Edvane Stories

In early August 2026, I posted my contribution to that day’s #vss365 flash fiction on X and Bluesky, using the prompt word #divine. The post was a little grim and morbid, but drew some attention and the host at the time, Beth Greenberg, said she would ‘read that story.’ So here’s what I came up with for Beth and the #vss365 community.

By the time I saw the inn, I had already accepted that I would not reach Dreyton Percy before morning. Rain had followed me since noon, turning the road to mud and filling all of the ditches. Beyond the inn the land climbed sharply, and somewhere in that darkness a bridge had flooded. So the innkeeper told me while taking my coat.

He was a broad, greying and concerned-looking man. Accustomed to travellers arriving in worse condition than they intended. He gave me ale, put another log on the fire and said there was a bed upstairs if I wanted it. It was when he asked where I was bound that something in him changed.

“Dreyton Percy.”

“Then you’ll take the north road.”

“I was told it was quicker.”

“It is.”

He stood with one hand resting on the back of the chair opposite mine.

“You’ll pass the old castle.”

I knew of no castle, old or otherwise. When I said so, his fingers gripped the wood a little tighter. I wondered if it was fear, or something else.

He pulled out the chair and sat.

“Then you won’t know about the duke’s feast.”

I shook my head.

“No,” he said. “I thought not.”

The innkeeper sat back and watched the fire for a while before he began. He told me there had been two brothers, the elder born to rule and the younger born close enough to power to spend his life looking at it. The elder, he said, had been a decent lord by the standards of such men. He kept the roads passable, saw the granaries opened in lean winters and preferred accounts to tournaments. People remembered him because nothing remarkable happened while he governed, which the innkeeper seemed to consider the highest praise a ruler could earn.

The younger brother was different. Trouble gathered around him. Horses broke their legs beneath other men. Servants fell from towers. A steward who accused him of theft drowned in a pond shallow enough to stand in. The innkeeper recounted these things to me, then added that everyone in the district knew the younger brother had killed the elder.

“How?” I asked.

He shrugged. No one knew that part. There had been blood found between the chapel door and the sacristy after midnight, scrubbed badly enough that the joints between the stones stayed dark. The next morning the brothers rode out with six men. Only five returned with the younger son. The elder’s horse came back much later, sweating, with one stirrup torn loose. They searched the woods for three days and found nothing worth burying.

The younger brother became duke before the month was out.

Nobody challenged him. “Men like courage better when someone else has to spend it,” the innkeeper said, and after that there was little discussion of the missing brother inside the castle.

Then the cook appeared.

Nobody knew who had hired him. The steward denied it. The duke’s secretary denied it. The kitchen servants just found him there one morning, a vast man already standing over the chopping block with his sleeves rolled above forearms thick as beams. He knew where everything was kept. He knew which stores had spoiled, which knives needed sharpening and which maid had hidden a bottle of sack behind the flour bins.

Everyone in the household decided someone else must have employed him and that asking would make them look foolish. Later, when stranger things began to happen, they decided asking might be worse.

The cook never seemed hurried. A pot would boil over behind him and somehow be lifted from the flame before he turned. He could joint a carcass in darkness. Once a scullion swore she saw him reach across a table farther than any arm ought to reach, though by breakfast she claimed she had been tired. Another servant found him standing before a hot oven with both hands inside it. When he drew them out, the skin was unmarked.

“He wasn’t a man,” the innkeeper said.

I waited for more, but he only rubbed one thumb along the grain of the chair.

“There are things,” he said, “that smell wrongly spilled blood the way a dog smells meat. Ancient things. He was one of those.”

Outside, the rain struck harder against the shutters.

“And the duke kept him?”

The innkeeper gave me a small, humourless smile. “The duke kept eating.”

Months passed before the duke ordered the feast, and by then, the innkeeper said, the cook had become a fixture in the household, a part of it. Nobody liked him, or trusted him, but meals arrived on time, the duke was pleased, and a pleased master warrants no further questions.

For the feast, the cook worked alone. He barred the kitchen doors and admitted neither butcher nor servant until the first course was ready to be carried upstairs. Seven courses followed, richer than anything the castle had seen before. There were glazed birds, black puddings sweetened with wine, marrow baked beneath pastry, spiced roots and meats so tender they parted beneath the knife. The duke ate greedily and drank more than usual, praising each dish louder than the last.

The innkeeper paused there, watching me over the rim of his cup, and said the meat was what everyone remembered. Some thought it venison, some veal, some boar, but none of them had tasted anything like it before or ever did again.

By the final course the duke was flushed with wine and pleasure. He demanded the cook be brought into the hall so he could ask what animal had given them such flavour. The great man came in wiping his hands on a cloth and stood before the high table. The duke asked him his secret.

The cook smiled. “An old family recipe, Your Grace.”

The duke assured him it was a triumph and bid the cook help himself to any leftovers before dismissing him.

Then the duke stopped chewing, as something hard struck his teeth. He put two fingers into his mouth and drew out the cause of his discomfort. A ring.

It bore the elder brother’s seal.

The duke screamed like a man who had seen something waiting for him in the dark, and the guards went running for the kitchen with half the hall behind them. The innkeeper said they found the doors unbarred and the fires still burning, though there was no cook, no servant and no sound beyond the spit turning slowly over the coals. What lay on the flagstones was skin.

He described it without embellishment. It was enormous, larger than any man could have worn, spread in folds across the floor as though something had stepped out of it and left it behind. The face sagged empty upon itself, the mouth open, the hands flattened beside the wrists, and the whole thing still warm. There was too much of it, the innkeeper said, too much flesh for the man they had seen walking the passages, as if whatever had occupied it had been contained tightly inside and had finally tired of the confinement.

Nobody touched it, but by morning it was gone.

The duke ordered the kitchen sealed and never held another feast. He ate alone after that, sparingly at first and then hardly at all, growing thinner each year until people said his clothes seemed to hang from him as though he too were becoming emptied out. He ruled for years, but the castle declined around him, and when at last the roof fell in, and the walls were abandoned, villagers still claimed that on wet nights the old kitchen smelled of warm fat.

The innkeeper said nothing more for a while. Rain lashed the shutters, and the fire settled lower in the grate, throwing a dull red light across the room. I found myself thinking of the road beyond the flooded bridge, of the ruined castle somewhere above it, and of how easily some places could keep the memory of what had happened there long after the people were gone.

The innkeeper rose to fetch more wood, and as he turned I noticed a fold of skin at the back of his neck, just above the collar, loose where it should have lain flat. It might have been age. It might have been the light. When he looked back at me, his beaming face was mild and ordinary, but I somehow knew that smile.

He offered supper, but I declined. He nodded, and said breakfast would be ready before I left.

I left just after sunrise, steeling myself for the journey along the north road to Dreyton Percy and the ruins on the hill. Needless to say, I made it on an empty stomach.

Interested in #vss365 flash fiction? Discover my posts on X and Bluesky.

I welcome polite comments. If you enjoyed this story, you might also enjoy The Smothing of Dunsop Bridge