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  • Waypoint
    • AIN
    • Before the Sun Fades
    • Convergence
    • The Galactic Federation
      • Tsien: Chapter 1
    • The Fallen Empire
    • The Fused
      • Chapter 1: Mission
      • Chapter 2: Lindsi
      • Chapter 3: Fusion
      • Chapter 4: Morning
      • Chapter 5: Meridian Park
      • Chapter 6: Filtration
      • Chapter 7: Explanation
      • Chapter 8: New Destination
      • Chapter 9: Solar Strip
      • Chapter 10: Power Imbalance
      • Chapter 11: Lock and Key
      • Chapter 12: Self-Determination
      • Chapter 13: Engineering
      • Chapter 14: Radiation Leak
      • Chapter 15: Shielding Patch
      • Chapter 16: Doubt
      • Chapter 17: Reactor Control
      • Chapter 18: Silent Success
      • Chapter 19: Need to Know
      • Chapter 20: Maintenance Entry
      • Chapter 21: Shards of Sight
      • Chapter 22: Nothing For It
      • Chapter 23: In Case of Emergency
      • Chapter 24: Sightlines
      • Chapter 25: Into the Unseen
      • Chapter 26: Escape to Nowhere
      • Chapter 27: Consequences
      • Chapter 28: Hard Vacuum
      • Chapter 29: Spacewalk
      • Chapter 30: Unanswered Questions
      • Chapter 31: Captain on Bridge
      • Chapter 32: Horizon Mission
      • Chapter 33: Answers
    • Mysteries Unite
    • Oranges and Lemons
    • The Path of the Gods
    • The Bridged Divide
      • Grehstadt
        • Paralysis
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Distant Realms

~ A selection of tales from across the Multiverse! Travel via Waypoint to learn more…

Tag Archives: Fantasy

Coming Soon!

30 Fri Jun 2017

Posted by Metalwings in Writing

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Admin, Before the Sun Fades, Books, Erithenia, Fantasy, Publication, Sale, Sci-Fi

The exam period is just about over, and with it I am freed to go back to writing! (I’d have written an explanatory post, but I didn’t realise quite how busy I’d end up until it was already too late!) Which means… that I am now ready to promise you all a new book! Preorders are now open for Erithenia: Reclamation, the first in a new series that will bring us to the world of Thenia, a modern technological society built in part around a power — sharren — as fundamental to Thenians as gravity. Old tales of gods and monsters are a myth — until the day that a cruise liner runs aground, a seemingly reasonless event that heralds the return of the heroes and villains long since thought to be no more than fable.

Reclamation will be out on the 1st of December, but register your interest now to be sure you get it as soon as it’s released!

And in other writing news… there’s about to be a big sale at Smashwords, and for the whole month of July, the ebook of Before the Sun Fades will be absolutely free! So why not pick it up?

Based on a True Story

05 Mon Dec 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Roleplay

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Fantasy, NaNoWriMo

I larp. It’s awesome. I am not particularly remarkable as a larper and do not, to my knowledge, receive special favours over other players. (Well, I don’t think I am, anyway.) In fact my death record is terrible: I have never before had a primary character live long enough to achieve anything. I play a death-heavy system where dying is easy and living is hard, and I’ve mourned several good characters. Oddly enough, despite how much each loss hurts, I like it that way.

Here follows the story of Why I Lost NaNoWriMo 2016 — and why I have no regrets whatsoever.

(Names and locations altered/avoided to protect the guilty. Needless to say, some variant of this is already a book in prep. Detail lost towards the end because (a) if I start filling it in this post will end up being the book, and (b) I’m not normally possessive but this is a special story dammit, only those who were there get to be the first to tell it properly. Or in other words, I’m not doing my normal Creative Commons thing until it’s actually complete.)

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Sometimes I Even Review Them

17 Mon Oct 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Reading

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Fantasy, Recommendations, Reviews

The only reason I don’t often recommend books is that I rarely know what to say about them. Reviewing can be something of an art, and I learnt mine on FanFiction.Net aeons ago (and emphatically not under my current name), where reviews are primarily for the benefit of the story’s author, rather than another reader. What do I tell other people like me about a book, other than “Hey, you might like this”?

