Queer Fantasy and Weird Tales for the People
“They’ll come,” Pereth mumbles into her shoulder. “I’ve summoned them with blood and fire. They cannot refuse me.”
The Book of the New Moon Door
While Isabel desperately shores up her defenses against the impending apocalypse, the high priest turns to the old ways. You can read this chapter right now on Patreon!
Fortress
The Temple of Ondir is full of books. A stack of this year’s mathematical textbooks, the cheap pulp paper already yellowing, sits beside the hallway leading to Father Pereth’s office. Beside it, a nobleman’s collection of encyclopedias, dust filling in the faded, embossed titles on the spines, leans precariously against the wall. There are handwritten manuscripts, unbound account ledgers, popular novels with titles like The Vampire in the Castle and An Ill-Advised Match, and a child’s alphabet primer, etched into a flat wooden block. A case of leaden printing letters, the hinges badly damaged, sits on top of a pile of catalogues of ladies’ fashions, just underneath the painted image of hooded Ondir carrying his lantern. The entire space under the dome is ringed in books, in stacks up to Isabel’s shoulders, and it still isn’t enough.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Twenty”“After all this,” he says with a sneer, “you still don’t have the good sense to lie down and die.”
The Book of the New Moon Door
A fated duel! Revenge! A daring brush with death! You can find it all in the latest chapter of The Book of the New Moon Door, now available on Patreon. If you can’t spare $3 a month, not to worry, this chapter will be available next week here on the blog for free reading.
Gone
Fallen leaves, turned from pale yellow to deep gold in the bizarre evening light, collect around Berend’s feet as he crosses the wide, central thoroughfare. On either side, the buildings loom tall and shadowed, and a thin green-black sliver of the vertical forest in the south cuts a dark line through the red-tinted sky. It’s shorter than it used to be, and something flickers in and out of view at the top, jutting out at different sharp angles whenever it appears. Berend tries not to look at it. His eye still aches from the last time he tried.
It’s quiet here, and all the windows up and down the street are shuttered. So lights, not even a burning scarlet reflection, shine out from amongst the dark wood casements and between climbing vines. If any of the wealthy citizens who live in this district are at home, they’re hiding very well. Berend hopes—because he’s less inclined than usual to pray, given that the gods are either dead or about to be—that Lady Breckenridge is among them.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Nineteen”The world is ending, she wants to scream in the man’s face, none of it matters.
The Book of the New Moon Door
Even in the midst of the apocalypse, you still have to deal with people. The latest chapter of The Book of the New Moon Door is now available on Patreon.
Dust
It’s only been a few hours since Berend became acquainted with the wall of bone, but it looks like wind and rain have been battering against it for centuries. The bones have turned the color of old parchment. Pores and cracks have opened up all along the lengths of each rib and femur, each dome of a skull, and all the knobbly ends of joints Berend can’t identify, piled up as they are. Under his feet, fragments of bone crack and crumble into dust.
A thick fog blankets the brief stretch of ground between the street and the wall, and it covers Berend’s good eye and muffles his ears. He’s maybe three steps past the temple when it disappears, lost in the morass of gray. The wall runs east to west, as far as he can remember, so he puts it on his left side and places one tired foot in front of the other. Even the eerie red light that made its home on the western horizon doesn’t penetrate the fog anymore.
How much time do we have? he wonders. It’s a foolish question—no one has the answer, not even the gods, and if he thinks about it, he’ll probably stop stark still and not be able to move again until the world finally does end.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Eighteen”They’re almost certainly gone, and whether that means far away or turned into bloody red paste, he can’t say.
The Book of the New Moon Door
Berend tries to tie up loose ends, and one of them comes looking for him. You can read this chapter right now on Patreon.
Knowledge
Around the ruin of Father Pereth’s office, Isabel has constructed a wall of books.
It’s really more of a low fence, three or four books high, depending on thickness. She stacked them haphazardly at first, but that prompted probing investigations from glowing tendrils and many-jointed fingers. Now, church records, illuminated manuscripts, and typeset prayer books stand in neat rows like bricks in a wall. She adds one more at the edge of the gap, a bound copy of the Kalusandr Scrolls, and winces as the already yellowed pages make contact with the heavy, damp air.
If this works, and this defense holds long enough for someone to find a way to send the thing beyond the wall back to the undreamt-of abyss from whence it came, all these books will be ruined. Centuries of church doctrine and millennia of history are only as durable as paper and ink. How can the church rebuild when all their knowledge is covered in mildew and mud?
It’s more important to save the people, she reminds herself. Knowledge survives when people do. What use are books in an empty city?
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Seventeen”Huge, multi-jointed fingers, each as tall as a man and gray as death, reach out ahead and grope blindly at the muddy ground. One swollen knuckle splits open, revealing a green eye with a pinpoint pupil.
The Book of the New Moon Door
Did someone order some body horror? No? Well, here it is anyway. You can read this chapter right now on Patreon.
Knives
Berend does not want to fight this man. He wants even less to kill him, but he’d rather that than give Hybrook Belisia the satisfaction of prematurely concluding his attempts to keep the world from ending. He’d also like to get back to the Temple District before the city scrambles itself around again.
Scarlet night is falling, but it’s still light enough to see that despite the gunshot, there’s no one else around—or they’re quite wisely hiding indoors. This particular street would have been a quiet one, under normal circumstances, but there isn’t a student in sight. There are no lectures from which to return home, nor philosophical discussions to be had over ale or coffee. Everyone is either crowded around the chasm, arguing over how best to build a bridge, holed up inside, or fled to the Temple of Isra.
Berend had mistaken this man for a student, from a distance, but his mistake is obvious now. The disheveled, hungry look isn’t an aesthetic choice, or the result of late nights peering at mathematical figures by candlelight. It’s only good, old-fashioned poverty. Whether it’s recent, or this would-be assassin spent his childhood cutting purses with a smaller knife, Berend can’t say.
“We can pretend we never saw each other,” Berend offers.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Sixteen”
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