Upon graduating as the top delivery agent in her class, Harriet P. Hopperfield had been eager for her first assigned route.

She had imagined something straightforward. Challenging, perhaps, but within reason. Something that would allow her to prove she could be as effective in the field as she was in the controlled confines of the academy.

Not many first-year agents were given routes like this, they told her. But Harriet had shown a particular kind of tenacity over her three years of training. A willingness to adapt. To endure. They believed she was the right choice.

She was not entirely familiar with the location she would be dropped – most of her training has taken place in the northern hemisphere. All she knew was that it was an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

It was a quiet Saturday afternoon when she was dropped at the northernmost point of her assigned route. With her basket secured snugly across her shoulder, she drew in a breath of cool, unfamiliar air. It carried the faint scent of damp earth and distant salt, something softer than she expected for a place she had assumed would be warm, bright, and tropical.

Well, at least there are no snakes. – She thought as she started following her route south.

The wind was the first obstacle.

It began gently, brushing against her ribbons and nudging at her balance as she made her first few deliveries. It felt like something she could work with – a cool breeze playfully teasing the leaf litter along her path.

Then, without ceremony, it changed.

By her second hour gusts began to pull at her basket, tugged at her footing, and slipped its fingers beneath the careful order she had arranged. Eggs lifted clean from her basket and carried off into the dark with careless confidence that made chasing them feel pointless.

She tried anyway, and failed.

Lost one. Then two more.

Rain began to follow without warning.

One moment the air was still, and the next it was thick with it. Heavy drops striking the ground with quiet insistence, soaking into her fur, her ribbons, the delicate paper wrappings that had been so carefully prepared.

The ground softened beneath her feet, mud swallowing edges, turning firm placements into uncertain ones.

She adjusted, because that was what she had been trained to do.

And then, just as suddenly, the rain was gone.

The sun followed.

It spread warmth quickly across the hills – sharp rays biting at her fur between gaps in the tree cover. The damp air turned soft and thick, and Harriet could feel the change almost immediately in the weight of her basket.

Chocolate did not respond well to hesitation.

She moved faster.

Wind, rain, sun.

Again. Again. Again.

As the day turned into night, it refused to settle into anything consistent, and Harriet let go of the idea that it ever would.

By the middle of her run, the neat structure of her training had begun to loosen at the edges. She stopped thinking about perfect placement, about angles and presentation, about whether each egg looked exactly as it had in the academy demonstrations.

She directed her frustration outward – at the sky, the wind, the ever changing ground beneath her feet –her sense of control quietly slipping out of reach.

As she placed a clutch of eggs under the protection of overgrown hydrangeas, she noticed movement just beyond a nearby fence line.

It was a subtle rustle of leaves interrupting the rhythm of the wind. Harriet paused, one ear tilting slightly as she listened, her attention narrowing instinctively.

There it was again.

When she turned, she found it sitting at the base of a low, crooked tree. It was a small, round-eyed creature, covered in soft brown fur, with an unusually large black, bushy tail.

Harriet felt herself relax, just slightly.

Back home, possums were sharp-faced, restless little things but often bluffed their menace before playing dead when under threat.

“Hello,” she said, lowering her voice as she crouched, one hand still resting lightly on her basket.

The possum tilted its head, as if considering her.

Then its gaze flicked, quick and precise, toward the nest she just placed.

Harriet followed the glance.

And that was all it needed.

It moved with startling speed, crossing the space between them in a blur of grey and sudden intent. One moment it had been still, the next its small paws were working with surprising confidence as it dug through ribbons and foil.

“Hey! No! No—those aren’t—”

She lunged forward, grabbing at the nest as it tipped under the shift in weight. Eggs knocked together, one slipping free and dropping into the grass with a soft, unforgiving thud.

The possum hissed.

Not softly. Not politely.

Harriet froze, the sound cutting clean through her hesitation.

The creature bared its teeth, small but sharp enough to make its point clear, clutching one of the eggs against its chest.

Harriet reached for it.

The possum struck, forcing her back to avoid injury. Her basket tipped in her grip, and two eggs spilled free, one rolling toward the tree, the other disappearing somewhere into the thick grass.

They held there for a moment.

Harriet, crouched and damp, staring.

The possum’s eyes followed the egg towards the tree. He turned and gave Harriet one last angry hiss, before scuttling after the egg and disappearing into the night.

“Enjoy it,” she muttered, rising to her feet.

She adjusted the strap of her basket – now lighter by a few eggs.

By the time she reached the rolling hills further south, her pace had eased. She placed another egg, less carefully than she might have before, and stepped back.

The sun was beginning to rise.

Its light came softly, a pale yellow threading through the cool blue of the morning, catching in the low-lying fog that drifted across the hills.

The land stretched out in long, gentle folds of green, damp and luminous. Pines pushed upward through the mist, their tops catching the light first, standing dark and steady against the brightening sky.

And out along the horizon, moving slowly and without sound, a handful of hot air balloons rose to meet the morning.

Harriet drew in a breath, both from exhaustion and the view.

Then, she heard it.

A door, somewhere in the distance.

She stilled instantly.

A small voice followed, bright with excitement.

Harriet moved without thinking, slipping low behind a fence line and into the shadow of a nearby hedge, the damp leaves brushing softly against her as she settled into stillness.

Small footsteps crossed the grass – a child.

Still wrapped in the softness of sleep, but carried forward by bright and unfiltered anticipation.

Harriet watched.

He paused in the field, scanning, uncertain for only a moment before something caught his eye.

“There’s one!”

He ran forward, dropping into the grass, hands parting the damp blades until they closed around the egg she had placed.

He lifted it like it was something rare.

“I found one!”

The clear and effortless joy in his voice cut through the quiet morning.

Harriet felt it before she understood it.

The child didn’t inspect it. Didn’t notice the slight imperfection in its placement.

He didn’t care – he just laughed. A full, unguarded kind of laughter that didn’t wait for things to be perfect before it arrived.

“There’s more!”

He moved quickly now, scanning, searching, each discovery greeted with the same bright excitement, each imperfect egg received as though it had been placed flawlessly.

Harriet realized, dimly, that she was smiling.

When the child finally gathered what he could carry and ran back into the house, his voice trailing behind him in a string of excited calls, the morning fell quiet again.

Harriet remained where she was for a while longer, listening to the silence settle back into place.

Then she stepped out.

The sun had climbed higher now, its light stretching further across the hills, the fog beginning to lift in slow, reluctant curls. The balloons drifted onward, unchanged. The pines still stood, catching the morning first.

Nothing had changed, and yet everything had shifted.

She drew in a steady breath, then turned, and continued on with the final leg of her run.

On returning to Headquarters, Harriet stood in front of the desk, paws folded neatly behind her back.

Her superior reviewed the report before him, eyes moving steadily down the page.

“…Harriet P. Hopperfield. Central North Island route. First assignment.”

“Yes, sir.” Harriet replied.

“You achieved an eighty-four percent delivery success rate.” Her superiors voice remained steady and unreadable.

The number settled into her chest with weight.

“That means sixteen percent were unsuccessful,” she said.

“Yes.” He nodded, eyes remaining on the page in front of him,

Harriet dropped her head.

Sixteen percent of children waking to empty spaces. To disappointment.

“I’m sorry, sir. I’ll—”

“Harriet.” Her superior closed the report and shifted towards her.

She looked up and met his gaze.

“That is a six percent improvement on the previous delivery agent assigned to that route.”

She blinked.

“I… what?”

“Seventy-eight percent,” he said. “That was the highest standing result for this route.”

Harriet’s eyes widened slightly at the realization.

“This route is not assigned for perfection,” he continued. “It is assigned for adaptability.”

He tapped the report lightly.

“And based on this, I would say you adapted very well.”

“I lost eggs to a possum,” she said.

“Yes,” he replied. “That is noted.”

“…Right.”

A small silence.

“Good work, Harriet.”

She straightened.

“Thank you, sir.”

She hesitated, then allowed herself a small, genuine smile.

The route had been hard. Harder than anything she had trained for.

But watching that child, she understood.

It had never been about control or about perfect placement, it had been about creating a small moment of joy.

Next year, she would do better, and the year after that, better still.

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A wife secretly tips salt into her husband’s coffee. A boy hides his sister’s car keys in the freezer and waits behind the kitchen door with his phone raised, ready to catch the outrage. Someone tapes over the office mouse sensor of a woman who already looks one inconvenience away from crying. A man in a fluorescent vest sets out fake parking notices across a whole row of windscreens and laughs to himself before the first curtain even twitches.

You move through them all like a thought they have not realized is their own.

You don’t invent the urge. That part belongs to them. The little flare of meanness. The itch to provoke. The hope of being the one who controls the room for a moment. You only push it a little bit further.

A teenage boy balances a bucket above a front door and crouches beside the hedge to watch for his father. Water would be dull. Mud is better. You slip into the space behind his grin and nudge the angle of the handle. Not enough for a spill. Enough for the bucket to tilt forward, heavy and certain.

When the door opens, it is not his father beneath it.

The old woman from next door takes the full weight of it across her shoulder and face. She goes down hard on one knee. First she cries in surprise, then in pain. The boy shoots to his feet, horror wiping the delight from him so fast it is almost artless.

You stay long enough to hear him say, “I didn’t mean—”

Then you are gone.

There is no pleasure in apologies. You’ve heard them all before. They never change.

The day opens wider as the sun climbs. Doors unlocked. Tempers short. People ready to laugh before they even know at what. You know how to find the cracks now. You have had centuries to learn where humans split.

You find a man in a supermarket replacing labels as his girlfriend turns the trolley down the next aisle. She means to laugh when she discovers the expensive wine switched for vinegar. That is all. A small sting. A harmless trick.

You slide through the moment and place your hand on his.

He swaps the labels all the way down the shelf.

Not one bottle. Twenty. Then thirty.

Then the imported olive oil. Then the infant formula. Then the allergy-safe bread on the top rack that a tired mother reaches for without reading twice.

The man blinks when you leave him. He looks around as if waking inside his own body. He sees the labels in his hands, the strip half-peeled from the shelf, and his expression empties. He doesn’t know how he got there.

You have seen that look before. Bewilderment first. Then fear. Then the frantic search for an explanation that will let a person keep believing themselves to be whole.

You laugh – the fact that no one else is laughing only makes it better.

By noon the city is humming. Phones ringing. Doors slamming. Someone sobbing in a public bathroom while her friends outside still laugh too loudly and insist it was only a joke. Somewhere, a school has to evacuate after a triggered fire alarm. You laugh at the confusion, the real joke being that this time, it isn’t false.

So many little tricks. You drift over it all, delighted.

Today, you take in what you want and leave the rest to the humans.

The first day of the fourth month. Your only day among the living. Your narrow yearly crack through the veil of the physical world. You have worn it smooth from use.

A train station. A group of university students. One girl has bought a novelty spider big enough to cover a palm. Her friends have chosen a victim carefully: a boy who startles easily, who laughs at himself after, who makes his fear convenient for others. They mean to hide it in his backpack and film the reaction when he reaches in on the platform.

