#halidomverse

"This Is How We Become Ghosts" is a techno-fantasy saga about memory, rebellion, and the fragile, feral love that endures beyond the grave.

Featuring:

Child soldiers and ex-gods

Bone-wearing storytellers with bombs in their pockets

Betrayals that crack the sky open

Mechs, memory-scars, and queens of trash

Start reading here: This Is How We Become Ghosts More about the author: clicky click.

Ricket - "The Seer".

“It’s okay. I saw this. I saw you. It was always going to be you.”

****

I've got big plans for baby-boy Ricket!

To celebrate, I wanted to share a little chaotic and unedited first draft of a scene several chapters ahead 😘

(no real spoilers just vibes)

Here's a little taste of the Roach infested storms to come:

*****

She likes it.

The chaos tastes good but hope tastes better and she wants her subjects to be fat on it.

Hope, she has learned, is a valuable tool and a resource. A pivotal foundation to a manipulation that will get her to the sun and not its ghostly echo.

She is the performer and today she will play hero because she’s so good at it and the discarded are so easy to convince.

Perhaps they can even convince her of herself. Perhaps she will get so good at it that one day she will sprout a cape and wings and really feel.

Feel what? Good? Real? Human? Anything?

She has to keep moving. Keep building. Keep scheming.

Her world is an oyster and she’ll grind her teeth on the shell and use the rest for jewellery. She can’t stop. Can’t stop. If she stops— she simply can’t.

Keep moving, keep learning, keep breathing. You can't catch a bug in the clouds but what are clouds if not a shadow's wicked cousin?

Move it. Move it. Move it.

Keep them fat.

Keep them loyal.

She will teach them more than dancing, she will show them more than light. To want and to yearn.

She will feed them ambition that looks like flexible fingers but grows into sharpened weapons.

She will mold them into exactly what she needs and they will not break, not break, not break because she is not in the business of breaking.

Hope.

Chapter 9 Snippet — Where the Sun Collects.

*~*~*~*

It doesn’t make sense. Nothing he’s seen or witnessed in the last few days does, but this least of all.

At the bottom of the cliff are ghosts in glittering ceremonial armor — black, red, gold — all caught in an endless battle. They clash like silent titans, tinged in a white, ethereal light that lags behind them like some reluctant shadow. There’s thousands of them.

The clearing itself is enormous and completely filled in with half-life. Several soldiers overwhelm a monumental iron gate that glitches in and out of existence — for seconds at a time it appears tall and impenetrable only to flash a sudden vision of the truth beneath; the gate is collapsed now, sunken into sand and crumpled beneath rock.

Rivin can’t remember how to breathe. It can’t be real, yet his steel eyes track the formations. He can’t help it — every clean stroke, every broken path, he logs away like a lesson.

It appears that gold is defending against black and red, led by a sheer commander wielding an enormous hammer. He strikes a blow that sends two phantoms lurching into dust — the ground kicks up but the grains are white and flash with static, leaving the true soil beneath undisturbed.

The commander then swings upwards and the force is powerful enough to eject his enemies head from its shoulders; the blood that spurts from the nub is perfectly silver but not of this realm either.

He watches the body fall, not unlike the Knight in the tunnels. The head rolls across the sand, kicked up by rushing feet and when it finally comes to rest something remarkable happens. It disappears.

Everything does.

Rivin’s gaze tracks the empty canyon but there’s nothing but ruin now. Skeletons mostly buried beneath dunes, caved-in buildings bulging beneath boulders and old debris.

Next, complete darkness.

He bites back a gasp as the sun is snuffed out. The world seemed to become still—not quiet but still, as though time itself had forgotten to tick forward. His stomach drops with it. “What’s happening?” His heart is hammering.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Roach’s fingers brush the tips of his own, curling until she holds him gently. Rivin grips her right back. It steadies him. Reminds him that he hasn’t suddenly died and slunk into the abyss.

“Maybe it woke up.”

He squeezes her hand a little tighter. “What does that mean?”

“Don’t worry. It never stays gone long.”

Like a switch — light returns.

****

Bow to the one true queen ☠️

****

If she was honest.

Sometimes it was all too much to bear.

Sometimes the tension in her chest felt as though it was going to burst wide open. In fact it often felt like her throat might close over completely and her eyes might forget how to ever glimmer again.

On days like those, she wanted little more than to curl into a ball and weep for lifetimes, for as long as there was still flesh on her bones.

Instead, she pulls a smile from the pit of her stomach and floats like she has any control over the story being written.

******

“Can you picture all the space up there?" She's looking up.

“Up top?”

“Where the sun shines.”

He follows her gaze. “I've never really thought about it.”

“Liar. Everyone has thought about it.”

“It's a waste of time. There's no point.”