Thought-Drive

A Ballad of Beginning                Darkness gave way to dream. The environment was very familiar, an enormous library filled with books containing the mysteries of magic. From the arcane architecture of evocation to the crystalline construction of abjuration, it was all there. It loomed, but it also snickered at the continuous failures of would-be wizards. The dream was even more familiar than its setting, but the longer it went on, the more things seemed different. Like nightmare was waiting under ever desk and inside every closet. It would not be escaped though, the dream. Perhaps that was its nature.                A figure striding through the dark halls broke the familiarity like thin glass. The stranger seemed on fire, the way power flowed about it, created a wake where the person walked like a flaming cloak. When it turned, as if s...

I was going to post a second fantasy short story, but the writing is taking longer than I'd like. I guess this is filler, then. Thinking back, I maybe should have worked on some writerly commentary in the same post or in a post after the stories. Maybe I'll fold that into things moving forward. In other news, the novel I'm working to finish by Christmas hit the 60k mark. For a lot of publishers, that's the threshold separating novels from novellas or acceptable from unacceptable in terms of submission guidelines. It was at chapter 17 that I hit the mark, and the latest chapter spilled it over. Then I took a break, because a new story that came to me crowded my concentration. That doesn't happen normally, but this time it was pretty clingy. Even after I took some notes down, and outlined a bit, it still didn't go away. It made chapter 18 a slog that I will have to return to and clean up. In a larger, horrifying sense, the novel has changed in my mind to somet...

Blood for the Soil                Clarice squinted at the small object in the distance. She squinted, and she concentrated. It didn’t come into greater focus, however it was growing steadily in size as it approached on the dirt path that cut through the gold and green western fields. But it was a slow pace. She looked down at the thick tree branch beneath her and the leather bundle resting there. She pulled at a loose string and unrolled it to reveal a series of glass discs of slightly different hues and moderately different sizes, each with its own pocket of soft fur. Clarice remembered the instructions of assembly, and went about arranging the discs in upright positions in little slots in the leather shell, then carefully re-rolled the bundle tightly around the round objects. She held it up to her eye and directed her attention toward the object approaching on the road. It was revealed to be a blurry smatter ...