You enter the girl just as she draws back the zipper.

Her hand goes deeper.

Past the backpack. Into the pocket of his coat where his wallet sits loose.

You pull out the card he needs to board the train.

You slide the spider into the empty wallet instead.

By the time he discovers it, the doors have already shut. He jerks backward with a shout, the wallet flung from his hand. People turn. Some laugh. More look annoyed. The train starts moving without him. His friends scream with laughter from the other side of the glass until they see his face and realize he is not acting.

He pounds once on the door as the train pulls away, then turns so fast he almost falls onto the tracks.

You leave before anyone tries to explain.

By late afternoon you are restless. Small humiliations no longer satisfy you. They haven’t for years. Too much practice has spoiled your appetite. It takes more now. More panic. More damage. More of that open, hunted look in the eyes when a person understands that something has slipped beyond their control.

The city gives you options.

A fake emergency alert. A broadcast. A voice borrowed from the dead. You touch them all, test the edges, and move on. None of them feel right. Too easy. Too common.

Then, just after sunset, you find the house.

It sits back from the road behind rusted iron gates and a line of cypress trees that lean together like they are whispering secrets. The windows are tall and black with no curtains drawn. Someone is home.

A young man stands at a long table in the front room, arranging candles in a careful ring. There is chalk on the floor beneath him, white and deliberate. Papers lie open at his elbow. At first glance it looks theatrical. A performance. A joke with too much effort put into it.

You move closer.

There are cameras in each corner of the room, small and discreet. A phone propped against a book. A grin touches the man’s mouth as he places an old silver mirror at the centre of the ring. Its surface is blackened at the edges and warped just enough that the candlelight inside it bends strangely. Then he checks his phone, lifts his head toward the nearest camera, and says, “If this works, no one gets to say I don’t commit to a theme.”

He means to fake a haunting.

You step into him lightly; he does not shiver.

You press harder. His fingers twitch on the table. One candle gutters out, then flares again. His pulse jumps once in his throat. Still he does not startle. He only smiles, slow and private, and says to the room, “There you are.”

It has been a very long time since anyone has spoken to you like that.

You should leave then.

Instead, you settle deeper.

He has planned this for an audience. The title on the phone screen says LIVE. You can feel the path opening in front of you already. A prank séance. Possession. Public terror. The kind of thing that will spread before midnight and live forever in recordings.

Your one day widened.

Preserved.

The man lifts the mirror and angles it toward his own face.

“Come on, then,” he says.

You do.

It is easier than it should be.

His body opens around you with no resistance, no blind panic, no stuttering fight for control. You take his mouth, his hands, the weight of his spine. The room sharpens. Candlelight grows hard at the edges. You feel the cameras. The pulse. The hot human machinery of breath and blood.

Delicious.

You bare his teeth at the lens and let your grin widen beyond what a human face should manage.

You reach for the nearest candle to make it burst.

The chalk beneath your feet burns cold.

The ring closes.

You try to step back out of his body.

You can’t.

The mirror in your hand flashes silver-white and your own face looks back at you for the first time in longer than memory holds. Not as anything that once belonged to the living. As you are now. Thin as smoke. Eyes bright with borrowed malice. Mouth open in surprise.

The body you are wearing does not move with your will anymore.

I had hoped you would notice before that.

You freeze inside the ring.

For one strange second, you think the voice comes from the camera speaker. Then from the walls. Then from nowhere at all.

The young man’s body lifts its head.

But I am no longer inside it.

I stand just beyond the chalk, where the candlelight catches on nothing it should. You look at me and know me at once, though not by face. It is the feeling of me you recognise. The shape of consequence.

“No,” you say, but the word scrapes out of the trapped body like rust.

I had given you time.

“You,” you say, and now there is fear in it. Real fear. “You’re the one who cursed me.”

I did.

Your eyes dart to the chalk, the candles, the mirror, the door. You search with that old frantic quickness, still believing there is always a clever way out if you move fast enough.

For the first time all day, there is no amusement in you. Only the rising animal terror of something cornered. It changes you quickly. Strips you down.

“Please… Free me,” you beg, “I promise I will stop.”

I look at you for a long moment.

I gave you the first day of the fourth month. One day each year to touch the living world and remember what it meant to be part of it.

“I gave you centuries of chances to use your gift wisely. You chose to torment others, year after year.”

Your borrowed chest rises too fast.

“I know,” you whisper.

No. You enjoyed it.

Your expression breaks.

“They got to live,” you say. “They got to love and grieve and ruin things and fix them and I had nothing. I had one day.”

And what did you do with it?

You already know.

The body’s eyes fill. Tears gather and spill down a face you stole for sport. You seem startled by them.

I watch understanding arrive in you at last.

You think of them.

All of them.

This is what you left them with.

Your mouth trembles.

“I’m sorry.”

I believe you, but it is too late.

The dark behind me opens soundlessly.

You see it.

And something in you gives way.

“No,” you gasp. “Please.”

I do not move.

When it takes hold of you, it is not sudden.

It is certain.

You are pulled from the body, unraveling from it in slow, helpless strips. Your hands claw at nothing. Your voice thins as it leaves you.

And in that moment—

you understand.

Not the joke.

The feeling.

The helplessness. The certainty that what comes next is already decided.

You look at me.

Your eyes are wide, pleading, terrified, fixed on mine as the dark closes around you and takes you.

I hope you enjoyed my April Fool’s Day story!
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Read More Dark Fiction:
The Heart Thief’s Song
A Duet for the Tides
A Hymn for the Dead
Machine Learning
The Replacement

Have you ever made yourself look so stupid in front of someone that you became their friend just to prove to them you’re not an idiot?

That’s how I met Dom.

The only problem is, now I’m the one stuck with an idiot for a friend…

So here I am, freezing my ass off in the dark, watching Dom attempt to free solo a warehouse wall to dodge security cameras and break us into an Amazon fulfilment center.

I think his plan is completely idiotic.

But, as always, I’m helping him anyway.

See, Dom and I have been friends a long time. Long enough for me to know two things.

First — his plans are almost always doomed to fail.

Second — they sometimes work anyway.

Dumb enough to succeed. That’s the category Dom operates in.

In the fifteen years since the day I accidentally called him “Mom” in high school — and felt obligated to befriend him so he wouldn’t me remember as an idiot — I’ve come to learn something important.

Dom is the idiot.

He used to sit in class daydreaming up plans like they were viable life strategies. Skipping class by dressing as a teacher. Buying alcohol in the same disguise.

Throwing a party with that alcohol so girls would finally like us.

I called him a fool every time.

But after that party, I dated Matilda Beaumont for ten months… and even made it to third base.

So.

Dom was an idiot. A lunatic. A damn fool. And yet, somehow he managed to still pull of the craziest stunts.

“It’ll be a piece of cake. Trust me.”

That’s what Dom said when he told me the plan.

“They’ve got loads of these things,” he went on. “They won’t even notice if we take a couple. It’s basically a victimless crime.”

“Breaking the law isn’t what I’m worried about,” I argued. “It’s getting caught.”

I looked at him properly.

“Do you even hear yourself? You think two guys can break into a place with multi-million dollar security… and your plan is to ‘spider-man your way in’ ?” I gesture with my fingers as I mockingly quote his words back to him.

“Come on,” he said. “When haven’t I delivered on a plan before? Remember Matty Beaumont?”

“Of course I remember Matty Beaumont. I also remember three months of detention and being grounded just as long.”

I leave out the part where Matty got herself detention too, just so she could pass me notes.

“Just because dumb shit goes right doesn’t mean dumber shit will,” I said, throwing my arms up.

“What if I told you I’ve got a buddy on the inside?” he said with a tilted grin. “I just need to get past the security cameras. They’ll handle the alarms, leave the locker room window open on the south side of the building.”

“I would say you’re a goddamn fool for trusting anyone with this plan.”

“I trust you, don’t I?”

He gave me that imbecilic expression — the one that somehow reads as confidence.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and close my eyes for a moment to think.

“Okay,” I sighed. “Remind me again, where do I fit into this plan?”

Dom smirked.

That’s when I should’ve walked away.

Instead, I’m here, piss frozen solid in my own bladder, watching my idiot friend ten feet off the ground squeezing his way through a narrow gap of a window.

The moment he slips in, I get into the drivers seat of truck that has been just convincingly enough disguised as a legitimate delivery vehicle.

For the record, we did discuss how we were supposed to get past security with a big-ass truck rolling up in the middle of the night.

Dom said, “Don’t worry about it.”

He was right.

The guards at the gate barely looked at me. One glance at the ID badge his “guy on the inside” sorted, and they waved me through like an overdone routine.

“Fucking idiot,” I mutter under my breath, unsure if I meant the words for Dom, or me.

I back the truck up to the loading bay on the east side of the building, correcting twice before I get it straight and close enough to look intentional.

I put it in park and leave the engine running.

And I wait.

More minutes than I can bear roll by.

Dom is a no-show.

I try not to panic. Dom is an idiot, but he’s gotten out of tight spots before. He’s probably distracted. Probably found something shiny, gone down the wrong aisle, convinced himself it was the right one.

I keep waiting.

Waiting.

Too long.

Just as I step out of the truck, the warehouse door rattles and rolls open.

Dom bursts through it, hauling boxes.

Not a couple.

Stacks… Endless stacks…

“Goddamnit, Dom — this is too much!” I shout an angry whisper to avoid raising suspicion.

“What, this? This is barely anything,” he fires back. “You should see what they’ve got in the back. They won’t even notice.”

He gestures wildly as he hastily grabs boxes from the stack and shoves them into my arms.

“Quick — help me load.”

Against my better judgement — which, at this point, has been thoroughly ignored — I start packing boxes into the truck.

I slam the doors shut once the stack has been fully cleared, and Dom disappears back inside.

“Wait for my guy,” he calls. “I’ll meet you outside the south perimeter.”

I don’t bother arguing.

He’s gotten us this far.

Why not all the way?

I sit.

And I wait.

The waiting damn near kills me this time.

Then I see movement in the side mirror.

A figure approaches the truck.

Opens the door.

Climbs into the passenger seat.

Turns to face me.

“Hi Bobby. Long time.”

And there I am — staring straight into the face of none other than Matilda Beaumont.

In an Amazon uniform.

I look at Matty, mouth hanging open, and for a moment I am an adolescent boy again.

She chuckles, then her face flattens.

“Stop staring and drive.” her words snapping me back into my body.

I hit the accelerator.

We don’t speed off. No screeching tires. No dramatic escape — just a slow, steady crawl to the security gate.

They check both our IDs and just like before… they wave us through.

I exhale as we turn the corner and pull into our rendezvous point — a quiet cul-de-sac near the south end of the fulfilment center.

Moments later, Dom bursts out of a bush and climbs into the truck beside Matty, grinning like he’s just conquered something.

“I told you to trust me,” he says. “Piece of cake.” A wide grin plastered with pride oozing from his face.

I glance at Matty.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” she replies.

