Elias: The Plains Prophet
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Book Four of Ten
Coming Soon!
Currently Drafting.
A Story of Choice, Consequence, and the Price of Truth in the Age of Unbinding
He doesn’t see the future, he sees where choices lead.
For eight years, Elias White Buffalo has walked the broken paths of a changing world, warning those who will listen and carrying the weight of those who wouldn’t. To some, he is a guardian. To others, a curse made flesh, the Woe-Bringer who arrives before everything falls apart.
When the paths converge on a single, unavoidable truth, Elias chooses to walk into it, surrendering himself to the Hollowbound, a rising force that turns prophets into fuel and faith into cruelty. Branded, silenced, and broken by design, he finds the one thing the visions never fully revealed… a girl of fire whose power could reshape the future or burn it away entirely.
Together, they flee into a world that doesn’t want them, hunted by zealots, haunted by choices, and bound to a convergence neither of them can escape.
Prologue
The storm came in from the east, the way Elias had known it would.
He had known it before the sky gave any sign worth reading. Three hours back, with the afternoon still dry and the sun still laying its long gold across the grass, he had felt it arrive behind his eyes, a low pressure that settled at the temples and pushed outward, the ache that had stopped meaning headache to him a long time ago and started meaning weather. He had looked up when it came. Anyone would. But the sky had been clean then, a high pale blue thinning toward the mountains, and it told him nothing he didn’t already carry.
Now the storm was here. It crossed the eastern grasslands as a single dark wall, the kind of front that doesn’t drift so much as advance, dragging its own shadow over the country ahead of it. The wind reached him first, well before the rain, and it came carrying the smell of wet earth from ground that was already taking the storm somewhere out of sight. The grasses bent all one way. The light went flat and strange as the gold drained out of the afternoon and a ceiling of slate came down in its place, and the far hills gave up their edges and went gray and shapeless at the seam where the land met the weather.
He walked into it.
He didn’t slow, and he didn’t turn up his collar yet, and he didn’t look for any low place to wait it out, because waiting it out wasn’t the direction he was going. He walked toward the dark wall the way he had walked toward every dark wall for eleven years, steady and unhurried, a man closing the distance to the thing most people spend their lives trying to keep at their backs. He had always done this. Walked into what others walked away from. Storms. Fevers. The towns that barred their gates at the sound of his name. Somewhere in those eleven years he had stopped wondering whether there was something broken in him that turned him toward trouble instead of away from it.
There wasn’t. He had looked, the way he looked at all true things, and there wasn’t.
It wasn’t courage either. He was honest with himself about that. Courage belonged to the men who felt the fear and crossed it anyway, and he honored those men, but he wasn’t one of them here. Walking toward the storm cost him nothing he had to overcome. It was only the shape the visions had pressed him into, year by year, until the shape stopped being something he did and became something he was. The paths showed him where he needed to be. Getting there was the part still left to him. So, he went into the rain, the way he always went.
The rain came down on the Montana ground the way rain always came, with no opinion about what it ruined. It fell on the grasses and the bare rock faces and the dark distant line of the timber without preference among them, the same water for the wheat as for the stone, and it would go on falling whether it was wanted or not. Weather had never learned to care. That was one of the things Elias liked about it. It was honest in a way people found it hard to be.
He walked on through it and read it the way he read everything, not for what it was but for what it meant underneath. Other men saw rain and saw rain. He saw rain and saw where it would be in an hour. The water came down and gathered and began to move, and the moving had rules, older than any town and older than his people’s memory of the country. It found the low ground the way it always found the low ground, not searching for it, just obeying the one law it had ever been given. It ran off the rock and pooled in the hollows and slid down the long grades toward the places that sat lowest, carrying what it lifted along the way.
He watched the soil take what it could and then stop taking. There was a point past which the ground couldn’t hold any more, and after that the water belonged to the surface, and the surface ran. He had watched that point arrive on a hundred slopes. He knew its signs the way he knew his own hands.
The land took the change without being asked if it was ready. It never was asked. It only absorbed what came and made what it could of it, the same as he did, the same as anything did that had learned there was no use refusing what was already on its way.
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