BONEREADER Background Story

Career criminal and mercenary Harlan Hill dies in the electric chair, but death offers him no rest. In the hut of a Native shaman, a mysterious spirit challenges him to a game of dice, wagering a chance at rebirth—and perhaps vengeance.

Against all odds, Harlan wins. Stepping beyond the hut, he enters a surreal, mescaline dreamscape: a purgatory shaped by memory, guilt, and judgment. Whether he belongs there or not is another question entirely.

A brutal man with a stubborn belief in his own justice, Harlan has always relied on willpower and violence to get what he wants. Crude and uneducated, yet capable of both compassion and cruelty, he is a soul suspended between darkness and light, forever swinging from one extreme to the other.

“You cannot remember how you came to be in this dilapidated shack. The air is thick and stagnant, heavy with the smell of stove smoke, tobacco, and something metallic — like the air after a lightning strike. The only source of light is a dim, flickering bulb without a shade, dangling from the ceiling. It casts its glow on an old table smeared with soot and dark stains. On the tabletop lie a deck of worn cards, a pair of dice, and an empty glass.

A wood-burning stove smolders in the corner, but its heat offers no warmth. Instead, it twists the air, bending it into trembling mirages.

Opposite you sits the Old Man. His face is a map of lived lives, carved with deep wrinkles and blotches. His eyes are clouded, pale, yet somewhere deep within them sharp sparks of absolute, impartial cunning flicker. His long, bony fingers lazily shuffle the cards. From time to time, he taps a fingernail against the table, the sound echoing unnaturally. When he smiles, you glimpse an incomplete row of teeth, like old, yellowed domino tiles. He is not merely sitting there — he seems rooted to the chair, to the shack, to the very fabric of this place. A predator merged with its ambush."

With few exceptions, the characters in BONEREADER are nameless. They exist both as spirits and as projections of past sins haunting the protagonist's fading mind.

Shaman

An ancient, unnervingly cheerful trickster who deals the very first game — and, in effect, decides whether the protagonist gets to exist at all. He calls himself "the single thread" tying Harlan's soul to the living world, the spirit world, and the nothing that follows, and treats death, mutilation, and eternal damnation as material for jokes. He is the one who turns lost souls into dice.

Gender: Male

Apparent Age: Old; ageless in reality.

Homeless

A legless, shell-shocked ghost of a WWI soldier, seemingly stationed for eternity on the concrete floor of a ruined high-rise. He no longer remembers his name, his war, or which side he fought for — only mud, rats, and the taste of metal — and has settled into a kind of exhaustion. He's given up on hope and rebirth alike, and simply waits, quoting Descartes at the void that's slowly erasing him.

Gender: Male

Apparent Age: Adult; frozen at the moment of a long-ago death.

Insect

Something chitinous and half-glimpsed, guarding the threshold of a place it calls the Grove — a place whose stillness the protagonist's very presence disturbs. It savors Harlan the way a predator savors a scent. Its speech is clicking, insectile, half-language, and its tools are grown rather than made: an eye that dulls into a die, a claw that snaps off into a card. It doesn't so much converse with Harlan as consume him — slowly, with evident relish, as if it already knows how this hand will end.

Gender: Unclear / referred to as "it"; presents without a fixed human gender.

Apparent Age: Eternal.

Cowboy

A drunkard, cattle driver, and bounty hunter. A killer who believes himself an instrument of justice. He represents an echo of the protagonist's father.

Gender: Male

Apparent Age: Around 50; eternal.