The Homestead
This is a Samantha Grey story set in the early 18th century of Dimension Delta Zeta 17-46. It tells the story of Samantha settling down in a remote valley in the wilds of Kentucky for her first homestead.
Prologue: Agent's Discovery (1903)
The archive reeked of mildew and forgotten wars, a basement vault in the Treasury Building where the Secret Service hoarded its ghosts. Agent Diana Collins, thirty-four and coughing from the dust wiped off a leather-bound journal stamped "HR-713 - Confiscated 1896." Prisoner HR-713: Samantha Grey, the half-devil who'd been chased across the Badlands in The Cleansing. The file's psych eval read like heresy -- too human, too resilient for a demon. Collins cracked the spine, yellowed pages turning under the sharp electric light.
The earliest legible entry, dated 1715, blurred: ridges and wings, a valley's call. "Madness," Collins muttered, "These evil things should be destroyed," but her pulse quickened. Assistant Director Elizabeth Washington's orders were clear -- profile the asset for potential urgent utilization. Or disposal. Therefore she read on, the journal's weight in her hands, wondering if Grey's words hid the key for her superior's decision. The letters bled into the page like old blood, and Collins leaned closer, wondering if Samantha had used it for ink.
Part 1
Entry 1: Ridge Survey (15 September 1715)
Dearest pages; ink scarce as mercy these twenty years, but this ridge; its beauty demands witness. Crested it at dawn, my wings folded tight 'gainst the chill wind, my tail lashing brambles. Tail seemed to stop growing longer. Uncanny thing to have, but I'm learning the use of it. Down below me, I saw a valley sleeping: stream silver-twined through oaks, slopes steep as judgment. My bones ached from this endless journey; and I now choose to claim it. I flashed down in a blink, as I find I can when my destination is close and clear, my misshapen feet sinking in soft loam. I envisioned it then: a cabin, sturdy against storms, a garden like Mother's, no torches, no screams. These horns itch under my hood, and mine eyes glint red in the stream's pools. My devil's blood, in towns they called it. Here, perhaps a forge. But God's? I do not know. Perhaps no other can know the meaning of 'forsaken' as I do, now. The land here quiets my heart. A private peace, safe from prying priests. I will stay. Tomorrow, I will see what the land offers for my home. And if my new fires within serve, not curse.
S. Grey
Kentucky Foothills
Entry 2: First Labor Trial (23 September 1715)
The valley's promise sours quick as milk in sun; ink from yesterday's quill run dry, but this folly must be scratched 'fore it festers. Dawn broke misty, my blood hot with foolish zeal; the trees mocked me, saplings first to test this devil's push. I called the force within, that unseen unearthly hand; eager, too eager, like a colt unbridled. They bent and snapped clean, tumbling like sinners to judgment, overpowered even my strength in the shove. This larger oak, that dead sentinel by the stream, buckled wrong -- twisted mid-fall, roots clawing air, and crashed full into the water. Silt bloomed black as sin, muddying my only drink, the current choked with bark and foul litter. In time it will settle, and I must for now find my drink upstream.
Frustration boiled hotter than any aura I dare summon; wings twitched to flee it all, tail coiling 'round my leg like a traitor's whisper. What good these gifts if they wreck what I claim? The horns weigh heavier today, no tool of heaven or hell, just a girl's folly, overreaching. I left the stream and fetched the axe. An iron relic from that kind trader's cart. Blacksmith's make, sharp and true. My first swing bit tentative, but the rhythm came, a man's speed and power in the swing and bite -- one true gift of this girl's curse. Limbs parted clean now, no wild tumble. The stream weeps silt still, but tomorrow mayhap I'll dredge it. My fear is ebbing; resolve stirs like embers banked. If God forges in the wild, perhaps He tempers here too. My arms shake too much to write more.
S. Grey
Kentucky Foothills
Entry 3: Reflection Log (30 September 1715)
Five days the silt lingers, a black shroud on the stream, as my quill's end frays like my patience. The water runs foul still, forcing me upstream to sip from clearer bends. That crash echoes in my dreams: the oak's groan, roots rending earth like the angry cries of a mob.
