ENDLESS SCARS: INTO THE GREY
Waking amidst shattered ruins with glowing silver scars across his chest, nineteen-year-old Mote remembers nothing of who he was or how he arrived. Joined by Alna, Ree, and Eprim, he journeys across a desolate landscape stalked by monstrous Elge and afflicted by a contagious apathy that turns human lives to stone.
CHAPTER ONE EXCERPT: LEMON OIL
The kitchen smelled of coffee and cardboard, and beneath both, faintly, of the lemon oil his mother used on the table whenever she was unsettled and needed her hands to have an argument with something that couldn't talk back.
Mote stood near the door frame with his hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket. The jacket was light—not meant for rain, certainly not meant for the raw wind cutting across the yard outside—but he hadn't taken it off since coming through the side door twenty minutes ago. His mother hadn't asked him to take it off either. She was leaning over the wood, her rag moving in tight, methodical circles over a knot near the edge, her knuckles white against the yellow cloth.
"You don't have to do that right now," he said.
She didn't stop. "If I don't, the ring from the cup stays. You know how soft this pine is."
"It's been there three years, Mom."
"That doesn't mean I have to like it." Her voice was flat, thin as paper left out in the sun, but behind it lay a vibration he had felt all morning—the quiet, humming tension of a house waiting for a storm that hadn't shown up on any radar.
Then the wall vanished.
There was no sound at first—no crack of thunder, no rending of timber. Just a sudden, violent expansion of light that swallowed the kitchen, the lemon oil, and the rag in her hand. The air turned instantly cold, smelling of ash and damp earth. A flash of silver light crawled up Mote's arms like liquid metal, burning through skin and cloth alike.
When he opened his eyes, the kitchen was gone. And so was her name.