This was an interesting and relatively interesting fantasy world. The scope of the story and the dark tones and scenario of the work was fascinating. It suffered some by avoiding clarifying (i believe deliberately) some of the fundamental concepts in the world for more than half book. It's pie...
In Tirhan, Nyx could not smell the war. On the other side of the pass, the first thing she noticed was the absence of the tangy reek of bug haze and burst residue. Tirhan was big and green and rolling, and as they descended into the grasses of the valley below, Nyx found herself suddenly claustro...
It’s why Nev had fallen in love with bodies in the first place. When you spent time with the dead you could be anyone you wanted to be. They didn’t know any better. They didn’t want to have long conversations about it. They were vehicles. Transport. Tools. They were yours in a way that no living ...
Still with me? Good. This one first showed up in a now defunct online magazine called The Boundless Realm back in 1998. It was the second fiction piece I ever published, and I got a whopping $5 for it. It’s the original Brutal Women story, and sorta set the scene for everything I’d write afterwar...
A half-dozen anti-burst gun towers ringed the swollen black sprawl of the city, half again as tall as its two minarets. Most of the gun towers were charred husks. Heaps of debris littered the roadway. Rhys and Nyx walked with their hoods pulled up. Geckos skittered across their path. They passed ...
Ahkio stood in the kitchens, watching his sister’s body being prepared, as Nasaka told him of Yisaoh’s arrival. The funerary attendants washed Kirana’s body in rose water and cardamom. They laid it on a stone slab in the temple kitchen on a blanket of fragrant bonsa leaves. Funerary chefs from th...
Nyx had figured Bomani would just be some kind of rock and mudbrick construction. Maybe a collection of hovels arranged inside a stone circle. It’s not like she expected anything like civilization this far north, not behind a bloody-minded desert wall in the middle of some flesh-eating sea of san...