Greetings, traveler,

Ashen Rider opens with the close of famous poem by William Earnest Henley:

“I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”

That poem, “Invictus”, was shown to me by my now-wife and acts as a thesis statement for this entire tale of the afterlife. Only you can captain the ferry of your life, take ownership and accountability for your actions. If you fail to, the river will take you.

Invictus, named after this poem, is a new(ish) character designed for Part Four. At first, his name is ironic—but as you witness his actions in the weeks to come, ponder what it means to captain of one’s own soul.

New chapters arrive every Wednesday. If you’d rather not wait, Ashen Rider is available now in paperback and hardcover.

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From the collected journals of a mad wizard

When next I dreamt of Pandemonium, I was caught in the grasping tar of the Wall of Souls between Grahtzildahn and the Vale Betwixt. My influence was suspended, entirely stunted, a lingering side-effect of having witnessed the beautiful aspect of Dusk.

You must understand, dear reader, that the gods are complex in their physical manifestations. Their presence on Earth—or in Hell, beneath the Earth’s crust—is not indicative of truth. Rather, such beings undergo a process of visuospatial translation to be interpreted by the mortal eye, bound by the limitations of the material world.

A fragment of Morgana existed within Cain, her chosen champion in life and in death. Dusk, which is how I will refer to this fragmented aspect hence, is an echo of her previous incarnation as the benevolent shepherd of lost souls into the Great Beyond. This is to say, her power—Cain’s power—is overwhelming, especially within the proximity of her corrupted whole.

My observers—jailors, in truth—grew displeased with my prolonged impotence. At first, they accused me of withholding my prophetic visions out of spite. My dear friend, Headmaster Pascal Doon, knew better. He understood that I yearned above all else to witness myth in the making. He understood the gravity of the strange happenings unfolding beneath our feet.

It was four more days of rigorous nothing before my observers lost interest in my flaccid sorcery, and finally granted me a night of much needed privacy. That same night, my friend appeared in my quarters—my cell—with a bedroll in hand. “I will dream with you,” Pascal Doon said. “It’s clear this situation is growing beyond our collective ken. Should anything untoward come to pass, I am with you.”

I had no words in reply to this magnanimous gesture. Surely, my friend saw the significance it had on me as I shed a single tear from my obsolescent eye.

“Shall we begin?” he asked at length.

“Like old times, eh?”

Pascal Doon chuckled. “This time, we aren’t searching for maidens bathing in rivers.”

“No. Instead, we search for goddesses with the power to rend lost souls asunder.”

“True enough, friend. True enough.”

The headmaster laid out his bedroll, and together we chanted our incantations to summon sleep, to conjure a dream. My eyes fluttered shut. Through our combined powers, when I opened them again, I was standing inside the court of the Demon King Grahtz.

* * *

I stood at attention on a polished marble floor of diamond-shaped tiles, refracting swirls of cream in black tea, suffused with the warm glow of the hanging braziers above. I took in a measured breath—about six seconds to fill all three of my lungs with piquant air—and prepared myself to face my lord.

Today held particular significance for me—I was to be named a legionnaire of the Reborn Legion, sworn to defend my city from those hellish invaders seeking to destroy our hard-fought order. Each lost soul in the generous Lord Grahtz’s court dreams of being the subject of this ceremony, of the cool steel of his sword to be placed gently on their shoulders.

He called my name—my old name. I marched down the aisle to the throne and kneeled before the lord.

The Great Lord Grahtz had ruled the Burning City of Grahtzildahn, against all odds, for ten thousand years, protecting the Great Stair from the fell beasts yearning to feast upon the mortal flesh above. I was fortunate to awaken under the good lord’s care, within those glorious walls, of all places. My comrades had told me tales of their previous lives in the deeper layers of Pandemonium. The officer who trained me, who groomed me for the station I was about to attain, told me that she had existed as a sack of living flesh for nearly five hundred years before she found a ledge high enough to end her misery. She woke in Grahtzildahn, reborn.

Indeed, I was fortunate in myriad ways—I had lived only on the first layer, suspended above the Congealed Sea for a mere half century. When first I awoke in my new form, metallic and inorganic, I was deeply disturbed. This is normal for the souls captured by the lord’s recruiters; it takes time for the natural soul to acclimate to the confines of a cold, unfeeling body. Though my shell was at first empty, I trained and honed my skills, and over time flesh grew within; an organism to nurture my soul, as my shell protects it.

Today, I woke with a beating heart, and so Lord Grahtz sent his summons. I would be inducted before the entirety of my community, my family.

My lord sat leisurely upon his throne, smiling down unto me. He was like us once, a lost soul. But it was his self-sacrifice that made our glorious rebirth as his soldiers possible. As I kneeled, he laid his blade clinking serenely on my right shoulder, then my left.

“Rise, my son,” said the lord, his voice a cerulean waterfall wetting the sharp edges of the court. “You have proven thyself worthy. You have grown… and thus, you will live.”

“Thank you…” I croaked, unable to conjure more worthy words fit for my divine benefactor. For the first time, I looked up from my toes—sabatons forged in the shape of toes—and beheld his visage. The face of the Great Lord Grahtz, eternal ruler of the Burning City of Grahtzildahn, is a grotesque sight for those who do not understand him. To craft his legion, he first had to learn, to suffer, through many trials and many more errors. His own flesh, mottled and mutated, overgrew the armor he had forged for himself before his ascension. Now, he is bound to his throne, tormented with constant agonies so that my kind may live.

“Once a boy, cursed to remain so for all eternity,” said the good lord, “you have been remade into a man, forged of silver, brass, and obsidian. You are now whole—I name you Invictus, for your unwavering courage!”

“I am your humble servant, my lord.”

A glimmer of a grin danced across his twisted countenance. He had opened his mouth to speak when the throne room’s doors crashed open behind me, and a frenzied legionnaire sprinted toward the throne.

“What is the meaning of this interruption?” Grahtz snarled.

“The walls are breached, my lord!” the intruder cried.

“Breached? Impossible!”

“The Dread Angel attacks, sire! A dark creature of her brood was flying for the Stair, but we shot it down. We’ve captured its riders.”

Lord Grahtz’s fury cooled to simmering contemplation, then flashed to concern. “Invictus!”

“Yes, lord?”

“Take the Dread Angel’s riders into the Pit. Learn what they’re after. This is your first command, as one of my Reborn.”

“It shall be done.”

* * *

We woke with a start. I was drenched in sweat, and my dear draconian friend would have been, too, if he possessed the glands. It is a well-known limitation of oneiromancy that one must first visit in the waking world the places he wishes to surveil before he can dream of them. I had scoured Morgana’s realm, spent years of my life among the sickly people of Monrovia. And I tell you, dear reader, that I have never set one foot onto the arid plains of Grahtzildahn, nor into the limits of the Burning City.

“Headmaster…” I panted and took a deep pull from the cup on my bedside table. “Did you take us into the second layer?”

Pascal Doon sighed wearily as he rose and began to pace. “I did not. In all my eons, I have yet to gather the gumption to traverse the underworld. You are uniquely tenacious in that way, my friend.”

“What does it mean, to inhabit such a creature against our combined wills?”

“It means that we must return to sleep, post haste! I see now that your obsession is warranted. We witness uncanny events.”

Comforted by the much-needed validation from my closest, oldest friend, I eased back into my cot, desiring the comfort of my silken mattress back in my quarters. I took three deep breaths, then chanted my incantation anew. Pascal Doon joined, and soon, the room spun around us, fading from reality.

Next Chapter → The Night of Tears

Coming at y’all with an off-the-cuff email on an off-day with some exciting news. An early review for my upcoming Weird Dark Fantasy novel, SOIL, has just gone live on Black Gate Magazine.

Not only did Dark Muse News columnist S.E. Lindberg discuss what he enjoyed about the book, but he provides an entire guide to my published fiction for those wanting to dive deeper and an in depth analysis of SOIL’s themes.

Lindberg writes: Sword and Sorcery fans will enjoy the elements of melee action, direct encounters with strange gods, and exploration of mystic temples. The world and culture are fleshed out, and super-infused with intense child-bearing motifs … the whole setting is brewing with issues of legacy and parenthood.

SOIL is coming to BackerKit on October 29th as The Arcanist’s last major project of 2026. Though the book is finished and I could theoretically publish it on KDP tomorrow… working on Mordschlag’s interior design has given me the gumption to fill this book with art.

So that’s what crowdfunding will unlock. Dope art of Vikings, Old Gods… and Wolves.

Read Lindberg’s full article at Black Gate Magazine.

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Greetings, traveler,

We’ve arrived to Part Four, which means we’ve crossed the threshold to Grahtzildahn, a strange and terrifying plane which is more important to the grander narrative of Dusk & Dawn than we may initially think.

New chapters arrive every Wednesday. If you’d rather not wait, Ashen Rider is available now in paperback.

Subscribe now

Let me tell you, boy
A tale of down below. 
Where the days are hard
And the beds are stone. 

I’ll tell you the tale
Of when time had split. 
And the fires of hell 
Were our only light. 

Ephraim (-54 to 47)

“Down Below,” published Year 40.

In the sky, crossing the threshold

Grahtzildahn, second layer of Pandemonium

The dreamlike threshold separating the unceasing storms of the Vale Betwixt shimmered with the furnace heat of Grahtzildahn. The nearer they drew, the sorcerous wall appeared more like an illusion than something material. The barrier danced, milky tendrils jittering through translucent skin like living fibers of an onion stalk. As Montauk slowly ascended the wall’s height, preparing for a steep dive to pierce its membrane, Kateryna began to feel wisps of hot wind cutting across her face and hands.

Kateryna held fast to the saddle horn with one hand, brandishing the Sun Spear of Dawn with the other as Seth clutched to her waist. Her stomach lurched as Montauk withdrew her wings and plunged into the barrier.

Like flies stuck in amber, their velocity was extinguished by the grasping tendrils, coated with sticky, sorcerous bile. Oily fingers clasped Montauk’s legs, holding her fast. Searching hands fondled Kateryna, creeping up her shins, then her thighs. She clenched her abdomen, her hamstrings, locking herself into the saddle against the wall’s festering will.

Seth slid back, pulled away. Kateryna released the saddle horn, catching his wrist. His face contorted, reflected pain, but his scream was inaudible. She gasped for air—but the space inside the wall was naught but void. Montauk pawed helplessly for freedom, her massive heart pounding, starving for oxygen.

Thump, thump. Thump, thump.

Kateryna struggled against the weight of worlds to lift Dawn’s spear. The iron tip cut slowly through the malaise—then, ignited with radiant flame. The tendrils shriveled from the blinding light. A hole burned into the wall’s viscous skin, allowing scorched air to fill the space, exploding with holy flame around Montauk.

The griffin bucked and flapped her great wings. Back in open air, the torrid updrafts carried them to the freedom of the skies over Grahtzildahn. They had crossed the threshold between hells. The stench of moldering earth of the Screaming Fields fled for that of blackened plains beyond—sulfur and smoldering hair; the tepid humidity of the Vale Betwixt evaporated for the arid furnace that was Grahtzildahn.

Kateryna’s vision wavered, collapsing around the periphery.

“Rest now, young ones,” Montauk said. “You need time to acclimate to this place. I will find us shelter.”

Thank you, Montauk… Kateryna thought as sleep claimed her.

Beneath the surface of the badlands

Grahtzildahn, second layer of Pandemonium

Kateryna woke, bundled between Seth and Montauk. It was dark, and the stagnant air was cool and musty. Bulbous stalagmites depended from the ceiling, denticulate ripples running along their lengths. Some had reached all the way to the ground, forming knobby pillars.

Off in the distance, she heard a gentle drip falling into a larger body of water.

Her mouth was dry, her lips splitting at the seams, her body drenched with clinging sweat. She rose, stripping off everything she wore, save for her boots and small clothes. Arms raised to touch the rough stone ceiling above, she stretched out the lingering pain that came with a perilous journey.

She looked down at Seth, yet consumed by a fitful sleep, choking on bile with every belabored breath. Dark blemishes scored the surface of his skin. Kateryna knew they would soon burst into the token black boils, weeping fetid pus, inviting further infection, marking the final stages of Morgana’s pestilence.

Kneeling, she nudged him awake. Seth was slow to emerge from his stupor, his eyes opening before rolling back again. Finally, he was overtaken by a coughing fit. Kateryna lifted him upright, pounding his back and holding his hand as he vomited blood and bile.

“Kat…” He panted, breathless. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know—underground. There’s water further down, but I don’t want to go alone.”

“I can’t…” His eyes returned to his rancid spew, seeping into the parched rock of the cave floor. “It won’t be long, now. We both know how this ends.”

“Nonsense.” Kateryna picked up her satchel, reached inside. Her fingers glanced across the cold glass. “Open wide.”

“Why? I’d rather not play doctor—”

Too exhausted to explain, Kateryna pulled out one of the three vials Ibrahim had given her. Pulling off the cork, she grabbed a handful of Seth’s sandy hair, forced his head back, and dumped the bright elixir down his gullet. She watched in awe as the inflamed sores lining his throat calmed, then receded to mere bumps.

Seth doubled over, coughing again, but soon quieted as the elixir did its work. He breathed deep and laughed. “Gods in hell! That’s… I feel—I don’t know! I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt healthy.”

“It’s temporary. It suppresses the symptoms, but the disease lives on.” She took a pull of a second flask. “I have only one more dose, so we’ll need to keep moving as soon as Montauk has recovered. Do you have a weapon?”

Seth looked down at his moccasins. “I don’t…”

“Seth!”

“What?”

“How have you survived?”

“Ain’t like I’d have a chance in combat, anyway!” Seth sighed. “Besides, if it weren’t for the riders, I wouldn’t have made it.”

Derrida saved him? The Dread Angel’s grip must be weakening across the board… Not just with me and Cain.

Montauk opened her eyes as they spoke. The griffin rose and stretched, arching her back. Her voice flowed within Kateryna’s consciousness as a gentle breeze. “Check my saddle, young one. Cain always stows a sidearm.”

Seth stared at Kateryna. She nodded. Seth approached Montauk and sifted through her saddlebags. He drew a silver flanged mace.

“Least I’ll get to hit something, before I die again…”

Fortunately, there was nothing awaiting them further down the cave, only soothing, cool air—a rarity, to be sure, as Kateryna already knew from her seconds of consciousness in the dry heat of the surface.

They came upon a narrow passage; they could freely move their arms and upper bodies, but two shelves closed in at waist height, and all they could do was sidle along. Progress through the tortuous path was slow and painful, as fingers of jagged rock clawed at their flesh. The dripping knell had risen from a tinkling to a clangorous din, and after a half hour, they at last emerged from the gantlet into a cavern, finding an underground spring resting at its center.

The spring was the size of a large bathtub, like the one Kateryna’s mother once enjoyed in her first life. A stalactite the size of a pinky finger was the source of the drippage, supplying the spring’s reservoir, one drop at a time, over the course of eons.

Seth ambled past her and buried his face in the pool. He only came up for air once he had drunk enough to satiate the thirst of the entirety of Monrovia.

“I’ve never known such bliss,” Seth said, collapsing on his back. “I could stay here forever.”

It was a tempting prospect. They might have been able to manage it, too, subsisting on cave mushrooms and rat meat. But the pestilence had already fixed a time and date for their impending doom. Or, before that, some hellish beast might wander in for a drink.

If not one death, then another.

Kateryna knelt beside him, drank from her cupped hands. The water was warm and mineral-rich. A bit acrid, stale. But it was water. Clean, clear water. She assumed such blessings dissolved long ago.

“Seth?” Kateryna ventured. A vision lingered in her mind’s eye; a memory of standing on those golden hills; her back turned away from home, a ring in her palm.

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember… what I did to you?”

At first, his expression was questioning, oblivious. Then, understanding spread across his face, soon replaced by a flash of pain settling into grim acceptance.

“I do, now.” He shook his head. “I haven’t thought about that in ages.”

“Neither have I. I’ve only just remembered.”

“It’s this place, isn’t it?”

“The fog… it was her doing.” Kateryna swung about, looked Seth in the eyes; they were sallow, bloodshot. He only nodded, his glare cold as the stone walls surrounding them. “I’m so sorry, Seth.” She began to sob, “I’m so…”

He scoffed, flung a dismissive hand. “That’s far away now. Long in the past.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“No…” He sighed. “It isn’t.”

“Did you…” She looked away, unable to look him in the eye, for what she next needed to ask. “Did you do it—because of me?”

Memories danced across his features, behind his tortured eyes. Before her, Seth relived a lifetime of trauma and pain, from which death should have long since freed his weary soul.

Seth heaved, tears streaming down his battered cheeks. “Kat… You were everything to me. And then you—”

“I did.”

“Why?” He shook his head repeatedly. “Why, Kat? Did you not love me?”

“Of course I did—”

“Then why did you leave?” Seth shouted, his knuckles white as he gripped the shaft of Cain’s mace.

“I didn’t know…” Kateryna stammered, tears obscuring her vision, stealing her breath. “I just—”

“You just what?” He rose, dropping the mace clattering upon the hard ground. “Please, tell me why you left!”

“I loved—still love you,” she said, as memories of her old life flooded back into her mind. “But I knew… I was afraid I wasn’t the woman you needed by your side. I’m so…”

“Kat,” Seth said, his heaving chest deflating as the breath of anger seeped from lungs punctured by disease, and a heart riven by grief. “Did you think I wanted you to change?”

She stared at him. Never had Kateryna bothered to ask herself that question, only presumed what others might have thought of her—of them. The Valentine aristocracy was an orthodox bunch, full of gossips and self-styled judges of what is good and proper. She had always existed on the fringes of those circles for the way she looked, for the way she acted… for who she was. A Wystran, a scoundrel, a ruffian, a fisher, a baker, a ranger, a sailor. In other words—not a real woman.

Her lower lip quivered. She was torn open, her innards splayed out in front of him. Has it been so simple, this whole time?

“I don’t know.”

Seth enfolded her in his warm embrace. He had become so thin and frail, he nearly crumpled beneath her strength as she returned the gesture.

Kateryna buried her face in the space between his shoulder and his neck, her hot tears cutting a path through the grime coating his copper flesh.

Words have power. Kateryna knew this. The power to maim, to wound—but rarely to mend. So, they held each other in silence for what felt like years. Perhaps years had indeed passed around them. She kissed him on the cheek. He looked into her eyes, taking in her entire being, and kissed her lips, just as he had all those summers ago in the golden wheat fields, on the borders between their fathers’ holdings, their castles standing vigil at their backs.

They undressed, beholding each other as they were: beaten, bruised, blemished with blackened boils that beat in time with their broken hearts. The filth of hell clung to them. They had languished in it for so long.

And why?

For the sin of being born human.

Gods save the proud.

Immersed in the warm water of the spring—a miracle in its own right, in a place where miracles stilled in the womb—they held each other for fear of losing the precious memories they had only just reclaimed.

The waters lapped gently between Kateryna’s breasts, pooled in Seth’s dense chest hair. Staring into each other’s eyes, never once looking away, she wrapped her legs around his waist, and together they swayed, washing away years of detritus.

And so much pain.

In the sky, approaching the Burning City

Grahtzildahn, second layer of Pandemonium

Arid winds buffeted Kateryna’s face; infinitesimal particulates opened invisible abrasions over every inch of her exposed skin. Below, the land was red, iron-rich dirt covering the craggy, boundless expanse. Towers of lavender flames ruptured the landscape, geysers fueled by boiling springs, much hotter than the one they had found deep beneath the surface.

She saw the Great Stair in the distance. It climbed from the horizon to the hard ceiling, leagues high. A jagged cityscape surrounded it, a shimmering mirage refracting scintillant torchlight in all directions. Brass walls surrounded leaning spires of blackened stone, climbing impossible slopes as if the city were one of the great mountains overlooking Valencia, filling its belly in preparation to erupt its vengeance upon the flat plains beyond.

The Burning City…

There was lurid beauty to the spectacle, despite the sinister reality of Pandemonium. Is it our nature that coerces us into seeing the good within a structure built with evil intent? Or does there remain a glimmer of hope, even in the most downtrodden reaches of existence?

A shrieking din assaulted her ears. Seth groaned, clutching his head. Montauk whinnied and began a rapid descent. Men shouted below. Red and brown figures scrambled on the ground, their armor glittering from the flaming geysers surrounding them. A deep horn bellowed from the city, signaling the emergence of a great winged reptilian creature from its nest in the ceiling above.

“Duck!” Kateryna yelled as she pressed herself into the griffin’s mane.

A swarm of arrows launched from the masses below. Montauk spun, flourishing her wings, batting away the whistling shafts. Kateryna lifted the Sun Spear of Dawn overhead, unsure what good it would do, but trusting in the Oracle’s promise.

May you light my way!

The wyrm screeched over their heads, swooped low, and twisted in the air before appearing in front of them to block Montauk’s flight. The beast was gaunt, clearly starving. Its ruby scales clicked and popped, as if skittering insects commanded its movements, rather than blood and sinew.

An orb of light burst from the Sun Spear, suffusing furnace heat with divine warmth. The wyrm shriveled back, screeching as it fell behind Montauk. The weapon’s shaft vibrated in her hand with vigor—with life. Kateryna was no longer so alone, so forgotten; someone watched on from above, lending a helping hand. There might be hope yet.

Still—the path to the Great Stair remained fraught with many perils.

“Worry not, young one,” Montauk whispered. “I’ve lived long. I’ve lived well. I will deliver you no matter the cost!”

Another shriek shook the ceiling above, the very air, shattering Dawn’s protective light, shards of morning raining death on the hapless foot soldiers below. The wyrm’s shadow passed over them, an infernal gust nearly blowing Kateryna and Seth off Montauk’s back. The wyrm, once a great dragon of old, yearning to reclaim its superiority over the skies, twisted around and matched Montauk’s speed.

Kateryna reversed her grip on the spear, raised it above her shoulder, and poised to throw. She thanked the gods for Cain’s insistence that she learn how to use such a weapon, despite the outrage of his aristocratic colleagues. The spear grew hot, the tip glowing bright orange.

The wyrm furled its great wings, diving in again to block Montauk’s path, molten rage boiling within its rubrous maw.

Kateryna hurled the Sun Spear of Dawn, which turned to a bolt of lightning as it arced from her hand. The bolt tore a gaping wound in the thin membrane of the wyrm’s wing, and it plummeted, screaming to the fields below, where its weight exploded into the ground, destroying the ranks of soldiers pursuing them.

The Burning City drew near. Brass rooftops glinted in Kateryna’s periphery. Blackened stone structures leaned wearily upon molten bases, warped and withered under centuries of infernal heat uncounted. The people damned to live in the streets screamed and panicked at the sight of Montauk, a black mass of wings, completely alien to them in the fiery realm of the Demon King Grahtz.

“I’ve taken you as far as I can, young one.”

We’re nearly there! Don’t give up, Montauk!

A mechanical crack thundered from a tower set within the palace’s outer wall. Something slammed into Montauk, knocking her from the air and careening towards the wall. Kateryna’s heart lurched as she realized what Montauk had meant.