This pause teaches me. This unearthly shove serves not for giants but whispers for small bends and snaps. Overreach buckles all. Therefore, I have set aside the dream of a cabin for this month. The wind bites too sharp to wait on heavy timber.
Instead, I have raised a camp of humble make, what the traders call "half-faced." I found two sturdy saplings and wedged a ridgepole between them. Here, my curse proved a blessing; my tail held the heavy beam steady as a third hand, locking it true while I packed the joints, a feat no normal woman could manage alone. Against this spine, I leaned ribs of branch and shingled them thick with pine boughs to turn the rain. The front stands open to the air, where my fire shall sit, casting warmth back into the burrow. It is no castle, but it is shelter.
Yesterday's work with the axe lingers in my palms, blisters painful, yet healing swiftly. I was tentative at first, glancing often, but the rhythm steadied in me. Swing, bite, part. No wild tumble, just clean falls, the limbs sorted for the fire and the bedding.
If this valley is a forge, either God's or Lucifer's, then work it I must. Tomorrow, I will hunt the riverbank for roots. A haven demands sweat, not just spark. The howls hold distant tonight—perhaps they sense me.
S. Grey
Kentucky Foothills
Part 2
Entry 4: Traitorous Axe (11 October 1715, Mid Autumn)
The leaves do turn gold and brittle, frost nipping at dawn. My quill perseveres, but my hands ache from it all. These past weeks, the axe has become companion, yet traitor too. At first, my swings were clumsy as a child's prayer, glancing off bark like my pleas off heaven's ear. The larger boughs laughed at me, wood chips flying wild, barking my knuckles. The strains came fierce, blisters raw on palms, my flesh no match for iron's bite.
Yet, I have witnessed the truth of what they say: if one has both a knife and an axe, one has every other tool the wilderness demands. I have begun to stockpile heavy timber for the winter works, though the lean-to must serve for now. The logs are heavy, slick with moss, and prone to rolling when struck.
Frustration gnawed deeper than hunger when the wood jumped from my block, wasting precious light. Insecurity coiled like my tail 'round my waist, whispering that a woman alone cannot tame oak. But that is a lie. Therefore, I set the curse to work, not in lash, but as brace.
I have learned to wrap that limb tight around the timber, pinning it against the chopping block. It holds the wood still as stone, serving as the heavy hand of the partner I do not have. With the log braced, my weight shifts and the axe finds its mark. Swing, bite, part.
With trepidation I look upon myself -- now I declare I shall not miss my chosen mark and strike that limb holding fast the work!
Now the clearing fills with the scent of split oak. The stack grows high, not a cabin yet, but the promise of one. Visions of my new competence stir faintly in my eye, though horns and wings remain such uncanny growths. If Lucifer forged them for mischief, perhaps the Lord redeems in the steady labor. Tomorrow, more cuts.
S. Grey
Kentucky Foothills
Interlude: The Asset (1903)
Collins removed her spectacles and rubbed the bridge of her nose, leaving a smudge of archival dust on her skin. The light in the vault flickered, a dance that made her jump.
She looked down at the entry she had just finished. Traitorous Axe.
The report from the 1896 capture described HR-713 as an infernal weapon of great danger, a creature that a team of ten men had pursued for days by stealth before secured in witch-hating irons. The Agency viewed her appendages; the horns, the wings, that tail -- as instruments of unnatural war.
Yet here, in the fading ink of 1715, the "monster" was using that tail to brace a log. She was using her devil's strength not to tear men apart, but to keep her own self from freezing to death.
"Adaptable, resourceful," Collins whispered to the empty room.
Washington wanted to know if the asset was controllable. The Director saw a rabid dog that need be put down. But as Collins turned the brittle page, the "rabid dog" dissolved. Instead: leverage. Mechanics. The girl wasn't struggling with evil; she was struggling with oak. It was disquieting. The file said demon. The handwriting said blisters.
Collins checked the clock on the wall. It was past midnight. She should go home, but the winter of 1715 was closing in on the girl, and Collins found she could not leave her in the cold just yet. She wiped her glasses, set them back on her nose, and turned to the next dusty volume.
