into kotaom : a novel by david faylin | [home]
The Nation of Dolour. HoD Awaits You.
Borrada looked out at the small stands of stunted trees that mocked the Bonsai. They were spread between groves of dead Wych elm or Mountain ash or Black alder that reached their spindles to the sky but fell short, as hulks do. He was dismayed at the soulnessness. But it was all anyone in Dolour knew. That, and the heat.
They passed the killed and the wandering orphaned. The van’s windows framed it perfectly: the poignancy of a landscape that evinced Dolour’s long, long war with Lugubria; his war. The Reeks upraised an altitudinous, natural border but these peaks were no missile shields to half-pint Dolourish itinerants: the war’s nobody-people.
Arms and hands and heads, some with eyes still shocked and pleading – like humans as abattoir offal – all these things flowered well on the grey roadside. But it was Dolour’s governing nonchalance that pushed the van up the ascent, ignoring the stones and bones that lapped its floor pan. And he himself had been one of the worst.
[the above is an excerpt from Into Kotaom]
