“Gareth Killkenny is the King of Thieves,” said Mumford with a satisfied smile. “He can spot a fellow thief at a hundred paces, charm the underclothes off a Foresworn Sister, and he once fooled the All-King into believing he had a long lost twin brother.”
World Building: Minorities
The Gift and the Burden There was a time when wizards held a position at the top of the great pyramid of society. The great wizard-kings of old passed their Gift down, father to son, mother to daughter. A man or woman with the Gift on the battlefield was worth a hundred of those without, […]
World Building: Goblins Remix
Goblins of the Written Word As everyone knows, goblins are one of the greediest of the races, constantly hoarding coin. However, at the foothills of the Karthar Mountains exists a goblin of a different breed, whose thirst is for words instead of gold.
World Building: Other Planes
M-space m-space began as a simple notation in the formulas of the magician-scientists. It had been discovered long ago that for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction, and that the total energy in a system stayed the same. The only problem with these theories was the presence of magic, which seemed to […]
World Building: Warfare
The Wizardless Wars From Alexander Tinth’s Warfare: In Theory and Practice, Addendum There is an old saying that must once have been pithy, which goes “Wizard war is redundant”. This is of course a shortening of the full formulation, which is “Wizard war is redundant, for all wars involve wizards” which removes the syntactic ambiguity […]
World Building: Elves Remix
“They just want you to think they’re high brow,” said Mumford. Normally his crazy stories were easy to dismiss, but we were camping right near the edge of known elf territory, and so the three of us listened closely. We knew exceedingly little of elves.
World Building: Unnatural Disasters
The Temporal Storms From Elder Mayhew’s Existential Threats, Their Signs and Symptoms: The first truly definitive sign that a temporal storm is brewing is the appearance of the heralds. These men and women appear as if from nowhere, usually speaking foreign languages and typically in an advanced state of confusion. They are not heralds in the […]
World Building: Missing Persons
The Lost City of Potyr In 861, the results of the census of the Golden Empire revealed an anomaly; the population had decreased markedly for the first time in more than a hundred years. The drop could not be accounted for by war, famine, or disease. It seemed very much like someone had simply counted […]
Lost City
“The flag has too many crosses on it,” said Alexei. “What do you mean?” asked Feodor, barely looking up from his work. “It’s got eleven crosses. There’s one for each of the city-states that founded the Empire, you know that.” “Look at the flag,” said Alexei. “It’s got twelve crosses.” They were sitting in a […]
World Building: The Labyrinth
The Forest of Lost Time Until you try to leave, the Forest of Lost Time seems like any other forest of the mid-latitudes of Kerwin. The trees are tall, the undergrowth is sparse, and the light filters gently through the leaves. It is an idyllic place, marred only by the fact there there is no […]
World Building: Special Rules
The Time Machine The defining rule break of this world is the existence of time machines. These work according to some very specific rules, which in turn result in all of the divergences from our world (it’s otherwise the same as the real world). I should warn beforehand that this is a fairly large amount […]
World Building: Language
The Uttalak tribesmen are a curious sort, for they have no tongues. First contact with them has been lost to time, and it can only be imagined what trouble that must have been, for while the Uttalak (literally, speech-lacking in Miaran) are able to understand speech, they don’t use it themselves, and of course when first encountered […]
The Last Christmas, Chapter 5
Charles sat in his private viewing room, with Matilda right beside him.
“We’re outside of time, right?” asked Charles. “The viewer shows us everything that happened this year, but it’s not actually the end of the year yet. How does that work?”
“We extrapolate forward,” said Matilda. “We take the world as it was and simulate the whole thing forward from the moment that we left time.”
The Last Christmas, Chapter 4
The next morning, the very first stop that Charles made – after another enormous and varied breakfast – was to the List Room. Matilda stood by his side. He’d asked for Kelvin as well, but had been told that he was unavailable. He hadn’t actually thought that elves could be unavailable, but it was another data point to add to his model of how the North Pole worked.
The Last Christmas, Chapter 3
Charles awoke in the morning feeling more refreshed than he had in years. The bed was soft and fluffy, and he experienced a moment of confused bliss as he lay beneath the warm sheets, until he remembered that he was Santa Claus, and that the previous person to wear that mantle had been a monster.