Moonlight Over a Ruined Village

Tonight is the night we look back over the first five episodes of the series. We start with a hapless traveler on his way home that is pursued by a faceless phantom, and we end with a mysterious vigilante assaulting a gang of creeps in a graveyard. In between, we have two sisters learning a new way of life, two brothers preserving their old way of life, a ventriloquist dummy given unholy life by a ruined man, and a doomed soul robb...

For tonight’s tale, we meet Tomisaburo. Some of you may think you are familiar with that name, but you are mistaken. You have yet to meet Tomisaburo, but tonight you will be cured of that. For this is the night that Tomisaburo gets revenge on them boys for attacking him. That never happened, but the rumor is that he tried to tempt them with a haunted shamisen and they beat him for it. Since them boys did nothing to dispel the stori...

For tonight’s tale, we follow another traveler along the river road.  Though he has no definite destination, he has an aim, he has a purpose, and he has the means and will to obtain them. This is a man who was haunted by denizens from beyond the veil. Lost and desperate, he sought help in the ruined village. While there he found them boys and their crew. They helped him to find his strength. Emboldened, he returned to the River Roa...

For tonight’s tale, we meet our hapless drunk. He is standing on the street at dusk. He is alone and without his crew, but he is not aimless. For he is there to execute the duties of his office. The hapless drunk has moved up in the world, and he somehow managed to assume the role of liaison to the board of education for the ruined village. At least, that’s the way he remembers it. He is there to confront the teacher who sent a you...

For tonight’s tale, we follow our hapless wanderer as the reaches the conclusion of her journey through the darkness at the center of the ruined village. She is pulled from the battle between the two raving jackasses by a strange creature in the form of a ventriloquist dummy. From that point on, it gets a lot weirder.

 For this haunted dummy serves as her only guide through her encounters with an increasingly bizarre succession of ...

Tonight’s tale will be told in two parts. For the first part, we follow a young woman as she ventures into the village. The fires of her curiosity were undoubtedly stoked by the villages growing reputation for being infested with thugs, drunks, assholes, and the pedantic creeps who broke them. Her curiosity leads her to the infamous doll museum, and her better judgment leads her to leave it almost immediately. This leads her to the...

For tonight’s tale, we follow our solitary thug as he makes his way through the tunnels that run beneath our ruined village. He was sent there by a mysterious figure. Some call him the bird man, others call him the dirt spider. Our hapless thug is being pursued by an unimaginable horror that has just received a name, and that name is the Rook. The birdman informs our solitary thug that the Rook is coming for him and he will steal t...

For tonight’s tale, we meet a man embarking on a quest. Our pilgrim, a young man who is being relentlessly haunted by an unquiet spirit, has decided he can no longer endure the ice cold touch of the restless dead that pokes him in the eye every Thursday night. He seeks aid from one who is learned in the ways of the dead. Yet our hero finds that the learned make claims to knowledge they can never possess, and they are in no position...

For tonight’s tale, we find Tomisaburo, the mysterious Kitsune who acts as the demon lord of the ruined village, curled up in a hole he dug in the ground. He is lying there so he does not have to show his face to the moonlight. As he contemplates his place in the world of the living, a world in which he received that savage ass whoopin from them boys, he hears a strange voice. Intrigued by the level of venomous pride and arrogance ...

Though it is not my intent to allow this work to descend into the realm of self promotion, I fear it is necessary as it is relevant to tonight’s tale. I wrote a novelette entitled Escaping the Old Charleston Jail, and it is available on Amazon. It’s a dark tale about man at odds with the world around him. He turns to alcohol to dull the pain of fitting in, but the alcohol becomes a prison to him. Our doomed hero eventually finds hi...

For tonight’s episode, we find ourselves standing at the crossroads with one of the village’s disaffected youths. As we stand beneath the moon in need of direction and purpose, we await the birdman and his legion of doomed souls. The hour is late, and nothing good is likely to come of any of this. Nevertheless, we stand waiting, mulling over the past crimes and sins that brought us to this lonely street corner. Our guide is an aiml...

The village is much quieter after being the recipient of that epic asswhoopin expertly administered by the Rook and his crew. The weed has been pulled from the garden. But parts of the roots still remain. Not enough to warrant the brutal attentions of the Rook, but these loose ends have attracted the attentions of independent agents in search of new holes to invade. For all gardens have their snakes, and our doomed little garden ha...

Before listening to this episode, I must warn you that the world will be a different place by the end. As we enter this New Year, we are reminded that things change, and nothing lasts forever. So our village cannot endure in its current state of ruin, so change will be necessary. And change is coming. There is darkness in the village, and there are things that lurk in that darkness. Tonight, you will meet the reason those things lu...

This episode deals with one of the broken souls that was left in the wake of the two lumbering behemoths known as them boys. This man is at odds with society in general. Fortunately for him, he is blissfully unaware of this situation. Unfortunately for the rest of the village, he feels he has license to enforce his twisted will on others. The continued defiance of them boys to the machinations of this wild turkey leads him to make ...

This episode is an examination of a tale we received that none of us are quite conformable with.  It deals with the Faceless Entity from the first episode and examines what compelled them to cover their face. It was submitted to us by a figure who calls himself the Birdman. He claims to be a central player in a vast conspiracy to ruin the whole damned village. We will present the tale as we received it, and then we will provide som...

This tale is an examination of a legend unique to the village. It deals with a solitary figure on his way home from work. But on this evening he finds that the way home is longer than usual and fraught with an inordinate level of folly and madness. Being one of the savvier residents of the ruined village, he makes his way to the river road, far away from the traffic and noise of morons playing at urbanization. The road is long and ...

This episode deals with them boys. You probably know who they are. They derailed the tale from our first episode, they loomed over the second episode, and they are the sole focus of this episode. This tale finds them out where they shouldn’t be to do something regrettable. Yet on the way, they are confronted with a Kitsune who tempts them from the path to ruin with promises of grace and happiness. Kitsune are notorious for leading ...

This episode is about a young woman who was worried about her sister. She watched her forge a unique path that led from the dull banality of their suburban life to the rich vibrancy of the mountains and the forests that lay on its outskirts. Yet the further away she ventured, the more others pulled her back to the struggling village that needed her. This prolonged struggle is interrupted with the arrival of a small, petty man in a ...