Worth the Candle

This is the first chapter of a five-chapter batch, though this chapter is mostly in-character notes, letters, or musings, and can be skipped if you don’t like that kind of thing. Note from the Author Reimer’s Notes: The Optimal Build There is no optimal build. Every build has trade-offs and compromises in it. Some fare […]

It was well after midnight when we went back to the Erstwhile Manor. We were a bit split on whether to head to the Hotel Delzora instead, but the Erstwhile Manor required less in the way of stairs, and I was still down a leg, though the vines were more or less adequate for moving […]

I had no idea what the fuck Tommul would make of this particular scene, but one thing was very clear, which was that we were a mile up in the air. It had been a while since I’d done any serious math, but I was pretty sure that a mile was higher than the three […]

The remainder of the trial was an anticlimax. Onion was dead, and Phlox was hospitalized, which was a particularly bad sign for her given that she had access to so much magical healing. With the chair incapacitated and the vice chair dead, the War Council still had to move things along, and their first business […]

“I’m worried about you,” said Raven. We were back at the Erstwhile Manor, where Amaryllis was planning out how the next day would go. The War Council had planned to hold session, but it was up for debate whether it actually would or not, given that one of their members had died in the course […]

At first I thought it was a revision mage, undoing the fight, which would have been manifestly unfair, given that it was to the death, but maybe a bit understandable. If everyone admitted that I was the winner, well, I would take it. But no, it wasn’t a revision mage at all, that would have […]

Amaryllis and Simuryllis had a private conversation early the next morning, and I watched carefully as Simuryllis turned to dust, which dissolved in the air. It was a neat effect: I had never seen anything like it. I hadn’t really expected Simuryllis to go back on her word, but I’d thought that there would be […]

We were taken to the Erstwhile Manor by an armored car, bulky and frankly ugly by Earth standards. I was multi-threading, as I always did, watching for threats from beyond the car, but the other half of my mind was the more important one, focused purely on Amaryllis. Her face was completely blank and controlled. […]

We finally reunited at that awkward time when you’re not sure whether it’s late at night or early morning. I’d done a values ping on Amaryllis, and she’d responded back, rapidly moving values in the low-level range so that we could have a crude channel of communication that wouldn’t be too disruptive. Our method basically […]

“So,” said Rosemallow once Amaryllis had arrived at the White Room. “How did your meeting go?” Rosemallow wore a pink and white dress that deepened in color toward the top, mimicking the general shape and appearance of the flower from which she took her name. Almost everyone in the Court had flower-themed names, and on […]

There was a fair bit of mopping up to do. I sent one of the guards down into the expansive site in order to bottle the souls of the other guards I killed, hoping that by the time he got there, the timer wouldn’t have run down. You were supposed to have thirty minutes from […]

The Mirror Room was called that because it was arranged down a center line that bisected the large, central table, with both halves of the room being designed to be exactly matching opposites. The center of the room was a large vertical ward, separating the two halves from each other with all the might that […]

Horus had always thought that the big, cleaving line that separated all things was between the planned and unplanned. The city of Orrangush was a mix of the two, with grand, sweeping avenues and square plazas, and between them, where bigger buildings hadn’t gobbled up space during city-wide redesigns and writs of eminent domain, there […]

The corridors got wider as we went, in a way that was pretty subtle, until eventually I was staring down a hallway looking at a cavernously large room. Zinnia was standing there waiting for us, feet shoulder-width apart, holding a cleaver in one hand and staring at me. In her other hand, she held her […]

More time passed. Pallida was propped up in one corner of the room, still gagged, and the flow of blood from Solace’s head eventually stopped. I had no idea whether it was as much blood as I should have expected to come from the head of a ten year old crantek girl, but suspected that […]