The Demon from Another World

I spent some time yesterday doing a last minute proofread of my sword and sorcery tale The Demon from Another World which will appear soon in Anthology of the Damned: Necromoirrium from Treeshaker Books.

 

I would add that this is not a collection of S&S stories but dark horror. It just happens, I suppose, my yarn is particularly graphic, inspired as it is by John Carpenter's The Thing.

 

Here are its opening lines:

 

It crashed through the clouds in the dead of night, lighting up the sky as if it were day. The high-pitched scream that accompanied it was as if a thousand dragons (if such creatures even existed, which most people doubted) were being slaughtered in agony. Down it hurtled, cleaving the clouds and leaving behind a searingly bright trail that gradually dispersed an untold distance behind it.

When it crashed the earth shook far and wide, and those who were awakened by its reverberations thanked whatever gods they had it was nowhere near where they lived, before trying to return to sleep again. For most it was a fitful night.

 

It landed in the endless wastes of the Great Desert, instantly turning a wide circle of sand scores of miles across into rough, filmy, strange-looking glass beneath whose brittle surface lay treacherous chasms.

 

Gradually, whatever was buried at its core began to cool.

 

It cooled for years.

 

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They were a scurrilous bunch of mercenaries, broken by defeat, penniless, most of them covered in wounds, some of which festered and would lead to death in the next few days, and what supplies they had were almost gone. Worse still, they were being hunted.

 

After weeks of riding their dromedaries across dunes that stretched for as far as they could see still their shaman warned them when he used his powers of divination the squadron of Hessurian riders was still on their trail, only days behind them now...