Samuel Hargrove had a habit of starting his mornings slowly, like a train building steam. The kettle on the stove wheezed its way to a whistle while he shuffled around the kitchen, barefoot, wearing a shirt that had once been white but now leaned toward the color of old parchment.
By the time he sat down at his desk, the mug beside him sent ribbons of steam curling into the cool morning air. His "office" was really the spare bedroom of his apartment, a cramped space with a single window that overlooked the brick wall of the building next door. What it lacked in scenery, it made up for in peace the kind of quiet that let words take shape.
He woke his laptop with a tap of the spacebar and opened his current project "The Ash Rider". A dust-bitten fantasy about the last gunman of a dying frontier, it was the sort of story Samuel had always wanted to write lonely plains, rusted revolvers, and the hum of something ancient lingering in the distance.
The cursor blinked in the middle of Chapter Eleven.
The bounty had taken them deep into the burnt flats, where the sun bled red over the horizon and the wind sang in the bones of dead cattle. Marshal Corwin tipped his hat lower, his eyes fixed on the lone rider waiting at the edge of the saltpan. Xirathul, they called him. A name whispered like a dare.
Samuel sat back, rolling the pen in his hand. He'd come up with "Xirathul" two nights ago, a name that felt sharp in the mouth, like it belonged in a legend told around dying campfires. In his notes, the man was little more than a shadow: a drifter with no past worth telling and no future worth having.
He sipped his coffee and kept typing.
Outside, somewhere down the street, a garbage truck groaned. His neighbor's radio crackled faintly through the wall. The world was still waking, and in this little cocoon of stale air and half-drunk coffee, Samuel was far away, riding beside Marshal Corwin into a land that didn't exist.
The kettle's warmth lingered in the mug as he wrote about a gunfight under a sky that looked like rusted iron. In the story, Xirathul waited patiently, hands resting on the grips of his revolvers, his long coat swaying with the wind. No one in the burnt flats knew where he came from, but everyone seemed to know his name.
It was, Samuel thought, a good day to write.