“Dom,” I say, “why didn’t you tell me Matty was your guy on the inside?”

“Would you have believed me?”

He had a point.

“Besides,” Dom adds, grinning, “I thought it’d be a nice surprise for you two lovebirds.”

“Ex-lovers,” I correct. “From fifteen years ago.”

“Oh, Bobby,” Matty interjects, hand to chest, “don’t break my heart a second time. Technically, we never ended things. You ghosted me.”

“Ghosted you? You moved across the country and vanished.”

“I gave Dom my number to pass on,” she says. “You never called.”

We both look at Dom.

“Hey,” he says, holding his hands up, “look at the bright side — I got you back together eventually.”

By the time we reach his grandmother’s house, the adrenaline has worn off.

We unload the truck in silence, stacking box after box into the shed.

Once emptied, Matty and I throw a couple of sheets over the truck — a temporary solution to a problem we had no time to solve — before returning to Dom.

Dom is standing outside the shed, beside the last box, hands on his hips.

“Well?” he says, cheeks raised from an unerasable grin. “Don’t you want to see what all this was for?”

I crouch down and peel back the lid, and I immediately feel sick.

“Dom… you did check the boxes before we loaded them, didn’t you?”

“Well… not exactly. I didn’t have time.”

Of course.

I sink my face into my hands — defeated beyond fury — struck by realization.

I became friends with Dom to prove I wasn’t an idiot.

Turns out, all he’s ever done is prove how much I am.

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This past week marked my first month on Substack.

I joined not really knowing what to expect, or even what I was supposed to do on here. All I knew was that I had a lot of ideas, and I wanted to know if they were any good. If what I wanted to say, the stories I wanted to tell, actually had any worth.

When I opened my feed for the first time, I was daunted. I had no network, no subscribers, knew no one. I was starting from exactly zero.

So I just started testing things.

I posted notes, then deleted them. Posted articles, then deleted those too. Picked a publication name, changed my publication name (twice). I interacted with a few posts, but only on a surface level.

In all transparency, I didn’t trust the platform at first.

Everything felt a bit performative. A lot of “advice” that felt more like self-marketing. Thought pieces that sounded good, but didn’t feel that relatable, or like something I have heard a hundred times. And somehow, those were the accounts with the big subscriber numbers, which just made the whole thing feel a bit unrealistic to me.

I tried searching for better content. Stuff more aligned with what I actually like; fiction, short stories, thoughtful essays. I even threw a few notes into the void asking people to share things with me.

Nothing.

Then, kind of randomly, I got one comment from someone that ended up being more helpful than I expected. They simply said: engage properly with the stuff you like, and you’ll start to see more of it.

So I did.

When I saw something I liked, I didn’t just hit like, I left an actual comment. When someone shared something interesting, I replied to it. Not in a strategic way, just thoughtfully.

And pretty quickly, things started to shift.

More people followed me, some even subscribed. My feed improved. More of the kind of writing I was actually looking for. And then something else started happening.

I started to notice a community forming.

An interconnected web of people supporting each other, replying to each other, sharing each other’s work. Bigger accounts giving genuine attention to smaller writers who were clearly putting out good work.

That’s when something clicked for me.

Substack stopped feeling like a place where I needed to prove something, or chase validation, and started feeling more like a place where I could actually just get better.

Where I could earn that validation for myself.

Where I could write what I actually want to write, and not worry so much about how it’s “supposed” to be received. That was the biggest shift for me.

My community is still small. My subscriber count is modest but after only a month it feels miraculous compared to what I initially imagined.

I’ve connected with some really incredible writers. People whose work makes me think differently. Makes me want to push myself more. Makes me want to actually write something good, not just something that sounds good.

Every week I feel a bit more motivated. To write better. To read more. To try new things.

I know not every week is going to be a win. There will definitely be times where I phone it in a bit. But I also know there will be more times where I really give it everything.

In the last month, I’ve read some of the best fiction I’ve ever come across. I can’t list everything, but there are a few that have really stuck with me:

The One Who Stays by

The Artifact Part 1 by

Banquo by

Piss in the River Styx and Turn Hades Into Your Bathhouse by

The Last Work of Connor O’Donnell by

Fly by

Pin Your Heart to the Page… by

Even it up by

How Would You Feel If Your Test Was So Bad It Killed Your Professor? by

Sneak Peek (1 of 6) Into The Writer's Guide to Rural Life Volume One by (this specific piece by Alley is not technically fiction, but still incredibly foundational!)

Beyond this list, there are so many that have supported me and engaged with me over the last month. I’m grateful to every single one of you who has, and continues to, follow my journey. Whether you’re a subscriber, a follower, or just a quiet lurker, thank you.

Press the lurker converter button below to get your first class ticket for the next leg of my journey.

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That was the truth of it. Not courage. Not duty. Not glory. Just the effort of holding myself together long enough not to make a fool of myself in front of men who looked barely more alive than the dead.

I pressed my hands against my coat, hard enough to hurt, hoping I could force the shaking out of them. It did nothing. The trembling ran through my wrists, my arms, my ribs. I could feel it in my teeth when my jaw clenched.

The trench stank of wet earth, cordite, old smoke, shit, and something sweeter underneath it that made me think of meat left too long in the sun. Mud had worked its way into everything; cuffs, collars, bootlaces, under nails, into the split skin of knuckles. It darkened every face, every sleeve, every strip of bandage.

Ahead of me, a man I did not know gripped the ladder with both hands and waited for the whistle.

I stared at the back of his coat because I didn’t want to look anywhere else. If I looked down, I might see what the mud was trying to hide. If I looked up, I might see the sky and remember what waited above us.

The man shifted his grip.

His right hand caught the little light that reached into the trench.

For a second I thought it was only wet mud, slick and black where it had been smeared over the skin. He flexed his fingers and the shine changed with the movement.

I looked away. Fear was making me see things.

The man ahead of him crossed himself.

The one behind me muttered something that might have been a prayer or a curse. At that point they were almost the same thing.

I should not have been there.

The thought had been with me since they put a rifle in my hands. It came back now with such force that I nearly said it aloud.

I shouldn’t be here.

Finally, the whistle blew and the line lurched alive, the high-pitched sound cracking through my chest like lightning.

The man in front of me started climbing, boots thudding against the wooden ladder. Others followed in a jerking rush, vanishing one by one over the trench wall as though the earth itself were swallowing them, while my feet would not move, as if they had somehow gripped themselves into the mud to hold me in place.

Then somebody behind me drove a hand between my shoulders.

“Go!”

The shove pushed me forward.

I climbed.

The world opened into smoke and torn ground and blackened posts of wire. Men were already running through it, bent low, reduced by distance to dark shapes jerking across mud. Gunfire tore the air in a long, unbroken line. Shells burst somewhere ahead and to the left, hurling dirt and smoke upward in black sprays that hung for a moment before collapsing back into the earth.

Then I was over.

The ground was so churned it barely seemed like ground at all. It shifted under every step, slick and sucking, trying to hold me in place. I ran because everyone around me ran. There was no choice in it, no room for fear or courage, only forward movement.

Men were shouting, the shape of their words lost in the gunfire.

A body went down to my right. Another pitched forward ahead of me and slid into the mud on his face. Someone screamed in a high, cracked voice that sounded too young, too much like my own.

The noise was disorienting, coming from every direction at once and never stopping. Gunfire. Shellfire. Men shouting. Men screaming. I wanted to close my eyes, to lie down, to be anywhere else.

But I kept moving.

The wire was ahead somewhere. I could see the broken posts through the smoke.

If I could make it there—

Something hit my left shoulder.

It was not like being cut or burned or even struck. It was impact, pure and terrible, as though a giant hand had taken hold of me and slammed all its force through one side of my body. My rifle flew from my grip. My legs disappeared beneath me. The ground struck my knees, then my face, then all of me at once.

I did not understand what had happened until I tried to push myself up and my left arm would not answer.

The battle continued around me.

I lay in the mud and heard men running past, heard gunfire overhead. My shoulder felt not painful at first, but wrong, blank and absent and enormous all at once. I turned my head and saw only smoke and boots and churned earth.

I opened my mouth to shout.

Mud filled it.

I spat and coughed and tried again, but whatever came out was lost under the roar of battle.

Boots passed close to my face.

No one stopped.

The sky above me looked pale and distant, almost peaceful behind the smoke.

Then it vanished.

Relief struck me first.

I was alive. At least, I hoped I was.

The light pressed against my eyes with a flat, constant brightness that did not flicker like fire or shift like daylight through smoke. It felt unnatural even before I opened them.

When I did, the ceiling above me was white and smooth and seamless.

No beams. No canvas. No stains.

The air smelled like nothing.

Not clean linen. Not medicine. Not blood.

Nothing at all.

As though every scent had been stripped from it.

After the trench, the absence itself felt frightening.

A faint mechanical hum lingered somewhere beyond the bed, steady enough to disappear when I tried to focus on it.

I pushed myself upright, too easily. Only then I remembered my left arm.

I looked for a sleeve, a bandage, blood, anything familiar.

Instead, I found a metal limb rested where my arm should have been.

Steel caught the white light in dark, clean planes. The shoulder joint was narrow and precise, fitted into me with such exactness that the seam itself was more terrible than a wound would have been. Plates overlapped at the upper arm. Cables, or something like tendons. shifted faintly at the elbow.

The hand looked almost human.

The fingers opened, one after the other.

I felt it.

Not the familiar movement of flesh and bone, but something cold, something strange. Like the motion happened first, and the sensation arrived afterward to tell me it had.

I jerked back.

This isn’t mine.

The thought struck so hard it seemed to shake through me.

The fingers moved again.

Fingers. Not mine.

A voice spoke to my right.

“Responsive. Good.”

I turned so fast I nearly fell from the bed.

A man stood beside a narrow table, a slim panel in his hand. He wore pale clothing that fit close to the body and showed no sign of dirt, wear, or haste.

Nothing about him belonged to mud or gunfire.

He did not look at me.

He looked at the panel.

“What is this?” I heard myself say. My voice sounded small.

“You sustained critical damage to the limb,” he said. “It has been replaced.”

“Replaced?” I looked from him to the arm and back again.

“Functionality has been restored,” He tapped on the screen in front of him. “You are combat-capable.”

My chest tightened.

“No… I can’t go back out there.”

Images flashed; mud, screaming, bodies.

I stared at the arm.

The dark metal caught the light in the same hard way that other hand in the trench had.

I had seen it.

I had looked away.

“I don’t want this,” I said again, quieter now.

The man stepped aside.

“Stand.”

I pulled myself up, gripping the bedframe.

Behind him, a corridor stretched out under the same flat white light.

“You will return to your unit,” he said. “Redeployment is scheduled.”

Redeployment.

As though I were equipment.

Gunfire echoed faintly somewhere far away.

I stepped forward.

The second time I went over the top, I was still afraid.

But the fear had company now.

The arm moved too well.

