First 500: Char & Ash by Sapha Burnell
WELCOME TO THE FIRST 500: Char & Ash EDITION, WHERE WE AT VRAEYDA LITERARY SHARE THE FIRST 500 WORDS OF OUR PUBLISHED WORKS.
BELOW IS THE FIRST 500 WORDS OF Sapha Burnell’S Mythpunk + Godpunk NOVEL Char & Ash (Judge of Mystics Saga 1), CURRENTLY ON SALE AT THE VRAEYDA STORE AND WHEREVER NOVELS ARE SOLD.
Char
Char.
Two figures entwined in a circle of burnt saplings as tangled as old cord in the bottom of a forgotten fisherman’s vessel. The char drifted from immolated bark to the sodden grey shore in lifeless clumps. An orange ember faded to red in the macabre centre, as dull as the ancient wooden boat older than pyramids, in the Dover Museum scant kilometres eastward.
Inhaling to the side in an attempt to escape the miasma, Caleb Mauthisen lowered to his haunches with a grunt and a hiss. Winter’s harsh wind broke into early Spring’s breeze off the English Channel, cutting through his button down. He reached into the fragile mess and brushed ash away from the ember. Gravel crunched under another man’s boots, a shadow upon Caleb’s back he ignored even when the usurper moved his coat.
“A little late to pick back up at the Roman Fort, isn’t it?” Caleb rolled one sleeve to his freckled elbow, popped the button on the other cuff and rolled it up like its twin. No use damaging one of his two good shirts anymore than it already was.
Smoke melded with the salt water and petrol off the rocky beach, far from the sacred place the warriors buried in the trees deserved. An entire grove of honoured dead burnt to their ashes, before they could become the Fae trees which sprouted from their souls. Midgard’s progress shoved ancient ways to the side of the road, cast off with plastic bottles and crisp packets. Or untouchable curios set behind security glass, reduced down to a plaque of suppositions by detached historians in a museum.
“Think I ought to knock? Stroll up and kick my feet on the nearest ottoman?” The god who spoke towered over the figures, his ginger hair shorn in a style becoming of modernity. Stance as militaristic as the pistol strapped to his thigh, he surveyed the English Channel as if the primordial depths would regurgitate any number of Poseidon’s children for the hell of it. In his eyes, they likely could. Not that Poseidon did anything but guide endangered fish away from nets and trawlers nowadays.
“Helios found them, recognised the smell.”
Soldiers in olive fatigues secured the beach, cordoned a few onlookers and waved off cars. Their military and emergency support vehicles protected the charred copse, and blocked the view from the A-Road. Folk nattered at the uniformed soldiers, a few pointed in Caleb’s direction or released songbirds intercepted by Kopis Industries drones and herded to a vehicle where an intelligence officer took down each request.
One of the soldiers removed their Kopis and cut seaweed from the threshold of a scuffed drag mark. Mumbled into their comm that the mark ended abrupt enough to be teleportation or flight. Golden embroidery of olive leaves and the titular blade on his lapel labelled the soldier and the god:
Kopis Industries, Ares’ front in Midgard.
“Yeah, it’s distinct.” Ice-laden eyes scanned the charred branches and figures, one bent and crooked as a forgotten tree, the other as macabre and human as the half of him he couldn’t deny. The corpses crumbled in the stiff winds from the Channel, nothing but embers and charcoal left behind. “Cover me.”
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