Entry 5: The Hidden Harvest (3 November 1715)
The frost lies thick as wool upon the grass this morning, a white shroud that does not melt until high noon. My larder stands perilously light. The jerky from my arrival is gone, chewed down to the last salt-string, and the game has grown skittish of my scent.
I stood this morning in the clearing, staring at the patch where I had foolishly dreamed a garden might grow. The earth is locked hard as iron now; no seed would wake in it. A cold panic rose in my throat -- not the sharp fear of the wolf, but the slow, dull dread of the empty belly. I reached out with my senses, calling on the fire within to reveal some warmth, some life hidden in the frozen mud, but the land remained silent to my curse. My power burns, it does not feed.
Despair nearly turned my feet toward the ridge to flee, but then I remembered the tall, rough stalks I had seen bowing by the riverbank -- what the traders call "sun-roots," or Jerusalem artichokes.
I descended to the water's edge. The flowers are long dead, their heads drooped in brown ruin, but the treasure lies beneath. In my haste, I sought to pull the first clump free with the unseen hand, imagining I could pluck it like a weed. It was folly; the force was too blunt, and I heard the tubers crush and snap underground, ruined by my own impatience.
I knelt in the freezing slush and took up the digging stick I had hardened in the fire. It is slow, back-breaking work. I had to chip away the crust to find the knobbly roots huddled together like stones. They are ugly things, knotty and dirt-clung, but when sliced, the flesh is crisp and sweet as a nut. Looking further down the water's edge, vast numbers of them line the banks; God has provided, and I need not starve.
I dare not keep them in the open air, for the frost will turn them to mush, and I will not waste Heaven's bounty. I have dug a pit near the camp, lining it deep with dry straw. There I laid the roots to rest and mounded the earth high over them, a "clamp," as farmers say. It looks like a fresh grave, yet it holds life, not death.
My hands are raw and caked with river-clay, but my spirit is quieted. The Lord does not set a table in the wilderness, but He hides the crumbs for those willing to kneel and dig.
S. Grey
Kentucky Foothills
Entry 6: The Cold Hollow of Night (27 November 1715)
The wind shifted in the night, breathing down from the north with a bite that snaps the timber. The world has turned brittle; the stream edges are rimmed in white glass, and the ground rings like metal under my heel.
Last night, I paid the price of vanity. The cold seeped into the open face of my camp, stealing the warmth faster than my small fire could give it. In my arrogance, I let the wood burn low and sought to rely on the furnace of my own blood. I summoned the aura, wrapping myself in that unearthly heat, and drifted to sleep thinking I had cheated the season.
Such a fool I was.
I woke before dawn, not frozen, but hollowed out. My limbs shook with a palsy not of cold, but of a ravening hunger that clawed at my very marrow and threatened to drive me mad by it. To fuel that internal fire while I slept, my body had consumed its own strength, burning through the meal of roots and jerky I had eaten as if it were nothing. I lay there, gasping and weak, my skin hot but my core trembling, I am learning a hard truth: the fire within demands fuel just as surely as the fire without. I am not infinite.
I sought a mercy of woodscraft. I took the axe to green pines, wood too wet to burn, and cut thick logs. I stacked them high behind my fire, creating a wall of damp timber. It is simple philosophy, one I should have seen sooner: the wall catches the heat that would flee into the dark and casts it back into my shelter.
Tonight, the camp glows like an oven. The heat presses against my face, steady and free. The green wood hisses steam as it dries. A good sound.
S. Grey
Kentucky Foothills
Part 3
Entry 7: The White Wind (21 December 1715)
The world has ended in white.
For two days the snow fell soft as down, but at dusk, the wind turned traitor. It swung from the north to the east, a direction I had not shielded against. My reflector wall, once my savior, now acts as a funnel, catching the gale and driving the blizzard straight into the open mouth of my camp. The fire is drowned in hiss and steam; the bedding is drifted over.
I crouched there for an hour, teeth clacking like dice, watching the heat die. To stay was to sleep, and to sleep was to freeze.