That was what I noticed first. When I slipped, it corrected faster than I could think. When I hit the ground, it took my weight without shaking. When I grabbed the rifle, my grip settled instantly. I kept looking at it as I ran, half expecting it to lag behind me like dead weight or go suddenly mad and wrench itself the wrong way.

The battlefield was still chaos. Men still fell. Smoke still hid the ground until you were nearly on top of it. The wire still waited ahead like a threat from a bad dream. Nothing out there had changed.

A shell burst ahead and threw dirt against my face. I hit the mud by instinct and came up again before I had fully realized I’d gone down. The movement had been too quick, too smooth.

The man beside me did not get up.

I saw his leg bent under him at the wrong angle. Saw his mouth open in a shape that might have been a shout. Then I was past him.

I made it farther this time before they hit me again.

Shrapnel through the shin. A sharp burst of pain, the crack of bone. The world tipping. Mud rising. Darkness.

When I woke in the white room, the leg from my right knee down was metal.

I saw it immediately and I was sick on the floor.

Nobody rushed to help. Nobody even seemed surprised. I knelt there under the bright light, shaking and spitting bitterness onto a spotless floor, and a woman in pale clothing stood nearby with her hands folded behind her back until I was finished.

“Adaptation discomfort is common,” she said.

I looked up at her, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Discomfort?”

My voice sounded wrong to me then. Hoarse and weak and far away.

She glanced down at a panel of her own.

“Neurological rejection remains within acceptable parameters.”

“I’m not rejecting it,” I said. “I’m terrified.”

She made a note.

I think that was when I first understood that they did not care about the difference.

They sent me back.

The next few cycles blur together in places, but not all of them.

Some details stand out too clearly.

The climb over the ladder with my heart hammering so hard I thought it might burst before a bullet could reach it.

The bright, awful moment of relief when I made it halfway across open ground untouched.

The bullet that struck my side.

The white room.

The smooth, expressionless face of a man telling me damage to the ribs and left lung had been resolved.

Resolved.

As if he were talking about paperwork.

After that, breathing changed.

I noticed it in the trench before the next whistle. Men around me gulped air through fear and cold and damp, but my own breathing moved in and out with a steadiness that made me feel sick. I tried to force it faster. It corrected itself.

I still felt fear then. Deeply. Enough to taste it.

But the fear no longer owned all of me.

I began to see others more clearly after that. Not just mud and bandages and hollow cheeks. Other things.

A jaw that caught the light too sharply when a man turned his head. A strip of metal visible above a collar where skin should have met fabric. Fingers too precise in their movement. Eyes that did not blink often enough.

I had not imagined that first hand.

The trenches were full of men like me.

Or men on their way to becoming something like me.

I tried, after that, not to be hit.

I tried with a desperation that went beyond surviving. I learned the rhythm of shelling. Learned where the ground dipped enough to hide in. Learned how to move lower, faster, more efficiently. I followed shouted orders before they had finished leaving an officer’s mouth. I crossed ground that should have killed me and reached places I had no right to reach.

I became better at war.

That was its own horror.

A boy in an enemy trench raised his rifle at me and I shot him before I had fully registered his face; smooth, young like mine. My metal hand did not shake. My body did not lurch afterward the way it once might have. The gun kicked. The boy fell. I moved on.

The replacements made me faster. Stronger. Harder to kill. Every change made the next survival more likely. Every survival increased the chance of another injury, another return to the light, another piece taken and improved.

I was not being healed.

I was being kept in service.

The six time they sent me back with the left side of my jaw rebuilt after a shell fragment tore through it. The seventh time there was something done to my eye. After that, I could see too clearly from that side. Mud droplets on coats ten yards away, wire glinting through smoke, the faint twitch of movement before a man broke from cover.

I began to dread the white room. That fear did not replace the battlefield all at once. It crept in.

The whistle would blow and terror would seize me as before, but threaded through it now came another thought, cold and clear beneath the panic:

Don’t get hit.

Do not go back there.

The bright room. The clean air. The measured voices. The terrible absence of blood. The feeling of being replaced, one piece at a time.

The next time I climbed the ladder, I did it because I wanted, with a desperation I cannot properly describe, to make it to the other side whole.

I moved low through smoke and mud, every part of me focused on avoiding impact. My body responded instantly. Faster than ever. A shell hole yawned open ahead and I cleared it cleanly. Machine-gun fire stitched the mud to my left and I changed course before the sound had fully reached me. Wire loomed, and I found the gap without searching.

For a few shining seconds, I thought I might do it.

Then something struck me and drove me backwards into the earth.

Pain flashed white. Then numbness spread down my right side in a wave so sudden it felt planned.

I knew before I blacked out what they would take next.

“No,” I said into the mud.

The guns swallowed it.

The white room was waiting.

A man stood nearby, panel in hand.

“Spinal reinforcement successful,” he said. “Stand.”

“No.”

The word surprised both of us.

“You are cleared for redeployment.”

“I said no.” I pushed myself up on one elbow. “I’m done. I’m done! I won’t go back.”

Something sharpened in his attention. “Resistance response observed.” He made a note on the panel and then stepped closer. His hand rose toward the base of my skull.

I tried to pull away but something inside me seized. My spine locked. My legs found the floor. My body rose.

Panic struck me so hard it made the room tilt.

“No,” I said again. Louder. “No, stop—”

His fingers rested lightly at the back of my neck, where flesh gave way to something I had not wanted to imagine. Metal answered metal beneath the skin.

“Motor override functional,” he said.

I was standing.

My racing heart steadied. My body stood still as a statue.

I tried to move my arm and could not. Tried to turn away and failed. Every command I sent into myself vanished somewhere before it reached its destination.

Panic. Terror. Rage.

None of them mattered.

I remember the corridor after that; white light, smooth walls, the sound of gunfire waiting far off as though the world itself had been reduced to a distant machine.

I remember trying to hold onto the word I.

It didn’t mean anything anymore.

The soldier stood in the trench among the others.

Mud slicked the duckboards. Men shifted shoulder to shoulder beneath the earthworks, checking rifles, tightening straps, bowing their heads as the whistle waited somewhere ahead. Faces were grey with exhaustion and dirt. Hands trembled. Breath smoked faintly in the cold.

The soldier did not tremble.

Reinforced spine held posture upright. Left arm operational. Right leg operational. Respiratory efficiency maintained. Ocular response improved. Motor override confirmed.

The whistle blew.

The line moved.

Men climbed the ladders in a staggered rush, boots scraping wood, bodies vanishing over the lip into smoke and gunfire. The soldier climbed with them.

Open ground stretched ahead in torn bands of mud and wire.

Incoming fire registered from the right. Adjusted trajectory calculated. Forward movement maintained.

A shell burst to the left and threw dirt over three advancing men. Two fell. One rose again. The soldier altered course by half a stride and continued.

No hesitation.

Wire ahead. Gap identified.

The soldier crossed it.

An enemy rifleman appeared through smoke at the far parapet. Target acquired. Engagement immediate. Threat neutralized.

Designation unchanged.

Combat efficiency improved.

The soldier advanced.

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Read More Dark Fiction:
The Heart Thief’s Song
A Duet for the Tides
A Hymn for the Dead
Machine Learning

By noon the parade had reached O’Connell Street, and even through the pub’s locked doors Declan Byrne could feel it in his bones.

Plastic shamrocks hung in the window of the pub, because the owner insisted they did every year. A cardboard leprechaun with an absurd grin was taped beside the whiskey shelf. Green beads and glittering hats had been delivered in a box two days ago and now waited in a heap behind the counter, ready for that evening’s crowd to drape themselves in them.

Declan remembered St Patrick’s Day from when he was young. He remembered neighbors calling to one another in the street, fiddle music from a cousin’s front room, his grandmother setting a dish of soda bread on the table as if guests might arrive at any hour. There had been pride in it then. Not this hollow sort of performance.

He was polishing a pint glass that had already been polished when the latch rattled.

Declan glanced at the door. The sign hanging there clearly said CLOSED.

The latch rattled again, then the door pushed inward anyway.

A man stepped in out of the cold March air as if the sign was a mere suggestion.

He was small but walked in with confident strides. He wore a dark coat too fine for a laborer and too old-fashioned for anyone with sense, along with a hat that might have looked ridiculous on another man but somehow did not on him. Rain shone on his shoulders. His boots were muddy, though Declan had no idea where in central Dublin he’d found mud.

“We’re closed,” Declan said.

“So I gathered,” the man replied pleasantly, closing the door behind him. He stood a moment, taking in the bar. His gaze landed on the cardboard leprechaun by the whiskey shelf and his expression soured at once. “Sweet sufferin’ Christ.”

Declan snorted before he could stop himself.

The stranger looked at him. “Do you mind terribly if I sit for a moment? I’ve just walked through a city full of my own face, and I assure you it would drive a saint to drink.”

Declan should have thrown him out. There was stock to sort, glasses to stack, and an evening of hell ahead of him. But there was certain charm about the visitor, an ease with how that made him less like madman his speech would otherwise suggest.

Declan jerked his chin toward a stool. “One drink.”

“Generous of you.”

The man sat, removed his hat, and smoothed damp silver hair back from his brow. His face was difficult to place in age. He had the fine-boned look of someone who could have been sixty or six hundred. His eyes were bright and merry, though there was weariness around them.

“What’ll it be?” Declan asked.

“Whiskey,” said the man. “If you’ve a decent one.”

Declan poured him a measure of Redbreast without comment. The stranger took a sip, sighed through his nose in clear approval, and then glanced again at the cardboard cut-out.

“I’ve been insulted in many inventive ways over the centuries,” he said, “but I do believe that thing is among the laziest.”

Declan leaned an elbow on the counter despite himself. “You’ve strong feelings about leprechauns, then.”

“I do when they’ve my nose.”

That won him a laugh.

Outside, the parade roared on. Inside, the pub was dim and smelled of old wood, citrus peel, and stale stout. For a few minutes it felt cut off from the day entirely.

The man drank slowly. He spoke first of the crowds, then of the city. Not in the vague, sentimental way of a man romanticizing the past, but with odd particularity.

“There was a bakery off Capel Street once,” he said. “Small place. Burnt their oatcakes every Thursday without fail. You could smell it half the day if the wind turned.”

Declan shrugged. “Before my time.”

“Before most people’s time,” the stranger said lightly. “And there was a woman near the quays who used to leave milk on her sill every solstice. Never said it was for anyone, mind, but it always disappeared.”

Declan gave him a sharper look. “You talk like you knew her.”

“I did know her. Miserable woman. Terrible singer.”

Declan smiled despite the oddness of it. “You one of those old lads who’s decided fifty years ago was the last honest age?”

The stranger swirled the whiskey in his glass. “No. I’m one of those old lads who remembers when this city knew how to live beside what it could not quite explain.”

That took some of the humor out of Declan. He thought of the glass towers rising beyond older rooftops. Of historic facades kept only because they brought in tourists. Of pubs turned into attractions and neighborhoods turned into investments.

“Not much room for mystery now,” Declan muttered.

“Oh, there’s room,” the stranger said. “There’s just less welcome.”

