"The Grace of Turning Back" at Beneath Ceaseless Skies

"The Grace of Turning Back," the final story of the Curse-Strewn World sequence, appears in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #179, which can be read on the BCS website or in the Kindle store.

The Tynesi merchants, who traded everything from the silver rice of Timru and perfume leaves from Simrandu to chips of ivory off the Keld’s temples, had a term for a particular sort of improvidence: to throw money, time, or strength into seeing to completion a bargain they had already got the worse end of. It’s all After-Bad, they’d say.
A useful phrase. Aniver vaguely remembered his clearheaded pleasure at first learning it.
That pleasure blossoming within his soul had been sacrificed to fuel a magelight to chase away Semira’s nightmares as they approached the edge of the world. It hadn’t meant much to him, had not made up more than a candlelight’s worth of his being, but Aniver was down to the dregs of his power now. And he was draining those dregs, perhaps After-Bad, but he didn’t think they would do much good where he was going.

Has Aniver thrown so much of himself away After-Bad that he has nothing left for his last great spell, returning Nurathaipolis and her sister cities to their proper place in time? At what cost? Can Semira help him without losing herself, too?

You'll have to read to find out, but I will say writing the ending of this one had me tearing up more than once. Maybe because I'm sentimental, maybe because the Palisades Library (where my friend got me in Tuesday evenings for weekly writing parties) was very dry, who can say?

Also, [slight spoiler follows] for those of you curious to see how a Grace with six wings might look, this gorgeous piece by Rebecca Yanovska might help provide an idea. I didn't see it until I was into the editing process, but when I did I had that feeling of recognition.

I'm very grateful to Scott Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies for publishing the Curse-Strewn World stories, and of course to all of you for reading along with them!

While "The Grace of Turning Back" brings Aniver and Semira's stories to a conclusion, it isn't necessarily the last we'll ever see of them. Two prequel pieces are in my drafts notebook--"The Queen of Yesterday," referenced in "The Storms in Arisbat," has an interesting tale to tell, and of course there's the story of how Aniver and Semira met in the first place on The Glass-Clear Sea.

I can't promise I'll be able to smuggle a secondary-world version of the Sunk Cost Fallacy into those, but I'll surely have fun trying.

"The Astrologer's Telling" up at Daily Science Fiction

...charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low.

Ever since I first encountered that nightmare image, from H.P. Lovecraft's prose-poem "Nyarlathotep," I have wanted to write a story about the stars going out. A morbid urge? Absolutely. But there's a certain virtue in morbidity; it makes me thoughtful and perhaps compassionate, if that's a thing a writer of apocalyptic fiction can be.

And so "The Astrologer's Telling" comes from a different philosophy than Lovecraft's more nihilistic landscape.I hope it proves, as well as terrifying and mournful, perhaps a little inspiring. I spent some time worrying about the science of kindling and extinguishing stars, before I at last embraced the fact that my interest was much less scientific than artistic and emotional. And I hope the story is more impactful for it.

About this time last year, this story received an Honorable Mentions in the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing (whew! I've never been able to write the full name without looking it up). I am very grateful to Rick Wilbur and Sheila Williams for constructive commentary after the contest.

Review: Heaven's Needle by Liane Merciel

You know how I said The White-Luck Warrior became horror a few pages in?

The White-Luck Warrior would take one look at one page of Heaven's Needle and run away crying.

Which is why, despite it being marketed as high fantasy, Heaven's Needle is my review of choice for Hallow's Eve this year.

(That's a warning, by the way, that the following review will contain disturbing imagery and if you aren't up for that, especially if you're currently eating tasty food, feel free to visit a different webpage).



The prologue includes a nice grisly bit about people exploding, proving this is going to be far more twisted than previous The River King's Road if nothing else. Of course, we should expect more twistedness, given the Sun Knight Sir Kelland has been kidnapped and imprisoned by the sadomasochistic Thorns, whose magic depends on their worship of the goddess Kliasta through disfigurement and torture. His friend and would-be lover, Bitharn, is on her way to rescue him. But doing so involves deceiving and betraying their own order of paladins serving the sun goddess Celestia. She frees Malentir, a Thornlord imprisoned by the Celestians, in order to have a prisoner exchange.