No!

In the instant before impact, Kateryna held out her hand in vain hopes the Sun Spear might reappear, or that she might cast some ancient eldritch spell that would save them—but she had thrown the spear, and she was out of options.

“Hold tight…” Montauk’s labored thoughts trudged into her mind. “I will protect you!” The great griffin crashed through the parapet, bringing down slabs of shattered stone as they burst into the courtyard, flattening scattering servants and bystanders who fled too late.

Kateryna coiled her fingers in Montauk’s feathered mane, hugging her tight as she thrashed about. Montauk’s flight skidded to a final halt, and Kateryna felt the griffin’s powerful heart cease to beat.

Thump, thump. Thump…

Next Chapter → Rise, Invictus!

This novelette was a fun experiment between myself and my good friend/co-conspirator, Lee Patton. We took turns drafting sections of this tale featuring one of my S&S characters exploring Lee’s dark setting from his novella A Valley of Shadow.

Also, if you’re enjoying Ashen Rider, you may enjoy some of the references herein.

“The Dragon of Ost’safir” is also a taste of what’s to come in Mordschlag Sword and Sorcery Magazine, which has blown me away with its showing on BackerKit this month. We funded in 3 hours and are currently over 300% funded.

We’re in the final days, so if you want to get your meaty hands on the first two issues of Mordschlag, lock in your pledge today.

Pledge on BackerKit

Violet flames burned low and sickly within the cressets encircling the underground chamber. Amid the shallow vault of the ceiling, writhing shadows bred with the licking, fiery tongues, gave birth to the foul schemes hatching below. At the center of the chamber, three grim figures, robed in black and cloaked in sendal mystery, stood around a broad scrying basin carved from a single obsidian slab. They watched in sepulchral silence as the image of an old man, his ratty gray beard split by a grin riddled with missing teeth, shimmered, then faded. The disembodied tittering of the specter lingered above the mirrored surface of the water for a moment less than comfortable. Silence resumed; the putrid pallor of the flames brightened, took on their wonted infernal hue.

Standing opposite his two companions, the lone figure lifted his pallid hands, their slender fingers bedecked with rune-engraved rings, and lowered his cowl. His silver hair was close-cropped and unkempt, his sallow face, at once in the prime of youth, yet buried in the ancient depths of age beyond counting, was framed by low, sharp cheekbones, set with a long sloping nose and thin, pale blue lips. Looking out from under a high brow, his eyes were like black jewels, sunken deep within their sockets and flickering redly in the lamplight.

Orved Sepah shifted his hellish gaze to the figure on his right.

For a moment the figure was still, then lowered his cowl in turn. Bald and gaunt, darkness pooled in the weathered crags of his face, drawn taut by the grimace hidden beneath a thick black beard. He returned Orved’s gaze, peering over a snubbed nose, his left eye wandering to some point in the umbrage beyond. “The wizard is a fool.”

“Perhaps, Varchuun.” An inane giggle pranced off the thick, gluttonous lips of the left-hand figure as he pulled back his cowl. “But Phrygian Black is powerful.” Stringy blonde mustaches drooped over his overwide smile, several teeth glinting gold, like the earrings which depended from his bulbous lobes, ending in little bells that tinkled ceaselessly.

“So he is, Smeyakh.” Orved pressed his fingertips to his mouth. “And a powerful fool is a useful tool.”

Smeyakh chuckled to the chime of his bells.

Scowling, Varchuun glared at the charlatan who dared call himself a High Priest of Enostran; then, he looked to Orved, saying, “Yet, his champion, this Tarmun the Roach—”

“Is an insect! Once he has found that which we seek, I shall crush him beneath my heel and send his wizard wailing back into the Void from whence he came.”

“You mean to betray the wizard?”

Orved laughed, turning toward a far wall clothed in rich arrases and darkness. “Sacha. Varvar. Attend me.”

All sound faded, and the flames in their cressets guttered and diminished. Sound suddenly returned, and the fires quickened back to life. Two figures, hooded and cloaked in black, separated from the shadows. In unison they lowered their hoods; Sacha, upon the left, gazed with sea-blue eyes from under long, flaxen curls; Varvar, upon the right, stared with verdant eyes beneath a canopy of sable tresses. They stood with eyes downcast, their expressions dolorous, though each possessed a beauty disturbing in its unnatural perfection.

“My dread Omens, sweet daughters.” Orved approached the omens with the slithering grace of a serpent, caressed their cheeks, ran his thumbs over their full, rosaceous lips. “Go. Summon your brother.”

Smeyakh’s cachinnations clamored throughout the chamber like the tolling of funereal bells.

“This is foolishness in sooth!” Varchuun made a warding gesture with his hand and spat upon the cracked flags. “He is half mad, wholly dangerous; and you would set him loose upon the land? We cannot control him!”

“How he achieves our ends is irrelevant. We need not control him. He will find great pleasure in the task I have in mind.” Sneering, Orved faced the omens. “Now go, inform Ryedvest that I wish to speak of these matters.” Sacha and Varvar turned to leave. As they passed out of the chamber, Orved spoke: “Tell my Harbinger I wish to speak of blood—and death.”

Tarmun the Roach had been in piss-poor situations, but none so rank as this. Trudging through a musty ruin, his breath drained from his aching lungs with every step. Every footfall landed heavier on the cracked, mossy flags. His bones protested every movement, as if he had spent the last month gorging himself.

“Explain it again,” Tarmun panted, “where in Grahtz have you taken us?”

“No Grahtz here, friend!” said the blind wizard trailing behind Tarmun, holding on to the Roach’s girdle, his ethereal orb of emerald mage-light hovering at the van. “We’re far from that treacherous snake, I can assure you. We’re nowhere near anywhere. We could walk and walk and find nothing but unfamiliar pastures, strange mountains, unrecognizable languages.”

“What you say seems impossible, as if you’ve brought us to another world, just as Idraan arrived in ours.”

“Precisely! You’ve got the meat of it.”

Tarmun bared his teeth, his incredulous shout brewing in his hard stomach—his litany was severed at the stem as rocks fell somewhere deep in the crypt.

“Ho!—” the wizard leapt on Tarmun’s back, clamping his cold fingers across Tarmun’s mouth, reeking of spoiled cheese. The lumbering Wystran snarled but fell silent as a dark shadow stretched across the intersection of corridors. Tarmun crouched behind a shattered bust, the wizard still dangling from his neck.

A din of gibbering clicks emerged from the deep. He clutched the hilt of his greatsword, Redquill, protruding over his shoulder as a hulking monstrosity of clacking chitinous plates navigated the passage by tapping its hooked appendages on the ground.

He thought surely the beast would notice them, throw itself careening down and splattering them into pulp with one fell movement. But it simply continued its way further into the crypt, unbothered by their presence.

The wizard unlatched his gnarled fingers; Tarmun breathed relief. “Blind and deaf,” the wizard explained. “Rakuzhasii hunt through vibrations in the ground, but they can only perceive stimuli in their immediate surroundings. Good thing you’ve a keen ear! They feed mostly on unwitting tomb raiders in tight quarters.”

“This world you’ve brought us to is fraught.”

“Aye—just so. Yet it was I who brought the rakuzhas here from our world. Albeit that was when it fit in the palm of my hand.”

Sickness churned with the boulder in Tarmun’s belly. “Where might such a devil spawn? Surely not near Wystra.”

“No, no! Trouble not, for these prefer the desert heat. You shan’t ever catch one wandering into the chilly shadow of Castle Morose.”

The wizard’s words only troubled Tarmun further; the Warrior Queen had commanded that he soon march south, past the Golden City, to ravage the far-southern Valentine Outlands, on the border of the unnatural Idraani desert. He swore an oath to dismantle the tyrant’s trade route, against any foe. He would operate in the very place where these monsters brood, assuming he survived this job that he took from a seemingly innocuous blind old man in a tavern, not two days past. Oh, how circumstance always seems to wriggle free of mine fingers.

Carefully, quietly, Tarmun crept down the hall whence came the monster. The wizard sneezed an alien word of power which strengthened his globe of emerald light; the expanded field of illumination revealed a chamber scattered with fading frescos and red potsherds. Another word sent the globe to hover as a lamp just below the vault of the ceiling. Centering the room was an ornately carved sarcophagus, the likeness of a frail woman rendered upon the white limestone lid.

Tarmun sighed at the sight of it. Another bloody wizard…

The wizard hopped to the sarcophagus, running his bony hands over its surface. Pressing his face to the stone, he wheezed, “Good gods! We’ve finally found it… Pry it open, friend!”

An iron prybar materialized in Tarmun’s hand, though its heft made it seem as if it were instead made of lead. He chuckled beneath strained breaths and plunged the claw between lid and chest. With much heaving and effort—more than he would have thought, but every action seemed to require more of him in this foreign hellscape—the seal broke, and the ornate lid crashed and cracked upon the floor.

Inside was naught but the polished bones of a hand. The wizard scrambled into the coffin and swept the bones into a leather bourse, promptly tying it shut ‘fore Tarmun could grasp exactly what it was they had traveled so far to claim. He tossed the bourse to the Roach.

“Keep it safe!” the wizard hissed. “Now, we must make haste—”

Tarmun’s ears pricked up; the ceiling groaned, the walls shuddered. Tarmun dove into the wizard, both of them flailing onto the ground.

“Gods in Hell, man! You’ve nearly killed us!” the wizard spat.

“Hah! You would have been paste were it not for me!”

Black sighed and wriggled his arm free of Tarmun’s heft and pointed to the ceiling at an avalanche of stones and debris suspended in midair, enough to have swallowed them both. He shrugged and waved his hand, sending the pile clattering into the far edge of the chamber.

“I hired you for your brawn and your sword. Not your danger sense. You know nothing of this place—now, get off me, you damn oaf!”

Incensed, Tarmun gripped Redquill’s hilt. He might have liberated the ol’ bodac of his intestines… were he not the key to getting back home, lest Tarmun be trapped forever in this strange world where everything was heavier and smelled of moldering spirits. Still, Black was right. Two days had they spent searching in the dark realms of Enostran; and for what? The hand of some long dead wizard? Tarmun was tired of knowing nothing.

“The High Priests promised me a king’s ransom in rare jewels, and for you, access to the forbidden knowledge of another world… for a sack of bones? What’s so special about this ancient hand that we risk being buried in the tomb which holds it?”

A somber expression unusual for the wizard weighed upon his face. He looked at Tarmun, and despite his apparent blindness, gazed at the northman with eyes that seemed to have seen more than any sane, mortal man ever should.

“Tarmun… There is a power here, a darkness that—”

The scrape of leather over stone sounded from the doorway. The Roach and the wizard exchanged worried glances and scrambled to their feet.

A dark figure stood within the yawning arch, framed by the pale green light against the shadows from which he emerged. Clothed in black and armored in a mail coat of black-iron scales, he stood a head shorter than Tarmun, with his hand resting on the lobed pommel of the broadsword hanging in its scabbard from the broad girdle about his waist. Mage-light glinted atop his peaked helm, and its armored visor bearing the image of a dragon, which covered only the left half of his face, snarled in savage contrast to the smile splitting the grim warrior’s lips as he drew a long dirk from its sheath.

“A darkness too terrible to comprehend. For those too afraid to use it.” The warrior’s voice was the hiss of a viper, his words dripping venom.

Tarmun glanced at Black; the blind gaze of his arcane guide was inscrutable. He looked again at the newcomer. “Be you an emissary of the High Priests? Have you come to aid us?”

The warrior’s cachinnations were pitched with insanity. “Indeed, those holy fools call me Harbinger, though I serve none but the Great Dragon.” His blue eye narrowed, flashing like a shard of ice on the frozen wastes of the Wyse under hoary moonlight. Fury drew his lips into a thin, quivering line. “I have come to claim what is mine.”

“What is yours?” Tarmun asked, shifting under the unnatural weight of his mail corselet. “And what is this about a bloody dragon?”

“Be silent!” the wizard snapped, his blackthorn staff clacking upon the flags as he stepped forward. “Here is no friend. The High Priests have betrayed us, sent their assassin to add our bones to this tomb.”

“How… perceptive.” The Harbinger shrieked with laughter. Falling silent the next instant, he aimed the point of his dirk toward the wizard. “Says the perfidious Phrygian Black, the sightless conjuror who requires the aid of a witless insect, who would break his pact and claim the power of the Dragon for himself.”

Teeth bared beneath the bristling stubble of his brown beard, Tarmun seized the hilt of his greatsword, but before he could draw it, Black lifted his hand.

“Do not trouble yourself, Tarmun.” The wizard held the emerald gemstone which capped his staff to his open palm. “I’ll deal with this worm myself.” A spark shot into his palm, ignited into an orb of cerulean flame. Despite his blindness, Black leveled his flame wreathed hand at the assassin.

Tarmun knew then the wizard had opened his third eye, his second sight trained on the one whose insolence had kindled his wrath. This fool is about to be naught but ash. He almost pitied this hapless Harbinger. Almost.

He failed to notice as the assassin flicked the edge of his dirk over his thumb, its dark blade drinking the offered blood. His hidden left eye flashed crimson behind the visor.

The sage light of the chamber suddenly dimmed; all sound grew muffled, choked, as if Tarmun were caught under water, drowning, and the space around the Harbinger warped and shimmered for a flickering moment. The next, light and sound returned; and where once stood the fell assassin, there was now a tall, red haired and broad-shouldered woman of unconventional yet striking beauty. Clothed in leather breeches and belted tunic, she peered longingly at Black, her eyes seeming to shift color between sky blue and verdant green.

The wizard’s breath shuddered; the flames in his hand diminished. “Kateryna…”

“Phrygian…” Her frightened gaze flickered about the chamber. “Where am I?” Her wide eyes fixed on the wizard’s still smoldering hand. “Why do you summon your fire against me?” The woman’s panicked face twisted into a demon’s mask, malice parting her lips in a wicked grin. “Would you watch me burn again?” Hysteria fueled her screams as a pyre of witch-fire kindled at her feet, her body consumed by the flaming crimson tongues.

“Kat—no!” Black gasped.

The woman’s immolating wails shook the crypt as melting flesh and sinew sloughed from her bones. Wailing turned to demoniac laughter, and the charred skeleton crumbled away to reveal the Harbinger. Burning wrath flared in the wizard’s hand; that same instant, the Harbinger drew his blade across his palm as he raised his hand. Tendrils of shadow burst from the dark corners of the chamber, coiled about his forearm like blood-starved pythons. The umbral serpents flowed into the wound; his left eye flared once more with an infernal light. The sorcerous assassin aimed his hand at Phrygian Black.

Tenebrous threads of blood-tinged shadow lashed out from his fingers, coiled about the wizard’s neck and limbs. As his staff clattered to the ground, the Harbinger made a fist, and the threads constricted, binding Black. “You wanted to sample the power of the Dragon. Now come down from your high city in the sky,” he yanked on the threads, pulling the wizard face-down to the floor, and drove his dirk through the umbral cord and down into the stone, “and crawl upon your stomach to eat the dust of the earth.”

Redquill leaped from the Roach’s shoulder, and in a single motion he brought the gleaming blade down upon the vile threads strangling the wizard. With a sparking clangor the great blade recoiled from the threads, intact and tightening. Brandishing his blade, Tarmun growled, facing the assassin. “Release him, dog!”

Leaving the dirk in place, the Harbinger stood, laughter seething from between his teeth. “Only obedience shall free your master—bring me the relic, insect. Or watch as my hex chokes the life from his decrepit bones.”

Tarmun took a fighting stance, fatigued by the stream of entitled bastards speaking down to him. Besides, the Harbinger had no reason to allow him to walk away. I must destroy this devil. Quickly. “Speak not your lies in mine ear. ‘Tis your blood that shall feed my Redquill!”

“Ah, your blade would spin a mighty tale,” the Harbinger said as he drew his sword hissing from its scabbard. Like the fetid scales of a serpent, the black blade glistened, the ripples of its crimson pattern welds flowing along its length as rivulets of blood. “But my Blacktongue whispers the mysteries in my ears.” The Harbinger leveled his blade with Tarmun. “She speaks of oblivion, sings to me of your death!”

With a roar Tarmun charged; the author of the devilish interloper’s destruction, Redquill’s blade swept with broad strokes, its gleaming point ripping through the gloom. But the sorcerer had his own tale to tell, and the reviling tongue of his black blade licked out like sable levin, the rebuke of his counterattack ringing out over the crypt walls.

Raising high his blade, Tarmun dropped it like a guillotine in a sweeping arc meant to steal the sorcerer’s legs. The Harbinger leapt, nimbly avoiding Redquill’s razor wind, and ascended over the Roach’s head, landing behind him.

Tarmun swung round, his blade thundering in the wake of his straining thews. The Harbinger flung Blacktongue in a backhanded slash, knocking Redquill aside; then, drawing a hidden dagger from his sleeve, thrust with his off-hand blade. The broad blade snagged in the rings of Tarmun’s mail, caught by the thick linen folds of his gambeson beneath.

The Roach laughed madly and smashed his rock-hard forehead into the sorcerer’s masked face; the jagged edges of the dented visor carved a line across Tarmun’s scarred brow. The Harbinger howled, stumbling on his heels.

Fervent eyes wide, Tarmun lunged, heaving Redquill before him to run through the pale, otherworldly bastard. In the second it took the Roach to close the distance, the sorcerer touched his thin fingers to his neck, coating them with crimson streaming out from beneath his disfigured visor.

His covered eye smoldered like a blood moon on an overcast autumn night.

A frigid gale disgorged from the sorcerer’s lips, and Tarmun crashed face first into a black wall of cold limestone, dislodging his crooked nose for the nth time. He snarled a curse, shaking his head against nauseating agony. Tarmun wiped the blood and sweat from his eyes, wrenched right his broken nose, then looked up at the towering, charred battlements of Castle Morose looming over him. No longer was he trapped in the depths of an alien tomb, but back home in the empty, shadowed streets of Wystra.

“Morgana’s tits!” he cursed, swinging his head side-to-side, searching desperately for the wily assassin. Have I been sent back? ‘Twas a tempting prospect, yet proved false by his cramping thighs, his burning shoulders, the finger-filled bourse hanging heavy from his belt. Sweat pooled under his arms, bloomed across his chest as his armor suffocated him with sweltering weight. Remembering Phrygian Black’s words, ‘walk and walk, and find nothing but strange mountains,’ he fondled the bourse at his side and knew that he was farther away from home than he had ever been.

“Stand down, boy,” rumbled a heavily accented voice, not unlike that of the Enostrani Harbinger. Unlike the Harbinger, however, this voice summoned tremors in Tarmun’s knees.

Hunger wracked Tarmun’s hard, flattened stomach. He turned round to find himself gazing up at a thin, pallid man leaning upon a black-satin cane. Breath seizing in the back of Tarmun’s ragged throat, he groped for Redquill’s hilt; his small, soft hands closed on naught but air.

Tarmun shrank before the ghostly visage of the Lord Edgar Martikov of the Black House, a man whom he had long ago sworn to destroy, and had failed to thwart at every turn, even with the Warrior Queen at Tarmun’s back. Lord Martikov reached down, seized a moldering piece of bread clutched in his tiny fingers.

“I’ll never stand down, dog!” Tarmun spat, yet he cringed amid the shriek of his prepubescent voice. A too-wide grin peeled across the foreign lord’s face.

“Then I shall squash you, insect.”

The word Martikov chose freed Tarmun from his nightmarish reverie. ‘Twas the lord of the Black House himself who had first dubbed Tarmun the Bleeding Roach; only the Enostrani Harbinger, with his loose grasp on Pidgin Valentine, had ever called him an insect.

Growing in stature and in sweltering courage, Tarmun bared his teeth and towered over the pale man. Lord Martikov’s smirk morphed to wide-eyed terror as the hulking Wystran closed his massive hands round the lord’s frail face.

Tarmun snarled and heaved, digging his fingers between the seams of illusory flesh, biting his quicks like ice water. He howled and tore, and rather than the sensation of flesh rending from bone, he felt the rigid curl of metal whine through his very bones.

Iron clattered upon stone; Tarmun blinked and found himself standing again in the crypt before Ryedvest, unmasked, Blacktongue lying on the ground. The Harbinger’s right eye twinkled lazuline in the emerald mage-light. The left, slitted as the eye of a serpent, set within a mangled socket around which blossomed glistening black scales, flared like the living fires of Grahtzildahn above the seared, tattered flesh, and the exposed sinew beneath, spread over the left half of his face like the charred canyons that webbed across the Demon King’s infernal wastes.

Tarmun dropped the ruined dragon mask at his feet.

The Harbinger’s lips curled back, revealing half a row of savage, filed teeth. He barked guttural words in an incomprehensible tongue and held out his bleeding hand; the shadowed tendrils released their hold upon the struggling blind wizard and drove themselves into Tarmun’s chest, flinging him through the stone wall and careening into the open air….

Ryedvest stared at the bourse clutched in his hand, taken from Tarmun while in the throes of the sorcerer’s illusion. Cackling in glee devoid of sanity, he tucked the relics within his girdle. Falling silent, the sorcerer lifted Blacktongue off the ground. Sword in hand, he stepped toward Phrygian Black, who still lay prostrate upon the flags. It was only then that Ryedvest heard the wizard’s murmurs, his lips pressed to the stone, and a faint rumbling which pulsed through the earth.

The rumbling pitched to a thunderous roll, and a cacophony of chittering clacks and chitinous scrapings sounded from the corridors behind. Ryedvest snarled. “What blasphemy have you conjured, you blind fool?”

With an agility almost preternatural in its swiftness, and an infantile tittering, the wizard shot to his feet and leapt through the hole in the tomb wall. The orb of light above shrank and followed on his heels.

As the tomb was cast into a near absolute darkness, the approaching chthonic din took on a more horrifying aspect; but Ryedvest was a child of the Void itself. The very shadows of Hell were too lurid for his sight.

Placing a hand to his right eye, the sorcerer uttered the old words. Like that of an owl, his eye now shimmered with a copper sheen. Grip tightening on Blacktongue’s hilt, Ryedvest spun about—and beheld the horror of another world, of another hell.

Standing upon eight spindly legs, the chitin-armored demon rose to the height of a small elephant from the shadowed realms beyond Satar to the east. From its head, in place of eyes, extended long antennae that swept the ground, while its chelicerae clacked, and the pincers of its forelimbs snapped incessantly. A clear, venomous fluid seethed from the tip of its segmented, curving tail.

Fear brushed down his nape on prickling fingers. Ryedvest considered following the wizard through the wall, unconsciously taking a step back. Leather scraped against the rubble-strewn stone; the insectoid horror’s tail flickered. Only the instinct born of a lifetime of combat saved the sorcerer as he sidestepped, deflecting the lashing tail at the last moment. The tip sank into the ground. Blacktongue flashed in a darkling arc, and Ryedvest severed tip from tail.

