Owen Tyme's Blog: Tymely Messages, page 2

Reality vs. Demon for President!

Today, November 5, 2024, is a very special and strange day, at least in the United States, where I live. The current election and division between the Republicans and Democrats really inspired me to pay attention during the first Republican debate, last year.

I’ve never voted, since politics has always literally given me a splitting headache, because there’s too many lies to really uncover the truth. Cynically, I sometimes wonder if there’s any truth to be found, at all.

Still, I wasn’t paying attention to the politics, but rather to the behavior of political candidates, because I’d had a bizarre, fun and timely idea for a novel: what would happen if a demon ran for President of the United States?

So, I watched and continually found material that could be twisted into political satire, all the while unsure if I had the skill to make the novel work. I got it published in June, just in time for the current election to really heat up.

With voting happening today, I’ve been thinking about that novel, which is titled Demon for President!

I ran the election and potential twists through my head many times during the writing process, but never did I expect so many parallels between fiction and the real world.

In my novel, the demonic villain, Otto Vogerath, was shot at by a sniper while cutting the ribbon for a store. On July 13, Former President Trump became the target of a sniper, an event that chilled me to the bone, because reality became eerily like something I’d written.

For another example, I wrote about the President bowing out of the election to make way for another candidate, so it really caught my attention when that happened!

There are other parallels, but none so shocking as those two, or which I would care to discuss, because I’m not here to draw connections between real people and fictional characters that really aren’t connected.

I wrote the novel early this year and published it in June, before these events took place, but all I can think is this: art imitates life and life imitates art. There is truth to that old adage, after all.

I found the experience of writing political satire to be fun, educational and even intellectually stimulating, but at the same time, it made me nervous to see my fiction come true in such unsettling ways. I can’t say I found that part of the experience enjoyable, which may be why I haven’t discussed this novel as much as others.

I meant it all in fun, as a way to point out how silly and funny politicians can be, but I think I cut this piece too close to reality. It surprises me, the things I see without comprehending, which can so easily become a part of my work.

So much of my writing process is a subconscious black box, which I don’t even pretend to understand, a gift that must be fed for me to retain it, but which sometimes produces things that leave me speechless for the most unusual reasons.

I’m not sure I can take any more parallels with my novel, but hopefully, our next president won’t open a portal to Hell, so endless legions of demons can march forth to conquer the Earth. That would be one bit of straw too many for this particular camel.

Still, once the dust of this election clears, why not read about what could have been, if we’d gotten a Demon for President?

She Seeks Peace, Week #8

“She felt very strange, as if her memories weren’t her own, because they were a swarm of ants crawling around inside her skull, their skittering feet tickling her every synapse, making her laugh out loud, her voice echoing around her.

She wasn’t sure what her name was, but knew it definitely wasn’t ‘The Hunter’. It most certainly wasn’t ‘The Eighth Deadly Sin, Willful Insanity’, either.”

  – Excerpt from She Seeks Peace.

She Seeks Peace is volume 4 of Ashen Blades.

You can read a short description of She Seeks Peace to learn more or you can read short summaries of each day’s writing on Mastodon

Here’s links to the rest of my blog entries on She Seeks Peace, in chronological order:
    • September 12-13
    • September 16-20
    • September 23-26
    • September 30-October 4
    • October 7-11
    • October 14-18
    • October 21-25


Chapter 38: Letting Go

Evie spends all morning and afternoon speaking with the spirits of her dead friends. It gets pretty emotional for her, because she’s doing her best to let them go, so they can pass on.

The Hunter holds her hand and Evie squeezes it pretty hard with each tearful goodbye. She grows a little older with each, until she’s about thirty years old.

Last of all, she talks with her grandmother, but Evelyn asks to speak with the Hunter and Evie makes her visible.

Evelyn explains that she watched the world with magic for a very long time, looking for a champion to take Evie to her family. She’d heard of the Hunter, but couldn’t see her, because the hunter is effectively invisible to most forms of detection magic.

