Isorda i Vanara

Let me start off by saying, I don’t know what I am doing.

I get that there are some very smart people out there making some very good conlangs and I am not one of them. What I am is a person who loves language from a fiction writer’s perspective. While I have a background in English and Anthropology, I am not an expert in any of the things I am about to talk about. This is just the way that I personally solve these particular problems and how I got here.

I love introducing languages into my fiction. For me it is one of the most rewarding parts. I think this love of languages started when I used to subscribe to Dragon Magazine back in the day and in one issue, they had a lexicon of elvish or something. All in all, it was pretty limited. There are quite a few nouns but not much else.

I could say “Enial” which means “home” but without any pronouns to work with, I couldn’t say “my home, your home, his home, her home, or their home.” I could say “Enial Hinue” meaning “home song” which sounds cool but isn’t all that useful. I didn’t know what to do with this information at the time, but I did create Kesir Ravan (Elf Forest) as the name for my elvish kingdom, which I must have thought was a good idea, because I used it in like three different campaigns. At the time, I had a pretty decent naming language, and little else. Not to knock naming languages, those things are awesome.

While I couldn’t create elvish poetry or write an elvish song, I could name the elvish places on the map in a way that made them look different. So, the towns on one side of the river have names like Little Bend, Red Hill, or Bridge Town, while the names on the other side have names like Tha Sain or Noresh Ama. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just taken my first steps into a much larger world of languages.

My next big break came when I got a look at the Extraordinary Book of Names by Gary Gygax. The book is really neat, but my favorite part is the back of the book where there are pages and pages of random tables that let you make names by rolling a die and putting different sounds together. So you could get “Sinister” names like Myrsinbra, “Nasty” names like Kaazdrul, “Draconic” names like Chrosarxenornaluxis, or “Infernal” names like Urtsaug.

Clearly some of these names are ‘better’ than others, but I loved being able to give my NPC’s names that reflect a shared language rather than just looking around the room thinking…her name is Lamp…a...chair… Lamachar! Her name is Lamachar! Soon though, it became clear to me though that I didn’t have to just use this powerful new tool I had just for names…I could use it for other words too. Perhaps the “sinister” word for tower is Olvra and the word for blood is Erira. Now the characters can go to Erira Olvra, the Blood Tower on their next adventure. Pretty cool right?

As my work shifted from RPG’s to fiction, it occurred to me that I could make up my own languages using this method. Come up with a few words I like the sound of, then extrapolate on them till I have a list of the sounds that the language includes. Sometimes the sounds come at the beginning of the words, and sometimes at the end. Roll on table A then table B. Boom, brand new word. Sometimes I come up with special rules like if a word begins with sound X, it will be followed by a sound from table C rather than table B. Sometimes the interrogatives all end with the same sound. Sometimes the verbs all start with table E. There are lots of ways this can be done and they really seem to add a lot of variety to the sound of the languages you get.

Keep in mind here, I am not Tolkien and I am not trying to create a full-on linguistic study here, but sometimes it is nice to have a poem or bit of scripture from a fictional culture sound fictional while also being consistent.

The next consideration is grammar. I think this is where my lack of formal education on this subject really holds me back, but I do my best. I try to come up with one quirk for every language I make. Like maybe they don’t have plurals, or maybe they count in base eight, or maybe they ask questions in a very particular way. Just something that will make the language seem just one step deeper than “English with funny sounds.” I have toyed with the idea of making a genderless language, but I feel like George R. R. Martin kinda called dibs on that one by making it a plot point.

And that’s how I do it.

To date, I have never created a written script for any of my languages, but I think that might be a fun next step.

Is it the best way to make languages? No, probably not.

Do my languages hold up to academic scrutiny? I honestly don’t know. Probably not. But, I can translate Bohemian Rhapsody into Vanosarin. So, there is that.

Lone Cloud

Tales of the Burning Plains

Lone Cloud

“One foot in front of the other” he told himself. Always one foot in front of the other. Lone Cloud, called Ix Camiel by his own people, was not afraid. He walked behind his brother, Speaks with Wolf, who was the greatest hunter his people had known in generations. If Speaks with Wolf was tired, he did not show it. If he was afraid, he did not show it. If he was wounded, he did not show it. Lone Cloud wished to be as his brother one day. But, for now he was content to walk in his shadow.

Here, he was safe.

The two of them had walked for five days across the scrub lands just north of the desert. A lone vulture had followed them for the last two.

“Why does the vulture follow us?” Lone Cloud asked.

“It is waiting for us to die,” Speaks with Wolf, who was Abbem Zur Anag in the language of their people, told him.

“Why does it think we are going to die?” Lone Cloud asked, staring at the bird that planned to eat him.

