Nightfall on Stygies by Stark Holborn

Author:Stark Holborn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FLS
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2025-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stark Holborn is the author of the BSFA-Award-longlisted trilogy The Factus Sequence, the British Fantasy Award-shortlisted Triggernometry series and the Nunslinger series. Based in Bristol, Stark is also a games writer. ‘Nightfall on Stygies’ is Stark’s first story for Black Library.

An extract from Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work.

Ezekiel Sedayne was dying.

There was a time when he stood tall among men, as much a physical as an intellectual giant, but those days were done. He was old. He was at the end. His seven-foot frame had shrunken in. His spine curled with calcium loss. His hands were knotted with arthritis. His skin was slack, flowing around brittle bones like draped cloth. His lustrous black hair had turned as fine and white as the silk of a spider’s nest. It spread around his head on the pillow as if it, like his skin, had been laid there, and if he stood, if he had been capable of standing, he would have left it behind as a cloud of down.

Sedayne’s life had lasted longer than any child of Terra had a right to expect, but all things are finite, and his existence was coming to a close.

Human beings are aware of their mortality, yet they deny it to the very last. Sedayne regarded his intelligence to be in excess of most others. He believed he was free of the delusions that ruled the mind to reason’s detriment, yet now he succumbed. He could scarcely believe death was knocking at his door.

This cannot be happening to me, he thought. But it was.

Sedayne had come from nothing to become one of the greatest scientists of his age. Despite his failing body his mind was sharp. His insight clear. In numb amazement, he insisted he felt young in his soul. The ravages of age on his body gave the lie to that.

He appeared in many respects like a corpse. Lips drew back from yellow teeth made long by the recession of dark gums. No matter how fast his thoughts raced, his body barely moved. His chest trembled with the bird flutter of his heart. Every inhalation was a bellow’s wheeze.

But he was not dead yet. The breaths kept coming, and when the door to his bedchamber creaked wide his eyelids flickered open and his eyes, which were strikingly moist in the dry valleys of his parchment skin, swivelled to fix themselves upon his visitor.

‘The Altrix Herminia,’ he wheezed. His top lip stuck to his teeth for want of saliva, spoiling his smile. He was drying up from the inside out, like a spice pod left out to desiccate in the sun. Soon every drop of life would be wrung out of him, and there would only be an arid husk left. Then there would not even be that.

The Altrix came forwards with a rustle of layered, soft, plastek clothing. Upon her breast pocket she wore a caduceus in red and white that contrasted with the pale green of her dress. The uniform was formal

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.