I looked across the clearing to the log pen I had slowly raised -- high, cold, and headless. It had no roof, no chinking, no floor but frozen mud. But it had four walls.
Panic had whispered to dig a hole and hide, but the survivor within shouted to move. I needed a roof, and I needed it tonight.
I dragged the heavy ridge-pole toward the cabin walls, slipping on ice hidden beneath the powder. A normal man would need ladders, ropes, and ramps to raise such timber. I had only terror and these cursed wings.
I summoned the strength. I unfurled against the gale, the wind tearing at horrid, veiny skin taught between the vile, bony fingers of these wings. I kicked up off the earth, clutching the icy oak beam to my chest. The weight was crushing; it sought to drag me down, while the wind sought to smash me against the trees. I screamed into the roar-- a sound no human throat should make! And drove upward.
I crashed onto the top logs, dropping the beam into its notches with a bone-jarring thud. Then the rafters. One by one, I flew them up, my muscles burning with a heat that defied the frost. I did not tie them; I weighed them down with heavy stones and threw my stockpile of split clapboards across them, pinning them with long poles as the sleet turned to needles.
I am inside now. I have hung a bear hide over the doorway and built a small fire on the dirt floor. The smoke stings my eyes, and the wind howls through the gaps between the un-chinked logs, but the snow does not touch me.
I ache in every fiber. My wings are bruised and battered, retracted tight to heal. I have spent my strength to buy this box of air, but as the storm rages without, I know I have bought my life.
S. Grey
Kentucky Foothills
Entry 8: The Long Silence (17 January 1716)
The sun is a pale coin that barely clears the ridge before sinking again. I have lost count of the days since the snow stopped, for one white hour bleeds into the next. The silence is so absolute it hums in my ears, louder than any settlement clamor.
My cabin stands, but it is a sieve. The logs are rough-stacked and un-chinked; the wind whistles through the gaps, piling little drifts of snow in the corners of the dirt floor. I have hung my sole buffalo hide across the worst of the draft and sleep curled beneath two bear skins, my tail wrapped tight around my nose to keep the frost from biting. I am glad of the hides -- well-bought and well-carried. I am less a woman now and more also bear in its den, waking only to feed the fire and cook what meager rations metered for the day.
Hunger is a constant, dull companion. The sun-roots keep my belly from hollowing out, but the body craves blood and fat. I thought, in my folly, that I would hunt on the wing -- flashing from tree to tree, descending like a hawk. I am far too large, too easily seen, without cover of summer's foliage. And the winter woods are a church of ice; the slightest sound carries for miles. The thunder-clap of my instant jumps, the displacement of air, sounds like a musket shot in this stillness, sending every living thing scattered and hidden.
Therefore, I have put away the devil and taken up the whittler's knife. I spend the long, dark hours by the fire carving trigger sticks for deadfalls. It is delicate work; the wood must be smooth, the notch precise, or the stone will not fall when the rabbit nibbles the bait.
I have set a line of them along the game trails near the creek. They are silent killers. They do not sleep, they do not miss, and they do not scare the valley.
This morning, I found a snow-hare crushed beneath the slate. It was frozen stiff, a meager thing of bone and fur, but to me, it was a feast. I stewed it, bones and all, and felt the warmth return to my fingers for the first time in weeks.
I wait. I whittle. I listen to the wind hiss through the walls. If I am to survive this white tomb, it will be by patience, not power.
S. Grey
Kentucky Foothills
Entry 9: Blood on the Snow (12 February 1716)
My hand shakes so that the ink blots, but I must set this down before the fever takes me again.
The silence of the valley bred a carelessness in me. I went out at dawn to check the deadfalls along the creek, my mind drifting to hopeful thoughts of spring. I did not hear the shadow that detached itself from the limestone bluff.
It hit me with the weight of a falling boulder -- a "painter," the catamount, screaming like a woman damned. Its claws raked my shoulder before I even struck the snow, seeking the neck. In that moment, I was not a woman; I was prey.
I didn't think. I did not reach for the knife. I did not reach for the axe. I reached for the Void.