Meanwhile, Kelland is discovering moral complexities of his own in conversation with the leader of the Thorns, called the Spider. Here the Thorns rise above standard villain fare by revealing discipline and philosophy. For one thing, these vicious clerics are truthbound, which the Spider explains is because "the truth hurts worse" than any lie. It's still interesting that the villains of the previous book are suddenly revealed as...not exactly trustworthy, but more complex than they were at first. The Spider is also deeply in love with her husband (and their relationship has definite consensual BDSM undertones, which is confusing to the chaste Sun Knight but not represented as a sign of their Evilness. Although, alas, I miss the days of R.A. Salvatore's sadistic sorceresses and their captive elves, it was refreshing to see BDSM as a humanizing element to an evil character, rather than Bad People Having Bad Sex). Speaking of confusing the chaste Sun Knight, the Spider further sends Kelland for a spin by teaching him of a Celestian heresy that allows sexual activity within a committed relationship. In short, only casual sex is bad for Celestians. Given Celestia is the moral arbiter of this story's universe, I feel like She's going both too far (celibacy, according to my Catholic upbringing, is the sacrifice of emotional as well as sensual intimacy) and not far enough (what's so wrong with casual sex?).

This is all extremely interesting to me, if the thick paragraph above hadn't tipped you off. Unfortunately, one of my pet peeves from The River Kings' Road carried over--the flashbacks. "Have you heard of this fortress?" Character A asks. Character B has heard of the fortress, and now we the readers will to, in the form of a 2-page flashback/lecture. Then Character B replies to A, "Yes, I've heard of it. <Pithy 1-sentence summary of the lecture that tells us all we really needed to know for the story to move forward.>"

Enjoying this series involves some level of acceptance of the fact that every chapter or so will contain a mini-short-story setting up background information that is perhaps 30-50% relevant. I get some fantasy fans really enjoy the worldbuilding. I usually do, too, but I like it to be subtler and more connected to the action of the story. Especially because there's enough to unpack in this story.

Our villain (or at least one of them), Corban, starts down the road to ruin by trying to democratize magic, which has previously been the realm solely of the gods. Unfortunately, he decides to democratize war magic, as that's where the greatest popular demand is. Even more unfortunately, this magic isn't actually free of the gods after all--it comes from Maol, god of Madness. This is why tracing your supply chain is important, everyone.

That said, the idea of god-free magic is very tantalizing to those of a more agnostic strain of thought, and I feel the theocracy of the Celestian Sun Knights goes unexamined. Especially as Bitharn goes to prove the Celestians are not flawless avatars of the good.

I said about the previous book that this world's Viking-analogues were very close to historic Vikings, but I was incorrect. They turn out to be more misogynistic (not hard, actually, as the Vikings allowed women to own property, divorce, and many other useful rights) and this paves the way for a new character, the gender-role-crossing Sword Maiden Asharre. Asharre is mourning the loss of her sister, a Celestian cleric, when she is given the job of playing bodyguard to two new clerics as they travel to their first assignment.

It doesn't go well.

Kliasta, the goddess of the Thornlords, has driven her followers to pluck out their eyes, disfigure themselves, and devise some really amazing torture devices. Thorns still flock to her in steady numbers. The followers of Baoz, god of war, are the topic of some really horrible visions inflicted on Asharre as she crossed a booby-trapped bridge. Boaz is still pretty popular among solider types, who come to him willingly. But Maol, bloody four-armed Maol, is so wrong that he doesn't have volunteer converts; instead His spirit just sort of comes where it will, inflicting body horror and insanity.

He's taken over the town where our baby clerics and babysitter Asharre are going preaching.