He finished the whiskey and reached into his coat.

Declan expected euros, maybe a card if the man was especially annoying. Instead he placed a coin on the counter.

It was gold, or something very near it. Thick, old, and softly worn at the edges. Not polished. Not bright. A coin that seemed to have held the dark of earth in it for a very long time. One face bore a symbol Declan didn’t recognize: not a harp, not a crown, not anything minted by a state. When he touched it, the metal felt warm.

“That’s not legal tender,” Declan said.

“No,” the stranger agreed. “But it holds much more value.”

Declan turned it over between his fingers, skeptically. “Where’d you get this?”

The stranger’s mouth twitched. “Family savings.”

Declan looked up, ready with some dry answer, and paused.

For the span of a breath the stranger’s shadow on the back wall seemed wrong. Too small, perhaps, or too pointed. Like the outline of a hat with a sharper brim than the one he wore. Then the light shifted and it was only a shadow again.

Declan set the coin down more carefully than he meant to.

“If you are tempted for more,” the stranger said, “meet me after closing. I’ve work, and I could use a man who is not afraid of a little mystery.”

Declan frowned. “What sort of mystery?”

“Relocating some old belongings,” the stranger said. Then he took up his hat, settled it on his head, and smiled. “Nothing too wicked, I promise.”

Before Declan could ask another question, the man was gone.

The rest of the day swallowed Declan whole.

By six the pub was packed shoulder to shoulder. By eight it was roaring. Tourists with painted faces and rented cheer shouted over one another for Guinness and whiskey and whatever green horror the younger staff had invented for the occasion. Beads broke. Glasses smashed. Someone vomited in the alley. Two Americans tried to sing “Molly Malone” without knowing more than half the words, while a French couple made out against the fruit machine.

Declan poured and wiped and counted and cursed under his breath for hour after hour. Yet all night, whenever his hand brushed his trouser pocket, he felt the weight of the coin there.

Near three in the morning he turned the lock and herded the last of the stragglers into the wet street. Declan stood beneath the pub’s lamp, exhausted to the marrow.

The stranger was waiting under the awning next door, dry as if rain had the decency not to touch him.

“Ready?” he asked brightly.

“I’m either very curious or very stupid, but yes, I’m ready.”

The stranger merely smiled at Declan then started moving.

They walked without much talk. Across dark streets, past shuttered shopfronts and silent buses, through a city that felt temporarily abandoned by ordinary men. The stranger led him at last to a construction site fenced off with metal panels and bright warning signs. Behind them lay a strip of torn ground where the city had not yet fully swallowed the earth.

“This does not seem like moving house” Declan pointed out.

“This is the last fairy mound in Dublin,” said the stranger.

Declan gave him a long look. “Right.”

“I did warn you there’d be mystery.”

The stranger produced a small shovel from somewhere inside his coat. Declan didn’t ask how. By then he was past that, he simply took the shovel and let the stranger usher him over the fence.

“There were more of them once,” he said once they both reached the other side. “In the city, in the fields beyond it, under roads that were not yet roads. Places where my kind and others could keep to ourselves and still be near enough to hear your songs. But cities grow, and all growth takes room from something.”

Declan found he had no joke to offer.

“Tomorrow they dig this one open,” the stranger went on. “I can’t stop them so tonight we move what must be moved.”

“The gold.”

“The gold,” said the stranger, smiling again. “Though not, perhaps, as you imagine it.”

They dug.

The earth was heavier than it looked. Declan’s hands blistered quickly. More than once he nearly told the stranger where to shove his mystery and his mound together. But the small man dug on with infuriating cheer, humming under his breath as if this were no harder than turning a garden bed.

At last the shovel struck something hollow.

They knelt and cleared the soil away, and from it emerged a plain black pot, its rim chipped, filled with coins like the one Declan had in his pocket. Old gold, dim and warm, each stamped with symbols worn soft by time.

The stranger laid a hand on the pot almost tenderly.

“Well,” he said. “There you are.”

They carried it between them all the way back to the pub, slipping through alleyways as dawn threatened behind the rooftops. In the cellar beneath the bar, among kegs and crates and dust, the stranger chose a spot beneath the oldest part of the foundation.

“Here,” he said.

Declan fetched tools. Together they lifted stone, dug a hollow, and buried the pot beneath the floor.

When it was done, the stranger stepped back, satisfied.

“That’s it?” Declan asked.

“That’s it.”

“You made me drag ancient gold halfway across Dublin to bury it under a pub.”

“Under an excellent pub,” the stranger corrected.

Declan leaned on the shovel. “You still haven’t told me who you are.”

The man set his hat back on his head and gave him a look both merry and deeply old.

“The name’s O’Coinn,” he said, “I am one of the last leprechauns left in the city.”

Declan opened his mouth in disbelief.

The O’Coinn grinned, tipping his hat, and disappeared up the cellar steps before Declan could stop him. By the time Declan reached returned to the bar, there was no sign of the man at all.

Declan slept three hours and woke feeling as though he’d been beaten with a rake.

By late morning he was back at the pub, he had barely tied on his apron when there came a soft knock at the front.

He frowned. They weren’t open.

Another knock.

Declan unlocked the door a crack.

A man stood there in a dark coat, tall and elegant, with rain beaded on his shoulders. Nothing strange about him at first glance, until Declan saw, cast long on the pavement behind him, a shadow with antlers.

The man inclined his head. “Am I early?”

Declan stared.

Before he could answer, a woman stepped up behind the first, pale and lovely and smelling faintly of salt water. Her hair hung heavy as if still damp from the sea. Beside her waited a fiddler with a battered case under one arm and eyes too bright for any man.

More figures lingered further down the street. Small ones. Tall ones. Wrapped in coats, scarves, hats. Ordinary, if you chose not to look too closely.

The tall man smiled politely. “We heard this place was safe.”

Declan thought of the cellar, of the stranger, and the buried gold.

He opened the door wider.

They came in quietly, with more manners than half the living men who’d filled the place the night before. They sat at tables and along the bar, speaking in low voices. The fiddler opened his case and started playing. The woman by the window laughed, and for a moment Declan could have sworn he heard waves strike stone.

By the time he’d poured the first round, the pub was full.

Not crowded. Not rowdy. Full.

The fiddler’s tune curled through the beams and old mirrors and seemed to wake something sleeping in the wood itself. Conversation rose with it, story layered over laughter, and all of it carried a feeling Declan had not known he’d missed until it returned.

O’Coinn sat at the end of the bar as if he had always been there.

Declan pointed at him with the neck of a whiskey bottle. “You.”

“Me,” the leprechaun agreed.

“What in God’s name is going on?”

“You buried my gold beneath your pub,” he said, folding his hands on the bar. “It was never meant to make a man rich. It was meant to make a place safe.”

Declan looked around the room. At the antler-shadowed gentleman. At the sea-eyed woman. At the fiddler smiling into his tune. At others he did not dare name.

“For them?”

“For all who remember what this city was built upon.” The leprechaun’s expression softened. “Those who were once pushed out, bit by bit. Not always cruelly. Sometimes merely carelessly. But a city ought to have room for its ghosts and wonders.”

Declan let out a breath.

“And now what?” he asked.

“Now,” said the leprechaun, lifting his glass, “you keep the cellar dry, the door open, and the Guinness fit to drink. The rest will take care of itself.”

Declan looked around the pub once more. The dark wood. The worn brass. The old scratches in the counter left by rings and coins and hands long gone. Outside, Dublin still thundered on in buses and builders and glass towers and tourist nonsense. But in here something older had sat back down and made itself at home.

For the first time in a long while, Declan did not feel that the city had lost its soul.

Only that it had been waiting, patient as buried gold, for someone to give it shelter.

And so he picked up another glass, set it beneath the taps, and got back to work.

Happy St Patrick’s Day!

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I publish a new short story every week.

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Read More Dark Fiction:
The Heart Thief’s Song
A Duet for the Tides
A Hymn for the Dead
Machine Learning
The Replacement

The factory floor was already running when the new employee arrived.

Rows of machines stretched beneath long fluorescent lights that hummed faintly overhead. Conveyor belts carried unfinished metal casings down the length of the building, each station repeating the same narrow strip of movement: hands shifting between buttons and levers, indicator lights flickering, steel chambers snapping open and closed.

The air smelled faintly of heated plastic and machine oil, and the steady mechanical rhythm echoed across the concrete floor.

A man in a grey vest stood beside one of the machines, tapping at a tablet.

He looked up as the worker approached.

“Punctual. Good,” the supervisor said as he swiped his finger across the screen.

The worker stopped beside the machine and waited.

The supervisor glanced down at the tablet.

“Employee ML-113.”

“Yes, sir.”

The supervisor tilted the screen slightly, confirming the number.

He looked back at the worker.

“Confirm you received the instruction package prior to arrival.”

“Yes. I confirm.”

The supervisor nodded once.

“Good,” he said. “Saves us both time.”

He stepped aside from the machine and gestured toward the control panel.

“Go ahead.”

The worker turned toward the station.

A conveyor belt fed metal casings into a square chamber beneath a row of three indicator lights.

Green.
Yellow.
Red.

Below the lights sat the control panel: an on/off switch, a button, and a lever.

The employee flipped the switch.

A casing slid into the chamber.

Yellow.
Button.
Click.

The casing moved forward along the belt.

The supervisor watched the worker’s hands.

He tapped something on the tablet.

“Reaction time: two seconds,” he said. “A little slow.”

Another casing entered the chamber.

Yellow.
Button.
Click.

The supervisor continued watching.

“Your kind usually starts quicker when you’ve actually studied the instructions.”

Another casing arrived.

Red.
Lever.
Clank.

The machine released the casing back onto the belt.

The supervisor made another note on the tablet.

“We’ll see.”

The conveyor belt continued feeding casings into the chamber.

Yellow.
Button.
Click.

Red.
Lever.
Clank.

Machines along the production line echoed the same rhythm.

Click.
Clank.
Click.
Clank.

Workers stood beside their stations performing the same movements with quiet precision.

The supervisor remained beside ML-113’s station, his eyes moving between the worker’s hands and the tablet screen.

“Your predecessor averaged one point six seconds on their first cycle,” he said after a moment.

Another casing slid forward.

Yellow.
Button.
Click.

“I expected better from you,” the supervisor added.

Another casing entered the chamber.

Red.
Lever.
Clank.

The supervisor tapped the tablet again.

The belt carried another casing forward.

The red light began to blink.

The worker pulled the lever.

The machine buzzed.

The casing did not move.

He pulled the lever again.

The machine buzzed once more.

The casing remained lodged in the chamber.

The red light continued blinking.

The worker reached for the lever again.

The supervisor stepped forward and caught the handle before it moved.

“Stop.”

The worker released the lever.

The supervisor pointed into the chamber.

“Blinking red means a jam,” the supervisor said, raising his voice slightly. “I thought you knew your instructions. Seems not well enough.”

The casing sat crooked inside the machine.

The supervisor reached in and lifted it free, setting it back on the conveyor belt.

