6 Sentence Sunday Hallowe’en treat, part 3:

Howling wind, howling wolves

It’s the third Sunday in October, so it’s time for another Hallowe’en treat from Written Words.

Here are six more sentences from a spooky passage in Part 1 of The Bones of the Earth. The setting: nighttime, three days past the summer solstice and three nights past the full moon. The main character, Javor (pronounced “Yay-vor,” by the way; it means maple) is in his village’s holody, or wooden stockade at the top of a small hill.

Wolves howling brought Javor back to the night. The moon and stars were quickly covered by swirling black clouds. Clouds never move that fast, he thought.

The villagers stopped talking; mothers held their children closer. The wind blew dust around the holody.

Javor stood and looked over the stockade—even the trees in the forest seemed to have come closer.

If you want to find out what’s past the stockade, you can get a longer sample from the Sample tab at the top of the page. And if you really want to know the story, get the full book from Amazon. Just click on the cover image on the right!

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Spooky Sunday: 6 more scary sentences

It's Sunday, and you know what that means: time for another installment of six spooky sentences from my novel, The Bones of the Earth.

Like last week's Six Sunday excerpt, these six sentences come from Part One of the novel. In this section, the hero, Javor, and Photius, the mysterious wanderer from Constantinople, are tracking the monster that murdered Javor's parents - although Javor does not believe in monsters. Yet.

The pair have been following a trail of destruction for a day and a night, when Photius tells Javor they are about to enter the monster's own territory:

Past a small rise, the thin grass disappeared into a loosely-packed scrabble. A few bent, withered trees with hardly any leaves clung weakly to the hillside; ahead, a brackish creek wandered sluggishly to the east. At the bank, Photius said “Take care now, son. Don’t touch the water,” and they hopped carefully from stone to stone across a natural ford. Javor could see craggy mountains ahead; surprisingly, they had no snow on their tops. The whole vista seemed dead and repellent. Javor gagged on the reek of rotting animal carcasses.

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And if you want to find out what happens next to Javor and Photius, click on the links on the right or the tabs on the top of this blog.

Happy Sunday!

Six spooky Sunday sentences

Image source: Wikipedia Commons

My favourite holiday, Hallowe’en is coming up fast. In honour of the event, for the next four Six Sentence Sundays, I’ll be posting the spookiest passages from The Bones of the Earth.

The Bones of the Earth is a historical fantasy set in the Eastern Roman Empire during the darkest of the Dark Ages. It begins when Avar raiders kidnap two girls from the village of the main character, Javor.

In Chapter 3, Javor and his best friend, Hrech, go to rescue the girls, and find them that night, just after the rising of the full moon.

It was hard to make out at first what he saw in the moonlight, but when his foot struck something that rolled, understanding hit him like a cold wave. It was a severed head; the Avar helmet rolled off it and continued a short distance before it fell over in the grass.

Javor was surrounded by the dismembered bodies of the whole troop. Ten heavily armoured men had been literally torn apart—maybe more. They may have had friends. Everywhere he looked there were legs, arms, torso, heads.

Want to read more? Click on the tabs above for some longer free samples, or click the cover image on the right for a link to the whole book.

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