“Everything dies out here eventually,” Speaks with Wolf said.

“You could shoot the vulture,” Lone Cloud suggested, pointing at his brother’s rifle.

“Then other vultures would eat it,” Speaks with Wolf said. “And then they would come looking for us.”

One foot in front of the other.

“Are we going to Lalil Eharru?” Lone Cloud asked.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t we take the old imperial road?” the child asked. “It would be faster.”

“The soldiers know to watch those roads,” Speaks with Wolf explained. “It wouldn’t be safe.”

One foot in front of the other.

“Are they the soldiers that killed mom and dad?” the younger brother asked.

“Yes.”

Lone Cloud had been asleep the night the soldiers came. His mother had woken him and told him to go with his brother into the night. He didn’t see the soldiers, but he could hear the horses and gunfire somewhere in the distance. As he and his brother had fled the village Lone Cloud had smelled the smoke. By then, he could hear the screams.

His brother had taken him high into the hills to a cave few knew of. They waited for their family for a day, but no one had come. That night, Speaks with Wolf had told Lone Cloud to stay in the cave and wait for him to come back while he went back to the village. When Speaks with Wolf returned, he told his brother that they would have to leave. Their parents weren’t coming for them.

They traveled for two more days to reach Lalil Eharru. It had once been a tiny outpost on the edge of the desert, but over the years had grown into a great city. Lone Cloud’s people were the T’kelcho Agixem, the Bone Walkers, great builders of stone fortresses and mighty warriors. His father had brought him to Lalil Eharru every year to the hall of totems where they would pray before Inilum, the puma.

“Will we be safe when we get there?” Lone Cloud asked. “To Lalil Eharru, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Speaks with Wolf told him. “If the soldiers have already been there, there might not be much left.”

“Lalil Eharru has walls as wide as a tree,” Lone Cloud said. “The soldiers could never get through them.”

“The soldiers have big guns,” Speaks with Wolf said.

“Big enough to blow a hole through stone walls?”

“Yes.”

One foot in front of the other.

They found Lalim Eharru empty. Its great walls had been reduced to rubble in places and the gates hung open. About a dozen or so graves lay outside the walls. They were marked with simple wooden hexes in honor of the federalists gods.

They walked down the wide main street, with empty houses on both sides. Ravens flew this way and that in number so large that at times they blocked out the sun. Aside from the cawing of the birds and the flapping of their wings, it was quiet here. Too quiet. When Lone Cloud had been here before, there had been many eights of people. More than he could count. All talking and shouting to one another. His mother had traded for a pair of stone beads that he still wore braided into his hair.

Now it was so quiet.

They arrived at the eastern plaza. The place where Lone Cloud had watched the summer contest from his father’s shoulders. Now, there was a pile of what he thought at first to be firewood, but it was too black, and the smell was wrong. Black oily smoke still hung in the air, like meat that had been left on a fire. Looking at the pile, Lone Cloud could see the black hands still grasping with bony fingers. Black skulls that seemed to scream forever with no sound.

In front, a pair of coyotes fought over a bone that still had some meat on it.

The bodies were stacked at least eight feet tall.

Lone Cloud wasn’t scared. He was with his brother, and Speaks with Wolf was the best hunter his people had seen in many generations. Still, he wondered if this is what the soldiers had done to their parents too. Had they burned them?

“Is this everyone?” Lone Cloud asked.

“No,” Speaks with Wolf said. “Just the ones that fought back. They would have taken the others west to the Dead Lands. To the reserve.”

A sound alerted Speaks with Wolf and he grabbed his brother. They huddled against the wall of what had been a shop while the sound got closer. It was the sound of hoof beats, slow and steady, against the flat stones of the road.

As they watched, an old man appeared.

Imperial by the look of him. He walked with a donkey hitched to a wagon. The man sang an ugly song as he dug through the rubble of the city, tossing anything that might be of value onto the wagon. He had collected, stone pots, blankets, beads, and tools. As they watched, the man pilfered through the ashes at the edge of the pile of bodies. He found a few stone beads that weren’t destroyed by the fire. He tossed them into the wagon with the rest of his loot.

Lone Cloud watched the man with his morbid work from his hiding spot across the plaza. He didn’t notice Speaks with Wolf raising his rifle until he heard the shot. Angry crows took to the air and the coyotes ran, leaving their bone discarded. The man fell backward and lay still on the flat stones next to his mule.

“Why did you kill that man?” Lone Cloud asked.

“The federalists have a bounty on us. If he would steal from the dead, he wouldn’t hesitate to turn us over to the soldiers.”

“We should go to the Hall of Totems,” Lone Cloud said.