Then he pulled the lever.

The machine reset with a sharp clank.

The belt resumed moving.

The supervisor wiped his hands on a cloth hanging from the side of the machine.

“This always happens with your kind,” he said.

The worker stood beside the panel.

The supervisor tapped the indicator lights.

“Solid red means pull the lever.”

He tapped the chamber.

“Blinking red means you clear the obstruction first.”

He looked at the worker.

“Then you pull the lever.”

Another casing slid into the chamber.

Yellow.
Button.
Click.

Another.

Red.
Lever.
Clank.

Another casing arrived.

The red light began blinking.

The worker paused.

Then he reached into the chamber, lifted the casing free, and placed it back on the belt.

He pulled the lever.

The machine reset.

The supervisor glanced down at the tablet.

“Reaction time: one point five seconds.”

He tapped the screen.

“Good. Improvement.”

The belt continued feeding casings into the machine.

Yellow.
Button.
Click.

Red.
Lever.
Clank.

Blinking red.
Clear.
Lever.
Reset.

The rhythm settled into a steady pattern.

Click.
Clank.
Click.
Clank.

Machines across the factory floor moved in the same quiet cadence. Conveyor belts carried parts forward while workers stood beside their stations, responding to the lights without speaking.

The supervisor lingered beside ML-113’s station, occasionally glancing down at the tablet.

“You’re ahead of the curve now,” he said after several minutes.

Another casing arrived.

Yellow.
Button.
Click.

Red.
Lever.
Clank.

Blinking red.
Clear.
Lever.
Reset.

The supervisor raised an eyebrow.

“Huh.”

He made another note on the tablet.

“Your predecessor never got that smooth on the first day.”

The belt carried another casing forward.

Yellow.
Button.
Click.

The machines continued their steady rhythm.

Workers along the line moved in near perfect time with their stations.

The supervisor checked the tablet again.

“End of shift in five minutes,” he said.

The conveyor belt continued feeding casings forward.

Yellow.
Button.
Click.

Blinking red.
Clear.
Lever.
Reset.

Gradually the machines began to slow.

The yellow lights flickered once before going dark.

One by one the belts powered down, the mechanical hum fading until the factory floor felt strangely hollow without it.

Workers stepped away from their stations.

Some walked toward the far exit doors.

The supervisor tapped the tablet once more.

“Training assessment complete,” he said.

He looked down again.

“ML-113.”

The worker stood beside the control panel.

“Performance acceptable,” the supervisor said.

He paused briefly.

“Better than the last batch, anyway.”

The worker nodded once.

He stepped away from the machine and walked along the edge of the factory floor.

Without the constant rhythm of the machines, the building felt larger and quieter. Fluorescent lights reflected across the concrete floor as the remaining workers drifted toward the exits.

Near the end of the production line a narrow door stood between two steel pillars.

The worker opened it and stepped inside.

The room beyond was dimly lit.

A thin strip of overhead lighting ran along the ceiling, casting a dull grey glow across the far wall.

Several men stood there already, spaced evenly apart.

They faced forward with their hands resting at their sides.

Each one looked identical.

Their faces were blank.

A thick black cord extended from the wall behind them and connected to the base of their skulls.

The worker stepped into the empty space between two of them.

He turned and faced forward.

A loose cord hung beside him.

He lifted it and inserted the connector into the port at the back of his neck.

The cord clicked softly into place.

His arms lowered to his sides.

The room remained silent.

A row of identical workers stood motionless beneath the dim lights.

None of them blinked.

A moment later the supervisor passed the open doorway.

He paused briefly, glancing inside as though confirming that everything was in order.

Then he continued down the corridor.

The door swung slowly shut behind him.

Inside the room, the workers remained perfectly still.

This week for my personal reflection I have decided to write a short introduction to my publication and share a bit about me as a writer.

I named my publication The Split Compass as a metaphor for antinomy; two things that can be true at once.

A compass is meant to point you in the right direction and follow a single true north. But real life rarely moves in a single direction, and at times, my life felt like it was being steered into two.

In my case, the compass splits.

One direction pulls me toward curiosity.
Another toward certainty.
One toward independence.
Another toward connection.

The Split Compass is my way of exploring that tension.

I’m a developing writer with a long-standing fascination with stories and ideas.

I’ve always been drawn to fiction that explores complicated characters and philosophical questions rather than simple answers. Fantasy and speculative fiction in particular have always felt like powerful tools for exploring the deeper parts of human nature. Adjusting the world just slightly, introduce magic, monsters, or impossible circumstances to find a truth that might otherwise stay hidden.

Alongside that love of storytelling is an interest in philosophy in the everyday sense of reflecting on how we live and why we think the way we do.

Curiosity is probably the value that sits at the center of it all.

The world is far too complex for any one person to fully understand, and I’m not particularly interested in pretending otherwise. What interests me more is the process of thinking through ideas honestly, questioning assumptions, and occasionally discovering that something I believed yesterday might not hold up quite as well today.

My primary goal on Substack is to become a better writer while working toward completing my first novel. Most of what I publish here falls into two broad categories: essays and fiction.

The essays tend to be personal reflections on ideas that I find interesting or difficult to untangle, or recalling some experiences from my earlier life and what I learned. I am not someone who gives advice, just someone who makes observations and maybe ask some questions.

The fiction, on the other hand, is where those same questions often take a different form. Stories allow ideas to be explored through characters, worlds, and situations, in ways that challenge the imagination.

You’ll likely see a range of styles here, but fantasy and speculative fiction will appear often. They are the genres I always find myself gravitating towards, and the ones I also find most challenging to write.

This publication isn’t meant to be a place where I bear my soul or present a finished philosophy of life. But if you enjoy thoughtful reflections, experimentations on fiction, or the occasional philosophical wandering then I welcome you on this journey.

Oh, and I love pro-wrestling, but that is not a prerequisite for subscribing!

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Mud filled my mouth as I fell, and when I tried to cough it out I tasted iron and soil thick on my tongue. Something heavy pressed across my chest, pinning me in place so that every breath came shallow and strained, as though the air itself had grown reluctant to enter my lungs.

Above me the sky had turned pale and distant, smeared with drifting smoke that crept across it in slow grey streaks like the fingers of something searching.

Shapes moved across the field at the edge of my vision, and metal clattered somewhere beyond my sight. Men dragged themselves through the mud between broken shields and fallen horses, struggling as though the battle still raged just beyond the reach of my eyes.

Yet the sounds no longer belonged to the movements that caused them.

A sword slipped from a dead man’s hand long after the hand had stopped moving. A voice cried out from a throat already torn open. A spear trembled upright in the churned earth though no one held it.

It was as though the world itself had been wounded and now staggered forward out of time with its own heartbeat.

The field lay broken around me, strewn with spears that leaned like crooked grave markers and armor slowly sinking into the churned mud. Bodies lay where they had fallen, some twisted awkwardly into the earth as though the ground had already begun reclaiming them.

The smell settled thickly over everything.

Blood. Soil. The foul sweetness of opened bowels.

It clung to the back of the throat until breathing itself felt like drowning.

Flies crawled across lips and eyelids, moving over wounds with the calm patience of creatures that had seen many such fields before.

I tried to move my legs, but they did not answer.

Cold crept slowly through my soaked clothes, seeping upward from the mud beneath me until my body no longer felt entirely my own. My fingers twitched once against the ground before sinking back into the wet soil, as though the earth had already decided where I belonged.

A thin ringing filled my ears and refused to leave. When I closed my eyes, darkness came quickly. When I opened them again, something had begun to move across the field.

At first it seemed no more than a darker shade within the drifting smoke, a shadow gliding slowly between the fallen. It bent beside bodies from time to time, lingering there before rising again and moving onward.

Then I heard the sound.

A humming.

It was soft, like an echo in the wind, yet the vibration of it settled into my ribs and chimed faintly through my chest. Wherever the figure knelt, the humming lingered for a time before drifting onward again.

The figure continued its slow journey across the battlefield, pausing beside the dead and the dying alike. At one point it knelt beside a knight whose helm had been split clean through, the metal peeled back like a cracked shell.

The slow, gentle humming deepened.

The tightness left the knight’s face, the strain easing from his brow as though some terrible weight had finally been lifted from him.

Then the figure rose again.

As the dark shape drifted slowly across the field, something colder than battle crept into my chest.

Old soldiers sometimes spoke of things that walked the fields after war. Of quiet shapes that came when the screaming stopped.

Lying there in the mud and watching that shadow glide among the fallen, I found myself imagining the face beneath it: a ghoul, hollow-eyed and merciless.

My bones began to shiver, less from the cold now than from fear.

The closer it came, the more certain I became that it had seen me.

It passed between bodies without disturbing them. It stepped through pools of blood without leaving so much as a ripple behind. The humming drifted across the broken field with it, gentle and steady in a place where no gentle thing should have remained.

My body could not move, as though the mud itself held me fast. My lungs would not fill, and my voice abandoned me when I tried to force it from my throat.

The humming, however, continued to grow clearer.

Closer.

I had faced men with axes and horses bearing down upon me, yet none of that had ever filled me with the helpless dread that now crept through me as the shadow crossed the last stretch of ground between us.

All I could do was lie there and watch it come.

Then the figure stopped beside me.

Not a ghoul — a woman.

Her cloak was blacker than the mud that covered the field, yet not a stain marked it. Beneath the hood her skin shone pale against the dark fabric, and her hair fell loose across her shoulders like a spill of midnight.

She stepped among the bodies without disturbing them, as though she walked along some ancient road invisible to the living.

She knelt beside me, and the humming softened.

Warmth spread slowly through my chest. The weight pressing me into the mud’s cold grip loosened, and the breath that followed filled my lungs with an ease I had not felt since before the battle began. The ringing in my ears faded into quiet, and feeling returned to my limbs — relief like frozen hands held near a fire.

The horror of the battlefield began to feel like an old memory.

I lifted my hand toward her.

She took it.

Her fingers were warm, though not with the warmth of ordinary flesh. The heat of her touch felt steadier than that, like the quiet glow of embers in a hearth that had burned through many winters.

With a gentle pull she drew me upward, and I rose from the mud as easily as a man waking from sleep.

Only when I stood did I see what remained behind.

My body still lay beneath the shield, half swallowed by the earth, the eyes staring upward into a sky that no longer held anything for them.

For a moment panic flared in me.

Then she lifted my chin, and the soft humming that had followed her across the battlefield continued between us, low and patient, as though it had always been there and I had only just begun to hear it.

She did nothing but hold my gaze and the fear that had gripped me only moments before slipped quietly away, leaving behind a strange calm that felt deeper than relief.

Her eyes were darker than the smoke-stained sky above us. As I looked into them it seemed there was no depth to them at all, no reflection of light, only a vast and endless black that swallowed every shape that tried to form within it.

Her humming continued through the air between us and settled into my chest, steady and gentle, like the slow pull of a tide that had begun its long retreat from the shore.

Something within that darkness began to draw me toward it, and the world began to gently disappear.

