Title: Quartermaine’s Monster Hunters & Spell Components: A Farstone Adventure

Genre: Steampunk Fantasy, American Gothic

Audience: 18+

Blurb: Magic surged through the cracks in the sky.

Cities fell. Monsters rose. And from the ashes, a new frontier was born—wild, lawless, and burning with cursed possibility.

Farstone is the end of the line for S. "Two-Bits" Quartermaine, a disgraced lawman dumped into the leystone boomtown the day the rifts split the sky.

Now, something stirs beneath the riftlight sky. An off-world horror whispers from the void, promising madness, miracles... and worse.

Quartermaine must defend a town that barely tolerates him from a threat it can’t even see. The sky is broken. The rules are gone. And the monsters are just getting started.

Farstone began as a boomtown, little more than a scattering of miner shanties, filled with souls who braved the No-Man’s-Land of the continent. The desperate followed, armed with pickaxes and shovels, scraping at the dust in hopes of striking a vein of volatile crystal known as ley-stone.

They said we were entering a golden age. New laws promised children would trade the mines and fields for schoolhouses. Ley-heated steam tractors powered automated scythes. Explosives had grown too unstable, too dangerous for even the poorest family to risk their child, no matter how small their body might squeeze into the claustrophobic dark.

But as humankind is wont to do, we ignored the warnings and we chewed into the mountains anyway, digging deep into the soil like carrion beetles at a carcass.

Future generations will ask: Were there signs?
Did we know that drawing the planet’s lifeblood to the surface would summon predators from beyond the stars—beings older and more bloodthirsty than ourselves?

Historians will say no.

I’ll tell you differently.

I’m not sure “gentle friend” is the right fit here. Perhaps “persistent reader” is a better fit? I ain’t never been one for fancy speech. But if you’re reading this, you’re either a Farstonian or some poor outworlder who, for reasons I can’t begin to understand, chose to make a home in a land that’s foreign even to those born to it.

Excerpt from the Common Man’s History of Farstone

The mines of Farstone gave out groans that were temperamental, bone-deep. Warnings, if you had the sense to listen. But greed dulls ears. The rich wanted one more chest for the vault. The poor needed one more coin to keep a roof over their head.

So it was, on that day in Farstone.

The sky matched the mood of the earth. Clouds hung heavy, rumbling with distant thunder. Dry lightning sparked brushfires that sent smoke spiraling into an already choked sky. The wind blew foul, thick, humid, and still. The ground warped beneath our feet, bedrock swelling like a tide. People staggered, sick and anxious, unable to say why.

Later, those with the money to purchase history will say there was no warning. But the leymen knew that the keg had been packed. The fuse was lit.

Quartermaine left the sheriff’s office door open that morning. Didn’t much matter; the heat had settled, turning the jailhouse into a brick oven. As far as lockups go it was one of the nicer ones. Quartermaine had negotiated as part of taking the job. After all, it was the least the Farstone Trading Company could do. Those robber barons who owned the mines had made their fortune in trains decades ago. Sleek, polished Zephyr engines ran from the eastern seaboard, promising gleaming cities stitched together by glowing rails.

But what good is a promised utopia when you live on the edge of civilization?

That was a question for the brandy-snifters and leather chairs back East. Quartermaine had a twice-mended pine chair, a fourth-hand desk from a dead preacher, and a bottle of liquor that may’ve been brewed in a hog trough.

Still, he wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. This was his last shot. He would either retire with a scrap of his name intact or die with his boots on.

Stars above, he was tired. Tired of the heat. Tired of the tremors in the earth and in his hands. But most of all, he was tired of babysitting reprobates who thought the rules didn’t apply to them.

“Come on, Sheriff! It’s hotter than a ley-digger’s ass—”

The obscenity cut short with the clang of a tin cup bouncing off iron bars, and Quartermaine opened a single olive-green eye, allowing light to join the chorus of his cluster migraine. “Language,” Quartermaine growled.“Told ya, ain’t no money in the budget to fix the evap-cooler, which means we all have is water from the sink…” He said as he motioned with his chin to the pumphandle faucet over the basin.” 