“Apar na Shatumem?” Speaks with Wolf asked. “Why?”

“Because you killed a man within the city,” Lone Cloud said. “You should beg Puma for forgiveness so he doesn’t curse us.”

Speaks with Wolf seemed to consider his younger brother’s words for a moment. His face was troubled.

“I don’t think it’s a city anymore,” Speaks with Wolf finally said. “At least not ours.”

“Do you want to take the chance?” Lone Cloud asked.

“I guess not,” Speaks with Wolf said.

They wrapped themselves in blankets from the looter’s wagon to protect themselves from the sun. Speaks with Wolf unhitched the donkey from the wagon and set the beast free. It didn’t seem that excited about its freedom, but it eventually wandered off.

They went to the Hall of Totems, which was past the plaza. The hall was a large stone building with an open roof. Inside broken stones and smashed pottery lay scattered about the hall. The statues of Puma, Hawk, and Wolf had all been toppled over. Only Bear remained standing, apparently he had been too heavy to push over. Hawk was broken into three pieces when he fell and the soldiers seemed to have taken a hammer to Wolf as he was cracked and large chunks of him were missing. Puma didn’t seem to be too badly damaged.

Lone Cloud laid down next to the stone statue of his tribe’s totem and protector. When he had been there before, the priests forbade him from touching the totems, but now, he pressed his body against the stone. It seemed such a cruel thing to do he thought.

People fought, killed, and died. Lone Cloud was a T’kelcho Agixem. His people were warriors. War, he understood. But what the soldiers did was something else. Puma had never hurt them, so why smash him and the other totems? This was like no war he had ever heard of. It was like they were trying to erase his people and their spirits from the face of the earth.

“Forgive me Inilum,” he heard his brother saying. “I have shed blood within the walls of Lalil Eharru.”

“Whose blood did you spill, child?” asked a raspy voice from among the rubble.

The two brothers looked up at the sound, Speaks with Wolf raised his rifle.

It was no enemy they found there. Instead it was an elderly man. He was bleeding from many wounds and half buried in the rubble, but he was alive. He wore the symbol of a Shatum Lawa, a totem keeper, around his neck.

The two brothers rushed to help the elder from the rubble. He groaned painfully as they moved him to lay in the midst of the ruined hall, among the shattered remains of the totems he had served.

“Thank you,” he said to them. One of his eyes was bleeding and had turned milky. “Are there others alive in the city?”

“No,” Speaks with Wolf told him. “We came here after our village was attacked. You are the first of our people we have seen alive.”

“I figured as much,” the priest said. “I am Nimem zur Inilum, Weeps-with-Puma. Ironically, I shall die with him as well.”

“Are the totems dead?” Lone Cloud asked.

The wounded priest took a long deep breath.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “If they live, they do not move against these people of the east.”

“Can we stop them?” Speaks with Wolf asked.

Again, the elder paused and considered the question before answering.

“Theirs is a destructive way,” Weeps with Puma said. “I do not believe that we could be victorious against them. But, I also believe that their kind cannot long endure.”

“How?” Speaks with Wolf asked. “They destroy everything in their path till nothing is left upon the earth.”

“Exactly,” the priest moaned. “When they have devoured everything else, they will devour themselves. Whatever is left, will find peace in their ruin.”

“So we are hopeless,” Speaks with Wolf said, letting his head fall.

“So we endure,” the priest corrected. “and we remember. Till the songs of the totems are sung again.”

The priest started to say more, but a fit of coughing cut him off.

“Is there nothing we can do for you?” Speaks with Wolf asked.

“Below us is a well,” Weeps with Puma said. “Please bring me water.”

“You go,” Speaks with Wolf said to Lone Cloud. “I’ll stay here with him.”

Lone Cloud stood and walked to the steps that led to the cave below the hall. This was the furthest he had been from his brother since they started walking. The stones felt cold on his feet and he hesitated at the stairs. He did not want to be alone. He looked back to his brother who was caring for the priest.

Lone Cloud set his jaw and took a step into the darkness. He was T’kelcho Agixem, and his people were warriors. He would not let his brother down. He was scared, but he did not show it.

The cave below the hall of totems was cool. As was the clear water that poured from the walls where it pooled into a deep depression in the floor. Clay bowls sat near the water. Lone Cloud took one and bent to fill it, when movement caught his eye.

From the shadows emerged a man.

He was tall and bloody, his body pierced by many arrows. One of his arms hung limp at his side, a useless remnant. Still, he stood and leered at Lone Cloud. His skin tone and black uniform marked him as a federalist soldier.

The soldier said something, but Lone Cloud could not understand it.

