The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Seven

The Old Ghost

The Book of the New Moon Door cover image: A book with yellowing, wrinkled pages lies open on an old wooden desk, with a sprig of lavender lying in the center.

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.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Six

The Lighthouse

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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.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Five

The Device

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Berend breathes in the stale, dusty air, ignoring the pervasive scent of decay. His neck aches. He’s a big man, and a proficient fighter; there’s never been an occasion when someone has managed to get their hands around his throat, but he is certain that’s what he felt in that blasted room. If he recalls it, he can still feel the individual fingers squeezing, pressing into his windpipe. He hopes he’ll never have to experience that again.

There is his pistol, his trusty friend through more fights than he can count, lying in the dust on the parlor floor. Berend doesn’t want to leave it behind, for its sentimental value and the fear of what new absurdities might lie upstairs.

That means he must reenter the parlor.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Four

The House

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“Did you see that?”

Lucian is already frantically scribbling in his book, a rough approximation of the young woman taking form under his pen. He balances the lantern on the top of his case and rummages in his satchel, producing a glass thermometer wrapped in a handkerchief.

“Was that the ghost?” asks Berend. With one last look around the stable, and no movement apparent in the body of the horse, he shuts both doors and places the wooden plank across the metal brackets on the outside.

“Not sure.” Lucian gives the thermometer a shake and frowns at it in the dim lamplight before wrapping it back up and returning it to his bag. “I’ll have to take a few more readings. What did you find in there?”

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Three

Belisia

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To place the box in which Mikhail’s corpse currently resides into the temple’s extensive graveyard, Berend will have to pay one hundred silver pennies.

He is informed of this by Father Reeves, the priest in charge of funerary services, a tall man with a shaved head and an aquiline nose. He is paternally comforting and coldly distant, often at the same time, and it’s an unsettling effect. Long brown fingers make notes with a quill in a yellowing ledger.

We all end up as numbers. Berend hands over the money. It’s most of what he has. He’ll need more if he’s going to continue sleeping in a bed until his next job.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Two

Warder

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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.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter One

Mikhail

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The gods weep when a Son of Galaser dies.

Berend would know. It rained for five days straight after the battle on Braenach Hill, when nine Sons out of every ten were slaughtered in the grass, seven years ago. He stood in the mud, afterward, water pouring down on his bandaged head, and listened to the announcement that he and the handful of others still standing would be out of work, as part of the terms of their employer’s surrender.

Not many walked off that hill. Even fewer are still around.

And now one of them is lying in six pieces on an embalming table.

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New project!

Next week, I’ll be starting a new multi-chapter story, The Book of the New Moon Door. As always, it’ll be completely free to read, and released one chapter a week on Wednesdays until further notice.

The world is changing.

The old orders of the world fade away. The church’s power wanes, replaced by secular states. Magic gives way to science.

Berend was once a member of the Sons of Galaser, the most prestigious mercenary company on the continent. Now, the Sons are no more, and only a handful of his former companions remain, one of whom was dismembered last night in what appears to be a demon-summoning ritual out of an old legend.

Isabel is a Sentinel of Ondir, the god of death. Armed with bell, book, and candle, her job is to send restless spirits to the afterlife–and there has been much need of that, of late. Asking the ghost of a murdered ex-mercenary if he saw his killer before he died is a simple task, but she soon finds that things will not be so easy: though everything Isabel knows tells her it’s impossible, it appears his soul has been damaged.

As Berend and Isabel search for a murderer who can dismember a soul, and navigate their places in the changing world, they discover the terrible secrets hidden behind the veil of progress.

Beyond the Frost-Cold Sea: Chapter XXVII

Beyond the Frost-Cold Sea cover image: a wide, still river with forested mountain peaks rising on either side, underneath a clouded sky. — In which the journey continues.

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We made our way back to the gate, a grim procession through the rain and the rubble. Phyreios had truly and utterly fallen. There was nothing left of the temple at the foot of the mountain, once the city’s most magnificent structure. Of the arena, all that remained was a few broken pillars of soot-stained white marble, standing half-buried in a bed of broken stone. Over the husk of the city lay a miasma of smoke, and the rain brought up a thick fog. I could not see much farther than the reach of my arm. The Sword of Heaven hung heavy from my hand.

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Beyond the Frost-Cold Sea: Chapter XXVI

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Weight bore down upon me. The broken earth cut into my flesh. Were it not for the pain, I would have thought I had perished, crushed beneath the rock. Absolute, impenetrable darkness pressed in all around.

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