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Mauro Montacchiesi

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2025

Stories (7)
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7 Stories

111 karma pts

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The Vigil of the Wolf-Bride

Submitted to Contest #323

Ah, the hill was all knife and shadow that night, and Bran Castle stood upon it like a clenched fist against the moon. The villagers said the fortress kept watch; the soldiers said it kept count. But Mari—the candle-maker's daughter chosen as this year's Wolf-Bride—knew it kept silence most of all."Oh dear," she whispered as the wind bullied her cloak, "hold your horses." The mule balked, as if the mountain itself had a say in where girls should go when summoned by old rites. It had been better late than never, Father Ilie had told her, to r...

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The Warden's Prayer

Submitted to Contest #323

Northumberland, 1767 There is a room in Chillingham Castle where the wind does not blow so much as pace, like a gaoler counting steps. On the night I entered service—fresh from Alnwick, with a letter of character and a foolish belief in the straightness of the world—that room kept watch over me as surely as I kept watch over the family silver. My name is Matthew Kerr, son of a tanner, hired as under-warden to Sir Percival Hart and his sister, Lady Imogen. They had lately returned from Italy with a trunk of relics, a hired scholar, and a prob...

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The Salt-White Room

Submitted to Contest #323

The sky, the day the letters started arriving, had the texture and color of a bruise. I was teaching in the only school left in our peninsula—three rooms, one stove coughing more than it warmed. Between morning grammar and fractured arithmetic, a sixth envelope slipped beneath the office door. No stamp, no return address. Just my name, the way a child might etch it: shaky, trying to be brave. Inside was a photograph of the old sanatorium on the cliffs. It had been shuttered since the winter my brother went inland and didn’t return. On the ba...

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The Broken Thread

Submitted to Contest #323

Edmund Calder, Every morning at six,lit a single beeswax candle and placed it at the foot of the longcase clock.That clock had been his grandfather’s property. He whispered a line in Latin even if he barely understood it. He then bowed to the pendulum as if it were a patient, breathing thing. Only when the candle’s flame dimmed to a modest spear of light did he unclose the tall oak door, cradle the brass key in his palm, and wind the weights with three slow turns. It was his most sacred ritual—his way of keeping time honest. “Ah,” he mu...

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The Candle and the Light

Submitted to Contest #323

Once for his father, once for his mother, once for the boy he used to be, Marco adjusted his olive-green tie three times.The gesture had become Aa ritual in itself, this had become a way of slowing down the tremor of his fingers. Ah, well, he thought, it can’t be helped catching his reflection, by the entrance, in the church’s brass candlestick.Older than his thirty-five years his eyes looked.Incense curled like restless ghosts inside St. Jude’s nave. The stone pillars glistened with candlelight, and every whisper echoed into vastness. It ...

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Ashes of Triumph existence

Submitted to Contest #322

Ashes of Triumph existence A Tycoon's Sleepless VigilNo boundaries had the London night for Thomas Haversham. Only shades had it of infinite gray. Left unfinished on the mahogany table in his living room, his last glass of champagne was yet another tangible proof of a pleasure he could no longer feel. It was two in the morning.For him the hours had melted into an exhausting, single, sleepless vigil. Once a symbol of triumph and status, the velvet fabric of his suitwas now scratching his skin like a too-tight wetsuit. Gilded mirrors and Flem...

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Bridge, Tides and Neon

Submitted to Contest #322

Bridge, Tides and Neon.A New York StoryA contemporary dramatic tale Arianna Vitale, in a moment that had already dissolved into distant memory, believed in coincidence. In New York, the city that takes in and erases completely dreams like taxi lights in the rain, she survived through haste and snapshots. A freelance photojournalist, she had learned that the moment needs to be relentlessly tracked down, it cannot be conquered. Yet at dawn, that morning, as the wind carried the scent of iron and salt, and the ferry sliced a clear path ahead...

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