But I have quite a few really good books, having had plenty of time to build up my collection, and I really would like to share them with others. Recently I re-read one of my favourites, having just got it back from the friend I lent it to. This book gave one of my favourite RPG characters her name: Captain Kaylen Myrilesse — but even if I was permitted to talk about her, which I sadly am not, that would be entirely too much of a digression.

Havenstar

Glenda Noramly / Glenda Larke

The world is coming apart. But that’s normal: it has been for countless generations. Eight islands of stability are all that remain of the half-mythical country of Malinawar, and beyond their borders, chaos stretches: a world half unmade, the Unstable. Ever-changing, never entirely the same from day to day, the Unstable is a place in flux. Across it run ley lines, dangerous ribbons of pure power unleashed from the world in its destruction. The ley-lit can see them, sense them, perhaps even command them — the ley-unlit can only be tainted by them, transformed into strange and twisted half-humans, but still with the minds of the people they were before.

Keris Kaylen is the daughter of Master Mapmaker Piers Kaylen, whose life is dedicated to mapping and remapping the ever-shifting Unstable. In secret she draws her father’s maps, bound from ever following in his footsteps by the stifling, unchanging Rule that is humanity’s best attempt to maintain order and stability amidst the ever-encroaching chaos. When her father is slain by a Minion of the Unmaker and his effects returned to his family, she discovers the reason for his death: he had come into possession of an artefact beyond price, a map that could change the world.

The broken lands of Malinawar are sketched for us with a light, deft touch that enables the mind’s eye to colour between the lines, sacrificing neither detail nor pace. Even minor characters typically escape two-dimensionality, with their own lives and desires hinted at beyond the necessarily limited confines of their appearance in Keris’ story, and the wider world of the Eight Stabilities continues to move along its orderly track in between her sightings of it. Malinawar’s history is shrouded in chaos, yet the curtains of the past shift just enough to gain glimpses of it here and there, and to wonder.

Havenstar has long been one of my favourite books, and I absolutely recommend reading it if you can get your hands on a copy. It seems to mostly be out of print, but Amazon (of course…) are still selling it (albeit at a high price), though the author has since changed her pen name to Glenda Larke and I prefer the cover of my original copy. (Both links go to Amazon; the second is the listings for the old version, which can be extremely cheap used but runs the risk of, well, being a used book.)

And I’ve now discovered that she’s written a lot of other books since then… *vanishes into a book hole*

Some of the Options

25 Sun Sep 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Behind the Scenes, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Books, Fantasy, NaNoWriMo, Question for you!, Sci-Fi

My current options for November are:

  1. Arres. According to my records, his story first appeared in April 2011, in a dream I had. It was subsequently built on a little while listening to music in my parents’ car (Uriah Heep: Circle of Hands), and was the brief subject of a collaboration in an attempt to figure out how the heck he gets from his home village to, well, anywhere interesting, really. The biggest roadblock with Arres is that his motivations start out relatively small (find his father, find out why he left him this crazy scabbard tattoo thing) and have to be dragged somehow to something larger.
  2. Dayna, and how she ended up in the future. Dayna has been around since… hmm, actually, since the original Hero Machine, a character creator I once found on the Interwebs. I created her there and she promptly grew a story, personality, and so on, and I don’t think I even have records for when she began, beyond that a couple of my image files for her were last modified in May 2003. She’s a Martian-born space cop in the late 2100s, the era of humanity’s First Contact in my Galactic Federation timeline. When a horrible plague breaks out on Mars, she’s eventually infected. The Galactic Federation offer their aid, but one of their hospital ships goes astray and is lost in deep space for several hundred years… until it’s found by a particularly hostile and remorseless species, who wake the stasis-preserved passengers for bioweapons research.
  3. Cleris, and what it really means to have wild, imagination-limited magic in the world. I may be happy with Mysteries Unite as a piece of writing, but I was never quite happy with myself for writing it. It did its job — it won me a writing competition in 2007 (for which I never did get my prize: the prize was 2kg of chocolate and the exec ate it before the meeting in which I would have got it!) — and it was an interesting way to write, and it worked very well. But as the short story stands, it’s antithetical to everything I am and everything I stand for. It says this world, this wonderful, incredible world, isn’t beautiful. It says the fathomless mystery and majesty of the universe is worthless. And so I determined to fix it, somehow. In the end, I realised, it would take a book. A book for which the original Mysteries Unite was just a prologue. A book that would end in a truly heart-wrenching choice…
  4. Tsien, and how she and Siris won the war. At the other end of humanity’s part in the Federation’s timeline (it goes back to long before our First Contact!), the galaxy has been plunged into cataclysmic war. Tsien and her siblings are the culmination of three hundred years (Earth time) of research by the brightest minds in the Federation. If they can’t win the war, civilisation as we know it will die.
  5. Kirai, and the half of his story that doesn’t exist yet, a tale actually born out of a Waterstones competition to fit a short story on a large postcard in 2008. He’s the one who’s since got the furthest without participating in any writing challenges, and much of his tale already exists, at least up to the point where there’s a rather unfortunately fateful family encounter. The second half, however, doesn’t, and could really use my going on with it – I got to the point where all the truly huge conflicts were set up and poised to snowball, and then got distracted. ^^’

