Conte Cruel October #1 Rotten Ice

Written By Hadrian Flyte

Off and on all year I’ve been working on a collection of Conte Cruels I intended to actually have finished before the new year. I still might as every new horror that befalls my country is another reason to bury myself in work.

In an effort to focus on that project a bit, I set a challenge to write a roughly 100 word short every day this month. Some are bound to be shit, others might work out in the broader volume. Of course, if I think something has potential for that collection I might not publish it here. Who knows! We’re in hell anyway.

But here is the first entry, Rotten Ice.

Her breath hung like fog seeping through the trees. Thickening and swirling like a malignant cloud as she ran, beckoning the gnarled fingers that ripped at her dress and dared to pull her down into the moldering brambles below. The fog in turn grew colder, erupting from her lungs like rotten ice and silencing what scream might have been.

They looked for a while, even dared to follow what path hadn’t been reclaimed by the undergrowth but the howling deep within the forest only grew louder. A frayed scrap of silk clung limply to a briar, soiled and unwanted. Just as she had felt.

Hadrian Flyte

If there's a strange countercultural thing out there, Hadrian's probably orbited it in some capacity in the last 20 years. Games journalism, professional wrestling, upstart non-theistic religious movements, theater production , and data analytics are just some of the myriad worlds he's navigated in his 37 going on 38 years. Restless and curious, the chaotic push and pull of embarking on a new reality every few months to years has had a clear impact in his writing output. Maybe the next chapter is returning to what he assumed he was supposed to do all along: writing.

https://www.luciferslarder.com
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