The soldier staggered forward, bloody footprints left in his wake. Lone Cloud took a step backward, trying to put space between himself and the advancing soldier. The soldier was still speaking, but the words were gibberish to Lone Cloud’s ears. But, the tone was filled with spite. Lone Cloud turned to run back to his brother, but before he could, the soldier raised a pistol in his good hand and pointed it directly at the boy.

Lone Cloud felt his heart sink into his chest.

He stared down the barrel of the gun, thinking of the bodies he had seen in the plaza, the shattered totems above, and of the parents he had lost. He prayed to Puma that he would see them again.

As the sneering soldier came lurching forward again, still speaking. A voice somewhere in Lone Cloud’s mind told him ‘no’ it was not time for him to be with his parents and totem yet. His people were T’kelcho Agixem, and they were warriors. And his brother was Speaks with Wolf, the greatest hunter his people had seen in generations.

He would be as his brother some day.

Lone Cloud hurled the clay bowl at the soldier. The surprised soldier fired, just as the bowl shattered against his face. The bullet bounced off the wall of the cave as the soldier staggered backward. Lone Cloud leapt forward onto the soldier and they both fell to the ground.

The wounded Soldier was able to get a grip on Lone Cloud’s neck with his good hand and used his weight to roll on top of him. The man squeezed so hard that for a moment, Lone Cloud’s vision started to go white. But then he felt the shards of the clay bowl. Grasping the biggest one he could find, he plunged the shard into the soldier’s already bleeding face.

The soldier howled in pain and rolled into the pool. Landing face down in the water, he slipped and struggled trying to stay above the surface. One arm was useless and the other was unable to find a handhold to pull free of the deep pool. After just a few moments of frantic struggle, the soldier was still. He floated face down in the water of the pool.

Lone Cloud stared at the dead man.

He had never killed a man before. But his people were T’kelcho Agixem. If he was scared, he did not show it. If he was wounded, he did not show it. Lone Cloud picked up another bowl and filled it with water for the priest above and started back up the stairs.

One foot after the other.

The End

I had, in fact, made such a game. It was a very poor diceless game that had a handful of stats and focused entirely on spending points to do various moves in a sword fight. And that was it. That was the entire game. I think I played it twice with a friend of mine and promptly realized that it wasn’t very good.

Imagine my surprise a few days later when I got a phone call from the Highlander people. The message had been passed up and they wanted to ask me about my game. I told the very confused employee that I had kinda gotten bored with it and gave up. He gave me a sad “thank you” and we hung up.

To my credit, I was like twelve.

And that was the first time I ever tried to publish an RPG.

Decades later I created my first real TTRPG, a western called Devil’s Crossroad. It’s not bad. A bit amateurish to be sure, but I am still proud of it. You can find it on DriveThu. Last year I mentioned DCR in an anthropology class and one of the girls in the class was surprised to discover that I was the one who wrote the game she had been playing with her roommate. I was surprised too. I had no idea anyone was playing my game.

After Devil’s Crossroad I wanted to try again. So, this time, I went all out in a big legit fantasy RPG called Raven of the Scythe. This game is really good in my opinion, and I was always sad it never caught on, because I think there is something really special about that game. Sure, it is still a bit amateurish compared to the professional games put out by the big players, but for one guy with a laptop, I think I did a phenomenal job. Everyone I have ever played with says they love it. Either I didn’t do bad, or all my friends are liars.

It was when making RotS that I really feel like I started to understand a lot of stuff about making games and worlds. One of the first things I learned was that there is no such thing as a generic Fantasy RPG. I wanted RotS to be a fantasy game that didn’t assume a setting. I wanted people to be able to pick it up, make up a world, and run whatever games they wanted.

Of course, the game had a tone. That was never in question. The whole point of the game was to answer the tone issue that I was having with games like D&D. I was tired of every first level fighter being both a superhero AND outshined by spellcasters in just about every way. I wanted to make a game that felt like the lower magic / high danger games of AD&D that I played as a kid when I wasn’t watching Highlander.

I am not talking about the tone though; I am talking about the setting.

Even without mentioning a single kingdom, never stating anything about what time period the game world resembles, or giving a name to any NPC, the core rule book was full of information about the setting.

The first bit of setting information comes from the magic system.

The existence of a magic system tells you that the game world has magic. Later on, we would discover that the magic of this world was divided into six schools (later seven). Magic is powerful, but impermanent. I wanted to do away with the constant magical protection that wizards in D&D enjoyed. I wanted magic to do a thing and then go away. Most spells only have a duration of five rounds. This lets the caster get a cool effect, but they aren’t going to be hanging out invisible for hours or casting mage armor in the morning and being covered for the rest of the day. When determining what magic looked like in my game, I was telling people what magic looked like in my world.

Next was the equipment.

