Category: Books

There’s a certain mutual loathing going on here. Let me tell you right now: there’s not going to be a romance option, either. The idea would make either one of them recoil in disgust.

The vist let me know she was awake with her screaming. Well, as much as she could scream through the ballgag. I didn’t actually need her to talk for this next bit to work. Listening in horror would be just fine.

I knew she would immediately charge me, given what I was doing, but I didn’t turn until after I heard the sound of her sudden tumble to the ground. After all, I was perfectly safe. I’d checked the chain and ankle cuff, and I knew just how much range it would give the vist. 

I looked over. Nothing seemed obviously broken, which didn’t matter either way, but the vist hadn’t been improved by her involuntary roll in the filthy ground. Which was her own fault, so I decided I didn’t care. “You no move,” I told her. Technically, the vist and my people spoke a common language. In reality, the vocabulary had changed, and the accent, and I had more words to work with. So talking to them could be a headache. “Chain on foot, chain on tree. Chain on tree tight . You move close, tree choke, tree die.”

I don’t know whether to put up the truly horrible bits here. Because some horrible bits are coming.

You didn’t want to dry-gulch an elf while he was inspecting an elf-wood clearing, because that was exactly when he would be paying most attention to his surroundings. Picking him off before or after he got there just left you the vist to deal with anyway. So you needed the two together, only both distracted. There left a couple of good times to intervene, but you had to be careful then, too. Elves can move fast, when they’re not distracted. The important thing was to call your shot, so I waited until things just felt right.

I don’t know why the elves make vist do either submission ritual out in the open — no, wait, I do. No elf would ever drug or swive a vist in a vist shack, or really do anything else in one. If you think my contempt for the vist is vast, it’s nothing compared to the elves. They never miss a chance to demonstrate just how more important the elves are than everything else on this world, and a vist drug submission pushes a lot of elvish buttons. Probably even more than the swiving does, even. Alas for the elf, he was too engrossed at the sight of a vist writhing in ecstatic delirium from the drug to notice my approach until I was two feet behind him. That’s the nice part of an elf-wood. No leaves, no loam, just hard-packed dirt that soaked up sound.

So, hey, you know how I don’t do grim, much?

Yeah, the rules are gonna be different, this month. Starting with how I’m going to try to do a 3K story every week for Patreon, just because I want to icepick a couple of ideas instead of lingering over them. I’m also going to be invoking more horror this month, too. Just because.

The Goblin

It’s an elvish lie that we can only come out when it’s dark. There I was, deep in the elf-wood, wasn’t I? Right in the middle of the Bright, too. No bursting into flames, no screaming at the light, none of that. Thanks to my goggles, I wasn’t even squinting. See? Total lie.

The elves know it’s a lie, too. They just tell the vist different to keep them in their hovels at night, and too afraid to go far into the woods. I mean, sure, my people do stay out of the Bright unless we have a reason to be out and about then, but that’s just to make it harder for the enemy to see us.

It’s tricky, hunting your prey in an elf-wood. The trees kill everything that isn’t them, so there’s no brush or thickets to hide in, and any branches that fall off dry out and break up within a couple of days. I had to slip from tree to tree, trusting in my bark-colored cloak and ability to guess when it was safe to move. It also helped that I knew where the prey was going, more or less. There aren’t many places in an elf-wood that are different from each other, and I had already scouted out them all.

I try to be prepared ahead of time like that.