“Come on, Two-Bits,” drawled another voice from the left cell, smooth and amused.

Quartermaine stopped mid-stretch, his annoyed gaze landing on the lithe form of its owner, stretched out upon the cot like a pampered housecat. Their hair was black, long falling past their shoulders in a single braid. One of the three plaits was white as bone. The shock of noncolor began at their forehead, splicing through the ebony strands like snow over coal. “Don't start any of your bullshit, Kai,” Quartermaine grumbled as he knelt to retrieve his cup before pausing to pick up the cups of the two prisoners. 

“Language,” Kai said, clucking his tongue in playful reproach. Their copper finger wagging at Quartermaine as if he were a naughty child and not a man old enough to be their father. “I know you would much rather be out there helping the good…morally taxed people of Farstone. Why not let my friend and me go? I promise to burn down the jailhouse as a cover.”

“Because, firstly,” Quartermaine grumbled as the handle of the pump squeaked with his efforts to draw water. “You would have no problem burning the town down along with the jail, and me along with it. And secondly, you are a menace to anyone who has ever met you. Getting you to the prison in Summit means you are no longer my problem.”

“Come on, sheriff!” muttered the prisoner in the right cell. Thick-necked, broad-shouldered, and with a head and body that seemed to be carved from granite mountains that surrounded Farstone, the antithesis of the androgynous beauty in the opposite cell. This was Hazel, so named because he was a foundling that had been discovered in the temple yard beneath a hazel bush. When compared to Kai, one would think that Hazel was the more violent of the two. It was that assumption that had led to Kai’s impressive body count, and the reason they would soon be led to the marble quarry at the foot of Summit City. Hazel didn’t have a violent bone in his cornfed body; however, what he did have was a penchant for gambling and losing, and thus he would be joining Kai in the quarry to pay his debt. 

Quartermaine ignored the larger man, his attention shifting to a man who had begun the exchange. “You started this, ain’t you gonna try to feed me some cockamamie story about why you should be freed?” 

The man that Quartmaine addressed turned from where he lay on a cot behind Hazel. He was thin as a reed, his muscles wiry, and his trigger hand quick; he was undoubtedly the most dangerous of the three prisoners the jail held. He had tested the mettle of the Farstone Trading Company by pulling off more than a dozen train and bank robberies. It took Quartermain three and a half months to track him, along with a gun battle that nearly took off his ear. 

“Nope,” said the man on the cot, his eye opening only when the water began to rattle the pipes. “We both know if you let me go, you lose your cushy pillow as the FTC’s lapdog. Besides, I only ask for what is due me and what is right. In this case, it is water.”

Quartermaine looked up from where the water flowed clear from the tap. He would fill each mug, four in total, before handing them to each “guest”, Hazel, Kai, and the sharp-eyed Castor. 

Each would drain their cups before handing them to Quartermaine, and even Castor muttered a raspy gratitude to the sheriff.  Not being one to bask in gratitude, Quartermaine went back to the sink to fill the cups again. 

“Fuck…” The word fell like a stone from his lips as the sky filled with green-black clouds that seemed to roll in every direction.

The cups dropped from Quartermaine’s hand, his pistol in hand, cocked and loaded by the time the cups hit and scattered across the floor. A half-breath and the locks to the cells exploded open, each with a single shot. “Stormceller, now!” His voice boomed as he threw Kai towards the back room that counted as Quartermaine’s bedroom. Hazel and Castor were hot on his heels. 

Outside, the wind screamed, and trees were uprooted, and the sky…Quartermaine could not take his eyes from the sky.

“I can’t get it open!” Kai screamed as he tugged on the steel ring that opened the door to the stormcellar in the floor.

“Hazel!” Caster shouted even as the storm battered the roof and walls of the brick jailhouse. Caster, not wasting a moment, pushed Kai out of the way, hefting open the door as if it weighed nothing. 

“Get down, Two-Bit!” It was Kai — at least Quartermaine thought it was. The sky held him enthralled.

Then all went black.