Check out my latest installment of Wolf Head:
Bough’s Shadow

Here is a snippet of the Chapter:

The warmth of sleep slowly effervesces as Richard drearily drifts into consciousness. From pleasant dreams of home he’s drawn away, waking to the darkness of the cave. The strap of his crossbow cuts deeply into his skin, raw sores underneath sticking to the worn polyester with a slimy puss. He pulls the band from off his shoulder, opening the wound. Laying the weapon by his side, he falls back onto the hard rock of the cave-floor.

Supine, he lets his mind drift, staring up into the massless void of death, the shadows of this accursed cavern. Groggy images play like echoes, wakeful dreams leftover from his slumbers. Letting the random pictures ebb and flow over his consciousness, the hunter enters a fantastic world. The dissassortment of chaotic thoughts drains in a whirlpool about one point.

Under a blue sky with no sun or moon, where only stars, their soft light, shine upon a sloping, grassy field with green blades reaching up to your knees, Richard descends a little hill, coming toward the crystalline purple pool below. Within its reflection are the stars held, stretched and distorted by the little waves of that body. These shimmering points dance in the purple soup like minnows circling one another. Over this, a drooping bough casts its shade, the arm of a solitary tree, its knotted, twisted trunk grown by this pond’s muddy embankment. Beneath it, no stars shine, only the gentle movement of the water absent heaven’s light.

The squish and slurp of Richard’s boots, as they seep into the muck with every step, halt as he stands before that reflection. He sees himself once again dressed as the hunter, covered from head to toe in the black regalia of that order. Lifting his hand, he finds in it that small strip of bamboo he’d been given, he’d taken, all those days ago. As if prepared for his ceiling, the stick’s hole is threaded, ready to be hung with the others in his house.