Bottom line up front: I won’t be publishing any more selections from Light from a Dark Lord.
The intent had been to motivate my continued work on the story. The stats that I am seeing for readership aren’t really doing that. The opposite, in fact.
Read More »The Light From a Dark Lord Goes Out
You can find Chapter 2: On the Shore of the Great River here.
When I woke the next morning, the two of them were still talking. I know Herkrist slept very little, but I had no idea how much sleep an orc might need. Or a half-orc. It was kind of a stupid thought, but Tak was so different than any other orc I had met—or heard of—that I had trouble thinking of him as an orc. Now I realize orcs come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, just like humans, but back then, all the orcs I had known were mostly mercenaries or criminals along with very few merchants. Tak didn’t look or talk like any of them.
I started scrounging through the camp, and Tak didn’t say anything. I guess once he was onboard, we were a team. You share your stuff with your team. That’s how it works. It wasn’t a very large camp, so scrounging meant going through four packs in front of the tent under a canvas awning. I found some dried meat and fruits, and the precious dried beans I’d been looking for.
“You got anything to crush these with?†I didn’t care that I interrupted their conversation. They probably needed a break.
Read More »Light From A Dark Lord 03: Titles, Trappings, and TalkYou can find Chapter 1: Right Place, Wrong Place here.
When Tak had said to meet him at a camp, I had expected something more than a single tent with a guttering fire in front of it. I guess a camp is a camp. And I guess we should be a bit careful with assumptions.
Or maybe it’s just me.
The province we were in, Lunaventum, seemed a nice place, even in the dead of night. What with all the trees and fields and such. There were farms. I mean, not along the river, but in the area. I had seen a few since arriving in the province, but I think more than a few were abandoned. A lot of the space was empty. That didn’t make a lot of sense because since this land was pretty much free for anyone from the Great Kingdom. It had been a hundred years since the Downfall, but I think people were still afraid of the Terror Lands. I mean, they still called them the Terror Lands.
The royal steward resided in Lunaventum, further south than Tak’s camp or Bailthair by about a day. He had a thousand cavalry and triple that in infantry. That should have made anyone feel safe. But with the war over for a century, and the province ‘pacified,’ people just didn’t come.
Read More »Light From a Dark Lord 02: : On the Shore of the Great RiverI’m once again here posting my longform fiction. This time, it’s not from a completed work, but from my primary work-in-progress. I find it useful to have different WIPs with different voices as a kind of palate cleanser, and also because I generally have too many ideas banging around in my head.
This will not be presented as an e-book or in print any time soon. I’ve got to finish it first.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy.
I’ve been told it was my mother who named me Magastoris Algorist. Everyone just calls me Max. Though I found myself in a province on the outskirts of the Great Kingdom, that’s not where I was from. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t really from anywhere. There had been places I had lived, places I knew well, and places I might have even liked. I wouldn’t have called any of them home. I just didn’t have one.
Read More »Light From A Dark Lord 01: Right Place, Wrong Place
I write fiction because I am compelled to write fiction. There is so much I have written that no one will ever see. I’ve completed a couple of novels and a couple of screenplays that will never get published and never get shared. I have untold pieces of short fiction that no one else will ever see. I don’t write to publish. I write because I must.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to share it. And this coming year, I will share it. I have completed the first novel of a planned trilogy. I’m calling the series The Cyclops Banner, and the first novel is A Bloody Crown. I’ll be sharing that online here and will also publish it as an ebook. Each two weeks, I’ll publish a new chapter. There are 34 chapters, so that’s about a year and a half of content.
Read More »Sharing is Caring