10/06/2024 Snippet, CALL OF THE MOON-BEASTS.

I absolutely need to get going with this and the other story.

Derby Emi was surprisingly indifferent about Tobias walking all over her dust paintings. “Please wear the little boot-gloves,” she told him with apparent real cheerfulness. “You would not want to have the sand getting into your slippers.”

Tobias looked down. He’d never been a fan of abstract art, but he knew what he liked. He didn’t like this. In fact, he had secretly enjoyed watching Derby’s own footprints smoosh the floor design’s unsettling pattern into random chaos. “I feel strange, wrecking your, ah, design like this,” he lied.

“Don’t be, Commander,” Emi responded immediately. “That is why it’s on the floor. I may be forced to draw this, but I will have my own revenge.” A smile flickered, breaching above the surface of her face for a moment. “I have no desire to preserve it.”

Patreon Microfiction: Keep Your Distance.

Alas for the hero of ‘Keep Your Distance,’ humanity can understand aliens that hate them. Humanity can understand aliens that love them. What it has difficulty grasping is the idea that there may be aliens who simply couldn’t care less.

Book of the Week: The Silmarillion.

I offer a link to the Silmarillion here in the hope that, the next time somebody tries to actually do the Second Age of Middle-Earth, they take the time to go and get the rights to the correct goram book. I could tolerate many things of that show. Not understanding what the names mean is just a bridge too bloody far.

#commissionearned

10/05/2024 Snippet, THE GOBLIN.

The trick is to find bits that are interesting, but don’t give away any of the awful bits until you read them on Patreon.

Subsurface tunnels in the elf-woods don’t last long, since the trees’ roots will seek them out, but when you start from the boundary zone you can get a few interconnected hidey-holes set up that’ll last a week. I was nicely ensconced in the one farthest back into the elf-wood by the time the Wild Hunt rumbled by, a dozen feet above my head. Even muffled, they sounded nicely unhappy, and ready to take it out on anyone they found.

Just how they were supposed to be, in other words. I waited until the rumbling faded, then started scrambling up the narrow passage that would get me to the surface. Idly, I wondered how many of the bigger fish I’d get before they swarmed me.

I managed three. One was all I needed, and two would have been respectable, so three was something to be proud of.