August 2023 – Tyrant King Press

[Fiction] Long Winter Night, Chapter 3

He didn’t know what had woken him up. All was silent outside, or at least too muffled by their snowy tomb for them to hear. What had woken him up?

There it was again: the sound that his ears had deemed important enough to pull him out of sleep for. He heard a deep snuffling, followed by a scraping crunch. Something was digging its way in. Ben was suddenly acutely aware of the smell of blood on his clothes. Quickly he dug out his revolver, made sure it was loaded, and shook Finch awake. She grabbed her rifle and pointed it at the sound, and in the fading light of the glowstick they saw snow begin to flake from the wall. More and more snow fell, until finally there was a violent cascade as the animal broke though. A snout was thrust through the screen of pine needles, covered with dark mottled scales, gray and brown feathers, and topped with a blunt, horny boss. It could only belong to a grendol.

[Fiction] Long Winter Night, Chapter 2

He turned one way, then the other. What am I even doing? He mentally asked himself. It wasn’t as if their mounts were going to pop out from behind a tree and say Gotcha! They were gone, which meant he and Finch were walking home. Trouble was, even if the snow hadn’t obscured their surroundings, he hadn’t been paying enough attention to reliably recognize them anyway. As he resigned himself to the fact that their routine mission had just gotten a lot more complicated a shiver ran through his body, telling him it was time to get back under and bundled up.

[Fiction] Long Winter Night, Chapter 1

Ben Durden shivered despite his insulation from the cold. He hated coming out at this time of year. The forest was dead, and the Aurora australis dancing overhead turned their surroundings into an eerie dreamscape. He turned in his saddle to check on his companion. Radha Finch followed close behind, making sure to keep her dammak mount on his trail. While their shaggy iguanodont mounts were unlikely to get distracted or spooked by anything this time of year, the thick ground cover of snow could be hiding any number of potential hazards, from abandoned animal burrows, to tree branches, to frozen pools of water. Underneath his thick balaclava he smiled as he watched her progress. Finch may be new, but she caught on quickly. He had no patience for greenhorns who refused to learn anything, especially up here where one slip-up could cost them their lives.

[Fiction] The Prey

For the last two weeks, a small town called Gimu about an hour’s drive east of Kulig had been living in fear of a Yurgovuchia turned man-eater. The animal had taken five children so far from the surrounding farmsteads, and several days ago it had badly mauled a young woman before her aunt had driven it off by throwing rocks at it. This was regarded as unusual: while they were considered a threat to pets and livestock, yurgovuches generally had an instinctive fear of people and preferred to avoid them whenever possible. It was speculated that the animal must be sick or injured in a way that prevented it from hunting its usual prey, and so had been forced to turn to humans out of desperation.