The existence of a crossbow and rapier reveals a ton of information about the game world. By the way, the fact that I did not include firearms in the core book was one of the few things I wish I had done differently.

Then, of course were the monsters. Right away, we learn that not only are there monsters in the world, but what they are. This world contains griffons, hydras, wyverns, slimes, and floating eyeball monsters that flash a bright light when you hit them. There are demons and elementals as well, so now we even know a bit about the cosmology of this world. I really wanted the dragons in my game to be cool, so I came up with a neat system whereas dragons age they get additional powers and abilities so that each dragon fight is significantly different. Very cool and also betrays a lot about what dragons in this world are like.

Finally, I gave up on the generic tag and just went with it.

My game needed an in-game currency so the players could purchase their rapiers and crossbows. I could have gone with the standard copper, silver, and gold system. But I wanted something more unique. So, in Raven of the Scythe players have Copper Pennies (CP), Silver Eagles (SE), and Gold Dragons (GD). Raven of the Scythe has a crafting system where you can make potions and stuff from various herbs. These herbs now have names like Bride’s Bane, Crypt Bloom, or Dragon Leaf. You can even use these herbs to cure in game sicknesses like Gravedigger’s Cough or Blight Worms. Even built within the magic system are little deep lore drops, like how the spells that manipulate shadows are in the same cluster as the spells that cause fear. And both are part of the school of necromancy. Each one of these names tell the players and game masters things about the world in ways that I hope are inspirational and can serve as jumping off points.

Perhaps a GM sees the herbs like Bride’s Bane and decides it only blooms during a new moon. Maybe their world has scholars that track individual dragons to keep a record of how they are growing and developing.

My only real moral here is just, not to bother trying to be generic.

It won’t work anyway.

If you would like to take a look at Raven of the Scythe, it is available on DriveThru.

And if anyone at Highlander is still interested, I would be willing to take another crack at it.

“Here we are, born to be kings, we’re the princes of the universe”

As a kid I LOVED dinosaurs. Like really loved them. I could name more of them than anyone else in any of my classes right up until they stopped asking us to name dinosaurs in class. This is really the point when public education first failed me.

I had a lot of opinions on dinosaurs. Mostly this involved me getting upset when pictures of dinosaurs would be the wrong color. I was convinced that the only colors that were proper for a dinosaur was brown and “prehistoric” green. I still don’t know what that means.

This was back when we would have in class discussions about what we thought killed the dinosaurs, because at the time the jury was still very much out.

Then one summer night, my mom drove me to the theater one county over to see Jurassic Park. Honestly, it was one of the most important nights of my life. My dad wouldn’t come because he had heard someone say that the dinosaurs were gay and he didn’t want to see a bunch of gay dinosaurs.

I remember coming home to my single wide trailer in rural Kentucky that night feeling like I had seen something that had changed me. Because that is what real art does. I had seen things that shouldn’t have been possible. The dinosaurs that had been my constant childhood companions had been real for a couple of magical hours.

I lay in my room that night thinking about it. It was hot I remember. I had a metal fan on my desk that looked like it was from the 1950’s that I think my papaw had found in his shed or something. It was loud. And I remember being nervous because with the fan going next to me, I couldn’t hear if anything was moving around outside. That was how real the dinosaurs had been to me that night.

I would go on to get four Jurassic part toys from the original line that summer. The triceratops, the Dilophosaurus (Called ‘spitter’ on the package), the juvenile t-rex, and the raptor. I wanted these four specifically because of all the toys, those where the ones that were in the movie. That year at the school gift exchange I got an Allan Grant action figure (R.I.P). For Christmas, I got a SEGA with the Jurassic Park game, the one where you can play as a raptor and has those disappointing “boss fights” at the end.

I read Lost World the next year and my world got even larger. The characters in that book were scientists, professors, and smart people who had ideas about stuff other than where the best place to buy a used alternator for a Ford Pickup was. They lived in a world I had never even imagined could exist, and I wanted to be a part of it.

Then I went on to read Jurassic Park.

These two books became foundational text for how I approached fiction. I still try to emulate some of the things Micheal Criton did in those books.

This was all happening at a very pivotal age for me. I was quickly becoming a teenager and at the same time reading the thickest books I had ever seen about scientists talking about DNA and Chaos Theory. In that respect Jurassic Park was actually a very big part of my coming-of-age story. The perfect send off from the dinosaurs I had loved so much as a child as they saw me go off to teenagerdom.

Over the years I have watched a TON of reactions to Jurassic Park. It is still one of my favorite movies. Seeing someone else experience it for the first time is the closest I have been able to come to reliving how it felt to sit there in the dark theater next to my mom all those years ago. And one thing people normally point out is that the way they are moving the raptor at the beginning of the movie is dumb.

