Hello, my name is Dylan Davis. I am an American writer who lives in Germany. I hold an MFA in creative writing from Southern Illinois University. My goal is to write the narratives for as many games as I possibly can. Welcome to my portfolio. Please refer to CV for details on my work and education history. Refer below to an excerpt from my most recent fiction work.
Excerpt from: “The Last Lowlander” Currently being published episodically to my Wattpad.
From under a dusty pile of rubble, a form of man awoke. Grit and stone sloughed from her body as she rose, plinking and skidding across the sodden ground. Her armor was dented and scuffed, and the creases were filled with verdigris. It was not even her armor. She could feel it in the fit. Wispy, dead gray hair draped down the back plate of her armor in a tight rope. She looked left, crumbled walls of whatever old ruin she was in. She looked right. There was something there. She moved toward it, instinctively reaching for the blade at her hip. Her fist grasped air. She looked down at the absence, then flexed and rolled her shoulders. The thing to her right was some effigy. It was made of twine lashed to bone and antler. Frost had collected on the twine. She followed the glinting freeze along the twine and saw how it weaved around the bones and antlers. The taught twine wrapped around an antler’s spike, then ran straight and through the gap in the forearm, then curled into a smashed skull and vanished in the dark within. Gently, she flicked the effigy. Frost jumped from the twine, and a deep tone warbled from the thing itself. She bathed in green light, cast from whatever this was. It had to be the effigy, as nothing else could cast such a color. She looked around. The whole area from which she woke was covered in this light. The warbling continued, louder and louder. She stepped away slowly, and as she did, she heard something.
She whirled left and saw a creature come stumbling from behind a tree. It was skinny and the color of decaying intestines, a mottled brown and yellow. It walked uneasy on bony, shoeless feet. It lazily carried a broken sword by the pommel in one hand. She stepped from the green light and hunched, wishing she had her equipment, but old armor would have to suffice. The thing. Dead thing, half-dead thing, or whatever it was, did not seem to notice her. It shuffled along toward the effigy as though tranced. It walked straight past her, and she could hear the hiss echoing in its empty husk. Up close, she could see it was dead. It had no eyes. Its teeth were gone from the skull. Its neck bones were twisted and facing all the wrong directions. It then went into the light. For a moment, it stood there as though searching the ground, then it raised the broken sword. The hiss became a howl. Then, faster than she expected, it thrashed at the exact spot she had lay. Pings of metal on stone clanged in her helm. Little sparks leapt from the ground with each strike. The dead thing kept swinging, and swinging, and swinging. More sparks, more howling, more inhumane viciousness. She looked over her shoulder and saw another, and another behind the second. She looked back to the broken sword, blurred by the relentless swings at her old grave.
She walked up close behind it, then reached out quietly with her gloved hand. When she gripped the neckbones in her fist, the hiss grew deafening, as the thing tried to turn toward her. It broke its own neck in the turn, and made a wild cut at her legs. She bounded back, wrenching its neck downward. The head separated from the body by the force, and then it crashed into the ground, dropping the broken sword. She looked to the others behind her. They were closer, and they knew she was there. She grasped the hilt and a handful of sodden earth with it, then faced the two.
One seemed to look straight at her, while the other’s head was cocked sideways. She whirled the sword around once, feeling the weight. The break in the blade left it feeling horribly unbalanced, but it was better than her fists. The cocked dead thing held a rotting axe, the wood only barely clinging to the wholly rusted head. The other had nothing. They both shambled toward her. She stayed put, watching their every minute movement. She saw that, despite how slow they were, it hid a certain jitter to existence. Their bones shook and rattled as though bound by energy. A string so taught, it could snap and unleash something she was not prepared for.
She chose not to wait for that to happen, and instead chopped at the weaponless one with a steady ferocity. The sword lodged into the spine and stuck there. The dead thing fell to the ground, bringing her blade with it. The other lunged at her, the axe flailing wildly. She leapt backward and put her arms out wide, looking for a moment to catch it. The cocked dead thing slowed to the shamble again. The first one was not getting up again.
The cocked one, seemingly having worked up the energy, again, thrashed at her with the axe. She heard the rush of air as the blade went just to her left. She dove toward her broken sword, and, when it would not come free from the spine, she thrust her boots into the bones and pulled at the same time. The sword dislodged, and the bones fell to pieces in a pile. On her back, she looked to the cocked dead thing. It was bringing the axe down on top of her. The howl sounding like a dying tree or rotting river. She put the sword out in front of her, holding it by the broken blade and hilt. The axe crashed into it, making a thud as wood struck metal. The axe head flew off, lodging in the ground next to her. The sudden weightlessness caused the already uneasy dead thing to topple over her, too, though it then clawed and raked at her legs. She stuck her boot into its skull, then scrambled to her feet. She whirled the sword before her so that it pointed straight down, then dropped to one knee and thrust the blade into the ground, splitting the neck of the cocked one with it. The howling and hissing stopped. She breathed for a moment, then took stock of her surroundings, again. The three dead things had not yet risen again, though she was not going to find out if they would. The green light, too, no longer emanated from the effigy. The effigy had stilled it seemed, as though some life was gone from it. It did not even look like an effigy, anymore. It looked more like a collection of twisted dead things, now, haphazardly thrown together rather than before. Curious.
She got to her feet again, then, seeing nowhere else to go, followed the bend from where the three attackers had come.
Dylan Cale Davis 