MATT
Because me telling my dad that I don’t want to be a lawyer, that I actually want to be a writer so would he mind financially supporting me for the rest of his life, is not a conversation that’s likely to go well.
LAUREN
That’s bullshit.
MATT
What is?
LAUREN
Even if you’re right. You enjoy writing.
MATT
Was that a question?
LAUREN
Nope. I know you enjoy it. So you should want this story to be as good as it can be.
MATT
OK.
LAUREN
So show it to someone who knows what they’re talking about. Like Professor Trevayne. He gives you advice, you finish the story, then the next one you write is better. I don’t see the problem.
MATT
I wish I hadn’t sent it to you.
LAUREN
Well that’s just tough shit I’m afraid.
LAUREN
I’m going to bed. Two questions first.
MATT
OK.
LAUREN
One. When are you going to send me part two?
MATT
When it’s ready.
LAUREN
Spoken like a true writer :)
LAUREN
Two. What’s the title going to be?
THE DAWN ALWAYS BREAKS
by Matt Barker
He had no idea how much time had passed when he saw it.
Time seemed malleable inside the forest, to the point where it had ceased to have any meaning. The rain had stopped briefly, then started again more heavily than ever. In the brief moments when water wasn’t falling from the sky, the air had cleared and felt fresh, before thickening again as the rain returned. It had felt like the first storm had passed, only for a second, stronger one to arrive within minutes. Which was impossible, of course. The storms that battered the valley were huge, vast sheets of dark clouds that blanketed the entire sky. They took hours to move across the sky, and it was unheard of for one to follow another directly.
But that was what had happened. Stephen was sure of it.
The trail was still there, rougher and more overgrown than ever, now boggy with mud and with streams running either side of it, but it was still there. Stephen had considered what he would do if – when – it ended, if he found himself faced with the impenetrable wall of undergrowth and tree trunks that ran along both sides of the trail, but had pushed the thought away. He would deal with that if and when it became necessary to do so, and there was no sense worrying about it until then.
Thunder rolled overhead, a ceaseless drumbeat that shook great quantities of water down from the trees and trembled the trail beneath his feet. He paused, feeling the crackle in the air in his teeth and the bones of his jaw, then flinched as lightning burst across the sky, lighting the entire forest blinding white. A smell of burning filled his nose, the electricity in the air lifted the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck. The thunder rolled again, and this time he braced himself, ready for the flash when it came.
The lightning struck with a noise like the end of the world. It sounded like it was close – too close – and the blaze of light was long and hurt his eyes. In the blue-white seconds before it faded, leaving dancing spots of red and yellow in front of his eyes, he saw the scale of the place he now found himself, saw the trees stretching away in every direction, tall and old and endless. And away to his left, where the trail made a gentle turn to the left, he saw something else.
For a millisecond, he thought it was a tree. It was tall, and spindly, composed of straight lines and edges.
Then it moved …
Stephen allowed reality to come slowly, to wash over him like warm water. For long, stretched-out moments the divide between sleeping and waking was a blur of dark grey, the familiar surroundings of his bedroom bleeding into the equally familiar horror of his nightmares.
They were always the same, and he had accepted that they would never leave him. Not entirely, at least: there were nights, sometimes as many as three or four in a row, when he slept as he had before the war, and he was never less than grateful for such respite. Because he always knew it was only a matter of time before the things he had done invaded his unconscious mind again, and soaked his dreams with blood.
He swung his legs out of bed, pulled on his boots, and stood up. He felt the aches in his back, the pull of his shoulders, and grimaced. He had seen his own father stretch and wince in a similar way in the mornings, but that had been because he had been an old man. Stephen was barely thirty, although he could no longer claim with a straight face that he felt his age. He felt tired, and worn out.
He felt used up.
The physical hardships of the war had been severe, but he understood instinctively that this was something deeper. He had no learning of medicines and ailments, but he felt that a malaise had settled into his bones during his time in the west. Perhaps the old men and women of the village had been right when they proclaimed that there was a price to be paid for taking a life. If so, Stephen owed the kind of debt that would give even a king pause for thought.
He slid the bolt on his door – there had been much scoffing when he had hammered the metal plates into place, but then the farmers and blacksmiths and tailors who called the village home had never hacked a foreign king’s nephew’s head from his neck while his limbs still twitched and his body was still warm – and stepped out of his house.
Spread out ahead of him to the east were the fields that he had worked as a boy, first for his father and then under the unfailingly critical eye of his mother. The small stone church, abandoned since the dawn of the Age of Reason, stood at the north-west corner of the largest field. For three winters now the villagers had waited for its roof to fall in, but still it held.
To the north, the valley sloped down to the river and the rich lands beyond. It would never cease to feel strange to Stephen that when he