Maybe.

They were using a forklift to move a live animal crate, in the dark. And a lot of it had to be done by hand even after that. It seems like they could have come up with a better way of doing that.

My theory?

They did.

They probably had really good ways to put a raptor into that habitat. We learn later on that they bred eight raptors, this was the last one. They had put a raptor into that pen seven times already. Presumably all seven of those times had gone down without a problem. But those other seven times hadn’t been like this.

There were way too many armed guards standing around in the middle of the night looking scared for this to be something they had done successfully more than half a dozen times already.

The ways they normally introduced raptors had failed with her.

This animal had already caused them problems in the past. This was the “big one” after all. They are going to put her into that pen, and she is going to go on to kill all but two of the others.

That’s why they had this bone-brained idea of pushing her up on a forklift. That is why they didn’t have any way of locking the cage to the enclosure so she couldn’t push it away like she did. That is why they didn’t have a mechanical door on the cage that could open automatically without sending that poor guy on top to lift it by hand. And that is why they all looked so scared. They knew it was a bad idea. They knew something could go wrong because they had seen it go wrong in the past. It was a bad idea, but it was all they had left, the best they could come up with.

I feel like there should be a moral to this story. Like I should comment about how trying your best even when you know it’s not the best idea is important or how you don’t give up even when the good ideas don’t work.

Or maybe the point has something to do with how media and art are important. Had I not seen Jurassic Park that night I honestly can’t say that I would have tried so hard to go to college or if I would have been able to keep my inquisitive and artistic side alive in an environment like the one I grew up in that tended to punish those sorts of things. I probably would have, but I can’t be sure.

But at the end of the day, I just really love Jurassic Park.

Something something something “When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth!”

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Empire’s Gold

The railroad tracks stretched across the plains. A thin line of iron against a sea of endless swaying prairie grass. A million shades of brown, yellow and orange under the burning western sky. The Eku people had been shipped down here from up north in the thousands to help build these tracks.

Most of them died.

They had been blown up while blasting through mountains, buried under tons of rocks during landslides, or simply worked until their bodies gave out. A single outbreak of Gravedigger’s Cough had killed around two hundred thanks to the contaminated drinking water given to them, their bodies dumped in a mass grave and left out here. The railroad simply moved on and forgot.

The Eku must have remembered though. Because now a small grove of Blood Pines marked the site. Traditionally the Eku planted the trees at the site of battles or atrocities. They believed the pines comforted the angry and sad spirits of the dead and helped them find peace before joining their ancestors. But blood pine were native to the frost covered north, not here on the Burning Plains. Under the blistering sun of the scrublands, the trees wilted. They stood like corpses thin and sickly with branches mostly bare and trunks all twisted.

Blood stained the train tracks.

Figuratively and literally.

The rider dismounted, his long coat flared behind him in the hot plains wind. He followed the blood into the little grove. Some ways in a horse pulled on the dry prairie grass, a palomino mare with a crimson streaked saddle on her back. The horse raised her head to look at him for a moment before she turned her attention back to the grass.

A trail of blood led from the horse to a nearby tree, where Najo lay propped up against one of the pines. Once a lieutenant in an imperial cavalry regimen, now just a man in dirty blood covered clothes against a tree.

But he was alive.

For now.

“You got me good you doda,” Najo groaned. “What now, you come to torment me while I die? Can’t the dying even have a moment of peace?”

“Later,” the rider said. “After you tell me what I need to know.”

“So, that’s how it is?” Najo said. “Doda.”

“Yeah,” the rider replied as he took a step forward. “That’s how it is.”

Najo let his head lean back against the tree. An impressive amount of blood covered his shirt. An empty holster hung on his gun belt, but his revolver lay on the ground a few inches from his hand, barely out of reach.

“You got a telegram back in Black Spring. I know that much. Your imperial buddy was pretty talkative,” the rider closed his fist till the leather glove he wore pulled tight over his knuckles.

“So that’s it, federalist? You tracking down old imperial officers like a hound looking for a scrap? Let me tell you Etrusian doda, for six hundred years the empire of Vanosar was the biggest dog on this continent. It can’t just be erased because you federalists say so. From the ashes it will rise, again and again if it has to. Vanosar forever!”

A coughing fit caused Najo to double over. He sputtered and gagged until he was out of breath. A line of blood hung in the corner of his mouth and ran down his chin.

“I’m not here for Vanosar,” the rider said. “I’m not even here for you. I want to know where General Voroju Torla-Yumbri is. You got his telegram. I know you know, Najo. Just tell me.”

“You want the gold.” Najo coughed.

