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Jacob SanSoucie

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2025

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9 Stories

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The Last Lamp

Weekly Contest #325

The fog tastes like coal smoke and the Thames at low tide—which is to say, it tastes like London in November, thick enough to chew and twice as uninviting. I hoist my ladder over my shoulder and start my route. Forty-seven lamps from the embankment to Clerkenwell, two hours at dusk to light them, two hours at dawn to snuff them out. Been doing this for three years now. Good work. Steady work. The kind that keeps your hands busy and your mind blessedly empty. First lamp: corner of Drury Lane. I prop the ladder, climb, twist the key to open th...

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Korrin in the Deep

Weekly Contest #324

I wake to darkness and the taste of stone dust. For a moment—a single, merciful moment—I don't remember where I am. Then the weight presses down, the cold seeps in, and memory returns like a brother-in-law at dinnertime: unwelcome and impossible to ignore. Right. The tunnel. The ceiling crack I waved off because I was so close—just a few more feet to the old vein, the one Brandel had been working when the mountain swallowed him whole. The groan that sounded like the earth clearing its throat. The breath of air that smelled like a closed coff...

9 likes 7 comments 7
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The Knight of Unfortunate Circumstance

Weekly Contest #305

It took a few seconds to realize I was utterly and completely lost. The seconds after that were devoted to cursing every saint, deity, and my own mother for good measure. The forest had seemed a splendid escape route when Sir Oswald's men were bearing down on me with distinctly un-chivalrous intentions involving my entrails and the nearest tree branch. Now, as darkness settled like a shroud, it seemed considerably less inspired."Seven hells," I muttered, adjusting the ill-fitting breastplate that chafed my shoulders raw. The armor had belong...

7 likes 4 comments 4
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The Quiet Knife

Weekly Contest #303

Every bastard knows revenge is a road that only runs one way. Down.I've known it since I was thirteen and put my first man in the ground—a stable master who'd taken liberties with my sister. Cut him ear to ear with a blade I couldn't properly hold. Made a proper mess of it. Of him. Of me.Thirty years and gods know how many corpses later, I still know it. Every time I reach for steel, every time I watch the light fade from someone's eyes. Every red and dripping time.Revenge is a poison you drink to kill your enemy. If you're lucky, it works. ...

6 likes 2 comments 2
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The Letter

Weekly Contest #302

The letter that destroyed the Westbridge clan had been delivered to the wrong house. Such a simple thing. One street over, one similar name, a tired courier with rain in his eyes. That was all it took.Morit Creel sniffed the folded parchment, sealed with plain wax—no insignia. Strange. The couriers never made mistakes, not with what Lord Craine paid them. He weighed the letter in his palm and peered out the window at the rain-slick cobbles below. The courier was already a dwindling shadow at the far end of Butcher's Row."From Lord Craine," t...

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Beneath the Silt

Weekly Contest #302

The Gateway Arch looks different underwater. Eighty years post-flood, it's become a monument to decay, its surface now a tapestry of rust and crawling barnacles. Half-buried in sediment, it's still the tallest structure in what used to be downtown St. Louis—a steel dinosaur, frozen in its death throes.I checked my depth gauge: 147 feet. My lungs automatically tried to expand against the pressure of my reinforced dive suit. A nervous habit from someone who spends too much time in places humans weren't meant to go."Maddox, you copy?" Eliza's v...

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The Reluctant Questmaster

Weekly Contest #301

When the email first appeared in my inbox with the subject line "URGENT: Questmaster Needed," I should have deleted it immediately. Anyone with a functioning frontal lobe knows that emails marked "urgent" in all caps are either Nigerian princes or your mother-in-law. But in my defense, I was three cups of coffee into a Tuesday morning spreadsheet binge, and the mental fog was thick.So I opened it."Dear Mr. Holloway," it began, perfectly formal despite the screaming subject line. "Due to an unfortunate incident involving our previously appoin...

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The Unmaking

Weekly Contest #301

The Faceless God collected souls in glass. Not as trophies, understand, but as necessities—the way a carpenter collects tools, a scribe collects inks. Every vessel was a different shape, each soul a different hue. Some pulsed with vibrant colors; others glowed with subdued light. Together, they lined the endless shelves of the Hollow City, illuminating its obsidian walls with their spectral radiance.Vex was the God's most loyal servant—his Hand, his Voice, his Shadow.And she had just shattered her first vessel.The sound of breaking glass had...

8 likes 6 comments 6
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Chaltier's Well

Shortlisted for Contest #300 ⭐️

Chaltier's Well had stood for three centuries at the fringe of Western settlement, neither prospering enough to expand beyond its original boundaries nor failing enough to join the ranks of ghost towns that dotted the region like abandoned chess pieces. The town maintained precisely 1,876 souls – the same count reported in the census of 1876, and every census since.People didn't leave Chaltier's Well. Not permanently. Those who tried found themselves circling back within months, drawn by what locals called "the tug" – a homesickness so profo...

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