(reading time: 41 minutes)
The Legend of Broadside Barnaby
Old Thresher the card shark. Remember him? I bested his challenge more than a hundred times over and it were way past due for him to give up the location of Broadside Barnaby. He were the last name left. With him collected the Manifest would be complete, everyone accounted for in myth, and I could have my pa back. My family could have the eventual peace that I worked so hard to disrupt. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 2 minutes)
That were the story I told my pocket twister. It weren’t the most heartening, but I think confiding in him gave him some strength. He shook off most of that water and started looking more like his old self and less like a cloud constipated with rain.
Now you know whose soul I were collecting all them names for. I knew Pa weren’t at peace. He were still kept from Heaven and Hell in the ropes of Knot-eye, and the only way to get him back or get him to my mother were to obey the will of the Laudgod and eventually be rewarded. I had to be the man he told me to be, to conquer and dominate the West so thoroughly that nothing could stop me. Continue reading
(reading time: 50 minutes)
The Tangent of Sara’s Sewing Spiders
I told you about my mother’s dress shop. I didn’t tell you it were driven out of business by the peculiarest of competitors. My mother, bless her glorious soul in Heaven, were even kind enough to bring the woman who owned the venture a pie as a welcoming gift. Sure it were blackberry pie, not her finest pie by miles, but you can’t expect saintly behavior from a shrewd businesswoman such as her. Continue reading
(blurb)
There’s a version of the wild west where the land in the westward direction just never stopped stretching, where magic seeped out of the canyons and rode the whirlwinds. That’s where Lionel Worthett lives, and it’s where he would’ve died if the almighty Laudgod had just let him.
Instead he was given a task and a document called the Manifest of the West. All he has to do is get the most powerful miscreants, villains, and varmints to sign their names so they can be turned into legends that won’t get any more astonishing, and then he can have his reward, one soul returned from the hereafter, back to the infinite west.
(reading time: 52 minutes) (reading time for entire novella: 3 hours, 25 minutes)
Manifest of the West
by
Blaine Arcade
The Hellmouth
There I were, standing before the open mouth of the grand devil’s kingdom… one of its mouths anyway. A hot breath full of ashes descended on me. It were the first one I’d ever set my own eyes on and it weren’t what I expected. The mouth part of the name were supposed to be figurative. It were a disgusting word representing a gate so people would think even less of it than they already did. Except it weren’t so figurative. Continue reading
Blaine Arcade 