When I’m feeling more Fire and less Earth, I write fantasy fiction. I have a serialized collection of short-reads called “The Kingdom’s Disdain” available on amazon kindle. The first volume can be found here, for those who are interested in that sort of nonsense.
Book 8, The Spokes of Decay, will be releasing on Wednesday, after many months of delay and rewriting, so I thought I’d share a small, relatively spoiler-free excerpt!
A LEISURELY WALK
-SAVOS
It is only a short walk from my house to the place the goblins once called Tiel-Ekgruil.
If I wished to, I could bridge that span in three long strides like a great spider, but I prefer to take my time.
It has been at least fifty years since I’ve been in a hurry, and the time ahead of me stretches itself out like a strained but unbreakable linen thread, like a forest serpent stretching its neck out to strike. The woods please me, so I’m in no rush. There is much to see. There is much to hear, though very little to consider.
I step past a hill of ants, carefully tip-toeing around individual ants. There is no reason for me to hasten their destruction, and to them I am a titan, taller than a thousand-foot tower would be to a man. I do not abuse my height or my power. These woods are populated, not only by hundreds of thousands of tiny insects, but by billions and billions of unseen germs, living beasts invisible to most eyes, many of them a thousand times more deadly than an arrow or zarklago or dragon.
Beyond the realm of germs there are other creatures, things that waddle mindlessly between the veil of flesh and spirit, but remain unseen.
If they could be seen, the sight of them alone would kill.
There are humanoids with thousands of arms, and just as many heads as arms, bipedal flies the size of giants with eyes that burn with the brightness of a hundred suns, slithering feline reptiles that seep through the air and solid objects like vapor, goblinoids joined together by swoops of bodily tissue that all function with the same unfathomable mind, flat and radiant ghouls that shuffle across the forest floor like shadows, great barking hounds without skulls or features, chimeric crawlers that creep by the millions between particles of dirt, some with the heads of lions or birds, and no two are the same.
I can see all of them; I even have some command over them, but they fail to interest me like they used to.
To me, there is nothing that terrifies. There is nothing that surpasses. There is no monster. The moss, the worm, and the microbe all are comparable to Argacholon, Megejulah, and even Gorolmon.
All is death.
Though the mind flickers with the delusion that is life, it is but a brief fancy.
And so, I am living, the carrier of death, as I walk from death to death, now to bring about many ends, as each new sun rises.
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