Chitinous plates hissing, the creature wheeled with profane speed, swinging its pincer into the sorcerer’s side. Mail scales splintered under the force of the blow that hurled Ryedvest to the other side of the chamber. Searing pain burned through his ribs as he rolled to a crouch, sword raised. Pincers snapping, the horror scuttled around, blocking Ryedvest’s path to the damaged wall. Standing still, its antennae swept out once more.

The creature is as blind as its master! Panting, the sorcerer slowly stood. It must be deaf as well, for the sound of my breath surely would have drawn its attack. Then how… Ryedvest recalled the rumbling in the earth. The wizard drew the creature somehow with his enchanted muttering. It sensed the vibrations in the ground. His shimmering gaze shifted to the chamber entrance. I cannot fight this demon here, trapped in this tomb. If I stay, I shall be torn apart.

With the softness of a stalking panther Ryedvest padded toward the archway. His path to the arch brought him agonizingly near the clacking horror. As he passed the creature, a loosened scale on his mail coat dislodged and fell clattering over the floor. The sorcerer whirled just as the creature’s massive pincer closed on his body, one jagged edge tearing his exposed flesh beneath the shredded mail. Ryedvest roared his agony as the horror drew him toward its dripping, clicking jaws.

Blacktongue licked out, an abyssal thunderbolt, and the sorcerer drove his dark blade into the creature’s maw. The horror reeled back, releasing Ryedvest, his sword still lodged in its mouth. Hesitating but for an instant, the sorcerer spun about and sprinted for the archway. The scrape of the creature’s legs at first pursued haltingly but gained speed as Ryedvest entered the corridor.

The horror charged, drawing nearer by the second; and Ryedvest knew he could not outrun it.

Screaming in nauseous pain, vision dimming, the sorcerer dug into his wounded side, and with a handful of hot blood and torn flesh showered the hall with viscera. Serpent eye blazing, he shrieked the old words, then dropped to a knee and pressed his palm to the ground; sanguine fissures burst outward and up through the cracked stone to join the gore painting the ceiling and walls, lacing the hall with a lattice of blood-tainted, crystalline shadow.

The chittering horror was but several paces away.

Ryedvest made a fist; jagged spires of rock erupted through the floor, walls, and ceiling, and closed on the horror, crushing it in a maw of stone fangs.

The creature’s chelicerae clicked spasmodically as Ryedvest stepped toward it over putrescent streams of fetid blood. Standing before the demon, he stomped, pinning its writhing head beneath his boot, then reached down and pulled Blacktongue from its rancid maw. With a feral roar, Ryedvest took his sword like a butcher’s cleaver to the horror. The insect’s twitching husk stilled long before the sorcerer’s blade ceased its rise and fall.

Spitting on the ruinous heap at his feet, Ryedvest suddenly staggered back, vomiting blood and bile. Panting, he wiped his blade on his trousers, turned and sheathed his sword. The sorcerer took a few steps along the corridor, then slumped against the wall.

Ryedvest collapsed to the floor. Pain lanced his side; he held his hand to the wound; it came back red and filthy. Blood continued to seep between the scales of the rent mail coat. With a chuckle, he pulled the bourse out from his girdle, gazed at the bones inhumed therein. At last, you are found. How this Phrygian Black had discovered the relics was but another mystery in their legend. We had thought you lost for centuries. Kalis, the greatest of Enostran’s necromancers, who led its armies to victory in the second war to drive the Dragon from the land.

A deathly grin split the sorcerer’s face. Yet all the power you possessed could not save you from the Serpent’s fangs.

The tale of that night was well known among the initiated: Kalis was at last destroyed in a raid on her citadel in Sevast. But not before her personal guard was slaughtered outside her chamber; her captain, Izrak Laav, was the last to fall, died at her feet. The Dragon’s emissary obliterated the witch a moment later, though her final necromancy succeeded in resurrecting her faithful captain. In the aftermath, only the bodies of her warriors were found, and a smoldering crater where she had stood.

Did he bring you here? Is this truly all that remains of you? Ghostly rumors, whispered among the undead slaves of The Call, claimed that her captain carried still another set of relics. You are well-named, Ferryman.

Red ambition flashed in Ryedvest’s eyes. The grave-spawn would not be difficult to find. The power I would gather unto myself! Fingers closing around the bourse, his maddened laughter harried the hall; and as if by an executioner’s blade, his laughter was suddenly cut off. Ambition died on his tongue, and Ryedvest stared at the bones once more.

Of all the devils spawned from that hell of a war, there was none more terrible than that pit-born fiend. Izrak Laav. Better, it would be, to cut my own throat…

A painful shudder shook Ryedvest as he rose to his feet, turned his shimmering gaze back along the corridor. With the passage to the tomb now blocked by solid rock, and the monstrous carcass of that insectoid nightmare, it would take him hours to circle around the isle and pursue his prey deeper into the bowels of Ost’safir. Were it only the insect, Ryedvest would be content to let Tarmun scurry and rot in the maze of the necropolis into which he had flown.

For the necropolis of Ost’safir was a labyrinth, a true city of the dead, with its tortuous passages, its eldritch temples to the dark gods of the Void, and its towering crypts, rising like skull-encrusted spires into the black gulfs of the underworld. And greater terrors even than that which festered at his back stalked those haunted depths. No, there would be no escape for the Roach alone from that blasphemous city.

Yet Phrygian Black, the blind wretch, commanded the magics of another world. Likely, he would soon lead his pet insect to crawl up from the dirt.

The sorcerer laughed as he limped several paces back along the corridor, before resuming his wonted, arrogant gait. Then, as a viper in the dark, I shall wait and let my prey come to me. The shortest path to the surface would lead his foes back to the cave mouth, and the fane to the Dragon carved out from its very walls, which served as entrance to both the tomb and the necropolis further below. Ryedvest would prostrate himself before the Great Serpent’s idol and pray; for favor, for strength, for revenge, he would pray.

And he would wait. Until the empyrean dust of the stars fell upon the face of the earth, and all of creation was shrouded in the black winter of the promised end, Ryedvest would wait…

To crush his enemies.

And sow their bones in the ashes of the heavens.

Tarmun’s umber eyes snapped open, his pupils dilating as his awareness flushed out of a miasmic dream of his fraught youth starving beneath the shadow of Castle Morose. He lay still upon a pile of rubble, gazing up at a high, denticulate ceiling, awaiting the crushing agony which would surely flood his body the moment he so much as twitched.

The pain never came; instead, a sweet aroma of herbs and honey suffused the air, a cool breeze tickling his stubble. I must be dead, then. My bones smashed to countless pieces. That notion dispelled once the bright emerald light of the bloody wizard’s sorcerous globe seared Tarmun’s eyes, now so adjusted to the dark.

“Good,” Phrygian Black huffed, hovering over Tarmun. “My spell worked. I feared you had already hit the ground by the time I thought to cast it.”

Tarmun groaned and struggled upright. While he was spared the agony of a thousand broken bones, his muscles ached and cramped, both beneath the great weight of Enostran’s air and the seizing panic that flowed through his veins like rattlesnake venom when he realized he had fallen from a height three times that of the charred Wystran fortress.

Stripping off his tattered mail, he peeled the bloodied linen off his chest and doffed his greaves until he wore naught but small clothes and his worn leather boots. He tore his under-tunic and bandaged himself however he could.

Breathing deep relief, he groped for his belt, searching for the sacred bones. His hand closed upon naught and his breath again hitched in his throat. “I’ve lost the bones.”

“Yes. The Harbinger snatched them amid your hallucination. I do not fault you, for his wiles even fooled me. He must be some sort of empath; he knew exactly both our greatest shames. He even spoke broken Valentine!”

“We must take them back.”

“Hah!” The wizard threw back his head in a maddened guffaw. “Not a chance, Tarmun. Any good wizard knows when he’s outmatched—those who fail to see their failure are not wizards for long! What we must do is find our way out of this necropolis…”

Much of Wystra languished beneath the looming shadow of Castle Morose, a tall dragon-cooked fortress upon a hill of glittering white. The courtyard wherein they had landed was swallowed by subterranean penumbra, though it must have once known the grace of daylight, by the shattered planters decorating the corner of every thoroughfare. Vacant market stalls littered the grounds, whose granges were filled with shriven, blackened foodstuffs. Petrified stems and vines and leaves had once strangled a great dried-up fountain of cracked limestone, polished smooth, that had gone dull over countless centuries. There was no obvious course of escape, nor any indication of how far they must climb to escape back into the light of day.

“Can’t you just,” Tarmun waved his hands in the air, “open a gate—as you did to get us here?”

“Nay—I’m afraid not. At least, not this far underground. The bedrock causes interference, which leads to unpredictable mishaps in the casting of sorcery. Such things are no bother with simple cantrips. Never mind that, perhaps, my illuminating globe shines too bright.” Tarmun winced as the emerald light flared with the wizard’s words, “But in the manner of returning to our own world intact… I’d prefer to nix every risk, if possible.”

“Intact?” Tarmun knitted his brows. “Explain, wizard.”

“There’s always a chance—a small chance—that the gate closes too soon, possibly while one is passing through its threshold. In which case…”

“I see.”

The wizard made a popping sound with his lips, flicking out all his bony fingers. “Messy, messy!”

The duo started down the thoroughfare in an arbitrary direction and eventually turned around to follow a cool, sweet breeze that swept across the plaza in regular intervals. The longer they spent in the ruins of Ost’safir, the less the city seemed dead. Dormant, perhaps, was a more apt descriptor. Bodies littered the streets, the alleyways, the canopies. Though none were grotesque in their rest; their remains had been picked clean, the scavengers leaving naught but polished white bones—not unlike those which they had lost to the Harbinger—laying intermingled with heaps of dusty linen and silk garments of alien design.

Tarmun began to hear voices, echoes of distant conversations, as if people still congregated around the bend to discuss the weather, as they might have ages ago when Ost’safir remained insomnolent. Upon rounding those corners, the conversations suddenly ceased and there was, of course, nothing awaiting them but more piles of bones.

Tarmun nudged Phrygian Black each time new whispers wriggled into his perception. The wizard only scoffed, as if Tarmun had simply been hearing things. Hours passed, and Tarmun considered the wizard’s doubts: Perhaps he was hallucinating?

“Praise the Great Serpent!” a man called behind him, his sonorous voice unmistakably present.

Tarmun swung about, unleashing Redquill. “Who goes?”

Yet there was no one.

“Need I sedate you?” the wizard sneered. “Listen to me, Tarmun, there is no one living in this place aside from you and me, and probably that bastard Harbinger.”

“I learned long ago to always trust mine ears.”

“Not while an illusionist is about. Don’t trust anything you perceive until we escape this hellscape!”

Following the source of the wind, they soon crossed from the plaza into a courtyard furnished with blackened boles of dead date palms and walled by building-sized installations of etched limestone, lacing across the courtyard like the wall of a labyrinth. The script written upon the stone was entirely foreign to Tarmun. The bemused expression the wizard wore as he dragged his fingers across the etchings confirmed that they were just as strange to him.

Muttering a word of power, an emerald light flickered within the wizard’s cataract coated eyes. He spoke again, this time in a strange, guttural tongue unlike any that Tarmun had heard before. As the words rolled off his cracked lips, the breeze shifted suddenly to gale, whipping Tarmun’s hair into his eyes, prodding soiled linen into the wounds upon his chest as if someone were driving their fingernails into his rent flesh.

Tarmun growled his frustration and tied back his wild mane, knotting the hair behind his neck. Wiping his eyes, an array of orbs, glowing faintly of lavender, flitted about the courtyard above the remains of ancient Enostrani. Tarmun stared at them in wonder, thoughtlessly approaching the nearest one.

As he drew near, he again heard the unknowable whispers of a conversation held in times long past. Even though he did not understand the words, he knew the interlocutors spoke about matters of spirit.

“This was a temple…” Tarmun said wistfully, reaching out for the magnificent orb.

“That was one function of this place,” said the wizard, still running his hand upon the scriven stone, entirely disinterested in the northman’s whimsy. “Thinkers of all sorts once gathered here. Theologians, philosophers… This text speaks of The Dragon of Ost’safir; its eternal conflict with a crowned King of Kings; a Redeemer of humankind. I wonder—”

The orb was warm to his touch and flared, momentarily blinding Tarmun. Phrygian Black’s musing ceased with a suppurating sound like water pouring into Tarmun’s ears. Shaking his head, the northman blinked half a dozen times. The courtyard was bright; the polished limestone slabs refracting sunlight like mirrors. Where once were the tattered remains of people and hovering orbs, were now living, flesh-and-blood people.

“Hah!” Tarmun barked, eyes wide with wonder.

The scholars paid him no mind, as if he were no more out of place than they. Unlike the dusty archives within Castle Morose, this courtyard was alight with life and conversation. People from all walks of life gathered and peacefully debated. Some were more heated in their discourse, but all around kept a respectful distance from one another, maintained open, un-threatening stances.

Laughing like a mad buffoon, Tarmun hopped across the courtyard prodding his big ears into any niche he could find. Though he understood nothing of what he heard, he was convinced that he had unlocked some font of greater wisdom. A waterfall had spilt upon him, a sensation akin to drinking the finest mead after a battle won. Giggling, he made to clap his massive hands upon the frail shoulders of a yellow-robed monk, overcome with an urge to take the Enostrani stranger’s ear into his mouth and bite down on the cartilage as might an over-excited pup to its siblings.

Instead, Tarmun fell through the monk to the flags in a wheezing heap. He spun on his back; his sight consumed with flashing stars as cold hands smacked against his cheeks.

“Snap out of it, damn you!” the monk yelled in Tarmun’s native tongue. “Wake up!”

“I’m awake! I’m awake!” He laughed as if the unseen assault were tickling him.

“Gods in Hell, and up above!”

Tarmun stopped laughing then, as a searing pain wracked his entire form. Pressure gathered within his hard skull and his flesh ached as a sudden fever pitched and broke. Ears, popping Tarmun gasped, finding himself laying supine in the shadowed courtyard of sleeping Ost’safir, Phrygian Black’s grotesque mask of concern hanging over him.

“What—what in Grahtz was that?”

“A spirit had taken you,” the wizard said, offering a hand to help Tarmun sit upright. His frail bony fingers boasted a surprisingly strong grip. “I had to cast a spell to free your mind.”

“Is that not risky? Better just to leave me.”

“Nonsense.” The wizard waved a dismissive hand. “I brought you here—it is my responsibility to take you home. Besides, it seems I’ve weaved my sorcery without—”

A distant rockfall quashed the wizard’s words. The ground quaked, the towers bordering the courtyard shuddered; their roofs collapsed.

“Damn it all!” The wizard drove his blackthorn staff onto the flagstones at his feet, chanting eldritch words of power.

Tarmun knew not what fell words the wizard uttered; but he understood nonetheless that Ost’safir had finally awakened—and it meant to swallow them whole.

Phrygian Black rose his staff above his head, his sonorous voice coalescing with the roar of the earthquake destroying what remained of the city. An emerald window of pearlescent glass yawned open before them. As the wizard drew a relieved sigh, a crack lanced across the window’s surface. Window and wizard both warped, stretching towards the ceiling, before their bottom halves slung upward like a great, sorcerous slingshot.

The wizard’s scream peeled through air, rattling Tarmun’s keen ears; the words stretching as did their speaker. “Sur—face!”

Tarmun stumbled out of the way of a gargoyle falling from a high tower, now sitting sideways across the thoroughfare. The wizard was gone and with him, his mage-light. Blinded, injured, and trapped within the cyclone of destruction, Tarmun found himself cradled within a hotbed of misfortune. Never one to mope, the northman closed his eyes, and took single measured breath.

He scaled the etched wall, then leaped across the avenue to the leaning tower, quivering and grousing beneath his feet. Then, he ran the length of the tower towards its sloping, pointed roof. Reaching the top, he opened his eyes and gazed into a sea of writhing shadows and crumbling stone, consumed by the dim luminescence of thousands of wandering spirits. His ears twitched, filtering the noise for a sign, any sign which he may follow.

A hissing whine resounded somewhere east—air escaping the cavern. With luck, so shall I.

From building-to-building he leapt, climbing upturned walls and sagging rooftops. His breath smoldered in his lungs; his knees rattled with every hard landing. Soon he found himself back upon the ground, sprinting for the wall of bedrock which bore a—hopefully—northman sized hole.

Lavender orbs strobed upon the track, homing in upon Tarmun. He screamed as one came close, whispering of a sumptuous dinner upon a terrace, some thousand years past. The orbs shot through the air in chaotic bursts. The northman ducked, sucked in his gut, threw himself sliding to the side, then rolling back onto his feet, running until the hissing breeze swelled from whisper to shout.

Then, he came upon a great wall of bedrock, ascending towards the surface the entire height of the fall he had just suffered. The ghostly orbs converged upon him, dozens meandering in a menacing formation seeking to add Tarmun’s bones to their ranks.

Tarmun’s eyes bounced from place to place, squinting into roiling penumbra, searching for the escape he was now certain existed.

“Hah!” Tarmun rattled, locating the doorway some twenty feet above. He started up the wall, which began as an acute slope but quickly steepened. He quickly ascended the first half the wall, then jumped and clung to shallow handholds, inching his way up the second.

The orbs crashed into the bedrock below Tarmun, coalescing into a clumsy pile like drunkards swarming a lone privy. Tarmun’s arms bulged and ached with the pain of lugging his added weight. Not five feet from the ledge, his cramping fingers began to slip. He gasped, his foot plunging into a pool of ghostly lavender. Sick fermentation ran up his leg, wracking his entire being with noxious spasms.

Tarmun took a final glance at the obscured, darkling portal that may have meant his salvation, a wheezing giggle escaping him as the ghosts of Ost’safir finally seduced and sedated him.

The earth shook. Towers fell. Tarmun the Roach let go.

Closing his eyes, he thought to revel in the sweet embrace of hungry spirits—but the spirits did not take hold of him. Blazing light peeled at his eyes. Phrygian Black stood upon the ledge, his blackthorn staff aimed at Tarmun. Sweat dripped down the old coot’s face, and he roared as he flung the northman out from the sea of dead and crashing into him upon the landing.

“Gods in hell!” the wizard spat. “No time to tarry, the portal is about to close!”

Mind reeling from his sudden shifts in circumstance, Tarmun could only nod as he scrambled to his feet and helped up the wizard. Together, they took flight up the narrow cavern to the Temple of the Dragon.

Dawn had mustered its hordes of golden light in its waking campaign against the shadows amassed in the cave as Tarmun and Phrygian Black careened from the shaft and raced across the temple grounds. The portal at the cave mouth was yet open. But for how long, Tarmun dared not guess.

The Roach’s gaze flitted left and right; the terraced galleries carved out of the cave walls appeared empty; none lurked in the shadows cast by the great domed monoliths rising upon either side, etched with the images of demoniac forms which beggared description, their bases carved to resemble a mass of withered human forms being crushed by their perdurable burdens. Toward the idol of a three-headed dragon, standing the height of three men and hewn from a single slab of black jade, they ran.

Fear laced tingling threads along his spine. Though the dragon was the devil of another world, his soul recoiled at the sight, and he knew by some primal instinct that the bourns of reality were scant obstacles for the dragon’s taloned reach.

A glint of steel up near the dragon’s heads; just as warrior and wizard passed beneath the idol, Tarmun suddenly wheeled, Redquill’s blade humming as it rose to meet the plunging sword of the Harbinger. Swift enough, he was, to deflect the killing stroke, but the force of the blow yet sent Blacktongue’s tip tearing through Tarmun’s shoulder.

Black cried out in alarm.

The Harbinger reached out with blinding speed, swiped his fingers through the blood oozing from Tarmun’s shoulder; at the same instant, the sorcerer’s leg lashed like a dragon’s tail as he drove his heel into Tarmun’s ribs. The Roach reeled, and the Harbinger spun about with evil words upon his tongue, threads of blooded shadows extending from his fingers. The sorcerer swung, even as the threads wound themselves into a crimson cord, and like a serpent’s tongue whipped at Black’s chest. A thunderous crack; and the wizard was hurled from the cave and through the portal.

The echoes of Black’s initial cry died out.

The portal guttered like a starved flame. Horror seized Tarmun’s heart with a cold fist. I’ll be stranded here! But the portal stabilized. Though for how long, he could not know. Tarmun shifted his smoldering gaze to the Harbinger, who stood before him panting with blood seeping out from under the scales of his rent mail. That just leaves this fiend.

A wicked grin split what remained of the sorcerer’s face. Blacktongue glistened in his grip.

Tarmun stood with legs braced wide, Redquill’s shining blade held before him.

Only the quaking rumble of the sinking necropolis passed between them.

A shock from below ripped through the ground and the sorcerer staggered. Freed from the weight of his armor, Tarmun pounced with the speed of a hunting tiger. Yet the Harbinger recovered in an instant, coiled, and lunged to meet the warrior.

Blades flamed in the mourning light, and the clangor of their steel was drowned in the roaring waves of sound erupting from the depths. The Harbinger’s Blacktongue flashed like thunderbolts sent from the burning heavens; Tarmun’s Redquill whirled as a hell-spawned tempest raging upon the cold wastes.

Tarmun parried a thrust which grazed his brow and staggered back toward the dragon idol. Choking laughter seethed from the Harbinger. Chest heaving, his hand held to the grim wound on his side, the sorcerer approached. Breath hissing and bleeding from a score of cuts on his body and limbs, Tarmun wiped the blood streaming into his eyes. His benumbed grip tightened on Redquill’s hilt. Another monstrous tremor wracked the cave. Tarmun’s ears pricked up; a shearing crack sounded from the idol behind. He glanced over his shoulder. With a shriek of mad triumph, the Harbinger lunged.

Shifting his body to the side, he let the sorcerer’s blade graze his ribs. Stifling the agony searing his lips, Tarmun smashed the pommel of his sword on the Harbinger’s sword arm; the sorcerer’s cry was mingled with the splintering of bone. As the Harbinger’s blade clattered over the floor, Tarmun dropped his own, lifted the bastard by neck and groin, spun about, and hurled him crashing at the feet of the dragon.

The idol crumbled. Pinned beneath one of the dragon’s snarling heads, the sorcerer groaned, a welter of crimson rising about him.

Tarmun reclaimed Redquill from the fracturing floor and closed in to claim the relic. And to end the sorcerer’s wretched life.

The Harbinger suddenly hissed his evil words and dragged his left arm through the pool of blood. His serpent eye blazed with arcane fury and burst with a steaming squelch. Convulsing with blood-mad, shrieking laughter, the sorcerer pressed his palm to the earth.

Staggering back, Tarmun watched horrified as tendrils of crystalline blood and shadow wove like a web throughout the cave floor, walls, and the high vault of its ceiling. This is no man, but a demon from the very pits of Grahtz!

Coughing blood and bile, the sorcerer turned his remaining eye, lit with blue bale-fire, on Tarmun. “Come then, insect! Crawl upon your stomach,” he made a fist, “to eat the dust of the earth!”

But Tarmun had already wheeled, sprinting for the portal as the cave collapsed at his heels with a deafening roar.

“Embrace me beneath the ashes of the heavens!”