In August (around the same time the Hunter went back in time, during the previous book), the Fates appeared to her in a vision, telling her the Hunter was on the way, to take Evie to family.

She asks if the Fates can be trusted and the Hunter somewhat reluctantly agrees, because she at least trusts them to help her against Vogerath. That reassures Evelyn she did the right thing and she passes on, vanishing from sight.

The Hunter comforts Evie for a time, before the rapidly-aging woman says she’s tired and lonely. The Hunter pats her back and Riley steps in, for a group hug.

He reminds Evie, “You’re not alone.”

After that, Evie asks to be left alone, for a nap. She also corrects her accent mid-sentence, finally figuring out how to pronounce the letter L, promising to make Simmons visible, once she’s rested.

As Riley and the Hunter leave the bedroom, Riley expresses his worry that Evie might not stop growing older, because she’s now in her mid-forties!

There’s a brief scene in which Evie is alone with her thoughts and she briefly considers suicide, that she might be with her friends. The first of the monks that died was a woman with depression issues, who took her own life, though Evie hadn’t understood that at the time. Having seen how that didn’t solve anything, she decides against suicide.

She doesn’t realize it, but she’s growing older by the moment and she’s already rapidly headed toward a death by natural causes, though her aging slows as she falls asleep.

Some time later, Evie calls out for help. Riley and the Hunter rush in, finding Evie on the floor: she fell out of bed and can’t get up, because she’s now over ninety years old!

They help her back into bed. She offers to make Simmons visible and the Hunter prepares by hauling Mashu’ra out of her hat.

Simmons appears and thanks Mashu’ra for giving him the chance to fight demons. Next, he tells them both he loves them and admits this is going to be goodbye for a long time, though he’ll wait until the end of time to see the Hunter again, if required.

He also discusses the fact that he knows neither of them will let go of life until the demon threat is permanently solved.

Finally, he addresses the elephant in the room, asking the Hunter to let him go, because she’s been dragging him through life like a boat anchor. He isn’t angry, because she had no idea her magic had responded to her emotions by binding his spirit to her, but he is upset that he can’t pass on.

Last of all he says: “Go ahead and treasure the time we had together, but don’t hold onto me so tight.”

The Hunter enters her internal mindscape, like the way she fought Sogliun, seeking the deepest, darkest corner of her mind, where she buries things she doesn’t want to deal with.

This turns out to be a steel-lined corridor, along which hangs paintings, each of which is a different traumatic memory. Two examples are the death of her parents and Reggie’s death. She takes the painting of Reggie’s final moments off the wall and puts it under her arm as she goes deeper, seeking the darkest corner of the place.

She ends up at a dead end dominated by a piece of raw canvas that’s been riveted to the wall, which displays the death of Simmons on an eternal loop.

She goes off somewhere else for a ladder and drill of the old hand-cranked variety. She sets up the ladder and manually drills out every last rivet, taking the canvas down, though that leaves the wall bleeding. She rolls up the canvas and carries it away.

She returns to the usual corner of her mindscape and as an experiment, she sets the painting of Reggie’s final moments on fire, with magic. It turns into smoke that fills the shadows surrounding her, which are actually her memories. The return of that buried memory is painful, but it brings with it a flood of good memories that she’d been forced to bury with it, because they were connected. She’s finally able to look back on her time with Reggie, feeling joy.

She next lights the bloody canvas aflame, releasing the full pain of loss into her mind. It really hurts, but she’s ready to really deal with it and find a way forward.

Her inner demon (The Eighth Deadly Sin, Willful Insanity, or Insanity for short) hugs her in a surprising turn of events, because Insanity was born from the Hunter’s Id, which is all about emotion.

Back in the real world, she tries to say, “I love you”, though it comes out as “It’s a secret.”

Simmons responds, “I love you, too.”

Mashu’ra also says goodbye and Simmons fades away.

Meanwhile, Evie has grown translucent, because she’s also fading!

Riley is upset, because he basically gained a daughter and now she’s dying, in less than a day’s time.

