The desert was called Shunkare in the tongue of the merchants—one I did not yet know, and was unlikely to learn, traveling alone except for my horse—and it was made of dust, fine as silk and permeable as water. Save for the few days of the year when the rains came, the air burned to breathe and carried dust into the lungs, slaying the unwise and unmasked slowly and painfully while it painted the sky in streaks of violet with each rising and setting of the sun. As I set out from the oasis, I could see for miles: endless drifts of fine sand, carved by flooding and dried in place, like a frozen white sea.
He’s got nothing against the gods. He fought in one of their names for years. But they take their own sweet time to get around to helping their faithful, and he’d much rather rely on tangible things that work on schedule. Such as a firearm.
The Book of the New Moon Door
The latest chapter of The Book of the New Moon Door, featuring a desperate fight against a horde of zombies, is now available on Patreon.
Vivir Quintana and Mare Advertencia, “Árboles Bajo El Mar” (from Wakanda Forever)
Good morning! I’m currently playing fetch with my cat while waiting for a huge rainstorm to pass so I can do laundry (too much water overwhelms the city sewer system). I hope you are safe and warm today.
The February edition of the newsletter is going out tomorrow! You can sign up at this link (which is also at the bottom of the blog’s home page). Be sure to check your inbox for a confirmation link after that. The mailer service wants to check if you’re very sure you want to receive the newsletter.
Also tomorrow, the next chapter of The Book of the New Moon Door will be up on Patreon, and Journey to the Water will post here on Wednesday!
The next episode of The Well Below the Valley is probably going to be late (I try to get them out on the first of each month), but I should have it up by the end of the week.
I think that’s all for today. Thanks for being here, and have an excellent week!
“You should have predicted this, Sentinel,” Geray muses. He hovers two feet above the floor, as though to emphasize his relative safety and removal from the horde of undead at the door. “Hundreds of thousands of wandering spirits with nowhere to go, and the god of the dead absent. If they were a living mob, they’d have torches and pitchforks. I dare say you’d fare better were that the case.”
Isabel doesn’t have the will to stop herself from putting her hands over her ears. The pressure makes a dull roar that drowns out Geray and the wet, solid blows the walking dead are doing to the whitewashed wooden door. The lock is good iron, and the door itself a single, heavy oak panel, but it won’t hold forever.
As I pressed on, the voice grew louder, and its cries formed a few words I recognized: desert and full moon, sandstorm and devourer—the last a term that Kelebek had used to describe the tempest we had encountered in the southern ocean.
Chapter XXX: The Sea of Dust
Good morning! Eske is off on another adventure, and you can read about it right now on Patreon, or wait until next week when it moves over here.
Several states have elections tomorrow! Here’s a handy list from Ballotpedia. In Wisconsin, it’s the spring primary. Since I’ll be working at a polling place all day tomorrow, I’m bumping my chapter releases forward a day: Journey to the Water will post on Patreon on Wednesday, and The Book of the New Moon Door will post here on Thursday. Be sure to vote!
There has been an outbreak of homophobia in the online book world, so I’ll take this opportunity to inoculate this space: I’m bisexual, many of the people I love are also LGBTQ+, and I have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry of any kind. I used to argue with people online, now I just unfollow and block. If your interpretation of religion is more important to you than treating your fellow humans with respect, then maybe that’s something you should work on in your own space.
As always, thanks for being here, and have an excellent week.
West, then—as the river turned away toward the sea, and the distant peak of Mount Abora faded into memory, I pursued the setting sun through monsoon-flooded lowlands. Somewhere far to the north lay Phyreios, sleeping quietly under the watchful eye of its god, the mines empty and quiet; farther still stood the land of my birth, winter spreading over it like a cloak.
The battering on the doors has grown more insistent, an arrhythmic roll of a huge, flat drum. A trickle of old blood, embalming fluid, and gods know what else creeps underneath the nearer side. Isabel can smell them, the unmistakable miasma of rot, sickness, and cold, damp earth.
The Book of the New Moon Door
Berend and Isabel’s day continues to get worse. You can have a little zombie apocalypse, as a treat, by reading this chapter on Patreon.
Josefine Cronholm, “Close to You” (Carpenters cover; from MirrorMask)
Happy Monday! The sun is shining and the snow has melted, but it’s only a false spring. I once had a professor who had transferred from UC-Berkeley, and on the singular fifty-degree (10 degrees Celsius) day in February, he was delighted to announce that winter was over. All the native Wisconsinites had to inform him that he was about to be disappointed. Then, as now, the cold will be back with a vengeance and linger like the smell of a spoiled potato in the refrigerator.
Anyway! I’ll have a new chapter of The Book of the New Moon Door on Patreon tomorrow, and the latest chapter of Journey to the Water here on Wednesday. If you haven’t caught up on either of those stories yet, all the previous chapters are available under the Stories tab above (inside the Menu if you’re on mobile).
As always, thanks for being here, and have an excellent week.
“The geography of the nether world is complicated,” Isabel explains. “It’s governed not by distance and space but by the spiritual and conceptual relationship of one place to another.”
Not one of the words in her second sentence makes any sense to Berend. It must be evident on his face, because she looks at him and continues, “My point is that there are a lot of places in the world beyond that haven’t been discovered, and no one knows what might be lurking there.”
“Like the place with the eyes,” Berend says. He still can’t shake the feeling that the next time he looks out a window, they’ll be there again, filling the sky and staring down at him with malevolent, predatory intentions. “Or was that a thing? A creature as big as the world?”
Isabel shrugs. “There isn’t much of a useful distinction. Ondir is the gate, and the gate is Ondir. He is the realm of the dead and its lord.”
There’s a reason Berend never even entertained the thought of joining the clergy as a young man. He rubs at his own eyes, hoping they don’t look as dry and crusty as they feel. His borrowed coffee is wearing off. “Right. So you’re saying that there’s a place, or a person, or a…thing that eats souls like a fire eats wood. Nobody’s heard of it before, because it just appeared out of nowhere, but that happens sometimes.” He blinks, willing himself to stay awake and coherent a little longer. “Do I have that right?”
He looks at Warder, who glances expectantly up at Isabel.
She holds up two empty hands. “It’s more complicated than that, but yes. More or less.”
