Worth the Candle

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 […]

I wished that I had Grak’s temporal plate, because I wanted time to think, not just about what was going on, but about what I knew. Pinno had said that the entity had acted like Doris until they reasoned with it, and if it was acting like Doris because it was Doris, then that meant she could be reasoned […]

As it turned out, Star Doris had been telling the truth, and we weren’t far from where the blood mages had been doing their thing. Any normal member polity of the Empire of Common Cause would have mandated that high-level research and engineering take place far from a center of population, and this wasn’t just […]

“So what’s the murders per capita in this shithole?” asked Arthur, giving me a goofy grin. “Uh, pretty low,” I said. “If you’re comparing it to real life, it would be staggeringly low.” He frowned at me. “The way it was described to us, it was supposed to be a place where the gutters ran […]

We were given our own room while the Dorises secured us a star mage to teach me. It was bare bones but functional, and Grak had us warded almost as soon as the door was closed. “So,” Amaryllis said to Raven. “Tell us what we’re walking into.” Raven shrugged. “Based on what they said, nothing […]

Going into Captain Blue-in-the-Bottle’s exclusion zone was a legal gray zone. Amaryllis and I were dual citizens, with one country being an imperial non-member and the other being a full member in good standing. It wasn’t strictly illegal to cross into the Necrolaborem EZ, but it was illegal to provide aid and comfort, to engage in trade, […]

There was, as you might imagine, considerable argument about our next step. There was one and only one quest which had a time limit, and that was the one that Perisev had set for us, which was to go murder Captain Blue-in-the-Bottle. We had other quests, some of them that I’d had for a very, […]

The marriage inspector was the last thing we needed to deal with in Anglecynn, with the caveat that the Amaryllis clones and thirty of the tuung would stay behind in order to manage everything within the kingdom. The clones were hilariously bad at anything related to combat, and couldn’t use magic or entads, but the […]

“Alright,” said Amaryllis, smiling at me. “We have a huge amount of time blocked off together, impeccable defenses, and no distractions or other threats to our lives. It’s time to talk about what we’re telling the marriage inspector.” “Yay,” I said. We were together at one of the estates that had once belonged to Amaryllis, […]

Juniper, What the actual fuck? I tried to think of some other way to start this letter, but I kept asking you that question in my head. If it wasn’t going to be the first line, then it needed to be the second. Some possible first lines, ‘So you married Amaryllis,’ or ‘I hear you […]