Evie tells them what she just realized: She didn’t understand it at the time, but she’s been dead for a great many years. When she faced the demon that killed the monks, she blasted him with such a potent burst of life magic, she erased the demon magic in both her own body and that of the demon, killing them both.

Due to the nature of fairies (which is technically what the beings calling themselves demons in these novels are), Evie rose again in the same way Lara did in the previous book.

In the end, it hardly made a difference, because she’d never understood, until that morning, and the nature of her Spirit powers allowed her to freely cross the divide between the living and dead.

With her attachment to life fading, Evie is now ready to pass on.

Before she goes, she tells Riley something Evelyn told her: the woman he’s been carrying a torch for feels the same, so he should marry her and have lots of kids. He promised he’ll soon have a daughter again.

He thanks her for that message.

The Hunter is sad, of course, because she’d been looking forward to visiting Evie from time to time, thinking they would be friends for thousands of years to come.

She tries and fails to express herself, saying, “It’s a secret.”

Evie smiles and slips back into her Chinese accent, “I ruv you, too.”

She fades from sight, leaving a set of empty clothes behind.

After a scene break, the Hunter steps outside, in tears, mourning both Simmons and Evie, finally understanding the meaning of ‘bittersweet’. Looking back on her time with Reggie, however, she feels nothing but joy at having known him and the pain is gone, giving her confidence that she’ll someday feel the same about Simmons.

Too distracted to pay attention, she bumps into a huge man in a biker’s leather jacket and looks up at a squirrel’s head!


Part Four: Grounded

Chapter 38 marks the end of Part Three and Chapter 39 will begin Part Four.

This part will cover the climax, in which the Hunter will face Ulmoch, leading to her capture, followed by a battle with Wrath and his arch demon wedding guests.


Chapter 39: Chasing the Rabbit

Ulmoch starts to tell the Hunter he’s set a bomb on a timer, which will go off if she doesn’t face him, only to realize, mid-sentence, he forgot to set the timer. He tries to excuse himself, to go set it.

Naturally, the Hunter cuts his head off with her sword, intending to threaten him until he tells her where to find the bomb, but she’s momentarily forgotten the fact such a wound won’t disable Ulmoch’s body (on her personal timeline, the last time she fought him was a couple years ago).

Ulmoch catches his head and runs off, while the Hunter gives chase. He briefly trips on a bicycle (his head was facing the wrong way, because he was too busy talking), but loses no momentum, rolling down the sidewalk for a time. Once his head is reattached, he leaps from one residential roof to another, while the Hunter flies after him.

Ulmoch uses hairpin turns to avoid her, while subtly navigating his way toward a low-rent area of Alice Springs. He’s more dexterous than she is and able to stay out of reach. She tries using fire magic from her hands to turn better and starts to catch up, only for Ulmoch to accelerate, as if he’s intentionally staying just out of reach.

Finally, he goes in a straight line and the Hunter thinks she’s got him, only for him to drop between houses and enter one. She overshoots and smashes her way in through the front window, sending a hail of sharp fragments into Ulmoch!

He rolls sideways and ends up next to an old, hand-cranked record player, which is ready to go. He starts it up and it crackles in the background as the Hunter catches him by the neck and slams him into the wall, putting her sword very near his eye.

She’s so angry, her eyes glow an intense, blue shade.

Ulmoch surrenders and says he’ll show her where the bomb is, if she’ll let go of him.

She puts him down and he instead reaches into his jacket at high speed, yelling, “Psych!”

He produces the jar of liquid he’s been saying he got as a present for her and throws it at the ceiling, where it smashes, causing the liquid to spatter down on the both of them! It’s LSD, by the way. Nearly a whole pint of the stuff.

While Ulmoch sort of just accepts the high with pleasure, the Hunter stumbles around as the room becomes more colorful and spins around her, as if her head were mounted on a swivel.

She mutters, “It’s a secret?” followed by her inner demon using her lips, “What the-” she finishes by cursing.

