Richard Bailey
Bio
I am currently working on expanding my writing topics and exploring different areas and topics of writing. I have a personal history with a very severe form of treatment-resistant major depressive disorder.
Stories (91/594)
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Ashes Beneath Hollowspire - Part 7
They stood at the edge of the forest’s breathless hush, staring at the black glass spire on the cliff beyond. The tower rose like a needle from the land’s charred bones, fractured but whole, reflecting slivers of starlight in its broken surface. It was older than Hollowspire, older than the Flamecourt, older even than the songs Elira’s ancestors once wove into stone.
By Richard Bailey6 months ago in Chapters
Ashes Beneath Hollowspire - Part 6
Even as the glyphs of the temple dimmed, the hush they left behind was not peace, it was a silence waiting to be broken. The trio climbed the winding stairs back to the surface, each step echoing with ash-soaked finality. The stone underfoot still radiated warmth, the heat of forgotten power bleeding upward through the marrow of Hollowspire. Elira’s hands glowed faintly with residual spellwaltz rhythm, the sigils trailing off her fingertips like fading notes written in flame. Tovik’s palm still bore the shape of the seared mask, a blackened imprint over trembling skin that pulsed faintly like a living wound.
By Richard Bailey6 months ago in Chapters
Ashes Beneath Hollowspire - Part 5
The mask was heavier than it looked. Tovik turned it over in his hands, feeling the obsidian glass flex faintly at his touch, an impossible pliability, like it breathed with him. Its surface shimmered faintly beneath the temple’s flickering glyphlight, catching motes of golden dust in its curves. The DuMonte crest etched in gold was no longer dormant. It glowed as if lit from within, pulsing gently with every beat of his heart, as though answering some ancient rhythm.
By Richard Bailey6 months ago in Chapters
Ashes Beneath Hollowspire - Part 4
The air beyond the gate was thick, not with dust, but with memory. It pressed against them in invisible waves, each step drawing deeper into a space where time folded and meaning unraveled. The corridor curved downward into the earth, its stone walls alive with ever-shifting glyphs. Elira watched them shift as she passed, each sigil reacting to her presence, some flaring briefly, others dimming like ancient spirits holding their breath, whispering old songs in a language of light.
By Richard Bailey6 months ago in Chapters
Ashes Beneath Hollowspire - Part 3
The descent began at dusk, when the last light touched the horizon like a burnt wick. The mine entrance gaped like an ancient mouth, framed by rusted rails and reinforced with skeletal supports etched in a hybrid of old sigils and modern stabilizing glyphs. The surrounding earth seemed to lean inward, as if trying to reclaim the wound. The stone glimmered faintly, not with ore, but with veins of dormant light, pulsing softly to the rhythm Elira now recognized: not natural tremor, but echo-song. A buried harmony that tugged at magic, memory, and marrow alike.
By Richard Bailey6 months ago in Chapters
Ashes Beneath Hollowspire - Part 2
The next morning broke with a sky the color of old slate. Clouds churned above Hollowspire like a wounded beast trapped beneath the heavens, restless and clawing. The town sat under that bruised sky like a secret buried too shallow, its edges rimmed in blackened shale and the mine yawning open like a throat carved into the earth. Its scaffolds groaned under their own weight, reinforced with etched sigils that shimmered faintly in the shifting light. No workers moved among them. No carts rolled over the gravel paths. The mine was not abandoned, but it had long stopped belonging to the living.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
Ashes Beneath Hollowspire - Part 1
The road to Hollowspire twisted like a spine cracked too many times. Fog clung low over the dirt path, thick as breath on glass, curling between ancient trees that stretched like skeletal limbs toward a grey, overcast sky. Each step forward felt like trespass. The woods had long forgotten how to welcome strangers.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
The Gravedancer’s Waltz - Part 5
The estate no longer shimmered with illusion, it sagged under its own truth. What had once been gilded grandeur was now bone and rot, memory stripped of its polish. Faded roses wilted in the garden below, their petals unmoved by wind, for even the air no longer pretended to flow. The sky was not night nor dawn, but something between, a lavender-hued stasis where stars drifted like silt.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
The Gravedancer’s Waltz - Part 4
The ballroom burned with moonlight. Not firelight, not candlelight, moonlight, bright and cold and wrong. It poured in through the fractured windowpanes like liquid memory, and wherever it touched, time unraveled. The chandeliers melted upward. Tables elongated. Violin strings snapped themselves back into tune, and the waltz played with aching clarity, notes like blades.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
The Gravedancer’s Waltz Part - 3
A thin veil of dusk laced the estate, though time’s rhythm had already begun to stutter. Elira stood alone in the music room, her fingers brushing the spines of abandoned scores. Each parchment pulsed faintly with residual magic—inked not with notes but sigils. These were not mortal compositions. They were fragments of memory, twisted and set to melody. When she whispered a note aloud, a chandelier above her flickered in time.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
The Gravedancer’s Waltz Part - 2
The clock in the east wing struck midnight, though no one had wound it for centuries. A hush fell over the cursed estate, broken only by the soft strains of violin music that rose not from instruments, but from the walls themselves, echoes of a party that never ended. The ballroom lit from within like a lantern, casting golden light into the frostbitten gardens where no blooms dared grow.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
The Gravedancer’s Waltz Part - 1
The forest grew too still. Even the wind held its breath as the trio stepped beyond the last line of trees and beheld the forgotten ruin of Valemire Estate. Moonlight glazed the crumbling spires, and the ivy-strangled balconies jutted like bones from a rotted corpse. The manor stood silent on a hill of frost-hardened grass, its many windows aglow with flickering gold light that could not, should not, exist.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
