Novel

Dark America, Part 11 – Road Trip! Road Trip!

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Continued from Chapter 10, here.

Sergei sat in the driver’s seat of the heavy American-made truck, one hand on the steering wheel, trying to decide if he was annoyed or amused by the child’s constant chatter.

Perhaps a bit of both, he decided after a few minutes. After all, there was no reason why the two emotions had to be exclusive. He would readily admit that he much preferred companionable silence to filling the air with empty words, but the light in Sara’s eyes as her mouth babbled on was enough to warm even his frozen, cynical heart – if only slightly.

She was looking at him in the rear-view mirror, he noticed, and he replayed the last couple of sentences. “Yes? What about mountains?” he asked, not quite sure what her point had been. Continue reading →

Dark America, Part 10 – What’s Best for the Child

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Continued from Chapter 9, here.

Once I was totally certain that Sara was asleep, her little frame gently rising and falling in time with her slow breaths as she curled up beneath the blankets on the air mattress, I turned to the others. “So,” I began. “We’ve got a decision to make.”

“We need to take her back,” Corinne said immediately. “No question about it. She doesn’t belong here.”

“It is her home,” Sergei pointed out mildly, his tone neutral. Continue reading →

Dark America, Part 9 – Cooks in the Kitchen

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Continued from Part 8, here.

Even after agreeing to share her story, Sara pulled another truculent maneuver, one that only worked when its user was under fifteen years old.

“I’m hungry,” she announced, crossing her arms and glaring at me. “And all I’ve had is cold food because I don’t know how to plug an oven into a generator.”

Want proof that I don’t know how to handle kids? For a second, I considered arguing with her, trying to get this girl to tell me her story before I bothered helping her with warming up any food she might have. Continue reading →

Dark America, Part 7 – The Survivor

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Continued from Part 6, here.

“Survivors. It’s got to be survivors, there’s no other explanation.” Henry looked around at the rest of us, as if he could be more convincing by maintaining eye contact. The Frenchman’s thin mustaches practically quivered with the force of his words.

“Yeah?” Jaspers countered, not bowing to this insistence. “Then where the bloody hell are they? And why are they leaving cryptic billboards instead of getting on the radio?”

“Radios don’t work, Jaspers,” Sergei pointed out mildly. “And maybe they don’t understand what has happened. Americans are weak, and all people disappearing is scary to think.” He glanced over at me. “No offense, yes?” Continue reading →

Welcome to Rebirth

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Tarot looked around at the high cliffs as he slowly advanced forward, watching his shadow grow deeper.  He tried to hold his head high, tried to keep up his confidence, but he felt it slipping and fraying at the edges.  For once, the area of the Dark Lord’s Lair actually seemed, well, forbidding.

Pausing for a moment, he checked his defensive wards, ensuring that his spells were still in place.  They were, of course; nothing had changed since he last checked, two minutes earlier.  Still plenty of time on the shields, even without the perks that extended their durations before they’d need to be recast.

Tarot snorted to himself, a little of his natural swagger returning.  Amateurs.  No one who actually read up on the forums, researched the most advanced and effective builds, ever bothered with perks like that.  The real players, the ones who thought about true strategy, made sure to put as many points as possible into offensive attacks as they leveled up their skill trees. Continue reading →

This mercenary looks curiously young… [Part 2]

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Continued from Part 1, here.

Cassie frowned at the P’tchar, watching him move with such prissy, fussy little movements. She’d never actually met one of the renowned traders in real life, but the purple-tinged black exoskeleton, the long and slender limbs, couldn’t belong to any other species.

A praying mantis, she thought as she watched him carefully seat himself at her table. That’s what he resembled. A purple-and-black praying mantis, with large, worried eyes, on the verge of breaking down over some internal source of stress.

But he had money, and he wanted to hire her. So she was willing to listen. Continue reading →

This mercenary looks curiously young… [Part 1]

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J’qiqe P’char’trph’al sidled through the tavern, doing his best to not brush up against anything – or anyone. He’d never dreamed that he’d be forced to set foot in a place like this, a place so disreputable, a place filled with such… undesirables.

Even shrinking down his tall frame, however, drawing in the slender limbs of his exoskeleton, he knew that he attracted attention. After all, he was a P’tchar, and they held a definitive place in the social strata. Even these bottom feeders, these commoners, these mercenaries, understood the high status that he carried on his ornately engraved shoulder pauldrons.

Given the choice, J’qiqe would never have come here. Continue reading →

[AGttA] Chapter 10.2: The Celestial Court

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Continued from Chapter 10.1, here.

Read it from the beginning, starting here.

Axiom 10: Do what makes you happy.

The woman in the shabby little office had thrown back the curtains, blinding me with the light that came shining in.  But when I lowered my hand from in front of my eyes, I was no longer sitting in a small little book-filled room.

Instead, I sat on the same rickety chair – but it was in the middle of a huge amphitheatre, spreading out in all directions, rising up almost too high in the sky for me to see the top.

And every seat in the amphitheatre was filled by angels. Continue reading →

[AGttA] Chapter 10.0: The Professor’s Office

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Continued from Chapter 9.2, here.

Read it from the beginning, starting here.

Axiom 10: Do what makes you happy.

At first, I was certain that I’d somehow screwed things up.

I had imagined that, upon stepping through that door, I might find myself in some vast tribunal, some sort of huge celestial court where I’d have to argue my case to God himself, standing in a massive room and with a billion angels all staring down at me.  No pressure, of course.

But instead, I found myself standing in a small, rather shabby feeling office.  I felt like I’d landed back on earth, in one of the rear rooms in some community college department building.  This felt like the kind of space where an elderly English professor might spend his tenured twilight days, reading papers that no one else ever touched and writing responses that no one would ever get around to reading. Continue reading →

[AGttA] Chapter 9.2: The Library

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Continued from Chapter 9.1, here.

Read it from the beginning, starting here.

Axiom 9: Don’t lose hope.

The first difference that hit me, after I stepped through the door at the top of the stairs, was the silence.

Of course, this might have been the first thing that I noticed because, despite all my survival instincts screaming at me to keep my eyes open, those lids were firmly shut as I passed through.  I’m not sure why – maybe I thought that, if I didn’t look at any of the eldritch horrors on the other side, they wouldn’t be able to hurt me.

But after a couple seconds of listening to silence, I finally opened my eyes.

Books.  My first impression came as a single word.  Books, millions upon millions of books. Continue reading →