Novels I'll likely never see published #1: "The Dickinsons." · 5:14am Oct 28th, 2017

Long had mankind lived, and long had it suffered threats beyond mortal explanation. There were precious few moments when the forces of good and evil did not wage secret war against each other, with humanity as their unwitting puppets. And in times of divine crisis, the war grew more overt, bloodier, where the dominion of man grew overshadowed by angels and demons alike.

But in the twenty-first century AD, the forces of good were caught unaware by an unholy alliance of two distaff brothers - Conformity and Cynicism, whose twin powers plagued the nature of man, tainting the hearts of men and pushing them to the brink of armageddon. And yet the hands of good were tied, for evil watched their every step, and they could not act without revealing a critical weakness that would certainly doom them.

Only the seemingly innocuous muses Rhyme and Reason went unwatched. And this would be the downfall of evil, for Rhyme and Reason would not let the children of earth fall to ruin; and with their limited powers pushed to the brink, they empowered two of the world's great artists with supernatural gifts, that they might fight against the more overt threats to man.

Demons, Monsters and Undead alike would fall to these two champions...despite one of them being, technically speaking, dead for over a century.

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Bruce sighed. "So we're just going to walk into a bloody trap, then. That's the plan?"

Emily shook her head. Locks of her smooth, auburn hair drifted around her shoulders, and Bruce was hit with the sudden impression that anyone looking at Emily from behind might have thought she was a beautiful young woman. The darkening shadows of the evening helped to hide her face, too, but that was more or a worry than anything else; darkness begat nightfall, which tended to beget all sorts of truly nasty threats.

"This isn't a trap," Emily stated. "it's a prairie, full of beautiful wildlife."

"Okay, I'm going to pretend that you didn't refer to the college students on campus as "wildlife." I'm pretty sure they'll take it to heart in the worst sodding way, and about the only way this university could get any worse is if we had to deal with drunken sorority girls on top of-"

"Cultists?" Emily replied, pointing a bony finger into the gloom. Bruce squinted, and the bottom dropped out of his stomach. Shadows shifted all around them, drawing closer with every second, and the nighttime air began to fill with the sounds of snarling and wet, burbling noises, noises clearly not human.

"Sounds like more than just cultists. A lot more." Bruce reached down to his holster, and let his fingers clench comfortingly around his revolver's grip. The evening's turn of events felt almost like a betrayal, given that he was about to be ripped to shreds, but Bruce took cold comfort that at least his blessed revolver Hugin hadn't let him down so far, and if he was going to die then he might as well "die with his boots on," as it were.

Emily shifted ever so slightly, and Bruce saw her revolver - Munin - slide elegantly into her fleshless palm. There was something else, too - some movement he couldn't quite see, right beside her modest dress. Her skeletal frame stiffened, ever so slightly, as the shadows drew in on them. "Ahh. It's a proper prairie now, Bruce."

Something just at the edge of Bruce's vision flickered as if preparing to pounce. Out came his revolver in a flash, barrel leveled at the spot of darkness, but whatever had been there was gone. "Again with the prairie? Seriously? You realize that we're basically just Babes in a Black Abyss at this point, right?"

Something else flickered in the darkness, just off to Emily's right, and sickle-like claws lunched out of the darkness and straight at her throat. Calmly, Emily flicked her revolver towards the creature and pulled the trigger. A sudden crack of thunder erupted into the darkness, and the face of whatever had lunged at Emily dissolved into scarlet mist. The shadows shifted closer to Emily once more, louder than before, and Bruce was slightly shocked to hear Emily inflectionlessly address the waking nightmares.

"To make a prairie," Emily began, "It takes a clover and a bee. One clover-"

A tentacle lashed out at Emily. Her gun hand blurred as she pulled the trigger again, and an unholy ululation pierced Bruce's eardrums as the creature withdrew.

"-And a bee."

And as Emily's other hand swung into view, Bruce got a clear look at what was in her other fist, right before she flung it straight into the mob. The Inspiration grenade hit something fleshy and unseen with a satisfying thump, then erupted in an almost blinding flash, bathing their surroundings in supernatural light. Robed humans and disrobed abominations alike shrieked as divine energy seared their flesh, fur and bone, and Bruce could have sworn that, if skeletons could smile, Emily would have undoubtedly been wearing the world's finest shit-eating grin.

The terrors around them began to flee, but it was far too late. Sanctified gun barrels didn't need reloading, and Emily seemingly needed no excuse to keep firing shot after shot at the fleeing horde, preternatural aim guiding every round into its target. And, just like that, it was over: as the light of the Inspiration began to dim, Emily turned back to face Bruce, gesturing at the sea of corpses around her with a disinterested shrug. "And...reverie."

Silence overtook the air; unbroken by unholy caterwauling, it hung in the air like petulant fog, until Emily finally shattered it with a cough and a second, almost sheepish, glance at the bodies around her.

"Well. I suppose this reverie alone will do if, you know. If bees are few."

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Two poets. Two immortal personalities. Two gunslingers, divinely gifted with legendary talents.

Bruce.

Emily.

They were... The Dickinsons.