Johnny West's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Johnny West sat on the floor of a cold room and stared at his stringless guitar. The black body lay across his knees like a corpse holding a weapon. Soon he would break into the storm-smith god's workshop and steal the lightning strings. Without them, the guitar was nothing. Without it, his reckoning was nothing. The humming started again at dusk. Not from the guitar itself, but from the air around it. A dark, swirling absence had been gathering in the corner for weeks now, edged in colors that should not exist. It watched. It waited. Each night it pressed closer to the bed where he tried to sleep. He pulled out the carved wooden figure the dead craftsman had left behind. A small woodland woman, shaped from branches and leaves, her painted eyes still sharp. Inside her hollow back were the maps and the words that proved the strings were real. He had read them a thousand times. Tonight he read them once more. Outside his window, the old weathered statue in the field leaned further sideways. Once it had been a proud carved vegetable, a farmer's strange monument. Now its purple skin was scorched black down one side, struck by storms that came from nowhere. The storm-smith's reach had already touched this place. The unseen presence in the corner hummed louder in answer. Johnny stood up. He could not wait another night. He packed the lead-lined case, slung the dead guitar across his back, and stepped out into the dark. Behind him, the swirling void filled the empty room. Ahead of him, sixteen minutes and a god's workshop. He started walking.