Waves of stone cascaded around the Roach; the portal was just out of reach; Tarmun leapt, thrown out of the gates of Hell on a gale of dust and shattered rock… and the shrieking laughter of the damned.

Tarmun sat up gasping for breath. Winter cold seared his lungs, and the icy fingers of frozen grass prodded his thighs. “Where…” Grown wide, his eyes darted about. With a sigh, his hand closed upon the hilt of Redquill.

“Gods above! You survived!” Phrygian Black cackled with glee. “Did you recover the relic?”

The warrior shook his head.

Black frowned but said nothing.

“And where were you?” Tarmun glared at the wizard.

Black feigned injury. “Keeping the way open for your sorry, barbaric hide.”

Snarling, Tarmun leapt to his feet, blade gleaming in the afternoon light. Laughing, he placed a hand on the wizard’s shoulder.

Taking in the austere beauty of the scene, Tarmun’s gaze swept over the frost-coated slopes, over the snow-shrouded peaks of the Guardians looming in majesty upon the horizon and settled on the small village where this fool’s errand began. “I never thought to be happy to see the Shins again.”

“Ha! Perhaps you may put down here, once your service to the Warrior Queen is done?”

Tarmun smiled wistfully. “Maybe… One day.”

“Come, let us get back to that empty tavern before you freeze to death.” The wizard set off in the wrong direction.

Snatching a handful of Black’s robes, Tarmun hauled him round and, wayward wizard in tow, headed toward the village.

Chimney smoke cast the town in shades of gray, and the clatter of wagon wheels and smithy hammers composed a song of civilization. Walking along the street, Tarmun became keenly aware of his nakedness as passing men huffed, women blushed, and snickering children whispered amongst each other.

“Haste, old man. These people feast on mine body with their eyes, though I’ve had little to eat but moldering bread these past two days. Besides, too long have I been gone, and must return to my duties.”

Black chuckled as they approached the door of the tavern inn. “Fear not, young Roach. The trader’s caravan shall not set out until morning and has been perfectly safe here in the village.” The wizard’s features grew somber. “It is the journey south, fraught with many perils, which will require the protection of your mighty blade!”

The most recent release, “Isle of Swords” by marked the return of Cormac Mac Art, Howard’s Gaelic warrior who fights alongside Danish Vikings. Admittedly, this was my first encounter with Cormac, so I’m approaching this tale without any disillusions of nostalgia.

However, this is not my first run with John’s Sword and Sorcery. To Walk on Worlds was the first novel-length Sword and Sorcery collection I picked up in 2026 and it remains one of my favorite reads of the year. John’s prose is tight and concise, his imagination vast.

Everything that makes The Maxus Cycle great is on full display in Isle of Swords, albeit grounded in Howard’s weird historical world.

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Brotherhood and the Heroic Duo

Popularized primarily by Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, the heroic duo is a classic iteration upon the Sword and Sorcery protagonist. This tale primarily follows Cormac after a shipwreck, but he is quickly joined by his Dane companion, Wulfhere the Skullsplitter.

John has been praised for his stellar depictions of masculine characters and interactions. Isle of Swords is an example of this quality at its prime. It’s a subtle touch, but the cooperation, trust, and brotherhood between Cormac and Wulfhere is an essential element to a tale like this. They don’t lose their boastful viking spirits, but neither are they falling into the trappings of egotistical competition and domination.

Upon revisiting Howard’s Red Nails, I’ve reflected that Conan is likely so popular among male readers due to his temperance, experience, capability, and prowess—in other words, Conan represents a mythic ideal that readers should strive toward.

John does this, too, with an updated take on the ideal. He illustrates a cooperative partnership between warriors which the modern, isolated reader sorely misses. Lasting friends are harder to come by than ever, these days. Where Howard’s Conan is often diminishing his companions (something we’re more likely to encounter), John’s Cormac and Wulfhere embolden one another.

Cormac and Wulfhere prowling an island for Roman gold and getting into bloody sword fights with hostile Picts makes for a simple action tale on the surface. So too does it provide a briny gale of fresh air at a deeper, primal level.

Frankly, we need tales like this to paint a new mythic ideal of cooperation. To provide an example of true loyalty in the face of overwhelming dangers, of prowess and potential even when we may feel at our lowest. In our dark world, admirable characters give us hope.

Muddy, Bloody Action

John’s economical use of verbs and restrained brevity makes the action in his fiction sing. The reader is never lost, always captivated. The excerpt above engages the senses and yet bears no bells nor whistles, just solid use of language.

We get solid historical details, as well, tactics and brief images of arms and armors, but these things never drench the text and are placed only to enhance the tone. The fights are brutal and messy, bearing all of the danger you’d expect from a historically-grounded dark Fantasy.

Lines like this paint a vivid picture while using little white space. It’s subtle and evocative, and elegantly says-without-saying “Wulfhere got shot.”

In Sum

There’s little else that I can say for this tale over than to go read it. Even without any prior knowledge of Cormac Mac Art (and some other non-Conan Howard references), I immensely enjoyed short stay with this novelette. Fans of Viking fiction, historical fiction, or classic Sword & Sorcery will find everything they’re after.

It’s right up my alley and it’s firing on all cylinders. A perfect storm. For $1.99 across most eBook platforms, this one is a helluva deal. You can grab it most easily on Kindle.

Greetings, traveler,

I knew that with the inclusion of winged mythical beasts, I need to utilize them to their full extent. This is the aerial battle of the book.

The lack of repetition was a mind-bend while I wrote this book. Accustomed to doorstoppers, video games, and TTRPGs, where the hero must fight through the same type of encounter multiple times to learn.

Sitting at 200 pages, Ashen Rider only had time for one occurrence of every pivotal moment. This was the moment where fire rained from the sky.

Also! I’m crowdfunding The Arcanist’s 2026 Fantasy Magazines on BackerKit. If you like what I do, consider backing and grabbing a copy of Ashen Rider as an add-on.

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From the collected journals of a mad wizard

For seven nights, I dreamt beneath the observation of Citadel scholars, researchers dedicated to decoding the discipline of oneiromancy. Fools! When will they realize that sorcery is art, not science—I’ve always said: Phrygian Sorcery is beholden to the laws of science but remains entirely subjective in its application.

I must admit, I was humiliated. There I was, one of the four founding archmagi—my teachings informed sorcerous study and arcane theory for generations—confined to a padded room with only a one-way viewing window for company.

I resisted the orderlies tooth and nail. They dressed me in a scratchy gown, leaving my posterior exposed to the air. They bound my arms and legs with dampening chains to prevent the use of my Art to crush them like so many bugs. I ate only when coerced. And they beset me with fruitless sponge baths when I at last grew too tired to resist.

By the third night, my visions had become so vivid, so disturbing, that my body convulsed in wild fits—eventually, they had to lash me to the bed, as I began to float snoozing to the ceiling.

I later read reports claiming that I was muttering incoherently through waking hours and slumber alike. This was not nonsense, dear reader, for I recited the words of hell; conversations I overheard in Morgana’s Hall, in the Demon King Grahtz’s court. I bleated like a nightmare and screeched like a lemure, my soul ablaze with hellfire.

My symptoms lessened by the final night of my internment. My dreams returned to those unwitting friends: the wicked Syr Arthur Cain and my sweet Kateryna.

* * *

Cain wore the aspect of Dusk, the last vestige of the Goddess as she had been. Such a thing should have been impossible, but in the Dread Angel’s hubris, her blind obsession for her Chosen, she had failed to recognize a lingering spark in his heart—a spark that had once belonged to her.

For decades, Citadel scholars argued the merit of eye-witness accounts claiming an angel laid waste to Idraan, finally chasing the Kaza’dur back to whence they came. Now I saw the truth for myself—ashamed, too, as my doubts of such accounts had cost people their lives.

Dusk’s Avatar charged Syr Derrida first. Being the weakest fighter, he was an easy target—and he carried a passenger, besides. Dusk’s newly named Herald drove his white-faced griffin low, spinning in the air to evade the wide arc of the angel’s flaming sword.

Seth, unaccustomed to flight, fell from the saddle and plummeted towards the black waves below.

Kateryna dived after him, racing the poor boy to the sea. Holding the saddle horn with one hand, reaching into the open air with the other, Kateryna yanked Seth from his fall, pulling him by the hem of his tunic onto her lap.

With the battle raging above them, they fled for the shimmering threshold, to Grahtzildahn.

Dame Citha watched the pair fly away and, for an instant, considered sending an arrow for Montauk’s heart. Gabriel rushed by overhead, returning her attention to the raging angel that so resembled Citha’s beloved goddess—a version of her, at least, lost to time.

“Take the rear, strong right!” Gabriel shouted.

Citha dug her stirrups into Stockholm, who flapped his great wings until she fell in behind and above Gabriel. They surged through the air trailing Derrida’s retreat. Soon, they cleared the sea, flying over the blackened coastline of the Screaming Fields.

From her view, Citha saw Derrida’s evasion failing—he howled in pain as he parried a near-lethal blow from Dusk’s avatar. The avatar’s flaming sword showered sparks over him as Derrida batted it aside with his pitiful smallsword.

Divided loyalties and uncertainty clashed in her heart. Citha drew back her bowstring, an arrow of perfect light manifesting between her fingers.

“Forgive me, Goddess…”

Citha loosed her arrow, striking the avatar in the thigh. The blow did nothing but enrage her further.

Gabriel raised his halberd, poised to kill, for a center slash, but his blade sliced naught but air.

A shroud of darkness—no, a shadow—fell over Citha. She blinked, and Dusk was in front of her. Citha commanded Stockholm to lean forward so she could engage the avatar, but the griffin leaned backward instead, catching the avatar’s flaming blade in Citha’s place.

Always the stubborn prick, her poor Stockholm.

Gabriel circled back round, striking from above, leveraging the length of his halberd like an oar. He managed a shallow cut on the avatar’s scalp but paid for it with her searing blade plunging through his mount’s belly and into his ass.

Stockholm drifted, dying, to the ground.

Derrida, following close behind from Gabriel’s leading left, struck the avatar’s armored back. He cursed as the blade of his smallsword shattered against its divine armor.

Gabriel roared, consumed with battle-joy and bloodlust. His bleeding mount somehow remained airborne, still circling Dusk. Gabriel twisted his halberd for a passing back swing. Smiling wide, his teeth bared, he reveled in the glory this prey would bring. He imagined the head of his halberd buried in the angel’s chest, cutting free her lungs.

Instead, it was his chest that was on fire—the avatar had shifted so Gabriel struck only adamant breastplate. In retaliation, the angel gripped his throat, plunging her blade into his heart.

“She isn’t real…” Gabriel coughed, thick blood pooling in the corners of his small, pouting mouth. “None of this is real.”

Gabriel, along with his massive mount, plunged into the black earth, a plume of dust exploding in their wake.

When the cloud cleared, Dusk’s avatar landed to find Syr Derrida standing over Gabriel’s corpse—the remains of his smallsword jutting out of the big man’s face.

The angel raised her blade. Derrida sucked in a deep breath through clogged nostrils and fell to his knees.

“Please,” he said. “I’ve had enough blood to last lifetimes.”

The rage in the angel’s eyes cooled; the roiling storm above slowed to a gentle drizzle as the flame of her sword extinguished. The Goddess Incarnate looked down upon her knight, moved by the regret painting his face.

“I thought you were gone,” Derrida went on, “so I gave up hope. I see now I was wrong. Allow me to continue my service in Dusk’s name…”

“I gave up, too,” Cain and the angel said in unison. The avatar’s form faded away. Cain, battered and wounded, fell into Derrida’s arms. Dusk’s voice, disembodied: “Take care of him, my knight. We are almost through this darkness.”

Krakow cried out before Stockholm’s limp form. Derrida eased Cain onto the ground and rushed over to Citha’s side. She writhed beneath the dead weight of her fallen mount, her right leg crushed; her heart was beginning to slow, her boiling blood cooling to a simmer.

Derrida’s eyes cast over her, then to Gabriel’s bleeding corpse. “He was always a bloody pain, wasn’t he?”

Citha pulled vainly at her leg, then let out an ululating scream.

“You saw the Goddess…” Derrida rubbed his temples, knelt before Citha. “We all saw her.”

Breathless, she said: “Yes.”

“As she was before. She was whole.”

“…Yes.”

“What do we do?”

Citha’s eyes rolled to Cain, unconscious on the ground. “You need to take him… protect him.”

Derrida laughed, shaking his head. “I’m bloody useless! I can’t do this alone—I can’t leave you.”

“You must.” Citha grimaced as a sharp pain shot from her heel through the sack of meat that had once been her leg.

With those final words, Derrida retrieved his blade from Gabriel’s skull. The weapon had always seemed to make its way back to him for better or worse. But its time had ended—his smallsword had always been better suited for fencing with children than for warfare, for committing heresies across a generation or more.

Derrida tested the balance of the broken blade. After all these years, holding the thing for too long still made his wrist ache, ever the epitome of inadequacy. But now, everything rested upon his shoulders.

“Do you wish to rest, Citha?” Derrida said, squeezing his watering eyes shut.

“I’m not ready for that,” she gasped. “Free me, and I’ll make my own way. I’ll be of no help to you like this.”

“Morgana might find you.”

Citha’s mouth fell flat. “With what we saw… I’ll take that risk.

Derrida tightened his grip on his sword, shivers rolling down his spine. “Okay, then.”

Next Chapter → Part Four. Years of Detritus, Washed Away

Waag is author of the popular Skarde: The Wandering Sword trilogy, with the first entry, Citadel of Seven Swords, written during the 2020 lockdown and released in 2023, the follow-ups coming soon after. He saw a deficit in the thrilling tales of old and sought to add his own spin to classic formulas.

Much so for this tale, The Thing in Iron, which was originally published by Savage Realms Monthly and just re-released as a $0.99 short on Kindle as part of Waag’s Wandering Sword Short Stories.

Despite what the series title might imply, this one does not follow Skarde, but a swaggering thief called Kelamon in the city of Byzerdamen, which evokes much of the same tone as the Zamorian city of Arenjun featured in R.E. Howard’s “The Tower of the Elephant” and a bit of Lankhmar with a southern hemisphere twist. I also felt a lot the same adrenaline of Kalam’s insane battle with the Claw in Malaz City at the end of Erikson’s Deadhouse Gates.

What I admire about Waag’s style is his traditional, classically-minded approach to crafting tales of Sword & Sorcery. This tale would have been right at home in a 1930s issue of Weird Tales. At the same time, the writing is modern and clean-cut—no time wasted and no fluff, just adventure and momentum.

With this in mind, Waag took a large creative leap with this tale in the form of an unreliable narrator.

Oh hey! If you love S&S, check out my BackerKit for Mordschlag Sword and Sorcery Magazines. Also keep an eye out… Waag will be making an appearance in a new Arcanist publication very soon.

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Roof Games and Mind Play

Without diving too far into spoiler territory, Kelamon is a member of a thieves guild in city filled with thieves guilds. Upon seeing a rival member in his territory, Kelamon gets rather rambunctious and sets out to take out the competition… and runs into several uncanny complications on the way.

There is an action that is presented by the narrator (a third-person limited view of Kelamon) as factual that turns out not to be exactly as it was originally presented (vague enough for spoiler free?) Essentially, the sorcery at play within the tale seeped into the very structure of the narrative, altering the reader’s understanding of truth.

It’s a rather small element to the tale, but one that takes the largest leap and what sets this tale apart. While I think more could have been done with this idea, I appreciate Waag’s restraint—such a weird element could have completely taken over the narrative and turned it into an existential jaunt through obscurity as what happens much of the time with C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry (see my review here).

Instead, we get a cool weird element that defines the ultimate villain of the tale, a subtle touch that makes The Thing in Iron a unique take on the thieves’ guild formula. Given the tight word count, this element was exactly what it needed to be.

In Sum

The Thing in Iron is a solid tale and a swift read. Waag’s prose is polished and concise, leaving no wasted space on the page. For $0.99 on Kindle, it’s a worthy investment to get a taste of the Wandering Sword before diving into the Skarde trilogy and an excellent addition for existing fans.

Greetings, traveler,

Both this chapter and the one coming next week had me reading about formation flying and aerial combat tactics. No amount Microsoft Flight Simulator prepared me for it.

Shits gettin’ real.

Also! I’m crowdfunding The Arcanist’s 2026 Fantasy Magazines on BackerKit. If you like what I do, consider giving that page a follow so you don’t miss the launch.

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The Oracle of Dawn

The threshold of the second layer of Pandemonium

“And now you’ve seen,” Ibrahim whispered, rubbing Kateryna’s back tenderly. “So, I shall recite all you need to know.”

The old man raised his arms, throwing his head back as he chanted in a strange tongue Kateryna could not comprehend.

The lantern swung like a pendulum, back and forth, thick plumes of smoke weeping between the panes of wavy glass, sinking to hover just above the floor.

Kateryna fell back onto her hands when she looked into Ibrahim’s eyes, glowing perfect white. He rose, standing over her, possessed by a grotesque dance twisting and contorting his limbs, fingers weaving unknowable forces into the tapestry of prophesy.

“The Great Stair stands in the center of the Burning City—it leads all the way up… and all the way down. Salvation one way, damnation, the other!

“Your mother is rooted in the riverbed parting the shores of Life and Death, the Dusk and the Dawn. If you wish to find her, you must ascend the Stair. To survive, you must let go of the pain in your heart, all of it, for your soul will soon face overwhelming assault.”

Kateryna nodded and wiped a tear from her eye. “I understand what I need to do.”

“Good, child.” Ibrahim sighed, an eldritch wind escaping his lungs. “Good.”

The old man closed his eyes, releasing the incantation with a pulse of air that dispersed the lingering smoke. He redressed the soiled linens around his face, then turned towards Cain.

“I do not have a prophesy for you,” Ibrahim said. “Yet my matron bid I deliver you a message. If you’ll hear it.”

Cain blanched, the deep lines of his face carved into a dreadful mask. “I will hear it.”

Surrounding shadows closed in, threatening to snuff out what meager light remained. A chill skittered across Kateryna’s neck as the walls expanded, and the hut itself breathed in—then back out.

“Your role is not so simple,” the old man said, annunciating each word in a rehearsed mimicry of the Valentine accent. “You stand at a crossroads, and you must tread the mire to make the final push. Retrieve the blade forged from the blood of a thousand heretics. Thrust its point into the heart of evil. Only then can Life and Death walk together again.”

“These are not your words…”

“No.” Ibrahim’s expression softened. “They are not. Take them as you will—but consider them with care.”

“I cannot—”

“You’ve stricken this world with imbalance!” The old man’s voice shook the walls, rattling the bamboo chimes lining the ceiling. “Surely, you can muster the courage to correct it!”

Montauk’s tocsin cry sounded from outside. Cain leapt to his feet and charged through the invisible doorway, light blooming into an elongated door-shaped hole in the shadows.

Kateryna scrambled to follow, but Ibrahim held her wrist, beckoning her to wait. “Dear Kateryna Cain of Undton, take these gifts to assist your journey. You need not charge into the abyss empty-handed.”

He handed her a leather kidney bag decorated with dark beaded cords. “This contains three doses of my elixir. It is all I have to give; take care to ration it.”

The old man then held out his hands, drawing a plain iron-tipped spear from thin air. “This is the Sun Spear of Dawn. May it light your way and always return to you.”

The spear was lighter than Kateryna’s lost harpoon but felt more durable. The haft was hewn from the branch of a sycamore, sanded and polished to a smooth matte finish. It hardly looked like a divine artifact—but a spear was a spear, and it was more than she had before.

Balance and chaos.

“Thank you, Ibrahim…”

“Now go!”

Kateryna dashed after Cain. He stood at the edge of the porch, sword in hand, Montauk crouching low beside him. Three riders, clad in the same black armor as Cain and mounted atop their own monsters, hovered around the hut. She gasped when she saw the hostage on the back of the smallest griffin.

“Seth!”

Cain held her behind him with his off hand. She caught a glimpse of the towering drop just over the ledge and immediately felt her stomach lurch. Seth locked eyes with her, but the gaunt rider had clamped a gloved hand over his mouth.

“Give it up, Arthur!” the gaunt man said. “This doesn’t have to get ugly. Let us do our jobs, eh? You can finally have some much-needed rest…”

“Get onto Montauk,” Cain whispered to Kateryna. “Fly to the Burning City.”

Kateryna shook her head. “I’m not leaving without you—you’re coming with me.”

“Ain’t no chance of that, girl,” said a hulking rider. “Your old man’s screams are about to join the rest in the Fields.”

“Kat,” Cain said, glaring at the three riders. “Go.”

Seth ripped the gaunt man’s hand from his mouth. “She has nothing to do with this!”

The gaunt man sighed. “If we let your girl go, will you let us get this over with?”

“Yes.”

“Foolish,” said the third rider, a Skanu woman with a shaved head, her face adorned with silver jewelry. “The girl will return.”

“Way I see it,” the gaunt man said, unsheathing his sword, “the Goddess demanded Arthur’s head—so that’s all we’ll take.”

“Coward,” said the big man.

“Enough!” Cain stepped off the porch into open air, as if it were solid ground.

Bright light shone through his pores, through his eyes and mouth—quickly shadowed by the unfurling of a great raven’s wings. Cain’s body contorted, his skin bubbling and roiling like so many beetles burrowing into a corpse, then shimmering as a diamond in the glow of morning.

The aspect of a tall, full-bodied woman encompassed Cain’s withered form—a Valkyrie of Wystran myth, straight out of the stories Kateryna’s mother had told her as a girl.

“Declared for death or no,” the Valkyrie’s voice resounded through the air. Storm clouds gathered above, rolling and toppling over one another. Lightning flashed and thunder clapped in time with the beat of the Valkyrie’s wings. “I am still the Chosen, the living avatar of the Great Mother’s divine will. If you should take my vessel, do not expect me to stand idle.”

The Valkyrie raised Cain’s battered longsword, now wreathed in a shroud of holy flame.

The two men exchanged incredulous glances. The Skanu lowered her head in rushed prayer. Kateryna fell back into Montauk.

“This doesn’t make sense,” the gaunt man muttered. “Who is she?”

“The Goddess lives, Derrida!” the Skanu cried. “As she once was, the Goddess lives!”

“I’m bored of this farce,” the big man hefted his halberd over his shoulder. “I yearn for blood!”

Montauk scooped her head between Kateryna’s legs, tossing her into Cain’s saddle, and launched into the sky and away from the coming battle. The wind battering Kateryna’s face, she leaned into Montauk’s ebon feathers for succor against the forces of gravity she was not accustomed to. Kateryna yanked on the beast’s feathers, screaming for it to halt, but Cain’s beloved griffin paid no heed.

Kateryna’s heart skipped a beat as she watched her father—no, the Valkyrie, the Goddess Incarnate—charge the big man, who twisted, narrowly evading the killing thrust of her flaming sword. The other two riders dipped, repositioning into a defensive formation. In the chaos of the maneuver, Seth had slipped from the gaunt man’s saddle, plummeting towards the waves below.

“Montauk! Please!” Kateryna screamed, tears flowing down her face. She was powerless, forced to watch her beloved die. Again.

