Razed
Phoenix

The Book

Phoenix was named for a word, and the word came off the letters. Forty-five of them, from a man who died before he was born. They have come twice a year his whole life, up the same road, in the same hand, carried by a dwarf who has never opened one. They tell him how to lift a load, how to buy boots, what to do with his hands when a man is lying to him. They are the only evidence anyone has ever produced that he was thought about in advance.

Then, after twenty-two years of them, one arrives that describes something he did three days ago.

So he starts asking who his father was — badly at first, and then very well indeed. Every door gives him the same answer. The name empties a room. Nobody will say what the man did, and nobody grieved when he died. A healer looks him in the face, comes apart, and will not say why.

And the two men who carried his childhood up that road for twenty-two years turn out to be the two men who killed the man who wrote the letters.

Can a bad man write a good one into existence — and if he manages it, is that redemption, or only his most convincing lie?

Genre

Literary fantasy

Release

Coming soon

Author

V.R. Pfalt