Author: alexanderwales

“I’m going to need to rest soon,” I told the call of the gold as I landed in Necrolaborem. “Too much fighting and flying today.” It had been one of those long days, the kind that stretched on forever by virtue of having started early and been crammed full of taxing things. There was no […]

“We need to talk,” I said as I flew through the air. “You’re supposed to give me a break.” You couldn’t really carry on a conversation with the call of the gold, at least so far as I’d been able to find. It would give instructions, for some people as a voice in the head, […]

An Amaryllis had taken up position next to the manor entrance, which was now a large, burnt hole in the building. They had been lucky that the long elevator was untouched, because it would have complicated descent into the complex if it had been turned to slag. Unfortunately, the dragonfire was a mar on the […]

“What is this?” asked Amaryllis when I placed the uniform down on the table. It took her a moment to find the patches, and when she did, she stared at them for a moment, then looked at me. “I have theories,” I said. “The top theory is that someone from Earth came to Aerb, not […]

“I have reservations,” I said to the table of tuung. I did feel a bit odd, being the only human there, and I was definitely damp, since this room, like many in the complex at Poran, was equipped with a mister in the ceiling that sprayed at periodic intervals. Aside from me being human, I […]

I watched as the work crew dismantled Tommul. Dragon deaths were incredibly uncommon, the kind of uncommon event where a government workgroup might put together a committee to make a thick binder with plans and contingencies, which would then get left on a shelf for twenty years without being used, until the time a new […]

There wasn’t a lot of good information on who the most powerful gold mage of all time had been, but there was a decent chance that I was in the top one percent of all time. Gold mages were hampered by their quest for gold, and unstable by design, which meant that there were hard […]

The Egress was incredibly fast, and landed in the park five minutes later, going well in excess of a thousand miles an hour in order to do so. It was a better ship than the Underline in pretty much every way but its controls, which were nothing more than a map you could use to select your destination. In […]

It was a bit of a waiting game. We had to wait for Amaryllis to sync with a clone, we had to wait for reports to come through the Fourfold Flask, and we had to wait for some kind of secondary deal with the Dorises. When we’d finally negotiated with them, we were able to […]

“Is it done?” asked Perisev. Her voice carried on the winds, silky and smooth but also quite loud. I hadn’t remembered quite how big she was, nor the strange way she moved, as though unbothered by physics. “No,” I replied back, amplifying my own voice with vibration magic. “We have everything under control.” “I did […]

The office was the first door to the left down an industrial hallway, and in contrast to the exposed concrete and wires, it was fully furnished and stocked with enough antiques that I thought it had probably been the work of a few weeks to get everything just so. Where the office up above had […]

I had no idea what, if anything, there was to do about Solace and the locus. I had no idea how the locus had seen their relationship before the unbottling, before the resurrection, or at any other point. And maybe the metaphor that I was seeing was just a thin slice of time, the locus picturing Solace […]

The Underline sailed along, well under the three hundred foot limit, taking us not to the Isle of Poran, but back to the Necrolaborem EZ, this time with remote assistance from the Dorises to actually find the fucker. Based on the readings that they’d been able to give us in the DFEZ, he was in the […]