Justin Case – Tyrant King Press

Woe be upon you: a selection of terrible Gondolend short fiction appears

Hello. I haven’t got anything new to share with you jackals, but I do have some awful little non-canon Gondolend shitpost stories I wrote for shits and giggles.

[Fiction] The Beasts of Kulig County, Chapter 10

Dawn crept across the Samara as the remaining tawala lifted his head and yawned, his breath steaming in the cold morning air. He stood then, stretching muscles stiff from sleep, and took in the morning’s scents. There was a herd of grazers not too far away, but they were prickly and aggressive, not worth the risk. There were other animals even closer in the other direction, but with their thick armor and clubbed tails they definitely weren’t worth messing with. There was something promising intermingled with their scent though, and the giant groundbird strode off to investigate.

[Fiction] The Beasts of Kulig County, Chapter 9

Maggie brought the helicopter up, hoping to lessen the chances of spooking the tawala by being farther overhead. “I’d hate to be whatever that thing’s after,” she said. She glanced over at Gregory; he was watching the giant groundbird intently with wide eyes. Mixed with his look of awe was one of fear, and she couldn’t blame him. Even though she knew they were safe up here from that giant, it was still hard not to be a little frightened. She supposed it was an instinctual reaction, left over from when their distant ancestors were still getting the hang of tool use. She wondered what the animal was after, anyway. Whatever it was it was evidently obscured by the trees, because she couldn’t see it from their vantage point.

[Fiction] The Beasts of Kulig County, Chapter 7

Gina gunned the engine and twisted the handlebars, barely evading the long, ridged nasal horn of the bull hudu. The Styracosaurus continued to pursue her for a ways, but soon turned back to his herd with one last threatening bellow. Gina laughed to herself as she left the animals behind, heading for the dubious shade of a thicket of slash pines and saw palmettos. A small flock of hypsilophodonts fled the sound of her motorbike, pronking as they ran. She sat on her bike and watched them for a moment before unclipping her canteen from her belt and taking a drink.

[Fiction] The Beasts of Kulig County, Chapter 6

Thaddeus Whittington’s office could not have been any more stereotypical of an established university zoology professor. Thick, deeply varnished shelves lined an entire wall, populated by all manner of books, animal bones, and preserved specimens in jars. Perched atop a filing cabinet next to the window a taxidermied bird of prey glared across the room with glass eyes, while the mounted skeleton of a negren was frozen in mid-leap at one corner of the shelf hutch that stood above the desk. All over were photographs, some of them quite old. Mounted prominently near the door was an old black and white picture of a much younger Whittington, standing with two other men knee-deep in ferns and rushes, broad smiles on their faces. In the background rose the dark hard line of the Barrier; the picture had been taken nearly fifty years ago on the Havaania, the vast prairie that lay out beyond the wall that cut Gondolendia off from the rest of the supercontinent. Justin recognized one of the men as Gina’s uncle Stanley Pike, but he had no idea who the other one was. He supposed Gina probably knew.

[Fiction] The Beasts of Kulig County, Chapter 5

The sun wasn’t up yet, but the birds were already beginning to sing in the trees when Justin Case’s SUV pulled up in front of Gina’s house. The houses and trees of the neighborhood were silhouetted against the indigo sky, as it slowly faded to a lighter blue in the west. Gina shivered in the pre-dawn chill as she stepped off the front walk and crossed the front lawn.

[Fiction] The Beasts of Kulig County, Chapter 3

“Keeping an eye out up there, Maggie?”

In the cockpit of her Damselfly, Maggie Ovo looked out over the prairie and shook her head. “Everything looks clear up here,” she said into her headset’s microphone as she passed her little helicopter above the herd. “Just mgonzi and you shitkickers.”

[Fiction] The Beasts of Kulig County, Chapter 2

Samaraland was being invaded. Giant hoppers, Macropodotherium, were a large species of hypsilophodont indigenous to Vona, an offshore territory of Garacania. When the island had been cut off from the mainland by rising sea levels, its hypsilophodont population had quickly adapted and diversified, occupying every niche available to them. In order to navigate through the tall grasses that had taken over the island’s open areas, most adopted an energy-efficient hopping gait, earning the nickname hoppers, or as some cheeky zoologists called them, “hopsilophodonts.”