Because I am weak—because I am cursed to fail him, over and over.

A soothing voice billowed through her mind, clear as a mother’s whisper to her babe. “You are not powerless, dear Kateryna.”

Montauk?

“Cain does not speak. Nor should you.”

Dive, Montauk. Please.

“As you wish.”

Next Chapter → The Dread Angel’s Riders

SOIL: the next chapter of Dusk & Dawn

I am preparing to begin my last revision on SOIL for its physical release. It will be available first on BackerKit in October, then to the public on December 22, the one-year anniversary of Ashen Rider. The entire text in its preliminary form is available free on Arcanist Online.

A couple of early reviews have come through already!

Coy Hall, author of Devilry in Godling Wood said: “With SOIL, Mills scratches at the frozen skin of a hardscrabble land, unleashing a tale that seeps forth like lifeblood from a cold wound. Worthy of the skalds of old.”

S.E. Lindberg, author of Grave’s Daughters said: “In the highland village of the Shins, every child is born into a family or onto an Old God’s dinner plate... expect the heartfelt drama of Larkrise to Candleford with ghost hunting, child sacrifices, werewolves, and witch trials.”

This last revision is focused purely on a cosmetic and continuity related irks. I’m going to reinforce the Scottish Highland dialect in the Prologue and Part One; writing that book in a rolling release, I was admittedly a bit scared to lean so hard into a dialect and got more comfortable as I went.

Beyond that there’s some continuity things: a side character’s youngest son who later appeared as a daughter; The Old God’s Skjöld name changed from Grode/Grøde to Gørde (pronounced GURD) improve compliance with Norwegian pronunciation; and changing the Shin’s overcast days to an Arctic timeline of long nights and days where the sun never fully rises).

This is my proudest work to date, and I’m so excited for readers to get their hands on it. I have my hands on a text-only paperback proof, but I’m working commission and license some art to really amp up the visual experience, which is part of the reason I’m bringing to BackerKit’s Printopia.

The Arcanist’s BackerKit is Killing It!

We brought the first two issues of Mordschlag Sword and Sorcery Magazine and the next four issues of The Literary Fantasy Magazine to BackerKit this summer, which still has 18 days left in the campaign. We funded in 3 hours, 200% funded in 1 day, and smashed our $10,000 stretch goal in 2 days.

I’m blown away by this response. Crowdfunding was a format I’ve long lurked on, unsure if I could ever succeed on it. Not even a year after my first attempt, it’s helped me cultivate a vibrant community and build a real publishing business. Stuff like this wasn’t possible even 20 years ago.

Since we funded, I am now able to pay over 30 writers a per word rate who had originally agreed to publish their work for free. I’ll also have the funds to consistently compensate my team members who have donated their time and expertise largely unpaid for 2 years.

If you want to help us hit our next stretch goal at $12,500, (whose book, Kingdoms Trembling, I wrote a glowing review for) will join Mordschlag Issue #0 with an excellent new Weird S&S novelette, called “Gnawed Bones.”

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Interview with the Gung-Ho Geeks

I was interviewed by the Gung-Ho Geeks, a Sword & Sorcery podcast/blog who have talked with folks like David C. Smith and Sean C.W. Korsgaard.

I took over their blog with a massive write up about Mordschlag, Publishing/Crowdfunding, Lee Patton’s Izrak the Deathless, and my adoration for Lin Carter.

You can read that here.

What Am I Writing Next?

Before I revise SOIL, I’ve been working on a few short stories. I just finished and landed a new Tarmun the Roach story in a new anthology next year. I’ve written and polished several Tarmun stories, and he’s appeared in SOIL Part V. The only place you can read one right now is on the Arcanist Online preview of Mordschlag. I eventually plan to compile these stories into a fixup novel called Dawn of the Roach.

Right now, I’m drafting a novelette based on the life of greek tragedian Sophocles that I outlined with the help of my friend and Mordschlag contributor , a process which I’ll soon make available as a video podcast series.

After SOIL, I plan to finally begin work on what will be the final iteration of What Lies Below. This was the first book I’ve ever written and it has been rewritten from scratch three times over. I likely would have dropped the project, except that I promised it to my friends and family who backed my Dusk and Dawn Kickstarter. I stand by my word and so the book must be written.

The story as it once was did not work, and so what I thought was a finished manuscript I can use to fulfill the campaign… ended up in the trash (lesson learned: do not kickstart a book until it is a retail-ready paperback in your hands).

I am slowly re-outlining this story from scratch, scrapping almost everything I established in the past (it was my first book, after all, and thus riddled with newbie mistakes).

I have created a new main character which I think pull together the old characters in a way that wasn’t present before and make for a much better story. It will also tie into the antagonistic “meta-narrative” running through Ashen Rider and SOIL.

I am exciting to see what shape it takes next.

Beyond that, I will write more Sword & Sorcery stories and considering a direct sequel to SOIL. I have a solid concept for such a tale, but there’s much to be done before I can even fathom another project.

Till next time folks, thanks for sticking around!

Greetings, traveler,

This is where the mad wizard’s dreams start to fire off; we see other characters through a different lens. It’s also where Kateryna’s true pain begins to come into focus, and we begin to understand how she risked mirroring the mistakes of her father.

Also! I’m crowdfunding The Arcanist’s 2026 Fantasy Magazines on BackerKit. If you like what I do, consider backing and picking up a paperback copy of Ashen Rider as an add-on.

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From the collected journals of a mad wizard

I spent days pacing the tiles of my quarters in the western wing of the Citadel. I spent days pondering the implications of my visions, searching desperately for the thread that tied together everything I had seen thus far. I knew that somehow, I was bound to the poor people in the Vale Betwixt, and that it was my responsibility to intervene.

My colleagues were thrilled that I had returned from my morose expedition, and they pounded on my doors throughout the day. Yet I ignored them. In truth, my soul was still in Morgana’s possession, though my body had escaped. Each night, I lay awake dreading the baleful nightmare that might next plague my dreams. I dared not allow my colleagues to see me in such a degenerate state for fear that they would cast me out.

It had been weeks since last I bathed, for the bath house was several blocks away and surely, I would be spotted should I venture out. I stank of rotten eggs—the stench of sulfur. Bath or no, dear reader, the malodor of hell falls from the unclaimed. Yet, despite my own efforts with soap and cloth, I could not wash away my folly.

My soul was mine no longer, and thus, I was entrenched in a battle between Life and Death.

You, my dear reader, possess the fortune of hindsight. The fact you are reading my words, published and printed, is evidence enough that my fate was salvaged. So too, I was bound to my course—compelled to see it through.

It was the better part of a month before I worked up the nerve to weave my oneiromancy, to summon a dream of my own accord. I lit a bundle of frankincense and lavender in my urn to cleanse the air of malicious particles. I circled my bed with salt, skimmed from the surface of the Black Sea, a mile below my feet, for all eleven days of the academic week. Chanting the ancient words of the arcane, I called for the answers I sought.

The moment I closed my eyes, I was dragged into another world—another time.

* * *

Standing on the peak of a gentle hill, I looked out unto a vast sea of rolling, rubrous, golden grasses. The land dipped and bucked, falling and rising with thick, spiky heads of wheat bulging with ample grain. This sight had once made me profoundly happy. Today, however, I was consumed with apprehension.

I unfurled my slender fingers, my nails trimmed but lined with dark soil. In my callused palm lay a gleaming ring of white gold, set with a swollen garnet. I wiped my eyes; no direction felt like the right one, and I was stuck idling away in my ambivalence.

Sucking a breath of dry, late summer air, I felt a hint of peace—if only in the familiarity of the heat, the wind battering me as if I had opened the wrought-iron door to a furnace, a blanket of sweat and fatigue the only comfort of the season.

I took one last glimpse at the land, sprawling and free, then turned around. In the distance, perhaps a league or so, a rugged keep sat awaiting my return. Much farther beyond the keep stood the looming spires of Valencia, as they stood just before the fall of the Empire and immediately after, before the first Laszlo had built them higher, after the invaders were defeated.

I had come out here and pondered my escape every day for the last month and had yet to enact my plot. I did not know if ever I might work up the courage. I sighed and began the long trek home.

My mother was sitting at the head of the dining table when I arrived, staring aimlessly at the wall. She had become so frail, fallen so ill since father left us to fight the invaders. Her once-sumptuous brunette curls had dried into wispy cords. Her blue eyes that had seen so much had fallen into the sockets and glossed over. A dull, familiar ache in my gut beset me as I rubbed my mother’s shoulders and whispered gently into her ear.

“The monarchs are migrating, mother,” I said as if coaxing a child to spend time outdoors. “We should walk to the meadow and watch, like we used to.”

But my mother only sat there, her eyes now affixed on the old portrait hanging above the hearth. She and my father looked so healthy, so content, holding me as a newborn.

“I’ll have someone brew a pot of chamomile,” I said, forcing out the words, feigning compassion as I had for years now.

Air whistled through my mother’s teeth as her exhalation escaped her. “Why, Kat? Why did he leave us? What have I done wrong?”

“You did nothing wrong!”

She wept at the escalation of my volume, her cries a stuttering staccato that she no longer attempted to withhold. I shook my head, the muscles in my jaw tensing as I pulled my mouth flat, so she did not see my vexation.

I was so tired, so exhausted. And I had had enough.

I marched to the hearth, then pulled down the damnable portrait, pulling the mounting peg out of the plastered wall, leaving behind a gaping wound above a second peg, which briefly held a different portrait before the one I grasped was solemnly replaced.

“What—what are you doing?” My mother cried, rising from her seat for the first time that day.

I only snarled and threw the painting into the hearth, glaring into my father’s uncaring black eyes as his bitter countenance was consumed by hellfire. The flames crackled, the paint sizzled; together, they hissed: “You’ll burn, too.” I silenced the jeering with a fire poker, thrusting the iron tip through my father’s expressionless mask until my mother pulled helplessly at my sleeves.

“Why?” she wailed. “Am I not tortured enough? My only child…” She fell to her knees before the smoldering canvas and did not move again until her chambermaids retrieved her after midnight.

The next morning, I stood before the full-body mirror in my mother’s dressing room. I hardly recognized myself. I should have felt utterly vacillated, thrilled to walk the aisle into my own home, my own life. Away from my withering mother, who had begun to drain me alongside herself.

I should have been blessed with beautiful certainty. Instead, I scrutinized every detail of my pearly white gown.

Truly, the garment was gorgeous, immaculate, and befitting of the measured poise a governess should exude. But when I looked at the woman wearing it, saw her braided auburn locks, all I saw were the frizzled infant hairs jutting obstinately out of place. I stared into her freckled face, still scarred from youthful pocks and the fishing hook that had caught her cheek as a girl. I watched her pale, gray eyes—nothing like the resplendence my mother’s own once held—travel the length of my awkward, muscular body.

Any other woman could fill this dress and would better live up to the precedent it set. Any other woman would better serve my betrothed and his people.

The man I was to marry was kind, stately; gallant, as the wards, daughters of minor houses, liked to say. And who was I? The daughter of an orphan and a nomad, the girl who played with bugs and the woman who chops her own wood for the fire, who fishes for her own food and prepares her own dinners. Yes, I was bestowed a title at birth—but I was no lady. I had no manners, nor did I have the poise and the tact of a proper, noble lady.

“He deserves a better woman…” I said to the empty room, as my mother could not be bothered to leave her bed on my wedding day. “He deserves someone beautiful and decisive and regal… Not me…”

I wanted to be the one, to be his wife, to fill that dress with wide, child-bearing hips and ample breasts that could feed my sons and daughters. Yet the seams were too tight around my shoulders and stomach, and too loose around my chest. The corset suffocated me, siphoned my breath, even though life had already stolen every bit of air from my sails—and I had nothing more to give.

I stared at that woman and made a decision.

I would not stand idle and let the tide of duty lay claim to me; I would not make the same mistakes my father had. I would stand up for my ideals—even if they were inherently wrong. If I did not, no one else would.

Removing the white-gold ring from the third finger on my right hand, I placed it gingerly on the nearby vanity. I stripped off the flowing white gown I had no business wearing. I wiped the paint from my face. I stripped myself of my right to vanity. In its place, I donned my father’s old tunic and leather riding greaves, tied on a padded jerkin, and slid my hardened feet into my worn leather boots that I had worn to travel every path and hill within my father’s holdings.

I slipped out the backdoor before the guests arrived for the ceremony.

* * *

As I stirred from my summoned slumber, I was awakened by someone pounding upon my front door. I rubbed the grit and dried tears from my eyes, shaking my head. “Oh, my poor, sweet Kateryna…” I mourned under my breath as I hurried to greet my impatient visitors.

Approaching the door, I was surprised to sense the presence of the Headmaster of the Citadel, Pascal Doon the Lavender. Dragons who walk in the shoes of men reek of sorcery and radiate heat, which feels much like sunlight—even through doors.

I had already begun reciting my salutations before I finished opening the door. “My dear friend! What draws you away from your busy schedule?”

“You’ve not left your quarters in the weeks since your return.” Pascal Doon said as he stepped heavily over my threshold. His tone was eloquent and well-measured, yet his voice was guttural and primal, emanating from deep within his diaphragm. “The faculty is worried your expeditions have been too taxing on you. They desire to know if we need to solicit outside help to assist you in escaping your nightmares.”

“Nightmares? I have no nightmares! I am on the cusp of a great discovery, a most venerable breakthrough! Nightmares? Bah! I laugh at the notion, Headmaster. Neigh—I scoff at it!”

“Could you share what you’ve found? I must know why you’ve been sequestered so.”

I grumbled, crossing my arms. A cold draft licked my manhood, and I realized my loincloth had fallen off while I slept. Startled, I ambled to my wardrobe and hurried into a silken bathrobe.

“I will submit my research for peer review when it has been concluded. Be patient, you cold-blooded cur!”

A low growl rumbled in the back of my old friend’s throat. “Understand, my friend, what follows is out of my hands. You’ve made your bed.”

“What? I haven’t made my bed in weeks!”

Two orderlies appeared on either side of me, taking hold of my arms. I was astounded that I had not smelled their sorcery. Perhaps, I thought to myself, I was a bit worse for wear. My dawning understanding did not prevent my fruitless kicking and shouting of obscenities and draconic slurs.

It was far from my finest moment, dear reader.

“I need to know you’re okay,” Pascal Doon said calmly, after I had screamed my throat to ribbons. “We’re taking you to the trial facilities. You will dream under our supervision. From there, we will present our findings to the faculty chair, and they will decide if you should continue this project.”

The term “faculty chair” enraged me. Despite my bleeding throat, I began another litany. “You bastard! You can’t censor me; I bloody built this place, brick by bloody brick! My mind is hammer and chisel, my word is law, my findings established sorcery as we know it! You fools are keeping me from witnessing the most significant metaphysical event in recorded history!” And on and on I went, frothing at the mouth as the orderlies dragged me through the western wing’s halls, where the most esteemed professors lived and heard my mad tirade.

I have since grown to appreciate that my friend was only trying to help me. I even thanked him for his intervention and empathy. Eventually. Understand, dear reader, I had not slept for nearly a month—truly slept, for the sake of rest and recouperation—and I had developed an unhealthy obsession regarding my parasocial friends in Pandemonium and my seemingly damned soul, of which I had entirely lost track.

In the trial facility, they were forced to bind me with chains and a straitjacket. When I refused to sleep, muttering incantations to caffeinate my blood, they had to inject me with a sedative. Once the drugs took effect, and I was high and agreeable, the researchers led me through my ritual to summon a dream. It was all rather humiliating, but ultimately necessary.

As I drifted off—more like spinning, because of the drugs—my awareness was pulled yet again below the earth’s crust. The sedative had put me at ease, and with the support of the researchers, I was able to regain control of my bird’s eye view and stay hidden from the denizens of hell.

* * *

A young man wandered through a gray field, shrouded in roiling mists. He rubbed his arms, a vain attempt to subdue the incessant shivers caused by his soaked clothing and his overwhelming fever. His boots had been reduced to tatters, his toes bloodied from the long walk from the distant shore.

The man screamed his brother’s name. He wondered how many hours—days?—he had been calling, searching to no avail. Now his voice was failing him, overused and wracked by pestilence.

The mist parted behind the man.

A devil had been stalking him for the better part of an hour and now moved in for its coveted feast. The man had no idea how much danger he was in, his awareness eroded by the gaseous influence of the mist which plagued the Screaming Fields, designed to disorient lost souls until they were eaten. I wondered why my dreams had bonded with someone so insignificant. But I watched on, as I have long since learned to trust my Art.

The devil, in an act of playful curiosity, revealed itself to the young man, who, in frenzied sublimation, soiled his already soiled trousers and fell weeping to his knees. It leaned forward on thick arms, hunching like a gorilla to support its bulbous torso, hanging its mottled face above the poor man’s head, laughing at its good fortune and drooling with hunger.

“Please…” the man sobbed. “I need to find my brother. Let me find him, then you can eat me! You can eat me a million times over… Please…”

The great devil threw back its head and let out an incredulous guffaw, a terrible tumult of lost souls it had already devoured through the eons. What wonderful luck! It bent down low to the man’s height, stitching together an agreeable countenance.

“You make a compelling proposition, poor mortal,” said the devil. “Tell me, what is your brother’s name?”

“Isshiah… He’s just a boy…”

The devil hooted and snorted in amusement.

How foolish mortals can be! I need not remind you, dear reader, never tell a devil anyone’s true name for any reason.

“Ah, yes… Isshiah… A wonderful name, a godly name. I can lead you to your Isshiah—on one condition.”

Flesh folded in on itself in the beast’s chest, and a scrawny set of hands emerged holding a scrap of papyrus, every inch covered with a scrawl of unintelligible script. It plucked a thick hair from the perimeter of its puffy areola and used it to circle a blank line with its inky blood.

The denizens of hell often revel in bureaucracy, and it is oft said that our modern governing structures were first employed in the Burning City of Grahtzildahn. Devils revel in the hunt—and when they catch their prey, they use contracts and riddles to play with their food like mouser cats chasing chipmunks up trees.

The man took hold of the improvised quill with a tremulous, battered hand. He was about to sign the devil’s document, but was stopped by a shrill cry from above. Morgana’s riders—her remaining Chosen mounted atop their griffins, emerged through the clouds in V-formation.

The woman taking point soared over the beast’s head while the two men in the rear crashed into the demon, forcing it onto its back.

Syr Gabriel leapt from his mount and buried the head of his halberd into the devil’s exposed, fleshy underbelly.

Dame Citha screamed a command, her griffin rearing back, allowing updrafts to carry it toward the clouds. She pulled the string of her longbow, a bolt of light appearing in an arrow’s stead, then sent it spearing through the devil’s skull—ending its miserable existence in an instant.

The young man fell onto his haunches before the riders, relief spreading across his haggard face. Syr Derrida dismounted, pulling the man to his feet.

“It ain’t Arthur.” Gabriel said, then spat on the ground.

Derrida sighed. “Clearly.”

“Gut ‘im and move on, eh?”

Terror flooded the man’s expression, but Derrida raised a pacifying hand. “Don’t you see who this is? Raise a finger and I’ll feed it to Krakow.” Derrida’s mount snapped his beak to punctuate the point.

Still flying overwatch in the sky, Citha called out: “Time to move—the hordes caught our scent!”

“Tell me, boy,” Derrida yanked the young man’s arm and slapped him across the face, “have you seen Arthur?”

“Isshiah…” he groaned. “I’m searching for Isshiah… Father, please. You must help me.”

“I don’t give two shits about your simpering whelp, Derrida!” Gabriel roared over the thundering footfalls of the encroaching mass. “We need to fly!”

“Seth! Have you seen him?”

“Leave the boy, he’s dead anyhow!”

“Don’t leave me…” Seth bawled, collapsing at the feet of his ambivalent father.

“Derrida!” Citha yelled from on high, hurling beams of light at the drones leading the way for their heavier cohorts—all hungry for mortal flesh. “Time’s up!”

Syr Derrida took a final glance at the scared little boy before him. He had never cared for Seth; he had always been a weakling. A pathetic excuse for an heir… and just when his eldest son was beginning to show promise, he had committed the most cowardly act of all, betraying their entire family in one fell swoop.

What enraged Derrida most was how much Seth reminded him of himself. Derrida had never been brave—he was a pragmatist, only choosing battles he knew he could win. Yet his shit of a son had made it halfway across the Screaming Fields unarmed and unmounted as his failing body ate itself. Could Derrida have done the same?

Probably not.

“On your feet, lad!” Derrida mounted and pulled Seth onto Krakow’s back. A mental command brought them sweeping into the sky just as the skittering waves closed in, trampling over themselves in a blood-starved frenzy.

Gabriel glared at Derrida as they continued to the threshold, the border between Morgana’s realm and Grahtzildahn. Morgana’s newest Herald cared not for his companion’s resentment—he did not intend for the lumbering fool to return.

Next Chapter → The Oracle of Dawn

Overall, Battleborn fuckin’ rocks! With a solid spread of fiction, critical nonfiction—both original works and reprinted classics—beautiful interior art and a fun, in-your-face Military vibe, it’s an aggressive push for more action-oriented works of Fantasy in an industry failing to appeal to the average Joe.

In my original video review, I had a couple gripes understanding that the eARC I read wasn’t necessarily indicative of a final product. One gripe has been resolved, another remains.

For disclosure, while I was provided a free eARC by the publisher, I purchased my physical copy with my own money; my opinions are my own.

But is Battleborn right for you? If you love S&S, it’s certainly a worthy addition to your bookshelf. Let’s talk about why.

Oh hey! If you love S&S, check out my BackerKit for Mordschlag Sword and Sorcery Magazines.

Also, you can watch my full interview with Battleborn EiC, Sean C.W. Korsgaard on YouTube.

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The Fiction… It’s All Fantastic.

I cannot pick favorites here. I loved almost every story in this issue and the couple that weren’t for me were clearly great stories that would appeal to another reader.

A unique aspect to Battleborn is the variety of authors; we have newcomers like TJ Marquis and his excellent espionage/assassination tale, “Vengeance Vow”; Lee Patton’s “Temple of the River King” featuring an undead mercenary furnished with silky smooth prose reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith.

There’s tales from established names in the community, like zorro-esque “The Fury’s Blade” by Robert Rhodes and the indie-pubbed warrior, Skarde’s bender in “To Boast of Victory” by .

Something that sets Battleborn apart is editor Sean C.W. Korsgaard’s devotion to reprinting classic tales, some of which have been out of print for nearly 40 years. Michael Shea’s excellent “Pearls of the Vampire Queen” makes a return to print for the first time since 1982!

One of my favorites in the collection is the first print appearance of “A Stone’s Throw” by Howard Andrew Jones. This issue introduced to Jones’s legendary Hanuvar of Lord of a Shattered Land and two sequels comprising The Hanuvar Chronicles, which are some of the best works of modern Sword & Sorcery I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.

Sadly, Jones passed away in early 2025, so this may be the last time we see a newly printed Hanuvar tale. I did not have the pleasure of knowing him, but I eagerly study the brilliant works he left behind.

