Ossified: A Story of Redemption: Ossified Series, #1

By Ryan Richardson Barrett

Ossified is a doomed man's story of self-destruction remedied by retribution. Aiden grapples with the remnants of his life after dying in a fire that leaves him a man only of bone and a newly acting denizen of the natural world. The novel begins with cold realism before descending into the darker themes of fantasy and folklore.
Aiden's journey causes him to encounter new terrors, while the wild beauty of Appalachia acts as a backdrop for his actions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ryan Richardson Barrett
• Release date: Apr 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9798990156210

Ryan Richardson Barrett

Ryan Richardson Barrett is a writer and cybersecurity professional from North Carolina who writes primarily about computer science and any subject that inspires him to learn and better himself.

Book preview

Introduction

You can only take so much

From the life that is your own.

Anyone must look elsewhere,

When a debt is rightly owed.

When a few years fail to sate,

All that can remain is bone.

And so they may be burdened

With time trapped in between life

And a wide and high journey.

Those who did not meet kind ends

Have their odd story told here.

Chapter 1 – Saturday Evening

The desk had two drawers on the front, and a wooden scrolling hood could be pulled down over the flat desktop. After pulling open the left drawer and removing several books and stacks of paper that were in the way, Aiden pulled out a folded letter from between an instruction booklet for a washing machine and a birthday card he was not sure why he still had.

His expression seemed to dance from one emotion to the next as he stared at the letter and read. He gripped a blue disposable lighter and quickly rolled the spark wheel to set the lighter burning, and the piece of paper became rife with flame. Aiden gave a destitute laugh and scoffed, Well, who cares now?

Fire curled the edges of the letter before the flames consumed the paper, with several paragraphs of handwritten blue ink being sanitized from existence.

A small piece of charred paper from the letter fell onto the glossy hardwood floor. He picked it up after the charred scrap had cooled and threw the piece into the trash bin beside the desk. He held the rest of the burning paper until it was all but consumed and placed the last scrap of paper onto an ashtray on the desk, but that soon crumbled to little more than dust. He had thought of the strange letter before, but he no longer felt like it was needed; he did not know how to help them. He was changing.

Silence hung over the house. No notable breeze blew outside. The day continued calmly and understated. The forest around Aiden’s home could have used a nice breath of air to provide a reprieve from the heat across the hot treetops. The trees released their own breaths, but the southwest wind was never notable enough to blow the valley clean of humidity, with the sunlight’s warm haze of late summer providing discomfort for all.

Saturday had finally brought the end of the week. After working all week, Aiden had the conclusive desire he needed to drink. He deserved to drink. Why would he not? He drank every evening; tonight would be only slightly more dedicated to the cause of inebriation. There was no specific booze that Aiden enjoyed drinking, and there was undoubtedly no booze he had yet found that he did not enjoy drinking. Watching baseball on television, sitting on the back porch, and playing solitaire were all primary hobbies of Aiden’s intoxicated self. Aiden lived in a small house in the hills east of the larger, lengthy ridgelines of the Appalachian Mountains.

His great-grandmother gave him her house when she died eight years ago. Aiden’s great-grandparents paid to have the small house built forty years before that date, and Aiden inherited the home and subsequently moved in. Aiden was three years old when he first set foot in this old house, which stood on a quarter-mile-long dirt road that was out of the way of anything remarkable or potentially significant. Another dilapidated building (barely) stood at the end of the road, covered in ivy with a couple of sumac trees growing out of the broken windows in the front of the old house. The road stayed silent most of the time. Thunder during summer storms, police sirens hurtling down the main county road a few miles away, and cracking rifle shots from hunters in the woods are the only sounds that break up the stern, consistent silence, especially on a Saturday.

Aiden is bathing in the ecstasy of alcohol. He feels giddy and energetic. He stands, picks up his glass of cognac from the table that sits beside his chair, and walks to the kitchen. He walked with a near caper as he departed from the room, listening to the music playing during a commercial on the television. Arriving at the stove, he reaches up to the cabinet above its vent and picks up a sealed box of cigarettes and a lighter that lay contained in the otherwise empty cabinet. With his tools of vice assembled, he proceeded to walk out the back door onto the house’s small porch. Anytime the weather was passable, Aiden liked to be in the company of nature.

On the back patio, Aiden sets his whiskey on the table, and the motion causes the ice to rattle its brief tune against the glass. Sitting down on an antediluvian rocking chair that held strong as ever, Aiden unwrapped plastic from his fresh pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, tucked it between his lips, and placed the pack back into the breast pocket of his plaid shirt. The night was cool, and in a couple of hours, the evening would dampen enough to make anyone out in the weather less than comfortable.

Aiden had a pleasant face with wide eyes, a square chin that stayed shaved, and a broad, white-toothed smile that shined in the moonlight. He was always easy-going in his own particular manner. Smoking was an expensive pleasure that he rarely indulged in.

Cigarette held between his teeth, and smiling all the while, Aiden lit the cigarette and breathed in the burning tobacco smoke. Drawing breath through the cigarette caused the lit ring at its end to creep down the paper of the cigarette. The moon was out bright that night and about halfway from the horizon to the zenith of the sky, a waning razor-thin crescent. Aiden noted that in two days, there would be no moon. He would be sure to come out that night to peer at the bright stars in the unbleached sky. His equilibrium was not well-balanced tonight, and looking up at the moon, planets, and stars made him dizzy. Those celestial objects roved in oblong circles across imperceptibly large amounts of space, but Aiden felt like he was noticing minuscule movements in the ancient timekeepers of the sky. He jovially chuckled in reaction to the dizziness and reverted his gaze back to more earthly views, such as that of his whiskey glass sitting on the porch table. He picked the glass up and drank with vigor. The heat of the alcohol and the tang of the oak taste in the cognac was lovely and comforting. Glasses of liquor can kiss with all the raucous energy in the world.

Quietly, Aiden sat and smoked, both pondering things of significant consequence and things of little to no consequence at all. Something far off in the distance let loose an awful screech, causing Aiden to jump