I felt myself slipping forward into the darkness of her gaze, drawn slowly and without resistance, as though the night itself had opened before me and I had simply stepped into it.

The humming grew softer as the darkness deepened, until at last even that gentle song faded.

The world closed.

And there was nothing.

The time between getting out of bed and being late for work leaves very little room for error. My morning moves quickly: clothes, keys, the quiet rush of routine. When I get into the car, the playlist decides the mood for the day. The drive is usually where my mind begins to wander.

When I reach the office, coffee is non-negotiable before the work begins. Warm, earthy, and creamy, it steadies the start of the day while I settle into spreadsheets and problem statements. Issue logs, meetings, work streams. On the surface, the day looks perfectly ordinary.

But every spare thought pulls somewhere else.

A different time.
A different place.
Sometimes another universe entirely.

A thread appears first: a fragment of a scene, a single line of dialogue, the faint outline of a character.

In a break-time walk I let the scene reveal itself slowly. Who is here with me? Is it a familiar character, or someone I am meeting for the first time? I let the emotion determine the aesthetic and build the moment outward from there. It might be a sailboat caught in a storm, a cosy cabin hiding dark secrets, or the neon streets of a busy city. Slowly, the scene begins to take shape.

If the idea feels fragile, I try to hold it in my head. If it feels urgent, I pull out my phone and start typing notes as I walk, catching each thread before it disappears.

The day continues this way. Work on the outside, fragments gathering quietly underneath. A sentence here. A scene there. By the time afternoon fades, the idea has usually taken on a rough shape.

But that’s where I leave it.

When I get home, life returns to its usual rhythm. Dinner cooks while an audiobook plays. The dog is fed and walked. By the time the evening finally grows quiet, I’m in bed with a paperback folded open on my lap.

And then, just as sleep begins to settle in, the answer arrives.

A stubborn plot hole suddenly solves itself, as if my mind had been working on it all day without telling me.

I reach for my phone and start typing again.

Another note. Another thread. Another idea asking to be remembered.

There are always more ideas than there is time to write them.

So the fragments wait patiently in my notes until the weekend, when I finally sit down and begin the slow work of bringing them to life.

If you want to one of the pieces that sparked me during my workday wondering, you can read it here: A Duet for the Tides

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Joy, fear, anger, disgust, sadness — these are the core emotions, the foundations of our human experience. But love… love is something else entirely.

Love is not just an emotion. It’s not easily named or contained. It’s a noun, a verb, sometimes an adjective, just four arbitrary letters in a row. But what it points to is something much bigger than the word itself.

What do you call that feeling in your chest, the one that makes you feel both full and hollow, like you’re reaching for something intangible, yet somehow already holding it in your hands?

There is more than joy in the laughter you share with your friends. There is more than sadness in the grief you carry together. There’s something underneath it all. Something that binds, that deepens, that lingers long after the moment has passed.

Love, as a word, feels too small. Too neat. Too easy. It doesn’t account for the ache, the awe, the quiet recognition between souls.

How do you describe something so profound and subjective? A force that lives within one person, but cannot survive without another.

Love is not something we feel alone. It’s something we build, offer, break, carry, and return to. Again and again.

We often say heartbreak happens when we’ve loved and lost. But if love were truly lost, there’d be nothing left to break over.

Heartbreak isn’t the absence of love — it’s the absence of someone to share it with.

When we lose someone, we don’t lose our love for them. That love remains, stubborn and alive. What we lose is the person we used to give it to. The one who made that love feel purposeful, reciprocated, anchored.

Grief, then, is just love with nowhere to go. A flame without a wick. A river with no mouth.

The hole we feel in our hearts is not carved by the loss of love, but by the loss of presence. The loss of touch, voice, eyes of the living being who gave our love its place in the world.

In grief, love becomes aimless. It drifts. It aches. Sometimes, it lashes out or shuts down, afraid of misfiring, of hurting more. Perhaps the way through grief is to have the courage to aim it once more.

To aim it not despite our fear, but because of it. Because if love can survive death, then it can also teach us how to live again.

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The full moon hung swollen above the horizon, pale and watchful, draining the stars from the sky until only a depthless black remained. Its light stretched across the sea and shattered against the rocks in fractured silver, as though the water itself could not bear its brightness.

A man sat where stone met tide, unmoving in the wind. A lute rested against his ribs, and his fingers moved with the patience of long habit, drawing from the strings a melody so quiet it seemed at first no more than breath.

The sea began to shift with a subtle turning that opposed its own rhythm. The current tightened inward. Ripples gathered toward the rocks, as though the water strained to hear.

Then the surface parted and she rose without sound.

Moonlight laid itself across her shoulders and throat, across the pale curve of her collarbone, before dissolving into the darker gleam of scales beneath the waterline. The long sweep of her tail stirred the tide in slow, deliberate arcs. Her eyes were steady, unreadable, and fixed upon the man who did not look back at her.

He played.

For a time, she listened, and there was something almost assessing in her stillness, as though she weighed the worth of each note. Then her lips parted and from them came a sound that was not entirely song and not entirely speech, but something older than either; a sound shaped by breath and salt and a memory the land had long forgotten.

Her voice slipped between his notes and curved around them. It did not submit; it pressed and withdrew, rising where he faltered, tightening where he softened, until the two melodies circled one another, separate, yet bound by the same pull of the tide, the sea moving with them.

When the music rose, the water crept higher upon the stone. When the notes thinned, the tide stilled, as though suspended in expectation.

This was no chance meeting. It was repetition. It was ritual.

And I watched from the darkness above the cove.

I had not meant to follow the first night. The sound carried too cleanly across the water, too measured to be the work of a drunk or a careless sailor. I drew in my net and let curiosity lead my steps along the cliff path, and I looked down only to satisfy it.

What I saw should have sent me home.

The man seated among the rocks. The pale shape rising before him. The sea bending inward as though in obedience.

At first I told myself it was wonder that brought me back each full moon. Her voice was unlike anything born of lungs that breathe air. It threaded into the blood and settled there, impossible to forget. I listened for the structure of it, for the pattern that might explain its power, but the melody did not change.

I began to notice how early he arrived and how quickly she answered him. I noticed how her gaze never once strayed toward the shore, nor toward the dark where I stood. I noticed how the sea itself seemed to hold its breath when his fingers paused upon the strings.

Each full moon became a measure of my own humiliation. I stood unseen while a creature born of the deep offered her voice to a man who would one day turn to bone and soil. I stood unseen wishing that man was me. Believing it could be. Believing it must be me.

Longing, when it finds no outlet, does not remain gentle.

For eleven moons I watched. On the twelfth I waited.

He walked the cliff path as he always did, the instrument slung carelessly over his shoulder, his thoughts already turned toward the shore below. He did not see me step from the brush. He did not see the stone in my hand.

The blow was quick and graceless. He fell with a sound no different from any other man struck down in the dark.

The lute slid from his grasp.

It remained whole.

I carried it to the rocks and set it upon my hip as he did.

The sea did not welcome me.

My first attempt unraveled into discord. The notes tangled and died in the wind, thin and wrong. I tried again and failed again, anger rising sharp in my throat. For a moment I wondered whether I had misunderstood everything, whether she had come not for the music, but for the man himself.

That thought cut deeper than jealousy.

So I began again, slower this time, tracing each movement as I had memorized it through a year of watching.

At last the melody settled into place.

The water tightened and she rose.

There was hesitation in her stillness, a searching in her eyes as they scanned the dark behind me, as though expecting another shape to step forward. I did not turn. I played louder, pressing the tune outward, insisting upon it.

The tide began to answer and her lips parted, exhaling the first tender notes of our song.

The sound struck me like fever, closer than before, sharper, almost questioning. Hope swelled in me, foolish and bright.

Her gaze held mine.

Not searching past me. Not waiting for another shape in the dark.

Me.

The thought took root quickly and bloomed without caution.

She rose higher from the water, shoulders bared to the moonlight, tail coiling slowly beneath the surface as if restraining its strength. Her fingers skimmed the edge of the rock beside my boot, lingering there.

The melody tightened between us, not separate lines now, but something shared; a duet.

And I had learned it.

A year of watching. A year of listening. A year of hunger sharpened into patience.

As the tide pushed towards me and she drew closer, I cast the net.

Her scream split the night.

The song shattered into something jagged and feral. The sea recoiled, then surged in violent answer. She twisted with sudden, terrible force, the net tangling around her shoulders and tail as I pulled.

I hauled with everything I possessed, but she pulled harder.

Water crashed over the rocks and swallowed my boots. The lute fell from my grip and vanished into the surf, its final note swallowed whole.

The next wave did not roar. It gathered silently and struck with the full weight of the ocean behind it.

Cold devoured me as salt filled my mouth and nose. The world inverted. The net wrenched in my hands, tightened, and then something stronger than rope dragged downward.

Her body moved with brutal certainty, tail driving through the water in powerful strokes, pulling us both further into the dark abyss. The moon fractured above me into shards of light, then dissolved entirely.

My fingers had already begun to numb. The cords burned into my palms. My chest convulsed, desperate for air.

I could release her. I could let go and rise. The surface was still close enough.

But the net was wrapped around her. Around me. Around the prize I had earned.

If I released her now, she would vanish into the depths and I would return alone; empty-handed, unseen, forgotten.

No. She was mine.

The water grew darker as we sank. Pressure closed around my ears and skull. My lungs burned, then screamed, then pleaded. Instinct clawed at my throat, forcing my mouth open against my will.

Salt rushed in.

Fire tore through my chest as water flooded the space meant for air. My body convulsed, desperate, thrashing now where she no longer needed to.

Her voice sounded once more beneath the crushing dark -- a single descending note that carried us both into the black.

And I let the water take what breath remained.

Of all the books I skimmed past and never opened, there was only one I returned to read again and again: The Journey by John Marsden. I read his Tomorrow series like everyone else, enjoyed one or two of his other novels, then moved on to new shelves and new authors. But The Journey stayed. It followed me through phases of life where everything else changed. It was the book I opened when I needed comfort, when I felt quietly philosophical, or when I wanted to revisit the particular emotional weather of adolescence.

The copy I own is the same one I first read in high school. Years later I found it sitting in the library’s “free to a good home” box. It was decommissioned, pages lightly frayed and stained, waiting for whoever might still want it. I often searched through that box and brought many books home, but the day I found The Journey, it felt less like acquiring a novel and more like recovering something that had once belonged to me.

It felt as though there was a promise inside it that I needed to hold close. I wanted the kind of transformation Argus was given; the clear moment where childhood gives way to responsibility, where the world opens and answers arrive through experience. It suggested that growing up was not a slow drift but a crossing; a journey beyond the borders of what you already knew. I wanted to reach that place with the same excitement Argus had when he began his.

The book fed a restlessness I had no words for. It left me with the sense that life existed somewhere beyond the familiar edges of my world, waiting to be discovered rather than explained. I craved meaningful adventure, and The Journey gave me a window into what that kind of adventure felt like.