The Essays… A Thoughtful Inclusion

The essays serve a few functions: supporting the heroic/military theme of the publication and celebrating the Sword & Sorcery genre as a whole.

Personally, I enjoyed every single one, but I also recognize that it’s not what some people will be coming to this magazine for. There’s plenty of fiction to chew on, so if it’s not your thing I don’t think it will harm the experience.

If it is your thing, well… you’ll be pleased by the sheer level of detail writers like and Jason Ray Carney dive into with their literary analysis. There’s also a wonderful curated list of further recommended reading by Gregory D. Mele. Korsgaard penned a couple of panels and a historic tale of heroism from the real world. Good stuff, all round.

The Art and Design… A Feast for the Eyes

Battleborn’s interior design is one of the inspirations behind the design of my own magazine, Mordschlag Sword & Sorcery (though I failed to mention that in the video version of my last post… sorry guys, but I got it in last Substack article!)

The vibe is classic and timeless. High contrast black and white art… my favorite. I was an English major, not an Art major, so instead of trying to describe these things like I know what I’m talking about, I’ll just show you a couple of my favorite pieces:

My Singular Gripe

In my original video a couple months back, I critiqued Battleborn’s online availability. I’m pleased to say that it is now easily available on Amazon Kindle. Paperback access to non-backers is in the works; Korsgaard told one of my YouTube viewers that they’re shipping product to Amazon’s distribution center as I write this.

The remaining pain point is the typesetting itself. I love the overall design, but the execution of the body text is inconsistent, which causes distraction while reading. Flipping the physical pages, I can see sizes and fonts changing.

I do hope this gets resolved in Issue 2; the fiction in these pages deserves to be read without hindrance.

In Sum

Battleborn Magazine has positioned itself on the frontlines of fantasy, fighting the good fight against rapidly declining rates of reading. The breadth of its offerings are varied and ambitious.

The mix of short and longer form fiction, non-fiction, and visual art make akin to a fiction-first iteration of The Savage Sword of Conan. I have a lot of respect for the folks at Battleborn and I hope to see them succeed as the release of Issue 2 approaches and they move into Year 2.

That was the first appearance of Mordschlag Sword & Sorcery Magazine, which began as a very simple idea before blossoming into something so much more.

I opened up the first submission period and a month later, I had an full issue of 100 pages of prose. I thought I would just print out a few zines for the contributors and give out a free eBook. I thought that was the end of it.

Then, people kept asking me about Mordschlag; more than anything else I’ve published thus far.

I spent some time poring over Tales from the Magician’s Skull, New Edge Sword & Sorcery, Battleborn Magazine, my old school Dungeons and Dragons books, and a beautiful copy of The Magic Goes Away that I found at a Goodwill.

I put my nose to the grindstone and let my imagination go wild. I started sharing some images of the design, and people started getting really excited.

So, I did what any rational business-minded creative would do. I listened to my readers and made Mordschlag a real magazine, an actual printed-product that people can get their meaty hands on. Not only is it a space for new Sword & Sorcery writers to cut their teeth, but it’s also a place where they can share pages with the greats of our genre.

What started as a passing thought on a lunch break has turned into a something of a watershed moment for The Arcanist. We’re about to launch Mordschlag and the 2026 issues of Literary Fantasy Magazine on BackerKit and I’ve never felt so pumped for a launch.

But making a magazine from scratch is no easy task, and it’s definitely not my first lap around the arena. So I want to review at a high level the steps I took to turn Mordschlag from daydream to paperback.

If you like what I do and want to support, please check our BackerKit campaign, going live Friday, July 24, 12pm EDT.

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First Steps and Submissions

The very first thing I did was come up with a cover concept. Typically, this should be one of your last steps in creating anything, but for me, it helps to create a window into the future where I can imagine a tangible result.

Somehow I received 50 submissions for the very first issue. This was my first sign that Mord was more than I gave it credit for. For reference, in the entirety of 2025, I received 250 submission for The Literary Fantasy Magazine. In one week, I got 1/5 of that amount for Mord.

Since this was just an experiment at this point, I went through the submissions on my own, without the help of the submission readers team. That was challenging—and a bit grueling. I had a very clear picture of what I wanted to feature in issue #0 and so I was pretty harsh when swimming through the pile.

I had only 3 spots, but I found 7 standout submissions that I shortlisted. Out of those seven, I found my three stories to publish in issue 0. Since I have other publications, two more got accepted for other venues.

5 out of 50 submissions, that’s a 10% acceptance rate—and I don’t think that my markets will ever get to be so generous again. The more submissions, the lower the acceptance rate.

A Testbed for Weird Ideas

TLFM is very organized and plainly presented. For Mord, I wanted to take a leap, do interesting things that I might not do otherwise. I wanted a fourth story for issue #0 that was a crossover. So I reached out to Lee Patton and we tried something we’ve never done before—we took turns writing a short story featuring some of my characters exploring a place in his setting.

We aimed at 5,000 words. The story clocked in at 9,100; that’s a flippin’ novelette. Issue 0 already had an 8,000 word story and a 10,000—and this opened the door for another quirk that makes Mordschlag stand on its own.... most S&S magazines only allow up to 6,000 words; yet the classics thrive at the 10 to 12 thousand mark.

I often see writers lamenting how few markets there are which accept long form work. Now Mordschlag is one of those places.

The Design and Formfactor

With the stories chosen, I began to refine the presentation. I redesigned the cover, taking a high contrast B+W image from Diego Castro, who is absolutely excellent by , and with his permission, I recolored the negative space to red.

Not just any red, but a shade that might be found on the Dungeons and Dragon basic box of the 1970s. I looked around at these old products, I’ve always loved how the rule books and the adventure modules were multicolored; they look so interesting on a shelf.

So I yet again looked to Goodman Games, who published Tales of the Magicians Skull, and reference the coloration of their 5e conversions of classic adventures, and I decided to make a four issue pattern.

Issue #0 is red, 1 is blue, 2 is yellow, and 3 is purple. It adds a bit of color to a very black+white interior. And you can put them on the shelf with your OSR books.

Mord’s interior design is my favorite thing about it and I went wild with it. I used the combination of sans-serif headers with serif body text, common in old school D&D books, and I ensured that every story has a spread illustration, and at least, a half page introductory image. I filled out any blank space I saw with excellent artwork.

Integrating Tabletop

Speaking of D&D, a sorely missed column in the Tales from the Magician’s Skull was their Monster Pit, which featured a bunch of monsters pulled from the stories, ready-to-play in Goodman Games’s flagship game, Dungeon Crawl Classics.

While I studying the market of similar magazines, I realized no one else is doing this anymore. The original run of the Skull only lasted 12 issues and no one else has tackled this concept since.

I began my writing career as a freelance game designer for Fifth Edition D&D. I’ve long since moved on from 5e… but last year at GenCon, I had an excellent time playing ShadowDark RPG by Kelsey Dionne of the Arcane Library and I recalled her incredibly generous third party license.

So I contacted Arcane Library ensuring my idea was inline with their license and when they gave me the go ahead, I added my own take on the Monster Pit to Mord.

Menagerie Macabre will be found in the back of every issue of Mordschlag Sword & Sorcery Magazine, featuring not only monsters pulled from the fiction and ready to play in Shadowdark RPG, with short two page adventures utilizing the new monsters.

I’ve long yearned to get back in touch with my RPG roots and Mordschlag is just the perfect place to dip my toes back in.

Shoutout to Arcanist author Michael Goe for coming up with Menagerie Macabre.

Little Touches, a playground for my every creative whim

Mordschlag has truly become a playground for every cool idea I’ve ever had or adapted from other cool works I admire. It’s a far cry from the professional tone of TLFM while maintaining the same strict standards of quality.

I’m playing with a few other ideas which will make it into the first couple issues.

• Instead of notes from the editor, I’m going to write my meta-commentary from the perspective of Lord Mord, whose helm has been punctured by a murder stroke. Many pulp magazines have something of a mascot, and its a fun tradition I want to follow.

• Coming next year will be special Mordschlag issues, whose covers depict a mordschlag in action. Those issues will contain a special key to Lord Mord’s secret library, which will reveal a hidden story.

• Recurring characters from returning authors is a huge focus for the magazine. I’m working to simultaneously open the doors for newcomers, highlight veterans of the genre, and give cool original characters a consistent stage.

In Sum

I’m so excited for Mordschlag. Seriously, I’ve never had so much fun designing a publication and it means the world to me that this is the one that’s working for so many people.

Mordschlag Sword & Sorcery Magazine is available first on BackerKit on Friday, July 24th, 12pm EDT. Early bird backers and followers will receive free bookmarks and you’ll have to oppurtunity to pick up every book we’ve ever published at a reduced price.

I hope to see you there.

Greetings, traveler,

This was yet another scene that had been written and rewritten several times before the book was finished. The Oracle of Dawn was a concept I had since the story’s conception, but exactly who he was and why he mattered didn’t come until much later.

What ended up in the book was so much more wild than I thought it could become.

Also! I’m crowdfunding The Arcanist’s 2026 Fantasy Magazines on BackerKit. If you like what I do, consider giving that page a follow so you don’t miss the launch.

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In the sky, escaping Morgana’s demesne

The Vale Betwixt, first layer of Pandemonium

Atop Montauk’s back, soaring over the gray and dying lands that made up the Screaming Fields, the silver valley did not seem so dismal. Rushing by, the ground looked like a canvas, covered with a dark base of oils, yet to be rendered further. Pandemonium had no expression, no harmony, as the land of the living above. Monrovia had been a hovel, everything beyond its limits a deathtrap. Aside from the nauseating swell of waves and failing support pillars, all was still and lifeless in Morgana’s demesne.

Ancient myths, stories Kateryna had heard as a child off the mouths of traveling raconteurs, told of the Vale Betwixt and the cool color of its perpetual sunset, of the brittle sway of the leaves dancing in the languid breeze. Fulcrum had once told Kateryna that the sea they lived on was the flooded River Acheron, which Morgana had laid waste to, separating the borderlands between Life and Death.

So much waste. Soil, once carefully cultivated, now overwatered to drown out any and all life. Why—for what?

Kateryna felt Cain’s slow breath on the back of her neck. She was on edge with him so close, not yet accustomed to the notion that he was no longer her enemy—that he suddenly cared about his role as her father.

How is it we were pulled down with you, father? Did you sell our souls for your gain? Or was this all an unfortunate accident?

She shivered, shifted uncomfortably in the saddle, eyes trained again on the meager bloodstain besmirching the saddle-horn. How long had it been there? To whom did it belong? How many people had this man cut down between his two lives?

She buried all that—pushed it way down. None of those questions yielded helpful answers, nor did they help Kateryna to feel right about her new direction. All that mattered was that she found her mother. One way or another.

“Someone left ahead of me,” Kateryna said, if only to distract herself from her worries. “He had a day’s lead on me. He might be down below.”

Cain grunted. “I’ve not seen another boat. Nor has Montauk.”

“We haven’t searched for one.”

“No—but we’d have seen it. If it still sailed.”

If it still sailed… Kateryna had come to the same conclusion the moment she laid eyes on the leviathan. Where have you gone, Seth? Can I find you, too? Probably not. That hurt.

“He would have perished if he stayed behind…” Cain said through clenched teeth. “The Goddess took them all.”

Kateryna winced. Because of me… I taunted her, drew her ire.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet. Pandemonium is massive. Not even I have seen all its corners.”

“We need a map.”

“There are no maps. At least, not ones we can read. I know someone who might give us direction, should his mood allow it.” Cain pointed to a dark spot in the distance, hovering high in front of a gargantuan wall of light on the horizon. “He lives on the border of Morgana and Grahtzildahn.”

She glanced back at him. “The Burning City…”

Cain nodded.

Kateryna watched as the threshold drew closer. Soon, she could make out the mosaic pattern of sea foam and shattered glass, barring the fogs of The Screaming Fields from mixing with the black soot clouds pressing in from the other side. The two underworlds warred for territory against unwavering borders, pressing them into a bitter, eternal stalemate. The undulating hills beyond the threshold reminded Kateryna of home—not as they were throughout her childhood, but as they had lain barren the day she returned home to find her family had long since perished.

“Can this someone be trusted?”

Cain forced a curt laugh. “No one can be trusted, Kat. But he may help us yet. We fly to the Oracle of Dawn, the only man who can still commune with the gods above.”

More hours passed by, mostly spent in tense silence, interrupted by an occasional question from Kateryna and Cain’s unsavory, honest answer. She was beginning to doze when they came upon a ramshackle hut lodged within the middle of the border threshold.

On one side, the hut was rotten, the wood panels swollen from the humidity of Morgana’s demesne, and sickly grass wept from between the decaying thatch covering the roof. On the other side, the thatch was blackened, cooked by the blazing heat of Grahtzildahn radiating throughout the Demon King’s realm. Some force of sorcery suspended the structure high in the air—perhaps it was the threshold that held it aloft, perhaps something else entirely. The sight pained Kateryna. For so long, she had toiled to raise her sagging village away from the encroaching tides, yet here was the solution to all their problems, not three days’ journey away.

Montauk landed gracefully on the small porch, hardly big enough to hold her. Floorboards bemoaned their protest as Cain dismounted.

“Worry not,” he said. “This place cannot be damaged—not by the likes of us, at least.”

Cain opened the door, not bothering to knock, then strode into the inky darkness beyond.

Kateryna followed, her eyes widening as she saw the massive chamber within, much larger than the meager exterior structure implied. She wiped tears from her eyes as a thick aroma of smoldering frankincense and lavender battered her senses. This is high sorcery, the stuff of dreams… or nightmares.

It took some time for her eyes to adjust to the dim light, sourced from one hanging iron lantern, dancing with viscous shadow, pushing ever inward to snuff out what little light remained. Bamboo wind chimes hung motionless about the chamber, which seemed to expand endlessly into the void surrounding them. The door evaporated with a suppurating pop! as it settled shut behind them of its own accord.

A black man—a native of Northern Skan’basan, by his dress and complexion—sat cross-legged beneath the lantern. A bloodied bandage covered his face, save for his mouth. Patches of his skin had been flayed, leaving plots of gnarled, twisted pink quilting across what little flesh was revealed. He wore a ring on each finger of his right hand—one of tarnished gold, two of silver, one of oxidized copper, and the last of rusted iron. His rings were all missing their stones, sockets barren.

“You’ve returned…” the old man said, mildly amused. His voice rang out, deep and clear, unlike anything Kateryna had expected. “I was beginning to think you were forever lost.”

Cain removed his boots, then sat on the floor across him. Kateryna did the same.

“And here I am.”

“Yes… But you are not whole.”

Cain was expressionless. “I’m not.”

The old man flashed his large, ivory teeth, then turned as if to address Kateryna—as if he could see her. “Kateryna Cain of Undton, the would-be governess of Daizeton. It is a pleasure to finally meet you.”

Kateryna swallowed ash.

She had forgotten about that, and now that aspect of her life, long since passed, poured into the basin of her memory as an overeager cupbearer overfills a lord’s chalice. Oh gods… An image of a freshly carved tombstone consumed her vision. “Here lies the lord’s eldest son,” the stone had read. He should have never looked twice at me.

“And you, as well—” Kateryna was overtaken by a series of hollow coughs. She cleared her throat and finished: “And you, Oracle.”

The old man chortled, threw an exasperated hand at Cain. “This is how you’ve introduced me? I am insulted!” He spat into a golden cup at his side, which rang like a bell. “My name, dear Kateryna, is Ibrahim, Prophet of Dawn, the Great Mother Birth, known to your ancestors as Bridget and known to mine as Umi’al-jamise! You can call her whatever you like; she is not a picky goddess… unlike her sister, the Lady of the Chair.” He shot a sidelong glance at Cain, who shrank beneath the old man’s scrutiny like a child scolded.

Cain looked away and did not say anything to defend himself.

Kateryna was also at a loss for words, then beset by another fit of coughing, mucus streaming down her face. Her awareness rolled in and out, her vision wavered.

A firm hand grasped her shoulder. “Sit up, child,” Ibrahim said, not unkindly, “swallow this, and be still.”

The rim of a bottle touched her lips. Bitter, viscous fluid seeped down her tattered throat. A cool wind touched the inside of her chest, and when it touched her stomach, the nausea and coughing ceased.

“Gods…” Kateryna whispered, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. “What is that?”

“Lilac and gooseberries, with a touch of honey.” Ibrahim pinched the air to demonstrate.

She stared at him.

The old man guffawed and slapped his knees, his deep voice reverberating through the floorboards. “I am joking, of course. I must maintain some secrets, don’t you think?”

“Enough!” Cain roared, startling Kateryna. “There isn’t time for games. Where is my wife?”

A pall fell over Ibrahim’s face. “You have a lot of nerve to demand anything of me, boy. What do you offer in return, hmm?”

Cain opened his mouth but had no answer.

“Nothing! It is the only gift you’re capable of giving!” The old man spat again into his golden cup.

“What of me?” Kateryna said. “Surely, I have something to offer.”

Ibrahim smiled, but it was a mournful expression. “Yes, child… You do.”

“Tell me, then. To save my mother, there is no price too high.”

“As you can see,” Ibrahim gestured about the vast oblivion surrounding them, “I do not have much to keep me occupied. I yearn for a story, a memory, something to ponder and archive until my next guest arrives. I know all of Cain’s—he has nothing more to hide from me, but you, dear Kateryna…”

“I am new to you.”

“Yes—you are new.”

“Take care in what you give to him,” Cain said. “You might unearth more than you meant to. What follows can be painful. Sometimes opening the flood gates is just so—a flood.”

“Okay.” Kateryna nodded, surprised by the clarity and earnestness in her father’s black eyes. “I understand.”

Ibrahim leaned forward, clapping both of his bony hands on her shoulders. “Take off my coverings, and gaze into my eyes.”

Kateryna unraveled the soiled bandages from the old man’s face. He unfolded his heavy eyelids, and she gasped at what she saw. Brightness shimmered and subsumed her. Planets and galaxies surged to and from existence; clusters of stars and asteroids swilled all around. She then understood that her body was simply a vessel, containing the near-infinite potential of her soul. Beyond the body, the world as she knew it was simply a tomb buried beneath the ruins of countless civilizations.

In that brief moment, Kateryna was free of it all. She was dust, drifting beyond the moon, then she plummeted into a sea of memory to relive a hundred moments of a life long passed.

When next she opened her eyes, she wept. Ibrahim held her, comforting her as a father should. Cain watched mournfully beside her, silent. She felt his rough hand encompass hers in belated solidarity.

Next Chapter → What She Left Behind

I was provided an advanced reader’s copy of Kingdoms Trembling by , which might not have been something I picked up a few months ago—but holy hell am I glad I came across it now.

Stern takes the weirdness and cosmic horror that often accompanies Sword & Sorcery and turns it up to eleven. At the same time, Stern maintains a grounded believability within the context of the Kingdom of Kingdoms, K’Zal, placing the reader firmly into the boots its strange peoples who are not so unlike us.

Kingdoms Trembling reads like an artifact of another world, written for readers of that world… and that’s my absolute favorite approach to worldbuilding, and one of the methods I think works best for the genre.

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Hey! If you love Sword & Sorcery, please consider following my upcoming BackerKit Campaign for Mordschlag Sword and Sorcery Magazine!

Masterful Structure and Composition

Stern’s eye for simply arranging stories into a coherent fixup novel is next level. Though Kingdom’s Trembling rarely returns to previously established characters, every subsequent tale builds upon themes and narrative elements of previous entries.

For example, in one story a character encounters a strange, teleporting creature called a Devok, which allow people to ride on their thick asses (my own interpretation, lol) to teleport to distant lands. This encounters get a bit into the intricacies behind socializing with these fickle creatures, then moves on. The very next tale dives deep into Devoks, as they become integral to plot for that entry.

A highlight across the entire work is the opening vignette “The Passion of Young Osivrain in The Bright Season,” which establishes a sincerely romantic tone contrasted and contradicted by nearly everything else that follows in the text.

Though it’s only one page, I love this introduction; it immediately tells the reader why Stern’s writing stands apart from so many others. Even though we’re about to embark on a bloody, psychedelic journey through harsh, sand-geyser-riddled deserts where even the smallest, most innocuous insect can melt the flesh from your bones, there is a joyful optimism laced throughout the text.

Just because the world is messed up doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful.

Without diving too deep (you should read it for yourself), the romanticism established in this first page rears its handsome head at several intervals throughout the book and pays off beautifully by the end.

Sometimes the headers themselves take artistic liberties. “Fyrox Finds a Vengeful Path After Surviving the Storming of Aksoot” begins with a free form poem and is the only story to do so. “Osivrain and Yoen Pursue Raiders to Tayo’or” has subsection titles, but the third is just the traditional roman number III, as that was the most apt descriptor.

These diversions from a standard form are intentionally placed to remind the reader to relax and get freaky with it.

A Strange and Familiar World

Another standout with Stern’s Sword & Sorcery is his approach to worldbuilding. In most other S&S tales I’ve read, worldbuilding takes a backseat or isn’t really present at all. Stern immerses the reader in K’Zal, throwing out strange terms and customs, almost akin to the Inter-dimensional Cable shows of Rick and Morty. This approach holds this work upon a set of knobby legs, and Kingdoms Trembling would not work without it.

This scene reads unmistakably Athenian, riddled with hints of decadence and debauchery. Though I couldn’t tell you how one plays a luutne, or what the hell a oongaboos or boldok is, Stern’s care for linguistic principals gives the reader just enough to work with to create a mental image.

One might make the argument that Stern’s world borders on High Fantasy, and perhaps some elements straddle that line, but it’s the unique approach to plot and character that cements this work as an excellent piece of the Sword & Sorcery lexicon.

Where High Fantasy would spent time explaining things to the reader, Kingdoms Trembling builds atmosphere. The titles of the each of the included 12 stories are themselves an integral building block to the atmosphere, acting as historical descriptions of uncanny happenings throughout the storied fall of K’Zal (which is not depicted in this book, only foreshadowed, hence the trembling).

Blood and Attitude

Most of the protagonists we meet are warriors or cunning men of action. Every one stands alone and takes on a new flavor of the S&S attitude. The opening to “Tsogxot Brings Art to the Autarchy of Dolorox” is a clear example of this in action:

Other types of stories might have seen Tsogxot enter his hometown peacefully, but under watch, or perhaps imprisoned. Instead, Tsogxot paints a woman’s dress red with his attacker’s blood and marvels at his handiwork.

Another example is toward the beginning in “Fyrox Finds a Vengeful Path After Surviving the Storming of Askoot,” when Fyrox is taken by his sorcerous illness and his body mindlessly seizes, swinging his sword while he’s having a quiet moment with a tavern woman he fancies. Fyrox’s status as an outsider S&S protagonist prevents him from living a normal life throughout the tale.

My One Critique

Though I love this book and wish I could write several more paragraphs analyzing its strengths, it would not be review without a pain point. For me, the friction was singular—the lack of overt characterization.

I’ve already said the Kingdoms Trembling’s protagonists were unique and stood out from one another despite their similar roles as men of action—and that’s true!—but all that work is done with subtext and subtlety.

