Sneak Peek #3: A Bullet for Death's Rifle by Emily Duncan, illustrated by Sonia Liao
Death is a girl named Caterina Kazakova. She harvests souls with her sniper rifle and watches as war tears through her country, as it always has and always will. When Caterina falls in love with a soldier in the warlord’s army, she knows what they have will be a short and bitter thing. A girl who is Death cannot love; a boy who is a soldier in this war is fated to die.
She collected the tethers like strings tied to her fingers, some black, some red, some in colors that Caterina had no name for. There were many, the aftermath of this battle was grim. A shot. A tether tied to her index finger. Another shot. A string tied to her wrist. She did not discriminate, she tied strings from both sides around and around until her own gloves had disappeared underneath the weight of the souls and their stories.
But it was dangerous to listen. It was dangerous to bend an ear and allow the soul their final words. If one spoke, the rest would hear and demand their turn. Too many tethers, too many strings, too many souls to ever hear their woes and their unfulfilled dreams. Better to set them free.
- Except from A Bullet for Death’s Rifle from @glitzandshadows , art by @sonialiao
Thank you for your support!
Oh man so I have a weird relationship with short stories in that
1. my writing is…. way different with them. I can’t maintain this prose for anything longer than a short story.
2. I always trip myself up with worldbuilding (no surprise there)
but I knew that I wanted to go back to the dark and smoggy high fantasy!Soviet Russian world of the song witch Anya and her warlord husband, even if I had no idea if I could match the prose of that first story. Also I don’t know the world outside the ice fields & cabaret that were in the first short story. But I liked the picture of a girl with a sniper rifle collecting souls, a boy with stormy eyes caught in an endless war, and a chasm of a boy being slowly broken by all the death he sees every day. And i really liked the idea of having Anya and the warlord pulling the setting and the events of the story around.
And Sonia’s art is gorgeous. I was floored when I saw it especially because of her spectacular use of color against a purposefully colorless story.
Hey, @glitzandshadows and @sonialiao are doing something cool together. Help spread the word!
