A Friend To The Watch

Been pretty active on the writing front lately. Nibbling at the edges of A Friend To The Watch, hoping to make a meal of it:

Erron turned the page and Malost had his breath stolen. Images flooded across the winesong connecting them in a rough grey tide, like jagged rocks made liquid, yet retaining their ability to tear:

The Crowned One praying before an altar, surrounded by shadow, darkness, and creatures it hurt the eye to see. Prayers answered by something in that darkness. 

A rooster, silent and still. 

Dogs, barking. 

A man with shadows leaping from his mouth searching among wooden crates. 

Men in the colors of the Duke’s Watch struggling with a twisted tide of flesh spewing from darkness. 

Darts or quills, quivering in flesh. 

Blood but no pain, followed by a long nothing and the song of distant bells. 

Malost felt Erron moving toward the sound of those bells, begin to embrace the warm tolling of Vradesh’s call. Death spiral! he realized. Even that tiny, barely independent recognition required an effort of will Malost doubted he could match again.

Still, he struggled.

He knew nothing else.

There was nothing else.

Until the bells began to toll for him.

Fear proved a well-remembered goad, then.

Too stupid to know you’re beaten! he recalled the first Pathless he’d killed screaming at him. That Pathless was long dead, a heap of ashes in a nameless temple to some Pathless power, denied Vradesh’s embrace for all time.

With a gasp like a drowning man escaping deep water, Malost surged free, falling flat on his face.

A Day Of Hard Choice

So, I decided to scrap a POV character today. Erron, the young initiate, is gone as a POV character. He still figures prominently, but as he was too passive, I will replace him with Malost, a character who has a much more active role in the story right from the beginning and one I hope will draw the reader in more strongly than the initiate.

Here is the first bit I wrote this evening:


Malost found the wine here in the City of The White Boar a good match for the weather; cold, toneless, and none too agreeable to the palate of those not born of these northern climes.

Toneless or not, he reflected, swaying slightly as he turned from the bar, it serves.

Finding his cup empty and the serving maid being groped by a largish man who had her on his lap, Malost decided he must head to the bar himself. Squinting, he marked its location and set out across a floor that seemed to roll under his feet like the seas surrounding the tiny homeland he’d left behind years ago.

He dropped another coin on the bar, slammed the cup back. Had another served, started on it.

Malost closed his eyes and muttered a prayer.

The smell of salt and sea, gulls crying on the wind. 

Malost grinned, heart rejoicing in the sense of being back on the shores of his often-missed homeland.

A belch welled, found release, brought him crashing to the present with its thunder.

Almost, but not quite.

He again closed red-stained eyes, trying to find that place he needed to be, right on the edge…

Two Pathless hunched over a table, one with a tentacle waving, another with a hard shell covering half a twisted face, both before a third Pathless whose malformed skull had a raised crown of points and barbs along the brow. 

“Patience,” the Crowned One urged, “the triptych will arrive in a few days. Until then, you must stay here.” 

Ignoring the complaints of his companions, the Crowned One drank and upended his cup, ”I will bring more wine, food, and a proper offering before we make the next attempt.”

Malost knew, then, where they were. It was not so far from where he swayed.

A hiccup.

Stars, then bright light. A youth, as much boy as man, striding from the light, sun in his hair, speaking words Malost could not hear but understood, somehow, to be those of his namesake.

Another hiccup.

The same boy, now more a man, with grapevine wound through his hair, a song on his lips, and a jug of wine in hand, guiding others through a complex dance.