In dark room above a dark shop, a man wakes with a start. Down the street, someone has set off an illicit firework. Next door, sounds of revelry intrude upon the solitude of a cramped studio apartment. This is what woke him, but they are not what keeps him awake.
"Denver." He breaths the word like a curse.
As he sighs and shuffles off toward the bath room, the everlasting hum of the city pursues him. He turns on the shower, runs the water until it achieves its maximum lukewarm potential,
I have another chapter of A Lady of Morandau ready, but it doesn't feel like a good time to post it. It's not a violent chapter, but a brief but important passage has Anastasia receiving a modern assault rifle as a gift from her parents. In another chapter or two, I'm planning that she'll use it. This is not the time for any of that.
I don't buy the argument that I sometimes hear, that making things up in fiction has nothing to do with what you'd approve in reality. I happen to despise the e
This is the Prologue.
It tells of what came before.
4
Decadent robes hiked up to his waist, a wrinkled man wearing more jewelry than clothing ascends the stairs at as fast a clip as he can muster. Those among the living he passes salute or bow to him, but he pays them no mind: he is too focused on blocking out the nauseating squish that accompanies his every step. Every few meters, he is forced to move around the form of a fallen soldier, and in most cases, there is no way to av
I may change the title of this chapter. I couldn't think of a name until 'Aftermath' occurred to me as a lame joke, since Anastasia quits math at the end of Chapter 4. Maybe just something like 'Shooting high,' since that embraces both the shot in the air when the native dad walks in, and the bizarre effect of the skull talisman at the end.
This one is a mixture of stuff that has been planned so long I don't remember at all when I got the idea, stuff that was planned out more recently, and s
An alien clan of warlocks and witches, mercenaries, whose own purposes are inscrutable. They will accept gold, but prefer to barter their services for materials, as basic as grain or as exotic as pitchblende. Their interventions in war have shaped history for many generations, but there are no reliable accounts of their battles, for they make no alliances and leave no survivors. Legends about them are innumerable, but the Morandau themselves are no legends. Many have met them. Most have seen the
It was late after caring for my horse and cleaning my revolver, but I had to see Rianna about my cough, and I still had to put Huygens’s broken carbine on Mother’s workbench. I had planned to leave a note with it, explaining how it had seemed to jam, but Mother was there, working late. She had her engraving station set up, with magnifying loupe and fine tools. She rarely bothers with that, though long ago she had made some uselessly beautiful patterns, designs etched on metal plates as intricate
This is the Prologue.
It tells of what came before.
3
From his viewpoint high atop the Spire, Captain Vlish is able to see the first glimmering star emerge, if only through his periphery. His eyes, like the eyes of the eighteen soldiers under him, are fixed upon the gold-trimmed double doors that are the only entrance to the Imperial Throne Room. From beyond the doors pours the terrible sound of combat: steel against steel, bodies falling to the floor, suits of armor rolling d
Chapter 4 started out very thin and sketchy, but grew fast. I wanted to do something to kind of nod at the whole 'school days' genre, and then get Anastasia out of it. So I fairly quickly got the idea of her leading a patrol with her math teacher under her command, and showing him, herself, and the reader that school was pretty much out, for her, now. I didn't really want to have her gunning down any more pre-industrial natives quite so soon, but riding around shooting gross alien beasts seemed
The next day began calmly, in the machining shop. I brought Mother a rod of good barrel steel that I had made the previous month, and carefully baked and cooled to anneal out flaws. I turned it on the lathe, carefully making it perfectly straight and round. Then I set it into the borer, and I checked the alignment three times, measuring and laying on the guide wires by hand, and stretching them tight. Mother judged it correct, and in effect that meant I had passed for a trained smith, because no
I stared at the small white square in my hand and didn’t notice when Yerzy left the hall. I was thinking about my father, but looking at the marker with which he had thought to banish himself in my place, I was also thinking about the strange white skull. It was a similar color.
The intrusion I had defeated was a real concern. It was a new kind of raider behavior, and the eery skull was a new kind of eldritch. The fact that it had seemed to disturb my shooting had alarmed the rest of the cou
The second chapter even more than the first seems to me to move fast. It's not supposed to be entirely clear why the council makes such a significant decision so abruptly. It's supposed to become more comprehensible over the next three or four chapters, as it becomes more clear who these people all are and what they do. A problem in writing this story, though, is that I've done some thinking ahead right to the end, and so there may be a lot of things that I already have in mind in these early ch
The council convened the very next morning. I would have attended in any case for the formal review of my brief tenure as Mistress, though under normal circumstances I would have been dismissed with some ritual phrases. Other than a few such bits of ancient liturgy, our councils are not formal. The few most senior residents — the ones who will anyway end up taking leadership in patrols and engagements — simply sit around a table and argue. The Master and Mistress decide who should shut up if mor
This is the Prologue.
