Queer Fantasy and Weird Tales for the People
A quick update on The Book of the New Moon Door:
My Great Rewrite is done, clocking in at 164,315 words and 438 pages. My intrepid beta readers are finishing up the last few chapters, and after I’ve gone through their comments, I will be doing line edits forever (for the next three days).
Tomorrow, I get to draw a map. This will be a Real Fantasy Book with a map in the front. I’m very excited.
That’s it for the moment. Stop back on Monday for a cover reveal and more updates!
Sacrifice
“What have you done?” Isabel gasps.
In an instant, the sky full of eyes turns to her, stretching the loose flesh of each socket. Though the eyes are bright and alert, the skin is gray and soft with advanced decay. Rot has settled in to the wall of books, as well, and the pages swell and blacken as white mold creeps over the covers. Isabel can only guess what happens once they disintegrate entirely. A cold, damp wind whistles between the moldering bookcases and across the office floor, tugging at stacks of wet, sticky paper and the lines of the ritual circle.
She takes one cautious step into the room and weighs a quick escape over the impending panic that will surge through the temple if the people there can see what’s happened. She closes the door and turns the lock.
The diagram on the floor is one she doesn’t recognize. Three concentric circles enclose the office from the line of books to a foot before the door; the outermost circle is solid and thick, while the inner two are thinner, with deliberate gaps of thirty degrees or so that don’t overlap. In each gap is a sigil. Isabel can recognize Ondir’s, Alcos’s, and the symbol for protection. Inside the innermost ring is the sigil for sacrifice. In front of it sits Father Pereth.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Twenty-Two”That’s all we get, isn’t it? Vengeance in life, and nothing afterward but the same pain.
The Book of the New Moon Door
Here at the end of everything, our heroes are finally reunited. You can read this chapter right now on Patreon.
Vengeance
Hybrook Belisia tosses the pistol aside and draws the rapier from his hip. He’s light on his feet, one polished toe pointed, his fingers loose around the hilt. “After all this,” he says with a sneer, “you still don’t have the good sense to lie down and die.”
In contrast, Berend grips his saber like he’s hanging from a cliff. It was a glancing blow, the pistol shot, otherwise his guts would be several feet behind him, but he’s still losing blood at an alarming rate. His shirt is already soaked through, and a thick, red stain spreads down one leg and into the heavy fabric of his borrowed coat. He presses his free hand onto the wound, hoping the pressure will keep him upright a little longer. He’ll worry about infection later, if he lives that long.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Twenty-One”“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”
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