If the scene where a ferret claws out its own guts hasn't proved enough warning, I'll just lay down the line: do not eat, and be careful of drinking, anything at all after page 200. I giggled through MangaMinx's Amnesia playthroughs, and this book was too much for me (not literally too much, but...I'm pretty sure you understand what I mean. If this were a movie I'd be hiding behind the couch). Body horror transformations, torture porn, and scary creatures chasing the protagonists through the night abound. There's also helpings of sexual assault (consider yourselves trigger warned), no child immortality, and pleas from mercy coming from orifices that shouldn't even work as mouths.

To defeat this haunting/manifestation/curse, Kelland and Bitharn find themselves working alongside Kliastans, who are not only safer than the alternative but also more stylish. You know it's bad when I prefer the aesthetic of missing-eyeball body modifications, although for the record, Malentir's thorned bracelets? Stylish.

Aside from the Amnesia games, this book also reminded me of C.S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy, if only for the surface similarity of sun clerics fighting the powers of darkness against a fantasy-horror background. Coldfire, though, had much more depth and the worldbuilding felt more rigorous--appropriately, as among its mash of genres there was a healthy dose of science fiction. Heaven's Needle seemed to miss the chance for deeper examinations of its premises in places like Celestian theocracy (also, Celestia appears to be the only benevolent deity in this universe). There was a nice bit of mindfuck, a twist I'm not even sure was played straight or not, when Asharre's horrific visions turn out to be helpful in defeating Maol, who uses terror to distract her from a path to salvation. Or maybe it was a double-blind taking advantage of reverse psychology. I'm not certain.

The Celestian plotline inflicts a specific cruelty masterfully in a way Coldfire also achieved and R. Scott Bakker's opus, though brilliant in other ways, hasn't managed: it holds out cosmic virtue alongside cosmic evil, revealing a right path that is neither good nor easy. Given Celestia exists, and Her precepts are good, and Her servants seek to ease suffering, and all this is self-evident, there's no excuse for Asharre, Bitharn, or Kelland to turn away from the frequently gruesome demands of their quest in Her service. In Bakker's universe you (especially as the reader, but as a character to) can toss up your hands at an especially grotesque im/moral scenario and live on in a selfish state of apathy. Perhaps some children have to be sacrificed so you can keep living, but oh well; the universe sucks and once you accept that, things make a sort of sense. Not so here. Serving Celestia may require you to let some children be sacrificed, and that makes it your duty to let them die, and this is a fact that coexists with the goodness of Celestia and, holy heck, my Catholic upbringing didn't prepare me for this (lies, it totally did and I'm drinking it up).

I was hoping for more tie in with The River Kings' Road, which I didn't feel had concluded the stories of all its characters, but Bitharn and Kelland are the only ones who carry over. I think the Thornlady in Road was acting as part of a long-term plot the Thorns had to capture a Sun Knight, all so they can secure Kelland and Bitharn's cooperation against Maol, but I'm not actually sure. Meanwhile,  Brys Tarnell isn't ever gonna get his redemptive arc, is he (which is fine, but then why all the backstory?). I'm not even certain if the series will continue or rest as a duology. If there is a third book coming, I hope it's a bit lighter in tone--maybe fluffy scenes of the Spider and her husband beating each other up and conquering the world. Yes, that would be a great deal cheerier.

Final judgement: I haven't read a really horrifying book in a long time, and it was oddly fun to give in to the occasional urge to whimper Liane Merciel, NO, have mercy!. It was also an interesting book to compare/contrast with The White-Luck Warrior, which I thought was scary at the time but is now regulated to merely grimdark swords and sorcery ("merely" meaning "on an unprecedentedly epic scale," but it didn't touch me in the deeply, emotionally violating sense Heaven's Needle did).

Read it if: you want to prove your toughness, enjoy some twisted dark gods, and, yes, see Kelland and Bitharn get their happy ending--whether or not you feel they deserve it after everything they allowed to happen in this book.

Do not read if: you dislike dead children, have extreme triggers for gore, and never want to picture intestines as a mode of locomotion. Oops, sorry, that mental image is here to stay. I don't see why I should suffer it alone.