I felt my gut itself fold into knots in a blind terror, blinking out from beneath the beast’s crushing weight and reappearing ten feet above the stream bank. I fell hard into the ice, but the disorientation bought me a breath. The cat screamed -- a sound like a crying child -- and I screamed back. I didn't cast a bolt. I just burned. Heat exploded out of me, shapeless and blinding. I felt the snow turn to steam against my face, scalding my own skin as much as the beast. It wasn't a weapon. It was a bonfire, and I was at the center. The beast fled, its fur singed, vanishing into the grey timber.
But it left its mark.
My left shoulder is torn deep, the flesh laid open to the bone, and a long furrow runs down my thigh. The blood looked shockingly bright against the white ground. I dragged myself back to the cabin, the cold now my enemy, seeking to freeze the weeping wounds.
I know what kills in the wild. It is not the cut, but the rot that follows.
I stoked the fire high and set my small brass kettle to boil. I gathered the hard knobs of pitch, pine resin, I had scraped from the trees for fire-starting. I melted it down until it was a sticky, golden syrup. It is a torment to pour boiling pitch into an open wound, a pain that whitens the vision, but it seals the flesh and poisons the rot.
I have bound the shoulder with dried moss from the unfinished chinks in the wall; it drinks the blood and keeps the wound sweet.
Now the heat rises in me, a fever that is not of the hearth. My cursed blood boils, eager to fight the infection with an angry strength, but it clouds the mind with dark whispers. To quiet them, I clutch my mother’s Rosary and recite the sorrowful mysteries. Hail Mary, full of grace...
The pain is a tether. It reminds me I am mortal. But as the firelight dances on the logs, I know this: the devil saved the woman today.
S. Grey
Kentucky Foothills
Interlude: The Heresy (1903)
Collins pulled her hand back as if the page itself were hot.
The handwriting in the entry had deteriorated into frantic, jagged scrawls, the ink blotched where fever-damp hands had likely rested. There was a dark, rusted smear on the margin—blood, near two centuries old, preserved in the dry air of the vault.
She looked at the Secret Service dossier open on the desk beside the journal. Subject HR-713. Classification: Infernal. Disposition: Hostile/Unstable. Secure Containment Protocol. Level Seven.
"Hostile, unstable," Collins muttered, tracing the bloodstain with a gloved finger.
A hostile entity would have burned the valley down. An unstable creature would have succumbed to the infection or the madness of the fever. But this... this was something else. The resin cure was not sorcery; it was the desperate, logical medicine of a frontier surgeon.
But it was the prayer that unsettled Collins the most.
The psychological evaluations from 1896 claimed the prisoner was "Altogether too human for comfort", a note the previous handlers had dismissed as manipulation. Yet here, alone in the dark and dying of sepsis, the devil had not called out to Lucifer. She had reached for the Rosary. She had recited the Sorrowful Mysteries.
Collins felt a chill that had nothing to do with the basement's draft. If the Treasury Department intended to keep HR-713 for some purpose, they were severely underestimating what they held in that cell. The resin cure. The logic of it. They thought they had captured a savage beast, an unholy and unnatural thing of magic and malice. But a beast doesn't fix a wound. A beast licks it and dies. A woman fixes it.
Collins hesitated, then reached for her pen. She wrote a single note in the margin of her report: Resilience exceeds projected parameters.
She turned the page to see if the girl had lived to see the spring.
Entry 10: The Mud and the Green (9 March 1716)
The silence is broken at last.
These past months, the valley held its breath, but today, under a bright sun and southerly breeze, it exhales. The creek, so long a ribbon of silent ice, has shattered its shackles. It roars now, swollen with meltwater, brown and angry and alive. The sound is sweeter to me than any hymn.
My shoulder is stiff -- the scar pulls tight like a seam in ill-fitting leather when I reach high, but the rot did not take me. The fever broke with the frost, leaving me thin, hollow-eyed, but standing.
Now that the ground has yielded, I have begun the work of turning this wooden crate into a home. The wind no longer owns the room. I have spent the last three days knee-deep in the riverbank, mixing a heavy mortar of clay and dried grass. It is a child’s game of mud pies, but with a builder’s purpose.