So there you have it. There are more, lots more, but I think a shortlist of five is more than enough for me to choose from. (There is a sixth option, which is “whatever I dream in between now and then”, but that’s quite beside the point.)

Questions or suggestions? Sling them at me in the comments! I’m happy to expand on any and all of the above!

Forgotten Words

22 Thu Sep 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Philosophical Meanderings

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Fantasy, Thoughts

They came to me this morning, a simple, almost nonsensical pair of sentences. I couldn’t remember where I’d heard them, only hear them in my mind covered in the feathery dust of memory. Old words, forgotten words, no reason to recall them, yet there they were. Tracking down that old familiarity by watching it only from the corner of my eye, I found their origin with an echo of surprise. From there, after so long, I had expected no more, a past that is over with and that rests softly amidst the silent dust motes in memory’s attic.

Yet there they were. No brave declaration, no grim prophecy, no defiance of fate — no, nothing but a moment of implausible humour in a tale turning dark, four captives mocking their captor as if their lives were not at any moment forfeit. All the words on either side are lost, only these words, and their cause, such as it was.

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Meet the Characters: King Sariven

14 Thu Jul 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Writing

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Ask away!, Before the Sun Fades, Characters, Fantasy

A legendary figure in Before the Sun Fades, recalled almost reverentially by the remnants of his people, King Sariven faced the darkness consuming his valley to the last, until the palace fell with him still within it. But how much did he manage to learn about the oncoming disaster? What secrets did he take with him into the shadows? Despite his desperate struggle to save his people, was there something more he could have, should have done?

Warning: contains serious spoilers, to the point where if you haven’t already read the book I really suggest you don’t read any further! After all, the tale of Rakariel’s attempt to restore the valley depends inextricably on the tale of how it came to be engulfed in darkness in the first place.


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Holy Catbiscuits!

13 Wed Jul 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Authorial Gubbins, Book Statistics

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Admin, Before the Sun Fades, Books, Fantasy, Publication, Sales

I was going to be good and not constantly post about how BtSF was doing in the sale (where it’s currently free), because that’s really annoying, but it’s now almost at the top of page 5 of the free-in-sale fantasy bestsellers and climbing!!! They default to 20 books per page, which means it stands at sales rank #83! I’ve hit double digits in my category!!!

Thank you! You wonderful crazy people who read random fantasy novels by someone on the internet, thank you all!

The Ghost Tree II: Crimson Ground

08 Fri Jul 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Writing

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Fantasy, Short stories, Songs & Poetry, Timewarp Tales

(The Ghost Tree)

A Timewarp Tale

I never saw the dancers again, though not for want of trying. Strange and alien, tantalisingly familiar, they spin in my sight even now, on the edge of dreams, half seen, half real. But I watched the pub, week after week, my comfortable and familiar friend. It never seems to change.