These things are the markings of a master, but in a world with names like Koerthyq and Pektelemum I often found myself losing track of minor characters. I feel a bit more in the way of simple physical characteristics could have assuaged this.

At its most coarse, this problem appeared in “Weaponmaker Roxatoi Becomes Sidetracked Returning to Lotzactol” (an otherwise excellent tale), where Roxatoi encounters a gang of men escorting a young girl with an uncanny secret. I realized halfway through the story that there were three men with the girl, when I had thought there were only two.

I just can’t connect identities to alien names without something more tangible to hold onto. This isn’t as challenging with names constructed more recognizable linguistic patterns (like Aurodeomus and K’Zal itself).

In Sum

Kingdoms Trembling is an excellent read and breath of fresh air for folks looking for something different. It’s a masterclass performance of composition and imagination, and one of the few books I’ve decided to shelf for a second read later on.

It cherishes its Sword & Sorcery blood, but isn’t afraid to branch out to serve the immersion. There isn’t a weak story in the contents.

It’s available from DMR and on Amazon. Give it your attention.

Greetings, traveler,

This was easily the most difficult chapter to write in the entire book; I won’t speak much as to why, just that its one that bites a bit too close to old pains; if it bites you in the same way, please don’t hesitate to reach out, I’m always happy to talk.

As hard as it is, writers should be vulnerable with the reader… this is what makes fiction one of the greatest artistic mediums on the planet and makes this story about demons and angels and griffins so intensely human.

New chapters arrive every Wednesday. If you’d rather not wait, Ashen Rider is available now in paperback and hardcover.

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You have been robbed.
Of something.
You didn’t know.
Could be taken.

Syr Arthur Cain (-13 to 35)

“Awakening,” published Year 36.

A conversation, somewhere far away.

The Kaza’dur left a gross power vacuum in their wake. In the years following your knighthood, you rose through the ranks of Valentine Aristocracy.

Valencia was no longer a humble fortress, subservient to a crumbling empire. The Kaldean capital, the Great City of Baltaire, fell the instant the invasion began. Once the Lord Governor Vidoq perished of dysentery, Don Laszlo Balderas the First put a crown upon his head and declared himself High King of “New Kaldea”—the name never stuck, as you know—elevating the Golden City to a superpower, as it was the sole producer of grain and wine to the surviving Kaldean cities.

High King Balderas financed the construction of three new fortresses along the southern borders of the Valentine Outlands. He had hoped these might prevent those wretched snakes from ever again approaching the white walls of Valencia.

On the first morning of spring, marked by dense cadres of daffodils bursting from every inch of soil and dancing robins courting in the open air, a ceremony was held in your honor.

Well, yours and two of your companions. Together, you and Syr Gabriel and Syr Derrida stood before the High King, who named each of you Lord Protector and bestowed upon you a border-keep. You swore an oath before the Dusk and Dawn, by light of the High Noon, to give your life if necessary in the fight against the invaders.

Dame Citha watched on from the front row, a grimace painted across her face, aimed unwaveringly at Derrida’s chest. When he felt her indignation, he deflated beneath the weight of his newly bequeathed golden badge. Derrida knew he was selected by merit of his cock—not for his ability to command.

Citha knew this, and so did you.

The slender man swallowed ash, on display for every Valentine Noble to scrutinize. He dreaded the dire responsibility that would come with his castle. Worse, he crumbled beneath the resentment of a woman he held overwhelming, unrequited love for.

Your keep was the closest to the city, so naturally, you all enjoyed a sumptuous dinner in your lavish dining hall. Centering the room was a great longtable made from four ancient sycamores. Lining the walls were stout pillars of polished limestone.

The High King had commissioned Astrofus, a renowned philosopher and sculptor—also a hack, but that’s beside the point—to festoon the entire room with hand-carved renders of Kaldean heroes in perfect marble. The affair had cost millions and stirred up quite the controversy among the nobility.

“Just think,” Gabriel cried out, raising an ivory tankard of spiced blueberry mead, “not long ago, we were filthy waifs shoved into fish barrels to serve as live bait on the walls!”

“Gods… how things can change,” said Derrida, running his hand across a marble woman’s bodice.

“Gods?” You shook your head in disbelief. “You borrow too much from these Valentines.”

Citha nodded her agreement, muttering a quick prayer to Dusk under her breath.

Gabriel leaned forward, spilling mead on the new table. “Don’t tell me you still believe all that shite the monks went on about? Come now, Arthur! It’s all a bunch of superstitious rubbish!”

“We’ve been blessed—some of us well beyond what he deserves,” Citha said, glaring at Derrida, who ducked behind his marble woman. “And you dare to blaspheme by belittling our generous Goddess?”

“Blaspheme? Blaspheme!” Gabriel rose, throwing his tankard splashing to the floor. “What’s fucking blasphemy are the fucking snakes who just decided on a whim that our world belonged to them! Where was your ‘generous Goddess,’ then?”

“We have been knighted by Dusk’s holy decree! Given sacred names of renown and land to call our own!” Citha’s eyes went wide. “In what godless world would four orphans be given so much?”

“Damn it, woman. Again with the bloody hysterics!” Gabriel stormed out of the hall without another word.

You hadn’t known he felt that way. You had thought Dusk revealed herself to all her children. Now, you were beginning to doubt even that. Though the memory of that night in the hot spring was slowly eroding, you never questioned the certainty you felt at Dusk’s gentle touch.

“I’m sorry, Citha. That was uncalled for.”

She snorted, lips curled at the sound of Gabriel’s heavy footsteps echoing deeper in the keep. “You are not who need apologize.”

“I allowed him to disrespect you and our faith in my home. I should have intervened.”

“Arthur,” Citha sighed, her dark eyes trained on yours, “there are other women in your life to worry over. I don’t need you to defend me.”

You looked to Derrida for support. Poking out from his hiding place, he only shrugged. You smiled, glad most of your companions remained your friends.

* * *

Anastasia sat in a patch of lilies and daffodils outside the walls. The hills, usually golden brown with dashes of red, were covered in waves of rolling green grass. She held her belly, swollen with child. You placed a gentle hand on her shoulder and watched proudly as your daughter played in the grass, hunting for beetles.

Despite the tranquility of the moment, your heart was steeped in worry.

The first pregnancy had been challenging for Anastasia; she nearly didn’t make it through. She was underweight then, and she was thinner now. She had become the Lady of a castle—she should have been comfortably plump and full-bodied. Irrational though it was, you blamed yourself for failing to provide, as if lack of food were the sole culprit behind her failing health.

She sensed your unease, danced her hand atop yours. Her touch had a way of quelling your anxieties. You bent down, pressed your chapped lips against hers. They were soft, tasting faintly of honey. Her mouth vibrated as she hummed a sigh of relief, as if your presence were as soothing as a cool cup of water on a summer’s midday.

“Only yesterday it seems she learned how to walk,” you said, admiring your little girl again. You could never keep your eyes off her for long. “Now she’s running through the grass, cherishing every life she comes across.”

“Isn’t she gorgeous, Cain?” Anastasia said, her voice the plucking of a harp to your ears. “This world isn’t ready for the gifts she’ll give.”

Kateryna bent down, offered her stubby finger to the Monarch butterfly. She screeched with delight when it instead landed atop her long, ginger curls.

“No…” You said, a smile set deep in your hard face. “The world isn’t ready.”

* * *

That day would live on in your dreams.

You didn’t know what Dusk’s afterlife might look like, but you hoped it meant reliving that afternoon on the hill, time and time again.

I’m so sorry that wasn’t what happened.

You were a soldier, you knew the risks you took, but you never thought your devotion would destroy your girls—your unborn child. The Dread Angel’s malice knew no bounds; she laid claim to your eternal soul and stole those of your family.

The days following that peaceful afternoon in the rolling, wheat-laden hills marked the rising swells that would grow into waves battering the tranquil shores of your life. You suffered the consequences of events that had occurred well before your time and, by right, had nothing to do with you. Is it your fault, Morgana’s Chosen, that the Goddess Corrupted marked you as her unyielding favorite amidst a sea of countless devotees? Did you invite her eye, tempt her to abandon the ways of godhood for the excess of mass consumption?

Do you remember the nightmare you had before you were called again to march upon the Kaza’dur? No?

It was a warm, late summer night, not four months since you’d moved into your holding. Sleep had found you easily, despite your anxieties of leaving Anastasia to give birth on her own, and her chronic condition that only seemed to worsen with each passing moon. You closed your eyes to find yourself back in the hot spring, floating in the warm water.

At first, a memory—a reminder of the first time you felt the love of another. You were only a boy, then, and you had possessed no notion of what you had truly promised to the goddess all those years ago.

Then, you felt her warmth. Dusk was in the water with you. Something deep in the recesses of your soul stirred. The goddess bade you to repeat the oath you had recited when first you met.

“I will never stop loving…” Suddenly, you felt a tinge of dishonesty in the words that followed.

Finish the verse, my Chosen.

“I will devote myself—”

No. You couldn’t say it. You were devoted to another, now. You’d made a pact by light of the High Noon, and the world had been in attendance.

Say it, Arthur. You swore to me.

“I cannot...”

Your breath catches in your throat as your entire being is assaulted with overwhelming, otherworldly warmth and turgid desire. You beg for it to stop—painful delectation, agonizing ecstasy, a perverse multitude of sensations that numb your extremities.

Your folly is laid out before you, an argument of stimulation insisting that any promises you made after the goddess claimed your soul are null. You believe that for a moment, as the pleasure ascends to its fell climax, your stomach cramps and your legs shudder.

The temperature of the water rises; you’re feverish and powerless and captivated all at once. You do everything to resist, to reject the sensations beset upon you, to find no pleasure in what is happening to you. Your skin is clammy and raw, your muscles are aching, and you scream your protest.

All to no avail.

No one is listening. The goddess assaults you, uninhibited.

It’s too much, you are only human, you are only a mortal man—and men are not to be trusted. You give in to the shame, to the voices shouting at you from all directions, demanding you give yourself over. Over to her.

She commands you to repeat your oath. You obey.

Your reward is a world-shattering release unlike anything you could have imagined—yet it is fleeting, soon replaced by heavy guilt congealing in your innards, settling at the bottom of your heart where it will remain for the rest of your days.

Your muscles relax; all sensation flees from your body, and you have been robbed of something you did not know could be taken.

When you woke, the moon still hung low in the night sky. Your wife sat weeping on the edge of the bed, facing away from you. Confused, bleary-eyed from sleep, you moved to embrace her—but stopped when you felt the mess under the covers.

Instead, you laid an uncertain hand on her shoulder. She shook it away, turned on you with the eyes of a stranger—eyes that had once enraptured your very soul, which now seemed to condemn it.

She opened her mouth, choked down a sob. Then, in a calm, even tone she asked: “Who is Morgana?”

Next Chapter → A Touch of Honey

Dr. Erik Goodwyn, among many other things, is a psychiatrist with more than 20 years’ experience and a prominent scholar of Carl Jung. Goodwyn seamlessly integrates his expertise of Jungian archetypes, mythology (and how these things meld and manifest internally in our dreams, externally in our Fantasy fiction) into his Fantasy.

You can read this book for surface level enjoyment, and you’ll have a great time. Soo too can you read in deeper and see a plethora of intentional mythological and psychological stitches woven into the broader narrative. You could hand this book to your 13-year-old son and be confident he’ll fall in love with the world of Erentyr and come away better for it.

This is one that will remain on my shelf for my kids to find—it’s a formative tale that can reinforce a developing mind, providing safe examples of trauma and transcendence with real-world analogues; all-too-essential for developing the anti-fragility of a young mind, which is tested less and less in today’s world of convenience and instant gratification.

See my full talk with Erik Goodwyn on YouTube.

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A World of Dreams

While the beginning of this tale takes place in the near-future Midworld (which illustrates a disturbing logical conclusion of our current AI-obsessed society), it soon transitions into the fairy tale realm of Erentyr.

This is a portal fantasy—something I’m usually not a fan of—but that portal is one of the most important elements to the myth. Erentyr is dreamlike (at least, those in Midworld would have you believe that it’s the “fake” world), and when we fall asleep we undergo a process that constructs our dreams, which is very similar to the concept of a portal. When estranged lovers, Liam and Mia, step through the portal to Erentyr, they undergo a sort of translation/transformation from the mundane world to the Fantasy world.

Erentyr acts as an externalization of Liam’s traumas and Mia’s issues with neglect, which embodies one of the core strengths of Fantasy fiction—externally illustrating the internal. Every obstacle and strange creature they encounter is some way an extension of their struggles.

(BTW, my habit of writing with emdashes is symptom of being a Mac user and not of AI interference. This obsession of mine long predates Claude.)

Isolation to Reunion

Without diving too far into the plot, Liam and Mia comprise our main two POVs that we hear from throughout the book. Liam is relatable, but ultimately I found Mia’s arc the most compelling. Together, they illustrate how the issues of the modern materialistic world can drive people apart, but overcoming hardship in a brutal, primal reality can bring people together.

They have arguments that ring far too close to home, digging into relationship struggles we’ve all faced. Mia begins meek and codependent, and eventually takes a dark-yet-independent turn as she explores her Erentyr-given sorcerous talent. Liam has bottled up and suppressed his traumas borne of a violent childhood and has to learn to navigate emotional release, maturity, and forgiveness. Though they are experiencing a Fantastic journey externally, internally they are going through things most folks are/have, too.

Because they come into the Fantasy world of Erentyr from the near-future Midworld, they speak and think in modern terms (which does wear away some as they spend more time with the people of Erentyr’s), they act as perfect avatars for a young to reader to see the world from, to consider hard questions. Again, this is something I’m not usually a fan of in Fantasy, but it serves the greater narrative so well, the book would not be the same without it.

I must hammer in the notion of this book’s importance for young readers. The author has placed every aspect of this book with intention to engage the mind of a teenager, to relate with them, and meet them where they’re at in our current year which is far too similar to the dystopian Midworld of KOTFD’s first 50 pages.

Much of the interpersonal conflict could have been written from my own life—I’ve never seen such relatability in Fantasy.

The Friction (For Me)

My critiques of Goodwyn’s debut in Fantasy fiction are largely up to personal preference. I’ve already discussed my feelings against portal fantasies and modern dialogue in Fantasy; I also praise Goodwyn’s use of both elements here, as they lift up the tale rather than detract from it.

Because this book is written with younger readers in mind, often subtext is used sparingly. Rather than spending a paragraph describing the feeling of rage, the narrator will state the Liam or Mia is enraged, which can sometimes come off as blunt. Yet it is another choice I can’t help but stand by—because of this, KOTFD is an easy read and accessible to anyone interested in reading it. Even with Erentyr’s vast depth, you can splash around on the surface if all you want is a whimsical Dark Fairy Tale before bed.

I do wish we spent less time in Midworld, which comprises the first six chapters. When I picked up this book, I came specifically for Erentyr and the hook of “a jungian psychiatrist wrote a dreamlike fantasy,” and what a hook it is! The story really opens up once it gets to Erentyr; Goodwyn’s nature writing is superb and he’s clearly spent much time studying highland culture (after writing my original Goodreads review, he wrote me and confirmed that he’s spent much time traveling in Ireland and Scotland).

In Sum

KOTFD closes with a classic happy ending where the heroes prevail over the darkness. I think this is a wonderfully refreshing narrative choice and in tune with the shifts in modern culture.

Dark, cynical, hopeless tales are fading away because the real world is dark, cynical, and hopeless. This is a dark tale, but full of whimsy, victory, growth, sincerity, and incredibly believable characters and relationships.

Liam and Mia, being former lovers, often bicker and each time it happens, I'm struck by how real those moments are. I've been there, I've had that argument. Somehow, they learn how to move forward, rather than burning yet another bridge, another skill lacking in our current society.

It’s been some time since I put down this book, and I continuously think back on it with growing fondness. I can’t wait to share it with my kids one day, and I’m very excited to dive into the next chapter of Erentyr.

Fast forward several years, enter my newfound obsession for S&S, my processing of the differences between High Fantasy (my first love) and Heroic Fantasy (what has begun to define my career). Surrounded by short stories, I'd think back to Erikson’s ten book epic, how different it was from everything else I was now absorbing. I know it’s a bit silly, but part of me began to morn this distance from my all-time favorite with my current fixation. For whatever reason, I felt the need to reconcile those differences.

Then, as I was preparing to join Rogues in the House Podcast as a new cohost, I came upon an episode featuring Waltz, Erikson, and C.L. Werner talking Neither Beg Nor Yield. Erikson spoke of R.E. Howard, and the massive influence those seminal works of S&S had on his own. I began to recall the short-fiction techniques used to craft the 3-million-word Book of the Fallen, a previous interview where Erikson talked on “The God in the Bowl,” one of the first Conan tales I’ve ever read—which went on to inform much of my first book, Ashen Rider.

All this preamble is to say that Erikson and Sword & Sorcery are not only compatible, but entirely interconnected. The Epic Fantasy guise of Malazan is only a mask to appeal to the wide world, but at it’s heart, these stories embody the attitude of Sword & Sorcery.

Erikson’s contribution to NBNY, “The Last Vandals on Earth”, is perhaps the first time his writing has been openly marketed as Sword & Sorcery. While it is quite different from the typical S&S story, it is a bloody tale packed with forward momentum (and attitude!), following a dwindling band of Vandals on their desperate flight across the desert of North Africa. It’s witty and a tad high brow, yet it features a heroine who—following with the tradition of heroic fantasy—is an unstoppable force of nature.

I love this tale. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. So I found it troubling that the only accounts of it I found on online were either neutral or downright hateful (accept for one guy on Reddit, who sees it like I do—you rock, sir).

I’ve come this morning to prove them wrong.

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The Friction and Why It Works

In my mostly-negative review of Jirel of Joiry, I began with aspects of the text that I liked and which worked well. This time, I’ll take a story I love and begin with the aspects that might turn readers off—and I’ll argue that these elements make the story a stronger in the context of Sword and Sorcery.

In the introductory note, the author explains that this tale is a fictionalized retelling of Sic Gloria Vandalorum (roughly, “thus ends the glory of the Vandals”), Nadir Chapter; a manuscript discovered within an archival trove of ancient documents at an early Christian church in Libya. Understanding this approach to the narrative is essential for understanding the story as it’s presented in NBNY.

“The Last Vandals on Earth” is built around a dying narrator who has taken it upon himself to tell the story of his dying people; thus it is written in the first person epistolary and dives deep into historical context and specifics. These are unconventional choices for S&S, but not unheard of.

Chronicling a First Person Narrative

Some might buck against the use of first person in S&S, but there are excellent works which thrive on it.

Lin Carter’s dual short stories “The People of the Dragon” and “Pillars of Hell” (reprinted in DMR’s Renegade Swords) are both written in first person, resembling oral retellings of epic events that defined the tribe throughout their history.

Michael Shea’s “The Pearls of the Vampire Queen” (reprinted in Battleborn Magazine Issue 1) also takes on a first-person epistolary narrative in the form of Nifft the Lean regaling his pen pal of his adventures by post.

I hesitate to mention my own work in the same breath; Ashen Rider makes heavy use of the epistolary form by way of a dream wizard’s journaled recounting of his visions, which are essential scenes of the plot.

“The Last Vandals on Earth” is written as one man’s chronicle of his people and of Respendial, a mythic hero that carries the spirit of the Vandals into history. Ulfilas is a soldier and cook, as well as a deep thinker. He understands his people’s history and expresses it with proper Vandal vulgarity.

One might argue that a simple cook would not rattle off the names of kings and cultures, both dead and thriving. I would point to the 24-year-old dishwasher at your local diner; ask him his opinions on student loans and immigration—I guarantee you he will wax political for hours if you let him, regardless if he has a B.S. Political Science or dropped out of high school.

It’s not a strange thing for lay people to have strong opinions on events larger than them—that in-of-itself doesn’t make them correct, nor does it make their perspectives unworthy of examination through narrative.

Ulfilas’s musings on Justinian I, King Gelimer, the duality of Christianity and Paganism, and the various conquests and falls of the Vandals around the world are not strange thoughts for a person whose life is fighting for that very cause.

Admittedly, it all comes off at first as very high brow, like you would have to be an expert on that historical period to even begin to understand this final tale of the Vandals… but that’s never how Erikson’s worldbuilding has functioned.

Mythic Worldbuilding

In most Sword and Sorcery, worldbuilding is not the draw. It’s usually off the cuff and presented only to the serve the plot. This does not mean that worlds remain unbuilt until the story is being written.

Howard’s Hyborean Age was an elaborate worldbuilding project with an entire fictional essay outlining every detail of the peoples, conflicts, and places of the time. Yet Howard drips these details into the fiction as they’re needed, and usually in a way that people just coming into the Hyborean Age wouldn’t necessarily understand on the first read.

Erikson’s own Malazan Book of the Fallen is often touted as the “Dark Souls of Fantasy Literature”, presenting the reader with a massive world and refusing to explain anything outright. It relies solely on subtext and context, as if it was written by a historian of the Malazan Empire for readers who live within the Malazan Empire.

This is a very interesting and effective way to worldbuild that puts characters and narrative on the forefront, unlike the Sanderson approach, which is usually centered around the strange mechanics of the world.

This is exactly the approach Erikson takes with “The Last Vandals on Earth.” What difference is there between fantasy lore you’ve never been exposed to and real-world history you’ve never been exposed to? Is it more acceptable to praddle off the name of Emperor Uriel Septim than it is to talk of Justinian I as if his rule had direct consequences on your people?

You don’t know what you don’t know—and a world rife with things we don’t know if the stuff of Fantasy and Myth. It’s very cool when we can understand every historical reference an author like Erikson packs into his historical fantasy, but not understanding is what generates the whimsy and mystery behind mythic storytelling.

In Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery, Brian Murphy argues that much of pulp Fantasy is derived from the Icelandic Sagas, the narrative patterns of Norse Mythology. In his dying hours, Ulias has certainly attempted to craft the myth of Vandals and to forge the legacy of his legendary wife, Respendial.

Respendial, Avatar of the Vandals

Most Sword & Sorcery tales concern the actions of one character, sometimes two. The hero’s actions and overcoming challenges is usually the point of the plot. But not always.

Respendial embodies the archetype of the pulp heroine as a force of nature. She carries the legacy of the Vandals on her shoulders and is said by the witch/goddess of the oasis to be of a unique kind, not to seen again for three thousand years. On her own, she is the like to a protagonist of an Epic Fantasy, which is many ways opposite Sword & Sorcery.

Enter the mediocre husband, Ulias the Little Wolf. A soldier by necessity, a cook by vocation. Through his wide eyes, we see and interpret the actions and triumphs of Respendial.

The most detailed action scene in the story consists of Respendial charging three mounted warriors joined by few more foot soldiers. Ulias did not see the exchange, but heard the men’s warcries and deathknells, then witnessed his wife returning triumphant. The action scene itself is what Ulias thought might have happened based on what he knows about mounted combat, horses, and lances. There is no difference to the reader by way of experience—we still get a visceral, bloody fight scene that rocked.