I pack the mixture deep into the gaps between the logs, smoothing it tight with my palms. My hands are stained grey and cracked from the wet, but as the clay dries, the cabin changes. The drafts cease. The fire burns steady and calm, no longer fighting the gusts. The light inside softens, amber and warm.
In the corner, the sun-roots I clamped in the earth have begun to sprout, pushing pale green shoots through the dirt I covered them with. They survived the dark, and so did I.
I stood by the stream this evening, washing the clay from my arms. The water is cold enough to ache, but it runs clear again. The black silt of my arrival, the debris of my clumsy power, has all washed down to the Ohio. Perhaps the land has forgiven me, even if Man does not.
S. Grey
Kentucky Foothills
Entry 11: The Forge of God (8 April 1716)
The dogwoods have burst forth in a cloud of white along the ridge, a sign wise elders say marks the time to plant. The sun now strikes the forest floor with a warm, heavy hand, for the great oaks I girdled in the autumn have shed their leaves and died standing, letting the light flood my clearing.
Today, I committed my hope to the soil.
I did not plant in the English rows I learned as a girl. Here, the roots of the trees are too thick for the plow I do not possess. Instead, I raised mounds of earth between the stumps, using the hoe I fashioned from a deer's shoulder blade. In each mound, I buried the "Three Sisters," as the native women do: the corn to stand tall, the bean to climb the stalk, and the squash to spread low and shade the earth from weeds. I let my heat flow out, and turned it to God's purpose of renewal, to aid the seeds I have sown to take root.
When the last seed was covered, I sat back on my heels and looked at my hands. They are changed. The skin is brown and calloused, scarred by the axe, the briar, and the catamount's claw. The nails are rugged and dulled, but still hard and strong. They are not the hands of the terrified girl who flew blindly into this valley, nor are they entirely the claws of the monster she feared she was. They are simply the hands of a woman who lives.
I used to wonder if this valley was a punishment, a cage for my sin-filled soul. Now, I just wonder if the beans will take.
My hands are still shaking, just a little. But for the planting, for the building, for the living -- I have them. The cold didn't break them. It just made the skin harder. Lucifer may have tempted me, but The Father holds my hands firm as surely as His Spirit warms my heart.
I am no longer a transient ghost haunting these woods. I have bled into this dirt, and it has fed me in return. I am the warden of this ridge.
S. Grey
Kentucky Foothills
Epilogue: The Stamp (1903)
Collins closed the leather cover of the journals from HR-713, the sound soft and heavy in the vault’s silence. Dust motes danced in the cone of electric light, settling on the desk like the snows of that distant 1716 winter.
She sat for a long moment, listening to the hum of the ventilation pipes.
Everhart was afraid of the prisoner. The notes from the Director’s hand spoke of "infernal biological contamination" and "unpredictable destructive yield." He feared that if they let the collar loose, the devil might just burn the capital.
Collins picked up her pen. They were wrong.
The woman who had written these pages was not a chaotic force. she had been a builder. She had spent a winter fighting not to conquer the valley, but to be accepted by it. She didn't want to rule; she wanted to belong. She had bled into the mud of Kentucky just to call a patch of dirt "home."
That was not a weakness. It was a lever.
Collins understood now. They needn't control HR-713 with chains or threats of hellfire. You controlled her by giving her something to protect. You gave her a flag, a unit, a mission. You gave her a "homestead," even if it was a government cage, and she would tear the world apart to keep it safe.
Director Everhart feared a calamity, but Assistant Director Elizabeth Washington needed a weapon. Collins had found her one. And perhaps more.
She pulled the official disposition form from the dossier. Under Recommendation, she did not write "Disposal."
She dipped her pen and wrote, in a steady, bureaucratic hand: "Subject demonstrates extreme resilience and high loyalty potential," and then, annotating at the top -- "Ms. Washington, I believe HR-713 is the ideal candidate for your needs."
Collins blew on the ink to dry it, then melted a drop of red wax onto the page. She pressed her seal into the hot pool, locking the file away.
"Welcome to the Secret Service, Samantha," she whispered.
She cut the light, leaving the ghosts of 1715 in the dark, and walked out into the 20th century.