Hex

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

had broken their hearts, just as every unfulfilled dream breaks the human heart, but that was life.

You adapted, and you made sacrifices. You did it for your children or for love. You did it because of illness or because of an accident.

You did it because you had new dreams … and sometimes you did it because of Black Spring.

People desperately resisted the idea of their own death by looking away for as long as they could and avoiding the subject.

Every last grain of idealism would be sacrificed on the altar of safety.

Magic exists in the minds of those who believe in it, not in its actual influence on reality.

“That looks way too much like the beginning of a fairy tale to me. One of the bad ones, where you get eaten by the big bad wolf in the end.”

Nibble, nibble like a mouse, tomorrow everyone will die.

they knew that desperate needs led to desperate deeds.

They looked like people who knew they had done something dreadful, something irreversible … and something they could easily live with.

It’s already happening, Grim thought, shocked. This is all it takes for people to plunge into insanity: one night alone with themselves and what they fear the most.

The infant’s only answer to the cruel hallucination of birth was to scream … so that’s what Grim did.

One evil spawned another, greater evil, and ultimately everything could be traced back to Black Spring. Black Spring had brought this upon itself.

Damn those people. Damn their never-ending chain of selfish choices. Damn their refusal to seek reconciliation, damn their inability to love, damn their sick insistence to see the ugly, not the good.