Queer Fantasy and Weird Tales for the People
I ended up taking a panel out, so this page was only six panels.
I’m not super happy with the rendering of the fire. It was too dark without the yellow, but looks a little too technicolor with it. Maybe I should have just stuck with regular orange and yellow?
Fire, dead things, and an unhappy protagonist below. This chapter will continue for five more pages, and then things will be less unhappy.
Continue reading “Last Watch Before Dawn: Volume 1, Page 35”Shell District
“Well, the evening is still young,” Berend says, rising from the table. “Shall we?”
The sun has set out of the range of the narrow window, but the sky is still light, a soft blue-gray tinged with fiery orange. Sailors and dockworkers are filling the bar, encroaching on the space around the corner table. They have a somber demeanor about them, besides the normal heaviness of a long day’s work, and their eyes dart warily across the room; word of the lighthouse keeper’s murder must have spread.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Eleven”River District
There are, Berend knows, two establishments in the River District appropriate for the hushed exchange of information. One is a tavern, poorly lit and more poorly maintained, but adequately supplied with good liquor; the other could generously be called a coffeehouse though the substance it served was only tangentially related to coffee. He chooses the former, and leads Isabel through the growing crowds of returning sailors.
The money from the Belisia job is heavy in his pocket. He’s done well for himself. Still, he trusts Lord Edwan about as far as he can throw the man, and he can’t shake the feeling that he’s just been paid to cover up the murder of the poor girl he saw in the light of Lucian Warder’s device.
He tells himself he’s done what he can. He almost believes it.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Ten”The Old Ghost
She’s starting to think of it as real, this demon of legend, like a living thing she’s searching for in the dark corners of the city. Isabel sits back on the heels of her well-worn travel boots, letting her skirts fall around her and bringing the arm not holding the lantern in toward her chest. It’s cold, and the wind blows freely through the open aperture of the lighthouse. On the positive side, however, the temperature keeps the body from reeking after what looks like a couple of hours since death.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Seven”The Lighthouse
Lucian Warder.
Isabel examines the record. The date beside Warder’s name is today’s, the twenty-first of Isra’s Moon. He must have gone to the library this morning, after word of the murder in the Shell District spread. Nothing unusual about that. Anyone would be curious—Isabel was, after all.
Still, it’s strange that she’s run into him twice in such a short time, and stranger still that he sought her out after everything that had happened last night. What did he say his device did? Banish restless spirits, rather like she does? What she does isn’t banishment, but that’s only the first of many problems she has with the concept of Warder’s device.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Six”Warder
Isabel sits at the small table across from Brother Risoven, her tea growing cold and a piece of bloody-colored fungus lying on a scrap of paper beside it. It’s stained the paper a wet reddish brown, and it’s shriveled a bit, but otherwise it hasn’t changed noticeably from when she pulled it off the side of a shack in the Shell District last night. In the thin early morning light from the high, narrow windows of the chapel’s living quarters, it looks rather like a severed finger, dark and twisted from putrefaction.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Two”
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