clips featuring Nova and Shade from Blacktop and Bone

Prologue to Blacktop & Bone

As the wind shifted, the scent became apparent to her. It preceded any visual cue of Death. This wasn't the smell of blood or decaying flesh, but rather the aroma of newly disturbed soil. Like a grave that'd been dug but then opened up to rainfall. A cloying sweetness followed, thick and heavy like spoiled things left to rot undisturbed. Then came the foul smell of flesh, unceasingly roasting under the sun. It left a metallic, nauseating taste clinging inside her mouth. It wa

"The cruelest prisons are the ones built deep inside the mind." Content Warning: Graphic violence, blood, child abuse, psychological trauma, disturbing imagery, and themes of mental illness and death. PROLOGUE: THE MORNING AFTER Red. Not the word, but the thing itself, raw and everywhere. On small hands that won't stop shaking. On white fabric that was once something else, something soft and harmless. It might have been a nightgown, maybe. The girl can't remember putting it o

On a dark highway, the dead watch her hunt what feeds on souls. by K.K. Schmidt The rain tasted like rust and gasoline, drumming against Nova's leather jacket in a rhythm she had long since stopped counting. She sat on the cracked concrete lip of the abandoned station at Mile Marker 17, her motorcycle parked in the shadow of the collapsed awning. The station squatted at the edge of the empty highway like something that had given up mid-sentence. Above her, a broken sign read

CHAPTER ONE: THE FIRST BREATH Pain. Not the clean, sharp pain of a cut or the dull ache of a bruise, but pain that existed in every dimension simultaneously. Pain that was color, sound, and taste. Pain that was the entire universe contracting to a single point of white-hot agony and then exploding outward into a thousand screaming nerve endings. She tried to scream, but her throat would not obey. She tried to move, but her limbs were distant countries, unreachable and foreign

The roar of an engine shattered the night. Headlights blazed through the corn, bright and blinding, and Nova threw up an arm to shield her eyes. The engine was loud, powerful, American muscle, and it was coming fast. She dove to the side as a black-and-chrome 1967 Pontiac GTO exploded out of the corn rows. Tires churned dirt and dead stalks as it skidded to a stop exactly where she’d been standing three seconds earlier. The driver’s door opened. A man stepped out carrying a s