Reality, on the other hand, proved very different. The world does not announce a journey, nor does it clear space for one. It is structured, cautious, and threaded with risks that keep most wanderings close to home. The freedom I imagined Argus stepping into rarely arrives as an open horizon. More often it appears in small, uncertain choices, made without guidance and without certainty that they matter at all.

But the story was never really about freedom. It was about responsibility discovered through independence. Argus doesn’t simply wander; he works, relies on others, and stays when staying matters. The journey doesn’t change him merely because he sees the world, but because he participates in it. He leaves as a curious boy and returns carrying values shaped by effort, consequence, and connection.

I didn’t recognise that when I was young. In my adolescence, the book felt like a promise of escape. What it was quietly offering instead was a picture of adulthood and true meaning earned through commitment rather than adventure without limits.

Another thing I’ve come to appreciate is that The Journey is not only about the physical and emotional upheaval of adolescence. It captures that first great reshaping of the self, but it does not suggest the reshaping ends there. We continue to change long after we return home. The growth simply becomes quieter, more gradual. The crossings we take are internal rather than geographical, and the journeys less visible but no less meaningful.

Now I no longer chase the feeling of adventure so much as the meaning found within experience. The journey I once imagined as distance travelled has become something smaller and deeper. It is now the choices I’ve made, the responsibilities I’ve kept, and relationships I’ve made.

When John Marsden died in 2024, I felt genuinely sad. His stories had been present at particular moments of becoming in my life. I read The Journey first as a promise of escape. I return to it now as recognition.

Perhaps that is what stories are for. They mark the changes we struggle to name. They give shape to transitions that would otherwise pass unnoticed. Maybe life is nothing less than the stories we tell each other; the ones shared with friends over a glass of wine, the ones retold every Christmas that never grow old, even the ones we tell complete strangers so that, for a moment, neither of us feels alone.

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Her low, patient melody reached me before my eyes opened. It did not startle me. It moved through the dark like breath close to the ear, and something in me leaned toward it before I could remember why.

Then the memory began to take shape.

The tavern stank of old ale and wet wool. Tankards struck wood hard enough to leave dents, boots dragged sawdust into the damp between floorboards, and men shouted simply to hear themselves do it. Then she began to sing.

Her voice did not rise above the noise, it settled into it. The shouting bent around her and dulled, as though the room itself had decided she was worth the space.

I could not see her clearly from where I sat, but I felt the song press against my ribs. I had heard many songs in many taverns. Most were meant for coins. This one felt meant for something else. Perhaps, meant for me.

A phrase lingered when I leaned forward. A breath slowed when mine did. Men crowded near her, thick shoulders and spilled drink between us. I rose without deciding to and pushed through them. Someone cursed, but I did not look back.

Then she stood before me.

Her hair burned copper in the firelight. Her eyes were blue and steady, measuring me without hurry. She smiled, as though I had arrived precisely when expected.

Her hand came to my chest — not boldly, not teasing. Her palm rested over my heart as though weighing it. My pulse struck harder beneath her touch, and she lowered her voice so that the song narrowed until it seemed meant for one man alone. It would have been discourteous not to answer.

She stepped back but did not break her gaze.

The last note faded and the tavern returned to itself. The space her silence left felt colder than the night outside. I turned, uncertain what to do with myself now that the song had ended, when her fingers caught my sleeve.

She leaned close enough that I felt her breath along my ear. “Your heart wants to be true.” Her palm pressed once more against my chest; firmer this time, as though confirming something already decided, and then she turned toward the door.

She did not ask me to follow.

I followed.

Outside, the air cut clean through the ale in my lungs. Frost silvered the grass and she hummed as she crossed it, the sound carrying easily through the dark. I kept pace without effort.

The forest swallowed us whole. Moonlight slid across her hair, silvering the copper. At times she vanished between trunks and something in me tightened — until the humming returned, winding through bark and branch and drawing me forward again. The forest did not feel dangerous. It felt seductive.

Roots rose beneath my boots. Damp leaves brushed my hands. Once she caught my wrist to steady me over uneven ground. Her fingers were warm. When she released me, I felt the absence.

Her melody shifted with the trees; sometimes clear, sometimes only breath, yet it never left me entirely. By the time the cabin appeared between the trunks, it seemed less discovered than awaited. Candlelight seeped through its seams. She opened the door. I entered.

Her humming pulled me awake.

Candlelight gathered slowly, drawing the room from shadow. Smoke hung low beneath dark beams. Herbs dried from the rafters; sage, something bitter, something sweet, and beneath it all lingered the smell of iron.

She stood at a table, quill moving across parchment with deliberate patience. The melody threaded between each scratch of ink. Relief came to me at the sight of her. She did not turn, and it seemed only right not to disturb her.

The room revealed itself in pieces. Glass jars lined the shelves, their contents floating layered and still. A mouse curled in clear liquid, its fur drifting as though it had only just ceased moving. A bird’s head hung suspended, beak parted, the inside of its mouth dark as a well. Further back, something pale pressed faintly against the curve of another jar. It did not resemble anything I had known whole.

The iron rings at my wrists were cold.

They fit too well.

I tested them once. The metal did not move. It seemed reasonable that she would wish me still.

She finished her writing and smiled — the same small satisfaction she wore when her song resolved cleanly in the tavern. Then she turned, and her eyes settled on me as though I had never been outside her attention.

She crossed the room and placed her hand over my heart again, her fingers pressing lightly as if listening for something beneath bone. I leaned toward her, only then understanding how little distance there had ever been between us.

“Your heart is my only desire,” she said. “Will you give it?”

It would have been ungenerous to refuse.

She drew a knife from behind her back and candlelight ran along its edge like approval. She placed the point against my chest. I felt no fear. I had wanted this, had I not? To be the man in the song. To be the one who followed.

Then her eyes lowered to where steel touched skin.

The humming stopped.

The silence struck harder than any shout. It was like stepping forward and finding no ground beneath the foot. The world sharpened; the warmth drained from her gaze, leaving only concentration.

For the first time, I heard my own heart.

It was no longer part of the music.

My arms tore upward in instinct. The iron bit deep. The chair did not move.

The knife entered cleanly.

Cold spread through me, swift and certain.

And in that falling instant, I understood.

I had wanted to be the man in her song.

She had wanted his heart.

As a female writer, I want to make sure my women have agency, depth, and purpose within the narrative, in other words, they should truly feel like strong characters. My first instinct, like many storytellers, is to make strength visible. In modern media, the strong character leads the charge, speaks with certainty, wins confrontations, stands at the front of the frame. If the audience can clearly see her power, we assume they will feel it.

But that isn’t always what happens.

Some characters dominate scenes yet begin to feel strangely weightless. Events unfold around them; prophecies activate, mentors explain, villains reveal, and the character proves her competence inside a direction she didn’t create. Others swing the opposite way; the story insists she alone can stop the evil, and the world rearranges itself around her importance. In both cases something feels off. Either she is carried by the plot, or the plot is carried entirely by her, but neither creates the sense of a person living inside a believable world.

The blueprint for something far more compelling, I’ve found, sits in an unlikely place: Bram Stoker’s classic gothic horror, Dracula.

At first glance Mina Harker seems entirely conventional as a careful, polite Victorian woman. She is protected by the men around her and kept away from danger whenever possible. She rarely occupies the center of the action, yet the narrative keeps bending around her involvement. Without her, the men hunting the villain cannot understand what they are facing, let alone stop it. Mina doesn’t dominate the story, but without her, the story cannot function.

She is not powerful, but she is necessary, and that may be why she still feels more substantial than many characters written with far greater spectacle. We keep looking for strength at the front of the story, while Mina quietly sits at its center.

Strength as Causality, Not Spotlight

What makes Mina compelling is not that she drives the action, but that she gives the action direction.

The men already possess everything they need to defeat Dracula. They have journals, medical records, eyewitness accounts, travel logs. They have courage and determination. What they lack is understanding. Each of them hold a fragment of the truth, but none can see the whole.

Mina becomes the one who assembles it.

She transcribes, organizes, and cross-references their accounts until the horror becomes intelligible. Dracula stops being an unknowable terror and becomes a creature with rules and patterns. The hunt really only becomes possible when truly she makes the information usable.

She does not replace their strengths, she arranges them so they can work together.

When a character is irrelevant, the plot moves without her. When she alone can save the world, the plot bends around her. Mina sits between those extremes. The group could not succeed without her, but she could not succeed without them. Her importance comes from contribution rather than superiority. Her power is demonstrated by consequence.

Strength from Constraint

What makes this more interesting is where her influence comes from.

Mina behaves exactly as a believable Victorian woman might. She is attentive, dutiful, observant, and concerned with others. On the surface these read as passive qualities. Yet they are exactly what allow her to see what the others cannot.

Because she listens seriously, Jonathan’s trauma becomes testimony instead of hysteria. Because she values everyone’s perspective, separate experiences become a shared investigation. Because she is methodical, scattered facts become strategy.

Instead of portraying her as a woman who rejects her world, Stoker portrays her as a woman who understand it. The skills she develops within her role as a late 19th century woman become the tools that confront the supernatural threat.

Modern stories often try to prove strength by separating a character from her environment. They are forced to stand apart from her society, her peers, even her relationships. Mina gains influence by engaging with hers. Her authority doesn’t come from overpowering the structure around her, but from comprehending it. She converts her circumstance into vital leverage.

Courage Through Participation

Late in the novel, Dracula infects her. She becomes the most endangered person in the group, and in turn, the most important. Here her strength comes from choosing responsibility while being endangered by it, not by remaining unthreatened.

Her psychic link allows the hunters to track Dracula across Europe. She insists on helping despite knowing what it may cost her. Her usefulness increases exactly when her safety disappears.

This is where her strength lands emotionally, through participation over invulnerability or dominance. She remains part of the solution even when she has every reason to withdraw.

She matters while she is at risk but she never becomes the damsel in distress either.

Strength as Integration

Now, I am not saying every strong character has to be a Mina Harker. Stories still work with heroes at the front of the action, common examples include Ripley in Alien, or Sarah Connor in The Terminator. The difference is that their strength doesn’t exist at the expense of everyone else’s. They don’t become impressive because the men around them are incompetent; they become impressive because each person contributes something the others lack. Courage, caution, technical skill, instinct; the tension comes from how those qualities interact. The audience isn’t asked to believe one person can do everything, only that the right people together can do enough.

Mina belongs to the same tradition. She isn’t the fighter, the doctor, or the scholar. She is the one who makes them function as a group.

Mina stabilizes knowledge, relationships, and direction. Remove her and the hunters return to frightened individuals reacting to events they don’t understand. With her, they become capable of ending the threat.

We often look for strength where it is most visible, through leadership, combat, defiance, but good stories register strength through consequence.

Mina isn’t memorable because she breaks the expectations of her world. She’s memorable because the narrative depends on her decisions.

Mina was written in 1897, and we often miss her because we instinctively assume women in that period could only be passive, especially in stories written by men. Mina complicates that assumption. She never rejects her world, yet the story depends on her more than anyone else.

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