The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...-of-book-1
coming any time now to Scribble Hub EDIT: https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2490960/

Thank you for reading the first book of Headless Over Heels!

I will be taking a short break between books to help build my backlog up a bit more. Book two will begin on August 17th.

Praise the Sorcerer General! Praise the Deathspell beneath which he shelters us! Praise the Verdugo and make way!

“Praise the Sorcerer General!”

The call pealed across the crowd with the force of a tolling temple bell, harkening them to silence.

“Praise the Deathspell beneath which he shelters us!” Atop the carriage, Seth paused and looked across the fearful faces staring up at him.

“Praise the Verdugo,” Tiago whispered from the carriage’s rear.

Seth flapped a hand behind his back in annoyance. “Praise the Verdugo and make way!”

Across the square, the roadhouse’s slatted door opened, and Annalise strutted out, hands on her hips. “How’s she cutting, lads?” She smiled from beneath the brim of her hat. “No pun intended.”

Seth climbed from the carriage as, atop the scaffold, the Corregidor of Shaldor sputtered with confusion. “Uh, Your Grace, uh—Madam Verdugo, I mean. We were expecting Verdugo Erheis—”

“He’s dead,” Annalise said, with the prim patience of a woman already anticipating next year, when she’d finally be able to stop repeating it. “I’m his replacement, Annalise al Ydris. Those are my kids, Tiago and Ofelia, and that’s my man Seth, who just had his first muster call. Good job, love.”

Seth gave a brief salute from the carriage’s front step. “Thanks. Hello.” As Annalise launched into the rest of her pre-judgment patter, he moved to the rear of the carriage and gave a light punch to Tiago’s arm. “I knew the line, man. C’mon.”

“Why’d you freeze up, then?”

“I didn’t freeze up,” Seth said. “It was for effect.”

Tiago smirked. “You hear that, Feeli? Dad’s doing drama.”

Seth gave a somewhat-less-light punch to Tiago’s arm. Despite their professed plans never to do so, Tiago and Ofelia had gone back on their word after discovering how annoyed Seth got when they called him dad.

“I got what he was doing,” Ofelia supplied from the carriage interior. “You have no theatricality in your soul.”

“You do it next time, then,” Tiago said.

“I have no theatricality in my soul, either,” Ofelia said. “I’m content with it.”

“Sword, please,” Annalise called.

Tiago and Seth moved simultaneously; Seth halted and gave a formal bow of permission. “I’d just freeze in the middle of the crowd.”

Tiago hefted the executioner’s blade to his shoulder. “Let’s assassinate him, Feeli.”

“Okay,” Ofelia said absentmindedly. She was attempting to teach herself crochet, a guidebook open in her lap; the lumpy results of her first attempt hung sadly from her hook.

An ohhh rose from the crowd as Annalise unsheathed her sword and the blood fountained forth from the scabbard. A scrawny man in the middle of the kneeling lineup of prisoners began to weep.

Tiago stalked back to the carriage, his arm spattered with scabbard-blood to the shoulder. “Gusher today.”

“Why does it do that, anyway?” Seth asked.

“Keeps the hexis sealed into the dynamos,” Tiago said. “Without it we’d lose a soul’s worth a season or so.”

“I know that bit,” Seth said. “Just why does it shoot out that way?”

“I’ve wondered the same thing,” Tiago said. “Speeds the draw for the Verdugos who aren’t built like brick shithouses, perhaps.”

“I always thought it was for effect.” Ofelia extracted her hook from a snarl she’d made and began methodically untangling it.

“Let’s not get back on effect.” Tiago squinted out at the scaffold. Annalise was crouching in front of the crying man, as he sobbed and choked and shook his stubbled head.

“A term in the Winter War is only three months,” she said. “That’s better than the jailhouse for three decades. Someone gave me that chance, once, and I reckon you deserve it, too. But it’s your choice.”

“I’m—I—Madam Verdugo.” The man was crying so hard he was having trouble keeping his eyes open. “I’m afraid.”

“So was Jamie,” Annalise said, gentle but unyielding. “And it’s too late to comfort him. I know you’d go back and fix it if you could, Austen. But there’s no magic that’ll turn the clock back. I’d be the first in line if there was, believe you me.” She helped him to his feet. “Now, you can serve your sentence out in the pen over Fontana’s way, and come out with the better part of your life wasted. Or you can put it on the line and make it something like right.”

Austen swallowed a quantity of sobby snot. “I’ll serve.”

“All right, Austen. Thank you.” Annalise clasped the man’s shaking shoulders. “Be brave, and keep your fellows safe, and trust in the Legion, and you’ll get yourself back home. And no matter what they say about you, they’ll never deny your redemption.”

Tiago sighed as his mother resumed her journey across the line of convicts. “Do me a favor, il Gutierre?”

Seth glanced from the scaffold. “What’s that?”

“Can you get into some kind of argument with her next head-taking day? So she can be in a bad mood and actually collect some damn hexis?”

“Maybe you could just be your charming self with her, Tiago,” Seth said.

“Always am.”

“We’re ahead of schedule, aren’t we?”

Ofelia pulled the travel kettle from its hook and poured herself more tea. “Tiago’s just Tiago-ing.”

“We’re on schedule.” Tiago reached into the carriage past her and retrieved a folded map. “Ahead is a stretch.”

Later, in the woods...

“It follows you, y’know.” Her voice vibrated against his cheek, lulling him further into comfort. “Through the Wheel. It’s your soul’s Darkness, not your body’s. It has something to do with your wants. Ofelia wants to know the truth of everyone. Tiago wants to escape his limited perspective and see the whole picture. I wanted, I don’t know. The chance to be someone else, and live some other way, I guess.”

He snuggled deeper into the crook of her arm and placed her hand on the side of his neck. “This way,” he mumbled, two-thirds awake.

“That’s right,” she whispered. “This way.”

“Mmm.”

“So if you wanna find your Darkness, I guess the question is what do you want?”

He was too adrift now to reply with words. He just wrapped himself tighter around her and hummed.

She laughed, gently. “Me, too,” she whispered, and the last thing he felt before sleep took him was her thick lips pressing against his forehead.

Speaking of the whole picture....

High above their heads the dome of the Deathspell curved into the horizon, encompassing the continent with its green and constant glow. Outside its borders, the fallen world swarmed with seraphim, an infinite gnashing planet of teeth and claws and death battering and breaking itself over and over against life’s final magical bulwark.

And as the year’s end approached, the gibbering eldritch tide thickened and sought any fault-line it could. And as the Legion Verdugos killed their way north, they raced against the Deathspell’s flickering, to bring the Sorcerer-General the thousandfold sacrifices required to bolster it for another harrowing year. And as Winter crept forth, the nights were getting colder and colder.

And far out in the unfathomable dark, a seraph was reborn, spat out from the turning wheel with a new and hateful deformity and a name still on its cloven lips:

Ydris.

But Seth was in Annalise’s arms tonight, and it was quiet, and he was warm.