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Excerpts

The Dying Light
2006
Eidolon 1, Eidolon Books, Jeremy Byrne & Jonathan Strahan eds.

Anu fell, twisted his ankle, fell again and kept falling. He rolled, grabbed at the ground and came away with handfuls of dirt. The mountain known as Old Man was steepest here. His face slammed against rocks and he swallowed gravel trying to scream. Earth and sky were both black and impossible to keep apart in his mind.

His ankle snagged a sapling and he roared, spinning so that he fell head-first over a precipice into deeper night. One hand shot out for the sapling and found it in the dark, gripped it hard so that he swung in space.

The grit in his mouth tasted of blood. He tried to spit it out, dribbling it onto his chin instead. Carefully he took a breath, afraid the air in his lungs would make him too heavy for the sapling. His heart beat in his ears, and his face was hot and numb though the air on his bare skin was cold. His arms had hollowed out from shoulder to fingertip and his fingers had grown fat. Too fat, he was sure, to hold on.

His mother would be angry. She would say he was careless, that just because he hadn’t found the story of his dying in the stars yet, still it didn’t mean his dying couldn’t find him. She would call him foolhardy.

“Until you have the foretelling,” she would say, “and can see what is held for you by the constellations above your foolish head, you should be careful.”

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