1168

Stairway to Heaven

29Jun2017
Caution! The following installment contains adult language and themes. Not exactly NSFW, but may cause palpitations in the extremely sensitive reader.

PART TWO

Ed slept late the next morning, wakened by the slap of Toby practicing bass in the next room. While generally one of his least favorite ways to wake up, somehow the noise couldn’t dampen his spirits this morning. He even found space to admit that Toby might be good. He dreamily allowed his mind to drift back over the previous evening’s events.

Catania, he thought. Well, why not? Smile like nothing happened and tough it out.

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1485

Stairway to Heaven

05Jun2017

PART ONE

Ed trudged a Sisyphean path up the dusky stairs to his dark third floor apartment. His shoulders felt like a stand of wind-tortured mountain pines; he hunched his back but nothing loosened. He didn’t feel like he even had the energy to relax. That was bad enough, but the feeling was all too familiar. What he really wanted was a back-rub, administered by a fairer representative of the fairer sex. The thought allowed him to draw a deep breath, but the tension returned immediately.

He reached the top landing and took another enormous breath, held it, tried one more time to blank the past ten hours of work from his mind. His neighbor, Catania, arrived at her door as he forced himself to start moving again. Ed’s back cried out in longing, and his pulse quickened, but this was an argument so old to him that he instantly and unconsciously talked himself out of any direct action. Instead, he merely grimaced, nodded, and said, “Hi.”

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1229

The Chimera of Taurillac Wood

22May2017
They were a formidable duo. Tomas the Rabid Dwarf: a very short man – although not truly dwarfish – so called for his temper and predilection for explosions and unprovoked violence. And Yelm the Iron Giant: so named because he stood eight feet tall and consistently survived what broke other men. Together, they ranged the European lands once ravaged by the armies and the creations of the New Scientists and the Madboy Kings, hunting down the Haunts which had survived the Second Thirty Years War. Those peasants and burghers who had likewise survived the conflicts, and who now found themselves piecing back together the old nations in spite of the vestigial aristocracies, paid well for proof that yet another of the monsters and machines created by the Madboys had been destroyed, and so Tomas and Yelm were able to stitch together a living in the midst of the ruins and the fear.

Eleven years after their first meeting, seven years after the last, soft sigh of the Second Thirty Years War, Yelm the Iron Giant and Tomas the Rabid Dwarf stumbled through the wide-open gates of Chantique. The Dwarf staggered because he was exhausted from pulling a cart laden with flintlocks and wheellocks and explosives and the physical remains of the Haunt of Duke Regen’s Fen High Way. The Giant, because he was dying.

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1408

Last Chance

08May2017
Here is a taste of what Subscribers will be seeing:

 

Ivan Rheimer has achieved The Dream: he’s a Freeman.  His indenture is paid off, his farm is lucrative, his contracts are satisfied, and he’s bored out of his mind.  Fortunately for him, his friends are not so together, and their problems could keep him busy for the rest of his life.  Maybe even a whole week, if he’s lucky.  Because there’s a killer loose in the isolated colony town of Last Stop, and no-one – not the local Corporate authorities, not a trained EarthGov investigator, not even a group of skilled and highly motivated former Vac Marines – can find and stop him.  But if none of them can track down the killer, what can an erstwhile media consultant and miner do?  Whatever the odds, he’s got to try, because the body count is rising.

Can Rheimer keep The Dream alive, or will Last Stop become a ghost town?

1400

the Lion of Aksfelgard

03May2017
 

Yelm’s father had often said, “The bitter lesson is best-learned,” usually just before delivering a corrective beating. But Yelm had swiftly outgrown his father, and discovered that teachers, too, can be taught. He’d been conscripted not long after.

Three years later, Yelm found himself in the presence of a teacher greater than his father.

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1272

They Pay In Advance

20Apr2017

“Folks down on Murphy Street say the swamps are lit up already,” Mona said.

It was late and she was washing up after dinner while her Mama sat at the kitchen table. The heat and the humidity, like the foxfire, had come early this year, and they punished Mrs. Gardner awfully. Mona repeated some of the town gossip as a distraction. She heard her Mama sigh.

“Just like the year your father went away.”

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1309

The Haunt of Guernikan Pass

20Apr2017
Everything hunts.

Mornings in the mountains are given to the rodents and the insects, seeking seeds and leaves and each other. Midday is the sole realm of the sun itself, driven to burn out whatever life it can reach. Evenings are for the snakes and the eagles; the former twisting into deep burrows, and the latter snatching up whatever the serpents drive forth. And all times, all prey, belong to the Guernikan.

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, 1293

Looking for Trouble

16Apr2017
“Whoa! That’s it momma! Shake ‘em!”

The young woman in the tight black turtleneck stopped short, her head swiveling as she sought the source of the comment, a ready comeback on her lips. But it was late; the park was empty. No playgroups, worn-out moms and sugar-fueled kids. No perverts with hidden cameras videoing awkward first dates. Not even a derelict, half-drunk on cheap wine, polluting a bench. That last in particular was unusual for the time of night. She shrugged with a little shiver, and started to walk more slowly onward.

“That’s the stuff! Come on. Take me home with ya!”

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