Page 294 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

mostly destroyed but for the single room I occupied. A
modest storm moved across the sky just above me, weeping
rain upon the forest. My family slept quietly beside me. I
had forgotten how much I had missed them, how much the
separation had hurt me. I gathered them up and departed into
darkness and silence.
The city of Willard would soon be upon me, and I
relished the thought of seeing it for the first time. It had
come by its insanity many years prior to the Great Darkness.
Some believed it was a dry run for the greater madness to
come, a staging ground of sorts. Whatever the source of the
city’s malady, it was undeniably host to a uniquely binding
madness, restraining the common sense of thousands of
people—and as history had documented well, these were not
idle lunatics. Not in the slightest.
There were signs my destination was not far. I began to
encounter the country dwellings that prefaced the formal
portions of the city, dwellings that had clearly known the
ridiculous clutch and titter of madness. I saw chimney stones
stacked into the shapes of great yawning mouths, exhaling
thick smoke into the dull sky. They crested slightly above
the treetops, and at first I took their exhaust to be a stronger
vein of storm, descended low over the forest, angry and
black. How those fires continued to burn with no one to tend
them was just another mystery I had no intention of ruining.
I came upon a vast swath of forest that had been cleared
to make way for a man-made lake, beneath which lurked
monstrous shapes hewn from yet unidentified species of
crystal and glass. I wondered if glassblowing facilities
comprised the throats of those spewing chimney-mouths.
Some of the creations broke the placid surface of the water,
peeking out from the depths, blending their translucent
bodies with the mist, holding ephemeral shapes as potent
as any dream. Beneath the water they dwelt, meandering
and serrated, nearly invisible due to their faint composition.
Their silhouettes had more than once been revealed by the
The Red Son | 297