Pete Murray – 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 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 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.”

[Fiction] The Beasts of Kulig County, Prologue & Chapter 1

PROLOGUE

A storm was rolling in, and distant thunder rumbled across the darkened prairie as lightning etched flickering patterns across the horizon. One by one the three Nasutoceratops lifted their frilled heads and sniffed, smelling the scent of rain on the air. These ceratopsians were not native to the prairie, their ancestors having been domesticated and brought north from the wet, swampy forests to the south thousands of years ago. Despite not being endemic to this mostly open mix of fern prairie and grassy veld the grazers had proven quite adaptable, and now they roamed the land in relatively small, yet commercially valuable, herds.