Samuel liked to think of his novel as a map one he was still drawing while his characters walked over it.
It wasn't a grand, charted thing with neat borders and tidy ink lines. No, The Ash Rider's world was a mess of smudges and half formed roads, sketched from the edges inward. He preferred it that way. It meant that even he didn't always know what was waiting around the bend until Marshal Corwin rode into it.
The morning sun had climbed a little higher by the time he sat down again. The steam from his coffee fogged the bottom edge of his glasses, and he wiped them clean with the sleeve of a shirt that could've used a wash two days ago.
On the screen, Corwin's boots crunched over dry, white earth. Samuel leaned back in his chair, picturing the vast emptiness of the burnt flats.
The air out there tasted of salt and old gunpowder. No bird dared circle overhead; even the wind seemed to think twice before crossing that place. And there he was Xirathul. Still as stone, dressed in a coat the color of grave dirt, his hat pulled low so the sun never touched his eyes. Some men drew a weapon to speak; he just had to say your name.
Samuel tapped the pen against his mug. Xirathul was supposed to be a minor character, a roadblock on Corwin's way to bigger trouble. But as the days went on, the drifter had taken on weight in his mind.
The name helped. He'd stolen syllables from a half dozen half remembered words, mashed them together, and somehow it fit. A name with dust in it, with a little danger.
Scrolling through earlier notes, he found the character sketch:
*Occupation: gun-for-hire
*Reputation: nobody's friend, everybody's problem
*Eyes: dark, steady
*Past: unknown
Simple. Efficient. Disposable.
Samuel's phone buzzed against the desk a text from Emma, his oldest friend, reminding him about their dinner later in the week. He replied quickly, thumbed the phone dark, and leaned back into the frontier.
Corwin didn't flinch when the drifter stepped forward. "Marshal," Xirathul said, voice low and dry. "You've got two choices. Turn back, or keep going and meet the ground sooner than you planned."
Samuel grinned. He liked the rhythm of it the standoff under an open sky. He could almost hear the distant creak of leather, the faint hiss of wind over flat earth.
By the time he stopped for lunch, he had three new pages and the satisfaction of seeing the map of his world grow just a little more.
In the real world, the street outside buzzed with traffic, the upstairs neighbor's kid pounded on the floor, and somewhere a dog barked without end. But here, in the quiet corner of his apartment, Samuel Hargrove was somewhere else entirely riding the burnt flats with a man whose name, he thought, was as fictional as they came.