The next scene is inside the Hunters mindscape, where rainbows pieces the perpetual smoky shadows, chasing them away, while the sun shines from under the feet of the Hunter and Insanity.

Years of carefully maintained self-control by the Hunter erodes under the onslaught of the drugs, forcefully drawing her two halves together, where they splash and merge, like droplets of molten metal, reforming as a single individual.

Meanwhile, Sogliun has been watching the house from the other side of the street and is really surprised to see it melting like wax, while every color of light shines from within. He analyzes the magic of the air, finding nearly every form of it he recognizes, though Void and Life magic are most prevalent.

He growls, “Ulmoch, what did you do?”

We switch back to the young woman having her first drug experience, but I pointedly don’t refer to her as the Hunter. In fact, she struggles with the very question of who she is.

She stands in a sunny field of grass and flowers, with rainbows flying like birds, surrounded by a landscape that’s singing along to the song White Rabbit, by Jefferson Airplane. The flowers sing soprano, the sun and rainbows are tenors, the stars of the sky sing alto and the ground itself produces a pleasant bass. She initially thinks the cartoonish landscape is beautiful.

The song refers to Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and she comes to believe her name is Alice and the story her mother read to her as a child is her own story, while the memories that crawl around inside her skull, like ants, obviously are not her own (memories of the Hunter and Insanity). That’s a little hint that Alice is a brand-new personality, brought on by a drug overdose.

Having solved the identity issue, she looks at her magic clothes, which have gone absolutely berserk in response to her thoughts and feelings, unable to settle on a style or color.

She says, “Stop that” and her clothes settle on a long, blue dress with a white apron, a pair of fingerless, elbow-length gloves and a blue, silk top hat, while her hair turns blond and hangs loose.

She finally notices a pair of items in either hand, including a bit torn from a white mushroom cap and a bottle of dark liquid, labeled, ‘DRINK ME’.

Feeling an urge to eat, Alice goes with the flow and bites into the mushroom. As a result, she grows quite large.

From Sogliun’s perspective, the house explodes into melted droplets as Alice shoots through the roof and the reality-warping power she’s manifested rolls outward, spreading her reality-warping physical hallucination to the neighborhood!

Humans run in every direction and even Sogliun seeks distance, because he doesn’t want to be caught up in it.

Naturally, he blames Ulmoch.

Alice decides she doesn’t like being large and takes a swig of ‘DRINK ME’. It tastes mostly of fruit, but she can pick out a little turkey dinner mixed in. She shrinks just as fast as she grew, ending up shorter than the grass, beside a caterpillar smoking from a hookah.

The Ulmoch-become-caterpillar asks, “How high am I? This is like nothing I’ve ever seen! Is this real or is reality as high I am?”

Realizing she overshot, Alice nibbles on the mushroom and returns to approximately normal size, finding herself standing beside a small apple tree covered in green apples, with a golden one near the top.

The dream-like beauty fades as the landscape turns hostile (the LSD is finally getting through her skin and her trip is turning bad, as a result) and the flowers grow fangs, trying to bite her ankles, though that doesn’t matter, because she’s wearing boots.

The rainbows, on the other hand, become a deadly problem as they swoop at her, their edges cutting her like razor blades! Seeking to defend herself, she calls up the Hunter’s wakizashi and deflects them.

As she fights, the landscape changes to a chess board on which a battle between the red and white armies takes place! She realizes the rainbows were actually the men fighting and they only cut her by mistake.

The Red Queen screams, “Off with their heads!” to encourage her men and Alice, being in a drug-induced suggestible state, swings her sword as she spins like a ballerina.

The Ulmoch/caterpillar has apparently changed size along with her and loses his head to her twirl, complaining, “Oh, come on! I thought we were finally getting along!”

She grabs Ulmoch’s caterpillar head out of the air before he can catch it and hauls it out of reach.

The song reaches the last line and she takes it as an instruction. Looking on the severed caterpillar head, she finds herself looking into the eyes of her own severed head. She grabs the golden apple from the tree and forcefully rams it into the head’s mouth, incidentally shattering teeth in the process. With the stem facing toward her, she plucks it off and hurls the head away, because instinct tells her something energetic is about to happen.

