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Want to sample before you buy? Read on:
Marrowmont’s a hard town. Complicated. The kind of city that ate you alive even before the Maw showed up with teeth and tentacles to join that three-ring circus. Not much left of it these days: a city under siege, half devoured; what’s still standing, held together by the Maidens, straight out of a dime novel and propped up by deities and demons and everything in between.
You live in a place like this long enough you either go saint or sinner. Sure, maybe there’s an in-between somewhere in there, even though they tell you to deal with the world in black and white – that that’s your job and them’s the breaks. Doesn’t hurt that it’s already a town full of monsters. Some literal, some just ’cause that’s what people call them.
Then there’s me: Pahaliah. An angel with a fistful of wings, a head of orbiting rings, and a former nun for a lover. (An abbess in her time, true, but pride’s a sin, or so they say. But then they say a lot of things…) The Angel of Redemption themself hanging out in a place that don’t want none and still trying to deliver it anyway.
Maybe I’m just used to the gig.
’Course, I’ve been wrong before. So deep in on the stories I wanted to believe I couldn’t protect anyone. Even myself in the end, and… Well. We’ll get there.
They say when your time’s up, your life flashes before your eyes. But me?
All I can think about is yesterday.
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We were three days into the Maw eating us out of house and home. Along with the house. And us. It was everywhere, pouring through the city like a biblical flood. Seen enough of those to know. Only this one was taking its sweet time wiping the old world away.
Even as we sat ourselves round that war council table arguing over how to fight or kill it – everyone who could be in human form; on account of the chairs mostly – as we’d been doing for days and getting nowhere, we were doing our best to ignore the beast pawing at the wards on the windows of that high tower the Maidens love to hunker in. Those tendrils pressing gentle, prodding, feeling us out like a lover.
Had a few of those in my time. Big part of why I’m not welcome back Upstairs – those pearly gates forever closed to me. Not something you advertise in my line of work. Not that I picked it. Didn’t have a choice. But always was more interested in figuring things out; in seeing the whole story. Maybe it’s why I’m telling you. Or maybe I just don’t want all that good work to go to waste.