Links:
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Kobo
iTunes

News: Grim Corps' Debut Issue and Dell Magazines' Award Honorable Mention!

 Today I am reading my contributor's copy of Grim Corps' magazine's premier issue, which contains a reprint of my psychological horror story and Poe* homage, "Ms Brellin". Along with of course my own piece (I haven't yet had the time to read up to the page where it starts yet, so my commentary is on other writer's stories and thus perfectly unbiased), there's some quite effective dark fiction here, with chilling lines dropped at just the right places. And the ink illustrations are ominously gorgeous.

Also, my science fiction story "The Astrologer's Telling" received an Honorable Mention in the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. I'm sorry I waited until my penultimate undergrad semester to discover this contest! My fellow finalists, as we've gotten to know each other through email, are some friendly and spectacularly talented people. I'm sorry I won't be able to meet them in person, as the International Conference on the Fantastic, where the awards ceremony is held, begins in Orlando on the very same day my class flies out to Ghana. Studying abroad is a great reason to miss anything, I suppose. Yet I am sorry to miss this one.

*I keep saying it's a Poe homage because I wrote it after nobody in my American Lit class agreed to go along with my alternative reading of "The Fall of the House of Usher." So then I decided, fair enough, I'll go and write a story that fits with my reading. Readers do seem to agree that "Ms Brellin," at least, is a contemplation of the horrors of loneliness...and the perhaps worse horrors that can come in attempting to escape it...but I've not yet heard any comparisons to Poe. But I thought I'd put it out there, in case anyone wanted to smile and nod and make my day.

Added: Publications List

If you look to the right of this post, you can now see a link to my Publications List, probably the single most useful page on this blog. It offers links to my stories, roughly organized by length and genre and also by series. There are currently 3 of the latter in progress:

A Dark and Wonderful History: Stories of Women and Monsters, is a sort of parallel history in a secondary world that has a share of similarities to our own. Also its share of differences. Gods, ghosts, the shapeshifting and blood-drinking Dihneen, sacred and magical trees, and doors that open to unimaginable places appear in these stories, all encountered--and sometimes, if only for a short time, controlled--by women.

The Curse-Strewn World is a planned series of at least five short stories and one novelette. Currently the first story--not the first chronologically, but written as a bit of an introduction--is available in Beneath Ceaseless Skies' 110th issue. "The Storms in Arisbat" was originally written as a sort of personal exorcism. I hoped if I could get down at least one story featuring these characters and their journey, which kept haunting me, I could move on with other projects (of which, like many writers, I always have too many). Well, I did complete the story, and some readers and reviewers enjoyed it--they enjoyed it so much that, like Lois Tilton in her Locus Online review, they wondered if there were more stories to come. The answer is: Yes. Yes, there are.

Heart's Kindred, featuring the swordsman Rathin and the wizard Anweth, I've written to be a purely enjoyable adventure series. As more stories are completed, they'll continue to build up the world where the wandering couple lives--a world which is linked, in fact, to several other stories I've written (read Of the Generation, based in the same setting, and you'll discover at least one custom, or perhaps a sort of spiritual or lifestyle practice, that also appears in Aqua Vitae). These links are far from unusual, and even my unsorted science fiction and fantasy stories may share references with each other. There's a scavenger hunt, or perhaps a bingo board or a drinking game, in there somewhere.

It's also for reason of shared setting that I've grouped the stories taking place in and around the Xeocin empire, though they are not by any means a series. The world-spanning empire's capital city of Xeocib is the locale of the novel I'm currently writing (reviews of The Halcyon in Flight especially have stated that there seems to be more background to the story than is shown, and probably further stories as well. They're right). While these short stories will not by any means be necessary to understanding the novel's plot or characterization, I think every single one of them has been referenced in the current draft of the manuscript.

As I created this Listing, I discovered a lot of 'dead links' and the reality of several stories which are no longer available online, in print, or in either medium. One of my next orders of business is looking for reprint markets so that some of these stories can enjoy the light of day again--and most importantly, so readers can find and enjoy them!