It’s a bright and sunny afternoon, the sun shining down from a blue sky. I’m coming from a different angle to usual, heading for the shop on the end of my route. I always look at the pub as I pass it, wondering what will be the same, what will be different. But this time… something feels wrong.

I can’t put my finger on it. It feels as though something has shifted in the world, as though something is out of place. Something so subtle I can’t see it, so obvious I can’t ignore it. I look at the Oak Tree over its lengthening grass. It’s the same shape, the same colour. The grass has grown; everything grows so fast in the summer. Yet it looks… sad. Strange. Alone.

And something is wrong. I’ve slowed down without realising it, and I’m only getting closer one small step at a time. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and the sun shines down on me, and it’s hard to believe on a day like this that anything could be wrong, but something is. And, just like that, my eyes are drawn up, to the sign that hangs high above the street.

It should be an old and familiar friend, but now it looks wrong. The strange, fey landscape in its washed-out blues and purples is white and red now, not repainted, because it’s as faded and worn as ever, but somehow changed. Now a deep and dull crimson soaks the ground beneath an almost ghostly, almost bare tree, as if a lake of blood has soaked through the world and changed everything. As if an end has come and a world has fallen and something has shifted forever.

I look again at the building, and the doors seem shabbier than they ever have, the bricks duller, the tiles faded. I can see through one of the windows with its motionless curtains open, and something, maybe a light fitting, is hanging askew from the ceiling. I don’t want to approach, because for once the place is uncomfortable rather than cosily inviting, and I’m almost afraid.

Perhaps the sign only looks different because I don’t normally see it from this side. Perhaps. But I walk on and turn around, and there it is again, a faded tree awash in a ground soaked through with blood, against an eerie sky. It didn’t always look like this, I know it didn’t. My memory can’t be playing tricks on me to this extent. Have I never seen it by daylight before? Of course I have.

I can’t find an explanation. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t want to approach it, so I turn around again to continue on my way, more unnerved than any building has any right to make me. And then I see a new change, a new difference, something else that’s wrong.

The ground on this side has been dug up and overturned, raw earth instead of lush green. Some rubble leans up against the wall, and I look at the building, and instead of that cosy-cat look I’ve grown to know, all I can see is decay.

Something has changed, and an era is over. And I don’t think I like the new one that’s dawning. Curiosity impels me, caution warns me, and something… something draws me. I look around. No-one’s there, and once again, though I can hear the traffic in the distance, I might be the only person in the whole world. Another secret moment, another slice of time alive with mystery – and with dread.

I turn again, and I step onto the path, avoiding the soil. I can’t go to the window I looked through before, I don’t want to step on that turned earth, so I go the other way, to the one with the open curtains and something hanging from the ceiling.

And it could have been forever
Since the world I saw before
I once saw them dancing
But they’re not there any more
The sun is shining on my back
But all I feel is cold
I peer into the darkness
And it seems to have a soul

The darkness sees right through me
The darkness knows my thoughts
The darkness is just waiting
For all that I have brought
I dare not blink, I back away
Until I reach safe ground
The Wild Hunt is hunting
And I dare not be found

And Another Thing

26 Tue Apr 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Roleplay

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Canon, Fantasy

Courtesy of the good GM, Grehstadt now has its very own long description! Go take a look!

A Fanfic With Permission!

21 Thu Apr 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Roleplay, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Characters, Fanfic, Fantasy, Short stories

Brought to you from the epic city of Grehstadt with the kind permission of its creator, my friend JD, I give you this rather unfortunate tale, Paralysis! My last weekend was spent travelling in order to go to two excellent roleplay games, hosted and run by some of my friends. In the particular one I’m writing about, my character, Jax Lightweave, found himself conscious but immobile after the entire party was hit with knockout gas by a paranoid and perhaps slightly nutty human biologist. The end result was, for him, decidedly traumatising. And, since things like that tend to stick in the head (hopefully not literally…), I wrote a little story about the aftermath from Jax’s point of view – which I am absolutely delighted to be able to share with the world!

Note: his nightmares aren’t necessarily quite representative of what actually happened… although they’re also not that far off!

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