Shade Flint: Chapter 1 -Pyromancer (standard:westerns, 563 words)
Author: The Author That Exists	Added: Jan 01 2001	Views/Reads: 4321/4	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Usual "western" pastimes are: having shootouts, killing Indians,and being covered in cow feces. Shade Flint's pastimes consist of: having shootouts, having the ability to control fire, and killing the undead for fun and profit,...so what.

a vulture circled high over the parched desert, and taking in all there
was to see, the picturesque canyons and plateaus along the South and 
West, and the flat, empty, forsaken spaces that seemed to stretch on 
forever to the North and East, and of course the food below him.  The 
food, was a man on a lithe, black Arabian horse.  The vulture could see 
the man was wounded and nearly unconscious, because man blood that 
smelled oddly of phosphorus dripped from the right side of the man's 
throat and had been doing so for long time. The vulture could see also 
that the horse was bewildered, wandering around and changing direction 
sharply, she estimated that she would be able to make a meal of the man 
within a few hours and that the horse would probably meander around 
riderless, not knowing what to do until it died of thirst.  They 
usually did. 

The man, was an imposing man, or he would have been, had he not been
slumped over the neck of his horse, bleeding from a blackened wound on 
the side of his neck.  He wore a faded black duster which swirled 
behind him, two bandoliers crossed over his black satin vest, at his 
hips were two shining black, engraved revolvers, on his head he wore a 
wide brimmed black hat from which flowed his straight gray hair that 
tumble down over his shoulders to his back, so closely matching his 
well-kept mustaches that hung down a hairsbreadth above his chin. 

From a cursory look, the man did not seem out of the ordinary, he
appeared to be a gunslinger of some sort, dangerous, frightening, but 
not particularly unusual, definitely not impressive to a bird.  His 
hat, with its wide flat brim, was placed in such a position as to shade 
his eyes from the ruddy sun that was sinking over the horizon, however 
as the buzzard peered at this bleeding man's eyes, she noticed that 
they appeared to be composed of brushed steel.  As the sable horse 
stamped on through the empty desert, she noticed that on the barren dry 
sand of the desert floor the horse's hooves made no sound nor made 
imprint in the desiccated soil, but as she observed the points where 
the horse had occasionally trodden upon a fallen blade of grass or 
twig, she observed that the grass had , without a sound, burnt to a 
crisp as if consumed by a flame.  Her keen eyes darted to the finely 
engraved revolvers resting on each of the man's hips but now, on closer 
inspection, were issuing forth a dull, barely perceptible, orange glow, 
as though the metal lining the barrel of each weapon had been heated by 
some infernal fire.  Indeed, the same appeared true with the horse 
itself, for watching this strange man and his shadowy mount closer 
still, the vulture perceived small wisps of bright red flame emanating 
from the flared nostrils and open panting mouth of the Arabian. 

Suddenly the man succumbed to his festering wound and, swaying a moment,
fell from his horse and tumbled on the ground.  A warm fuzzy feeling 
shot through the buzzard?s body a she swooped down to claim her prize.  
The last thing the buzzard ever saw was a beautiful, glowing, orange, 
crescent, as the red hot iron horse shoe crushed, and seared the 
buzzard's face. 


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