Seraphim Falls -

The water did not answer. It never had. That was the joke. He’d spent a decade listening for a voice that was only his own echo bouncing off the basalt.

Not the metal. The men.

The town died after that. Not all at once, but in pieces—a fire in the saloon, a winter that broke the ore cart axle, a stagecoach that never came. Men drifted away like silt. By ‘69, only Elias remained. He lived in a shack he’d built from the ruins of the brothel floor, sleeping on a mattress of dried moss, eating trout he caught with his bare hands. Seraphim Falls