It tells of what came before.
2
The Spire in Solaria is hailed as one of the great wonders of the modern world. Its porcelain walls rise a majestic ten stories above the rest of the Empire's capital, and can be seen from afar throughout much of he surrounding region. It is a fitting reminder to the citizens of Solaria and the Empire beyond of the supreme power and might of the Empire, and the purity that it represents. Even those in the Far Continents know
Anastasia Morandau is to a considerable extent a sort of tribute to Agatha Heterodyne, but she lives in a world that is not supposed to be at all cartoonish. She's spark-like in inventing technological weapons, but my intention is to keep all the science real, at least within a certain amount of poetic license. Along with her destructive genius, she has a nearly miraculous ability at right-handed shooting, but both these traits will eventually have explanations.
I've never really been able t
Oh, what was it this time? “Stazya, Stazya! Help!” One of the children had no doubt called another a Name. They had disturbed me all that morning, when I had really needed peace. And they were supposed to remember to call me Miss Morandau, now. I was Mistress of the House, for the next three days still. But the book I was reading was pitiful; I’d have more satisfaction flinging it down and stalking angrily downstairs than I would in pretending not to have heard the little monsters. Who were yell
The sonnet version:
He hangs in his balloon above the cliff
That is the titan’s ear to hear his call,
Sir Isaac shouting down his sermon: If
You throw it high enough it will not fall.
Awake at last for one last do or die,
Great Atlas shudders, straightens out his back,
And shoves with all his might against the sky.
Earth rocks. The sky flies clear. Blue fades to black.
Whether it’s strain that kills him, or respite,
The titan crumbles, shattered with his hopes.
Cold Newton might ha
Was bored one day so I browsed available movies to watch instantly on Netflix and came across this gem. Saw David was in it and gave it a go. I loved it, though I cannot say I would have loved it as much without David. He did a brilliant job (as in my bias he always does) but I think the writing was good enough for other actors to do a brilliant job of it, too. Maybe a little too much awkwardness on the part of the leading lady and the shop owner's interest in her was just plain creepy. All in a
They speed from all directions, sea and sky,
The gaunt dark spectral figures gathering
Unto this withered heath and ruined tower.
Some stalk in sunken lanes, some drift on scows
Along the dank canal, while some alight
From prows of stormblown ships with ghostly crews.
Some thicken from the mist, some rise from crypts;
Some merely slip through doors, while others slide
From scaley necks of ancient batwinged beasts.
Not one but carries something. Some hold staves
Of runescarred twist
A Lady of Morandau
In the wide staging ground outside the gate, some sixty men and women are mounting horses and hitching wagons. No voice is raised, but every movement is brisk. They will all be gone in a few moments. The men wear dark coats and brimmed hats. It is late autumn and the air is cool. The women wear cloaks, and hats of a more elegant style, though equally somber. The people’s skin and hair are of all shades, but darker skins predominate, and whiter hair, even on those wh
This is the Prologue.
It tells of what came before.
1
She turns from the portal site swiftly, unconsciously straightening the mess that the teleportation ritual has made of her hair. While her research and scry-scouting has been thorough, and the magical precaution to push the adventurers through the enemy wards even more thorough, there is always the risk of something going wrong on the other side. Time is of the essence, and there is still much to be done.
Her focus is now on
Solving a riddle is a D&D trope, or at least it used to be. It seems that every DM runs a game at some point where the players have to solve some bizarre word puzzle.
The IC problem with riddles is explaining why the heck the riddle is there to be solved. In a world of magic it's easy enough to accept that reciting the right word can open a gate or whatever. As for why any evil wizard would deliberately provide a clue to the right magic word, in the form of a riddle, I guess it's easier
Sitting in the train one day on my way back from college, I was joined by a bearded, elderly man who had with him one of those big, man-sized umbrellas which can so conveniently be also used as walking sticks. After making himself comfortable on the seat beside me, he began to recite a series of slokas under his breath.
Now this is very unusual behaviour, for slokas are usually recited in front of a holy idol only. Why should a person recite slokas in a train? I asked him whether he was a B
One evening in 1978 my family visited another family that my parents had known for years. Their son was older than my brother and me, and he entertained us with his home-brew version of D&D. He just made up his own rules, and those I remember seem kind of odd to me now. When we rolled up our characters, for instance, we rolled 3d6 for most abilities but only 2d6 for wisdom, because "people in those days didn't know very much". I remember I got 10 wisdom, and this was good for 'those days', s
