WIP: Solomon’s Choice – Ravena Takes a Look
“What a good boy you are,” soothes Ravena, and I want to turn toward her again, want to bask in that praise - Notte sighs. “Must you?” She stops.
“What a good boy you are,” soothes Ravena, and I want to turn toward her again, want to bask in that praise - Notte sighs. “Must you?” She stops.
This is a a snippet from my upcoming book, Solomon's Choice. If you join the newsletter, you'll not only get tidbits and freebies like this, you'll also get the next…
“But how could he guarantee… here you are, with all your free will… things,” I say, waving my hand. “With only Terrance allowed to kill people.” “Yes.” “Then he failed. He completely failed.” Notte sighs. “No. He succeeded.”
A sample from my work-in-progress, Solomon's Choice. Don't forget to join the newsletter for updates! I roll onto my back, marveling again at the lack of weight in my chest.…
Perfect movements, nothing wasted, arching smooth and lunging sharp and landing solid at angles I don’t think human bodies can do, and there are no pauses in their fight, no moments of indecision or rest, and all the while, hypnotic sparks fly overhead like a rainbow shattered. They fight the way music sounds. There is a rhythm, and I want to join the dance.
How that that THING be a person, be a being that thrusts its sentience in my face like a rude too-powerful slap?
It does feel borrowed, like ancient powers I’ve never known know me, and they have come calling my name.
Here I stand in the monument to his beloved gone, alone with the weight of decisions I cannot possibly see the ends of, cannot possibly work out all that will come from my choice, and yet I must make it now.
This smile, this is not a good smile, this is a killing smile with too-wide eyes and too much teeth and more of a snarl than a smile at all.
I am just about to blurt let me go home when the Lord of Night Whispers speaks. “By rights, we should kill you.”
"I am The Mortal’s Doom, and before your mother shed her first infant tears onto the soil of the old world, I was."
It sounds like exaggeration, does it not? I was there, and it is still difficult to credit.
Tiny yearning tugged at me. What would I find, if I could find my way there?
That power. Lips could lie but power could not.
I was in a van with Robin Goodfellow
and some Shadow’s Breath rando, and I had no idea where we were headed.
We carried stories from town to town, transmitting parables like pathogens, connecting people via the thin threads of empathy and imagination who would otherwise never meet.
So many things seem eternal, seem, in the moment, to be without end and culturally permanent scars. The great flood; the memory of dragons; the knowledge that there are demons in the dark.
I now present an unedited snippet from Notte, the dramatic hero of my WIP. SO dramatic. Oh my.
A bit of writing process and a brand-new NOTTE snippet.
The tower was filled with breaking. Breaking wills, breaking minds, breaking cries. At every turn, every landing, even every stairwell, Saqalu draped and twisted, wings out, faces stretched, and if they were aware of me at all, they told me to run.
Flames dance thanks to exothermic reactions, a process that releases energy to its surroundings in the form of heat and light. So did she.
She sort of… skipped, boots barely touching the treacherous ground, keeping on her feet even as I slipped and staggered and relied solely on her grip to keep me on mine.