate,” and ending near “abject avoidance.” Abranyah once asked where the disdain found its origination point, but the tanker would only reply,

This was the kind of fruitless nonsense that permeated The Scar—a seeming irregularity of principle and purpose to things. A body could rub a book to ash in their fingers. They could then take a step and trip over a heaping stack of books showing no mo...