Queer Fantasy and Weird Tales for the People
Her fingers remain flesh; her coat is still wool. Whatever happened here is over now. All that remains is a village made of iron.
The Book of the New Moon Door
In case you missed yesterday’s update, Journey to the Water is on a brief hiatus, and I’ll be posting new chapters of The Book of the New Moon Door every week for the next month or so. You can enjoy the latest chapter on Patreon.
As she approaches the forest, the pines whisper back to the ghosts. It sounds like she’s caught in a storm. It sounds like a warning.
The Book of the New Moon Door
Isabel crosses the apocalyptic landscape and finds something unexpected in the latest chapter of The Book of the New Moon Door, now available on Patreon.
Screams
Berend props himself up, his back against the dais and his head resting at the base of Isra’s altar. A smiling goddess, her arms cradling sheaves of wheat balanced on her wide hips like a pair of infants, gazes down at him beatifically. He’s always liked Isra; her green-clad nuns have gentle hands and a collection of excellent painkilling drugs, and they listen to his war stories, even pretending to be interested. The goddess herself hasn’t done much of anything, in his experience, but that’s how these things go. You pray to the gods, and maybe some people show up to do what needs to be done, and everyone gives the gods all the credit and moves on with their lives.
That is, until Berend learned that Galaser had given up his whole godly person to hold back the thing with all the eyes. He still doesn’t quite believe it. Maybe he didn’t really believe in the gods, not really. They were more like concepts than divine beings, weren’t they? Maybe someone like Isabel believed in Ondir as a person, the keeper of the gates or what have you, but most people didn’t.
Isabel would tell him that it doesn’t matter. Ondir is the gate, and also the idea of death. And so Galaser, the idea of a warrior, can stand on the idea of a fortress wall and give his life defending it. Berend might ask her for clarification, but she’s asleep, or close enough that he doesn’t want to disturb her.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Seven”Berend knows this is Arden Geray, despite the absence of his face, because of the bullet hole in his chest. The tattered remains of a starched shirt help, but Berend put that hole there. He’d recognize it anywhere.
The Book of the New Moon Door
After zombies, it’s time for more ghosts. You can read this chapter right now on Patreon, or wait a week until it’s available free here. My Patreon is only $3 a month!
Red
Isabel had never received a reply to her letter asking the Sentinels of Vernay to weigh in on the conundrum of the broken spirit of Mikhail Ranseberg—or, maybe, an answer was waiting for her at the temple, never to be reclaimed. She wasn’t going to risk the high priest’s wrath by setting foot in there now. She’d answered her own questions in the weeks that followed, anyway, and now here she was, with the thing that had torn Mikhail’s soul apart grasping at her through the gaps in a wall of bone.
Still, she’d like to see something familiar. If she had a home, it would be Vernay, in the church where she’d spent her childhood sweeping between the headstones and her adolescence poring over dusty tomes in the library. She’d been trying to return there ever since arriving in Mondirra, the city’s bustle and noise straining her faculties even when she had time to eat and sleep, which hasn’t been often, of late. Vernay is quiet, as a rule, and the dead do not wake there. The turning of its ancient mill has continued uninterrupted since the time of the Inquisition. It’s hard to imagine the cataclysmic changes that have come to Mondirra visiting Vernay’s ancient, packed-earth streets.
The dying red sun refuses to set as the evening grows late, and long after nightfall should have arrived, it burns like a stubborn ember on the horizon. Perhaps, Isabel muses as she strains her eyes over the as-yet-untouched West Gate district, the light there isn’t the sun at all, but rather some alien fire that was transferred here from the nether when the world was torn apart and stitched back together.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Six”“After everything, and considering the end of the world, you might as well call me Berend.”
Isabel takes this into consideration and decides that she won’t.
The Book of the New Moon Door
We’re 3/4ths of the way through the book, and our protagonists just might be becoming friends. You can read this latest chapter on Patreon.