He glanced at the revolver next to him, just a few inches from his blood covered hand.

“You’ve seen it haven’t you Najo?” the rider asked. “Two thousand bars of Vanosar gold, hidden away before the war ended. There were three generals in charge of getting it safe and out of Etrus hands. Ju’Nidim died during the war in some foolish last stand at Dry Rock. Rim-Sordadim died outside of Pine Fell last year.”

“How?” Najo asked.

This must have been the first he had heard of Rim-Sordadim’s death. He seemed a bit shaken up about it.

The rider looked up to the sky where a trio of buzzards had started to circle overhead.

“Just tell me where Torla-Yumbri is,” the rider said, “and you can die in peace.”

“Die in peace?” Najo asked. “Die in peace?”

“Yeah,” the rider said.

“You can die yourself, doda!” Najo cried.

He went for the revolver on the ground in a mad scramble to get the weapon. The rider drew his own gun first and fired.

The sound of the big revolver echoed off the blood pines long after the shot. Slowly a still silence pressed down on the plains where the smell of gun powder still hung in the air.

Najo slid over and fell on his side next to the tree. His breath ragged and shallow.

For now.

The rider holstered his gun and walked to Najo’s horse. The palomino was a bit skittish, understandably so. But it didn’t try to run. The rider soothed the mare for a bit and then turned his attention to the saddle bags.

He rummaged through the dying man’s few meager effects. The useless clutter fell to the ground unnoticed. Among the discarded items, a half empty canteen, an old tobacco pouch, a dented tin cup, and various other common objects. He found what at first appeared to be an unremarkable piece of paper. The rider picked it up in his gloved hands. The text on it read, “Gap Location Secure. V.F. telegram care of Fort Joseph”.

Fort Joseph, the rider pondered. Why did they take it north?

He cast a last glance back to Najo breathing his last few breaths.

“Good day, Lieutenant,” the rider tipped his hat to the dying man and walked away.

A world of infinite imagination.

A world of dangerous monsters, evil magic, and bold heroes ready to save the kingdom. This is fantasy at its best. Kings, queens, dragons, dwarves, horses, fortresses, magic and swords (iykyk).

But why does ‘fantasy’ always look like this.

The short answer of course is that it doesn’t. Properties like He-Man, …

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I didn’t like being in the military very much. I still have pretty bad PTSD and I never once saw combat. But a lot of the people I knew from that time in my life are dead now. Most of them killed themselves, but not all. I’ve made the joke “All my friends are dead” countless times. Only I’m not really joking.

I got out of the military excited to deal with my issues and see what the civilian world had to offer me. When I stepped off that base for the last time on that cold winter day in 2019, I couldn’t wait to see what was in store. In 2019.

I got out of the military in late winter of 2019.

Nothing was ever really alright after that, was it? We get little breaks here and there, a couple of months where nothing too bad happens, a day or two where everyone seems to be watching the same show, maybe even a few years that aren’t so bad. But it never seems to last anymore.

It’s hard not to feel like the world is dying and we are just stuck here trying to make the best of things while the ship goes down.

Maybe we are.

I have had to give up just about all social media. It’s just too much all the time. I would get on to see what my friends were up to and be immediately bombarded by news stories of atrocities that I couldn’t prevent, of people in crisis that I couldn’t help, and the opinions of the worst people imaginable just being displayed front and center in all their shamelessness for all the world to see with two hundred or more thumbs up underneath. Also, some girl I knew in college was having a birthday so I needed to tell her “happy birthday”. Maybe some people can exist in that environment, but I couldn’t. Not if I wanted to remain sane.

One of the things that I started doing this last year was working out. I like to lift weights. I like the feeling of pitting my body against a super heavy weight and seeing how things go. I like watching my arms get bigger and being able to pick up heavy stuff around the house. When you say ‘writer’ you tend to get a picture in your head of what that person looks like. I kind of enjoy not looking like that.

One day when I was feeling pretty down about things, I can’t remember what it was that set me off, and in this timeline there is honestly no telling. Things seemed bleak, things seemed hopeless, and I started to worry that I had given up. Not that I wanted to give up, or that I would give up, that I already had.

I became concerned that at some point maybe the light had just gone out and no one had noticed.

But then I remembered my weightlifting. If I honestly thought the world was as bleak as I believed it was, I don’t think I would bother going to the gym. Why would I? It wouldn’t make sense to meticulously count every single set and try to push myself to lift heavier than I did the last time. This isn’t just going through the motions and doing the bare minimum. Lifting weights is hard. Gym memberships cost money. It forces you to get up and go do it even when you would really like to just stay at home. It’s uncomfortable by definition. You can be sore for days after depending on how hard you go. I shouldn’t be doing this.