Being that Ulias is the one chronicling the this last journey of the Vandals, the world is filtered through his view and biases, as well as his foreknowledge. It takes the tale of Respendial off the Epic pedestal and throws it rolling in the mud with the rest of us plebeians.

One negative reviewer lamented the limited page time Respeendial was given; which would be understandable if this tale were about Respendial. But Respendial is not the focus of “The Last Vandals on Earth”—the Vandals are. Respendial, instead of being a traditional mercenary-motivated S&S character, is the avatar of the Vandals, the mantle on which their memory rests and propagates through time.

All this culminates into a tale that embodies the mythic wonder of Howard’s writing, and attacks the obligatory conventions of Sword & Sorcery in fresh, unique way that is grounded in history and elevated by a lowly, opinionated perspective.

In Sum

“The Last Vandals on Earth” fucking rocks. I may be an unreasonably enthusiastic Steven Erikson fan, but so too am I for Sword & Sorcery. This tale takes the genre and rearranges its parts in wild and bloody angles. It is focused more on experience and the communication of legacy than plot, which consequently makes for swift and easy-to-follow plot that was joy to read.

What I love most about Sword & Sorcery is its predictability; as reader you almost always know what you’re going to get. At the same time, this can get stale. Every now and then we need someone to throw a wrench in our routines and force us out of our comfort zone.

Do yourself a favor—purchase Neither Beg Nor Yield and read this tale. If you don’t like it, fine; you’ll still have one of the best S&S anthologies on the market.

Greetings, traveler,

This chapter introduces some of the fun nuance behind the mad wizard’s epistolary narration. The guy experiences the tale by dreaming from the POV of other characters who are not usually narrated. This opened up so much freedom to get into the dirt of Pandemonium.

This also concludes Part Two. We’ll take next week off and perhaps share a short story in the chapter’s place. Then, we’re on to Part Three—where things really start to get heated.

New chapters arrive every Wednesday. If you’d rather not wait, Ashen Rider is available now in paperback and hardcover.

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From the collected journals of a mad wizard

When first I returned home, I thought I might be free of those hellish nightmares. Wishful thinking, really; the stench of Pandemonium lingers, and no amount of soap nor baths did anything to remove it from my tainted, mortal flesh.

My heart dripped with worry. I feared for poor Kateryna, and I was captivated by Cain’s betrayal of his beloved matron.

I had arrived in my quarters by way of advanced transposition—not instantaneous, more like a tunnel leading directly to your destination. Such travel is exhausting and time-consuming, especially when folding between layers of reality. I spent the next several hours meticulously weaving wards into every inch of every wall, into every blanket, chair, door, window, anything that held any chance of carrying a curse or plague-ridden bacteria.

When finally I lay my weary head upon my pillow, I crumpled into my mattress like a bag of bones. But there was no rest awaiting me in slumber. No, dear reader, I did not need even to cast an incantation for prophetic dreams of hell to find me. They came on their own, unwelcome and insistent.

I found myself back in Pandemonium, standing in what I intuited as the hall of Morgana’s keep. When I cast my oneiromancy, I can maintain complete control of my perspective, and oft I opt for a bird’s-eye view to avoid detection by my subjects. But since I saw through the eyes of the Goddess Corrupted, I no longer had control of the dreams. I was standing in someone else’s shoes, in a memory, or perhaps experiencing that moment simultaneously.

* * *

Kneeling, I felt the heat radiating from the floor through my poleyns. In Morgana’s court, the walls were naked, built of shimmering, black granite. There were paintings when we first arrived, but she ordered them taken down… I will never know why. Who can understand the machinations of the divine?

She had me kneeling like a dog for a long time, as though testing me. Morgana glared, as if Arthur’s stupidity was somehow reflected in me. I was fucking terrified; I thought she might have my head for the fun of it. I could not even fathom what horror awaited me after a second death.

I had borne witness to much crueler fates than what the poor sods in Monrovia knew. The gods only know what hell they suffer now.

“I want him gutted. I want him burned. I want every trace of his thrice-damned existence reduced to ash!” Morgana raged, her cacophonous voice storming through the hall, shaking the walls. Then, all sound ceased, the quivering walls stilled, and a terrible chill deeper than the Wystran winter limed the hall with black-frosted hate. “Do you understand me, Syr Derrida?”

“Yes, mistress,” I said. My voice was a rasp; I felt like my vocal cords had hemorrhaged. “I will inform the others.”

“Go.”

Morgana sat upon her throne. Lord Sanguine had apparently dubbed it the Scarlet Chair, which never made sense to me—the damned thing was made of tarnished copper, patinated sea-foam green. Veins undulated between the jagged peaks making up the throne’s back. I always wondered if it was somehow alive.

The corner of Morgana’s lip quivered. A flash of discomfort, corrected in an instant.

I had noticed such… slips, occurring with growing frequency, and I found myself mourning my matron’s state. She had once been so pure, beyond the limits of the human condition. Now, like an aging housewife, she was sending us to wreak petty vengeance on a mortal man.

“You are now my Herald, Derrida,” Morgana purred, tilting her chin up ever so slightly, and tilting the rest towards me, ever so slightly. “Do this, and I will reward you graciously…”

Hunger stirred within. I never dared fantasize about having Arthur’s place by her side—that would be blasphemy. But now, the Goddess had called me only by that name which she bestowed upon me, and stoked my desire with her divine will. Or I had done that myself. How does one resist?

“Thank you, mistress.”

She bade me to rise, and so I did, and rushed out from Morgana’s hall, ascending darkened stairwells and traversing sharp corridors with inhuman urgency. My mind swam with the possibilities before me. The world was mine for the taking.

As I drew further into the keep, my loins calmed, and I was left with an unwelcome, intrusive thought. I don’t think I can kill Arthur. I was not nearly so skilled in combat as he—or anyone, for that matter—but moreover, he was my friend. But she is my Goddess, and she offers me her hand, which that fool squandered.

I was dumbfounded by his stupidity.

The Goddess loved him, clearly. She would not send us after him if it were not so. He had scorned her, and somehow, he had wounded her. Arthur chose a mortal woman over the Goddess. That part I could not wrap my head around. In life, my wife was a pleasant woman, and she birthed me two sons, but we married for political gain. Our indifference was mutual, and I had not spared her a thought since awakening in Morgana’s service.

And now Morgana might give her love to me. The stirring returned, and I imagined what wonders lingered beneath those perfect dark silks and blackened armor plates. Such a sight would be too much for mortal eyes—I might go blind. A risk I’m willing to take.

In the aerie at the top of the keep, my comrades—now underlings—tended to their mounts. Citha, a lithe Skanu clad in sleek brigandine, fed living trout to her griffin, which took the aspect of a gyrfalcon. I have always been attracted to her exotic features; her thin, corded musculature, her tight braids, smooth umber skin. Alas, the legendary Dame never looked twice at me. Not that I need her affectations—not after Arthur’s through.

Gabriel, a great, bloody ox of a man, groomed his incongruous condor griffin. I had little hope of winning his loyalty, despite our matron naming me Herald. I hoped he would not pose a problem.

My own mount, beautifully crafted by our matron in the aspect of a Kaldean eagle, nudged my shoulder. He sensed my unease. I sighed deeply, shook out my hands in preparation for the reaming I was about to receive from these two.

“Our matron demands blood,” I said, shifting in my stretched and torn boots, now too loose on my feet. “We take to the skies immediately.”

Dame Citha scoffed. “We don’t take orders from you.”

I swallowed. I need to keep my cool. “I have been named Herald. Now, mount up! We must ride.”

“Who died and made you so gods-fucking important?” said Syr Gabriel, towering over me. He bent down and prodded my chest with a finger the size of a sausage. How I loathed Gabriel, the shit-crusted whoreson.

“Arthur is marked for death. We must depart now if we are to catch up with him before he crosses the Goddess’s threshold.”

Citha and Gabriel exchanged worried glances.

“It was only a matter of time before she found out what he was up to.” Citha said.

Gabriel took a step back, gracing me with an inch or two to breathe. “He went home to his wife, eh? Bloody fool.”

I nodded. “You know how our mistress prefers this done—silver through the heart, silver through the brain.”

“Too bad,” Gabriel went on. “He was a good Herald. Better than you’ll be, I reckon.”

You’re not wrong, there, buddy ol’ pal.

Citha patted her griffin on the head, then swept onto her saddle in a single fluid motion. She closed her eyes, muttering some old Skanu prayer that had long since lost its power in the Vale Betwixt.

My mount shifted his weight between his front legs, whining softly until I placed a hand on his forehead. “Hush now, Krakow…” My boy was an empath, always anxious when I was. “Everything will be fine.”

Gabriel and I retrieved our saddles and weapons from the wall and geared up. We sat in silence for a time before taking off. There was a shift in power, and all of us felt it—none of us knew who would survive to benefit from it. I nodded at Gabriel, and he and his grotesque monster bounded through the landing bay into the open sky. I followed, Citha taking up overwatch at the rear. I hoped Gabriel felt my glowering hot on his back.

I will be the one, this time. Me.

Next Chapter → Part Three: Folly, Laid Before You

I’m pleased to inform you that Molly Tanzer has remedied every issue that I took with Moore’s originals in her upcoming book, Blue Fire, the first officially licensed novella-length tale of Joiry’s Lady.

Tanzer is a seasoned novelist, perhaps best known for her 2015 debut Weird Western novel, Vermilion, and her Victorian Supernatural Romance series, The Diabolist’s Library. She first took up the mantle of Joiry in New Edge Sword & Sorcery Issue 3, with “Jirel and the Mirror of Truth” which had quickly become a fan favorite. Tanzer reprised Jirel in NESS Issue 5, with a third tale upcoming in NESS’s 2026 run.

So it should come as a surprise to no one that Blue Fire is absolute fire (Am I hip yet?). Running now on BackerKit, the novella is kicking ass and taking names, and will be available to back until July 4th.

I had the pleasure to read an Advanced Reader’s Copy. While I was provided a free ARC by the publisher, Brackenbury Books, that has no bearing on this review. This review is not sponsored and the publisher does not know the content of this review until it hits the public. Below are my unbiased thoughts.

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Jirel in Action

My biggest gripe with the original Jirel of Joiry stories was that Moore spends a disproportionate time in Jirel’s head, so the reader rarely got to witness her strength as a warrior or a commander.

Tanzer maintains much of Moore’s lyrical interiority but does so with a modern sense of brevity and clarity, while lacing several instances of Jirel in action. Finally, the Lady of Joiry is given her sword and allowed to cut down those who stand in her way.

In terms of violence, the only time Moore’s Jirel kills another human being is when she’s breaking out of captivity in “Hellsgarde.” She gets a lot more opportunity to show off her sword play in Blue Fire.

There are fun set pieces and inventive battles with monstrous baddies. At the same time, she’s dealing with a mysterious curse that imposes a sorcerous illness upon her, keeping with Moore’s structural requirement that Jirel be debilitated in some way. I felt this was a much better use of that trope than simply disarming Jirel at every possible opportunity.

As much as I enjoyed these encounters, the fantastic elements present verge on Heroic High Fantasy rather than Sword & Sorcery with its whimsical world building and accessible magics. I think this is a good fit for Jirel, given her penchant for planeswalking into strange worlds. The story is bright and light-hearted in many ways, which I think will make it appeal much to younger readers as a stepping stone into the pulp classics.

Stories like this are a welcome addition to our modern understanding of S&S, as far as I’m concerned.

A Loner No Longer

Jirel (in)famously leaves behind Father Gervase to explore hellish worlds and other planes in the classic stories. A brilliant spice that Tanzer added to the Jirel recipe was friendship. We actually get to see Jirel’s connection with Gervase before she abandons him.

There’s also the return of Thevin Galois from Tanzer’s NESS short, “Jirel and the Mirror of Truth,” who acts as a supporting warrior companion, who introduces some interesting complications that drive the story forward. I appreciated Thevin’s presentation—she is a mess and has a host of her own problems, a constant engine of conflict and progressive complications. Tanzer has told me that Thevin can sometimes threaten to overtake the protagonist’s throne in the drafting process. In Blue Fire, I recognize this trait in Thevin’s writing, but it works in favor of the narrative when Jirel inevitable finds herself alone again, despite all the chaos surrounding Thevin, which acts to drive Jirel’s plot forward.

Without diving too deep into spoiler zone, Blue Fire’s Jirel does have a classic hike through Hell itself. This closing stretch of the book is where the novella most closely resembles something that Moore would have written. The whole conflict of the tale is centered on plot elements set up in the classic tale, “The Dark Land,” and pays them off wonderfully by the end.

Is Blue Fire Faithful to the Originals?

Absolutely. I think existing Jirel fans will appreciate Tanzer’s modern approach to Moore’s storytelling and how she injects her own style into it. Tanzer maintains many of the recognizable recurring elements from the classics (such as Jirel’s doeskin tunic) and reprises unique turns of phrase.

For the most part, the prose and the dialogue maintains a timeless element. Blue Fire could have been published long ago. But not always; sometimes, especially in dialogue involving Thevin, the narration verges upon modern phrasing.

I mentioned earlier that Blue Fire embodies more elements of High Fantasy, which is a deviation from Moore’s classic tendency toward the Weird. This might bother some fans of the classics, but I think it’s the natural progression of Jirel. High Fantasy is a good fit for this type of traditional Fantasy heroine who often visits other worlds.

Perhaps what Jirel gained in her abilities as an action hero diminished some of the strange horror of Moore’s classic. There’s a tradeoff for everything. What Tanzer did maintain was Jirel’s interiority, which is a hallmark of the originals. Jirel remains deeply thoughtful, and incredibly unwise.

Tanzer’s depiction of Jirel as a person and ruling knight of Joiry is also incredibly faithful to Moore’s depiction. Jirel retains her nearly self-flagellant Catholic faith, she is fiery, short-sighted, and impulsive. She is Jirel, in every way possible.

In Sum

I enjoyed the hell out of Blue Fire. It’s a truly refreshing take on a classic character that I think will please existing C.L. Moore fans and convince younger readers that Pulp Fantasy is worth a deep dive.

In leans more into High Fantasy than the conventions of Sword & Sorcery, but it remains an excellent Heroic tale that prominently features both Swords and Sorcery with swift pacing and interesting dilemmas.

It’s a worth read, for certain. You can back the campaign on BackerKit until July 4th.

Greetings, traveler,

Understanding blossoms. Cain swears to be a father. It’s time to take a rest from the turmoil of Pandemonium, and scritch a griffin under the chin.

Revisting this chapter now, in the light of some troubling things going on in my personal life, it occurs to me I’ll never have this conversation myself—from either role. That’s both melancholy and victorious.

New chapters arrive every Wednesday. If you’d rather not wait, Ashen Rider is available now in paperback and hardcover.

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In the fog of the Screaming Fields

The Vale Betwixt, first layer of Pandemonium

Kateryna shivered by the dwindling campfire. The air was temperate, at least compared to the gales on the sea, but her fever was worsening, and comfort had become an impossibility. Worse yet, her clothes were damp, reeking of waste now that she was on solid ground.

Solid ground.

For the first time since her first death, she was on solid ground. Earth, dirt, sulfur, the whole nine continents, and the seas between! Do any of those things still exist? She wondered if she still resided upon Earth—or was Pandemonium somewhere else altogether? So many questions swam through her mind at once, as if all her thoughts had piled up against Morgana’s wall and spilled over in the moment it crumbled.

Cain sat across her, hunched over his sword as he ground a whetstone across its edge. Dense fog encroached on all sides. A mournful cry resounded in the mist, now and again. Someone in pain. Someone dying. Her eyes fell on Cain’s blade.

It occurred to her then that she had no idea how Pandemonium worked. Scripture painted the Great Beyond and the Underworld as spiritual places, beyond the body. But there Cain was sharpening a sword. She, and everyone, and everything else, was as much flesh and bone as she had ever been. Hunger, thirst, disease, fatigue—it was the same.

No… it was worse.

Kateryna had languished in Monrovia so long that suffering became the norm, beneath her notice; every emotion and sensation, every thought and worry—everything had remained below the surface and never survived long enough to blossom.

The suffering and the toil were the least of it. Above all, Pandemonium isolated its victims, separating them from everything that made them whole.

Kateryna closed her eyes and rubbed her hands in the cool dirt. When she was a girl, the country around the estate was completely wild save for narrow dirt paths and a few wheat farms. She remembered coveting those early mornings when she snuck out from the walls to roll in the red grass and play in the dirt.

She had felt so connected to the world then, she had thought that she felt the Great Mother breathe—giving birth, taking life, starting the cycle anew. There, in Morgana’s demesne, she felt nothing but a subtle, beating pulse. The land was dead, picked clean.

True hell is the place farthest from the gods.

An old scripture. She did not remember which.

Somewhere, a man screamed. There was no way to know how far or how close, but his rasp and subsequently smothered breath sounded all too near for Kateryna’s liking. She imagined Seth somewhere out in the mist—hunted for sport.

The thought made her want to vomit, but she had already lost the entirety of her innards during the flight.

“Where are we?”

Cain looked up briefly from his work, then back down. “We call these parts the Screaming Fields.” He slipped, slicing his finger on the blade. Wiping the blood on his trousers, he rose to sheathe his very sharp sword and to stow the whetstone in a loose saddle bag. “This is where the lost wander until they are devoured.”

“Yes, that much is clear.” Another scream rang out as if to punctuate the statement, a woman this time.

Kateryna shivered, everything about this place unsettled her to the core—as it was designed to do. “But what about the rest of it? Why are we dead but beholden to the needs of the living? How does any of this work?”

Cain looked up, as if searching for the answers behind the clouds. “I don’t know.”

“Since we died, it’s been… years? Decades? All this time licking Morgana’s boot, and you don’t know how this place works?”

Cain shuddered at the utterance of the Dread Angel’s name. His eyes traced a path between the fog and the blackened dirt at his feet. Recognition lit up in his eyes, followed by a spread of realization. “Before now… I’ve never thought about it. I was not allowed to.”

Kateryna fought the urge to scream at him then, if only to avoid luring some terrible demon to devour them. Her throat was a shredded mass of ribbons, so she was unlikely to muster the voice, anyhow. Rage bellowed deep within, calling for reprieve. She was about to say something nasty—it was the least she could do to strike back—but the look in his black eyes gave her pause. His expression was not one of thoughtless ignorance, but of sudden epiphany. Kateryna watched the glaze seep from the whites of his eyes as his gaze settled on her.

He is seeing. Perhaps for the first time, he sees me.

“Yes,” Cain continued, squatting next to her. “We’ve been living in hell… We’re dead, and have been for a long time.”

Kateryna had no clue what to say to that. Instead, she was consumed by a rib-clenching coughing fit as she opened her mouth. She clutched her chest, doubled over, hacking and wheezing. When finally she regained her composure, there was a puddle of black blood, pooled in the shape of a star beneath her.

“You should have let me drown…” she groaned. “At least that way I could have continued on without this damned plague.”

Cain shook his head. “That would have been no better. This place is vast; you’d have been lost, and I’d have to find you too. That, and there’s no telling what terrible form awaited you.”

Kateryna pushed herself back onto her haunches. “You’re…” She almost had no will to say it, to invite the same disappointment with which she had become so intimate in this unnatural life. “You’re going to help me find her?”

Without hesitation, Cain said: “Yes.”

A gust of wind roared in the sky, joined by an avian caw growing louder. Cain’s raven-like monster landed with a thud next to him. It dropped a grotesque, rotting eel at his feet.

Cain smiled, scratched the creature under the chin until it flopped over on its side like a bison-sized house cat. The sight was nothing short of ridiculous; a man, who had until then been a constant antagonist in her life, giving a monster affectionate scratches.

“Kateryna,” he said, waving her over. “This is Montauk. It’s important you two meet properly.”

She reluctantly inched towards them. The monster—Montauk—rolled onto its feet and backed away as she drew near.

“Careful, she’s slow to trust.”

Something I can relate to.

“It’s a she?”

He grinned at her then, to which Kateryna did not know how to respond. “Of course. Also, she doesn’t like being called it.”

“What should I do?”

“Hold out your hand.”

An image of her hand severed at the wrist came to mind; Cain, lifeless, staring ambivalent, disinterested daggers into her corpse as she bled in the dirt. It seemed to her a reasonable anxiety, given every prior interaction she had had with the bastard.

Giving up every call to reason, Kateryna held out her hand.

Montauk only stared at first, narrow slit eyes moving between Kateryna’s face and tremulous fingers, but then the griffin drew closer and sniffed her hand. She heard a low rumble as Montauk moved to nudge her shoulder—Gods in hell and up above, she’s purring!

Cain watched silently from a careful distance.

Kateryna looked at him; he nodded his approval. Montauk dipped her massive head between Kateryna’s legs, tossing her into the saddle. Despite herself, Kateryna giggled. It reminded her of childhood—those mornings alone, rolling down hills. Decades ago, maybe more. Another life.

“She likes you,” Cain said.

“Yes!” was all Kateryna could manage as the griffin bucked like a rambunctious hound. She grabbed the saddle horn and felt something smooth. Looking down, there was a drop of fresh blood on it. “I want to get down now… alright, Montauk?”

The beast paid her no heed. Cain raised a fist, and the griffin halted instantaneously. Kateryna climbed down, fell back onto the ground, head spinning.

“She’s a bit overzealous, sometimes,” Cain said, scratching his head.

“It’s not that…” she whispered, suddenly overwhelmed by a blizzard of emotions and pains and searing contradictions. Her heart thudded against her chest, her brain swelling inside her skull. “For so long, I’ve cursed you. Prayed for your second death.”

She looked up at him, surprised to see his black eyes dejected.

“You abandoned us… even though you swore to my mother you would never leave us behind. You swore an oath before the light of the High Noon. Marriage is supposed to be binding, no?”

“Yes. It is.”

An image of a newly carved tombstone came to her then, uninvited. An arch of lavender, unattended. She shook away those painful memories. Not yet.

“How do you expect me to trust you? At every turn, you’ve ignored me—or betrayed me!”

Cain’s head sagged. “That’s exactly what I’ve done.”

Kateryna heaved, seized by another coughing fit. She crumbled to the ground, feeling like she might soon become one with the sulfuric soil. Her blooming migraine spiked, and suddenly she was rattled by chills.

“Kat!”

The world spun round and round, and blackness swallowed her all at once.

Minutes passed—or hours, who could tell?—before Kateryna awoke, Montauk curled around her like a mother lion with her cub. She was wrapped in a knit blanket she had not seen since before her first death. The yarn was stiff and ratty, but the color was still vibrant. Mother knitted this when I was still toddling.

Cain stood vigil beyond the threshold of the camp. His back was to her, his sword drawn.

The incessant screaming in the distance had ceased for the moment, and so too the miasmic nausea that had plagued her since leaving Monrovia. Kateryna settled back into the warmth of the purring griffin. Will you earn my trust, father? She was unsure. So much had changed.

But evil and pain were all that hell could promise.

Next Chapter → Wards Against Nightmares