Originally published in Writers of the Future XXIII, September 2007, and available free from the author's website. The obsidian shard, half the size of my palm, lay in my hand: a sharp, deadly thing still stained with blood. Its black surface shimmered with green reflections, and it quivered with the aura I associated with the underworld: blood and pain and death. Odd, to say the least. One did not find such objects in a dead warrior’s house.