But I am. I am working toward something. I am going out of my way to accomplish something that I don’t have to. I am trying to get better at something. In a way, each and every rep is a testimony to how I still have hope for something, even if I didn’t feel it.

The same was true with my writing. I think that we may be living in one of the most uncertain times for writers ever, and we still write. Somehow, I manage to get up, fully and painfully aware of what is going on out there and think “what would happen if cowboys fought a wyvern?” and write about it. I wouldn’t do that if I thought no one would ever read it.

I hope they do.

I hope someone somewhere someday reads about my cowboys fighting their wyvern and is entertained for at least a few moments. A few glorious moments where monsters can actually be defeated.

I hope they fall in love with my world of cowboys and wyverns and are inspired to do lore deep dives, make fan art, or start rewatching old episodes of Gunsmoke.

I hope they are inspired by it to the point that they want to try their hand at writing something of their own. If I ever get listed as an inspiration for whoever is going to be the next Tolkien that would be so cool.

Or perhaps someone will hate my stuff so bad that they go out and try to do better. That still counts as being an inspiration, right? Kind of like how Nirvana inspired Oasis? I’d take it.

The point is that I hope.

This is not meant to be some sort of toxically positive “look on the bright side” sort of nonsense. I don’t believe in the power of positive thinking. I don’t believe “it’s what you make of it”. Sometimes things are just bad. It’s ok to call them bad. It’s ok to feel bad about them. If something sucks, it doesn’t suddenly start sucking less just because you pretend it doesn’t.

What I am saying is that I didn’t feel as bad as I thought I did.

We may be doomed.

But we are not without hope.

I want to start new things of course. But there is always that strange and awkward moment between having something that you hope is a cool idea and the moment where you actually do it.

I have a cool idea.

At least I think I do.

And I want to share it with people. But, that means at some point I am going to have to show my cool idea to people and hope they enjoy it. This is made doubly difficult because honestly no one even knows who I am, so why would they care about what I think is cool.

I have tried to back off of social media over the years and as a result haven’t done much to cultivate an online persona. Which, I suppose is what I am doing now. But, that comes with the pressure of figuring out what I want that persona to be. I know the standard reply is normally to just be yourself, but which version of yourself exactly. Over the years there have been so many.

The version of me that went to college while working at Taco Bell all those years ago was a lot different than the version of me that joined the Navy when I couldn’t find a job after I graduated. Both of those are different from the me that went back to school on the GI Bill once my military days were over. Neither of those is similar to the me that is a parent, and so on and so forth. So, I am left trying to figure out what the version of me that is a writer looks like. Hopefully it is someone who is likeable enough and cool to the point that when I ask people to check out my really cool thing, they think ‘hey that guy seems really cool, and I’ll bet the things he makes are cool too.”

That is the hope after all.

The performative nature of this is not lost on me. I am intentionally putting forth a version of myself that I am creating. Even now, while I hem and haw about my actual anxieties, the choice to do that is pure performance, even if the anxieties are real.

So, what do I want my online writerly persona to be?

Should I come on here and tell funny jokes or stories? Maybe. I love jokes and stories and have been told that I am quite funny. But, I worry that if I tried to do a joke of the day thing or something it would just come across as forced, try hard or attention seeking. I mean, I am seeking attention, but I don’t want to be obvious about it.

Maybe I could do a little devotional thing or give my thoughts on politics or something. I won’t. Hard no. I have thoughts about these issues of course. Everyone should. But, I would rather those come through in my writing than just spell them out.

Talk about books, movies, or video games? meh, I could. I actually just saw the new Spiderman and really liked it. I also re-watched Hackers, which is an interesting snap shot of a world we lost. But, that’s all it would be. Just my opinion.

I could do the random and irreverent thing where every few weeks I just post something like “Man the Pizza sure is fluffy today.” But, that would be…well. I like Deadpool, but not that much.

Maybe I could do the family day in the life thing. But posts like “I took the family to the pool today and you won’t believe how many flavors of snow cones they have now!” requires a type of person that I just don’t think is me. Also, I am not sure I want to share that much of my daily life with people.

Perhaps I could talk about my (in my opinion) interesting life experiences? I kind of like this idea. It’s tricky talking about life and stuff though, not just for the personal nature of it, but also if I get the tone wrong I am going to come across as someone who is super negative and sort of a drag. I don’t want to be that guy. I am actually pretty fun at parties. But, if I only focus on the stuff that inspires or uplifts me… well that’s pretty corny. Life isn’t like that. But, I do think there is some value in reaching out to others and sharing these things with them. Things like this. Performative or not.

Also, I have some cool things I want to share.

And maybe I’ll talk a little about books, movies, and video games too.