Choices
“I’m sorry,” Isabel mutters, her eyes sliding from his face down to the mist-shrouded earth between her feet. “I’m glad you’re alive.”
It looks bad, Berend admits—a whole swathe of the city is gone, swallowed up in dense gray fog streaked bloody with the strange red sunlight. The sun should have set by now, he’s fairly certain, but the light lingers dim and cold over the wet landscape. He can just make out the sharp, flickering shapes of broken ghosts, gathered at the edge of what’s left of the cemetery. The solid, heavy shape of the Temple of Ondir stands firm and untouched at his back, but it doesn’t offer much reassurance. It doesn’t have Isabel in it. She’s out here, instead, which means she has already been inside. It’s the first place she would go—church folk are predictable like that, and Isabel is a particularly churchy sort of church folk. And she’s not still inside where it’s safe and dry and relatively warm, and where there are a few people nominally devoted to the safety of the city and the maintenance of the terribly abused order of the world, so something must have made her leave.
Whatever it was, it doesn’t bode well for Berend’s immediate future. As bad as things look, here at the edge of the familiar world, he’s sure they’re actually much worse.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Five”This is a problem for theologians, nether-world researchers, and the high church fathers in their southern palaces, not some washed-up mercenary and a disgraced, low-ranking Sentinel. He’d much rather let more qualified minds handle it, and wait out the apocalypse in Lady Breckenridge’s feather bed. He’d be happy no matter which way the end of the world turns out, and that seems to be the best outcome he can hope for.
The Book of the New Moon Door
Things are bad and only getting worse in the latest chapter of The Book of the New Moon Door, which you can read now on Patreon. If you need to catch up, all the previous chapters are available for free under the Stories tab above (under the Menu if you’re on mobile).
Empty Road
Berend leaves Warder in the nurses’ capable hands. He’ll be back later, when he’s found his things and a safe place to sleep, and maybe something resembling a meal. It’s not like Warder is going anywhere.
Bodies in varying states of decay clog the stairwells, lying piled against the doors and draped over the edge of the stairs. Some are fresh, their wounds raw and crimson, dressed in bloodstained nurses’ uniforms or fresh bandages. Berend steps over a gray-skinned body, naked except for the torn remains of a shroud clinging to its shoulders, its arms broken off above the elbows. He finds the missing limbs a few steps later, clutched in the hands of a fresher corpse, the back of its skull smashed in from a fall. Blood slicks the steps, sticking to Berend’s boots.
They were tearing each other apart. Behind the sleeve he put up to shield his nose from the haze of disinfectant and decay—so thick he can almost see it—Berend grimaces. A horde of undead isn’t an army; there’s no loyalty or camaraderie. They’re a haunting by another name, a manifestation of the pain and rage of a spirit who can’t accept that it’s dead. Losing limbs doesn’t stop them, nor does smashing their faces against a stone wall. A little collateral damage wouldn’t make a difference.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Four”Orville Peck, “Big Sky”
Good morning!
Firstly, I am happy to announce that The Book of the New Moon Door is complete! I am the proverbial day late and a dollar short, of course, but it’s done. Final word count for all three parts, including chapter headings, is 170,764. This will probably change significantly as I go through the editing process this summer. New Moon Door has been the least structured of my serial novels (which is a gentle way of saying “I was definitely making this up as I went”), and I’m looking forward to pruning it into shape.
This week, I’ll have a new chapter of Journey to the Water on Patreon tomorrow, and the latest chapter of New Moon Door will be up here on the blog Wednesday.
As of right now, here’s the plan for all my projects going forward: Journey and New Moon Door will continue their biweekly schedule while I’m editing New Moon Door. I’m aiming to publish New Moon Door this year and Journey next year. In between those, I want to revisit The Well Below the Valley and The Tarot of the Gates, possibly rewriting and reformatting the former before writing some new content for it.
I’ll keep you updated as things progress! Thanks for being here, and have an excellent week.
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