Ulmoch’s head sails out of the reality distortion and returns to normal. So does the high-explosive anti-personnel grenade she called up from the Hunter’s arsenal, which is inside his mouth. It explodes and Ulmoch is sent home, where it takes him weeks to heal properly. It was such a bad trip for him, he stays sober for three full months.

Feeling sick, Alice pukes, while the LSD dribbles form her clothes as they magically self-clean. She finally lays down, to sleep off the high.

Solgiun notes the unreality bubble reversing course and it eventually vanishes, leaving most everything as it was before it appeared. He reluctantly enters the house and finds Wrath’s intended out cold, so he calls for pickup, quite surprised that Ulmoch actually succeeded in knocking her out.


Chapter 40: Final Preparations

Alice is captured by Wrath’s minions, but in the process of getting her on a pallet with a binding circle on it, her hat falls off. One of the demons tries to pick it up. The hat eats them, both as the means to defend itself, but also to gain some extra energy.

Under normal circumstances, the Hunter’s father, Jake, gets the energy he needs to maintain the pocket dimension inside the hat from the Hunter, but when the hat is separated from her, he’s on his own, so he uses the traces of demonic magic available to him to consume any demon that dares to touch it.

He needs the extra energy, lest he be forced to start discarding things stored inside, as he once did in 1972, throwing out dinner rolls to maintain sufficient energy.

In the next scene, Lara arrives at Riley’s home, who tells her the Hunter left an hour earlier.

Lara summons Mashu’ra and he directs her toward the hat.

Alice arrives (still unconscious and captured) at Wrath’s abandoned mine base, where Lust gets to work positioning the pallet holding her, in preparation to separate her human and demon sides.

In the background, Gluttony prepares the wedding feast (summoned imps), while a trussed-up justice of the peace awaits being of service, probably followed by being eaten.

Wrath makes arrangements for the other arches to be summoned and the wedding dress is brought in. Lust tries to remove Alice’s clothes, but fails, complaining that they must be glued on. Wrath gives it a go, literally trying to tear them off her, but only tears a small portion, which rapidly repairs itself.

Seeing the magic clothes at work, Lust suggests leaving them be (magic clothes aren’t easy to make and can be very useful). Wrath asks her to put the wedding dress on Alice over them.

Wrath heads off to get dressed and get his hair done, for the first time, ever.

Meanwhile, Lara arrives at the old wrecked house and puts on the Hunter’s hat, surprised by the fact it has turned blue.

She uses the tracking curse Verda put on the Hunter and her hat in 1972 to learn the direction and distance to Alice. Next, Lara grows bat wings and flies off (with Mashu’ra in her body, the animal forms she can use are limited to mammals).


Chapter 41: Three for the Price of Two

Alice finally wakes and looks around at the room, which has all seven arch demons in it. She tries to leave, because it isn’t her kind of scene, only to burn herself on the interior of the one-way force field produced by the binding circle.

She looks down and sees the wedding dress, but doesn’t quite make the connection that she’s the bride. She’s a little slow on the uptake, like a stoner normally is.

She notes the tuxedo Wrath is wearing and finally realizes she’s at a wedding. She looks down again and realizes she’s supposed to be the bride. The arches laugh at her exclamation of frustration.

She tries to escape with magic, but she’s unable to accomplish anything.

Wrath orders her to hold out her left hand and she reasons she can’t win, so she goes with the flow and obeys.

Wrath puts the enchanted engagement ring Lust made on her finger, resulting in Alice exploding into a cloud of black smoke.

Switching to Lust’s perspective, she’s surprised to see not two figures forming from the smoke, but three. She’s also somewhat bothered by her slowly-growing conscience, because she helped put her jailer (the Hunter/Alice) in this position.

Her calculations are all wrong and with three personalities instead of two, none of them will end up inside a binding circle. She decides that with the plan so far off the rails, it’s time to leave, but as she heads toward the exit, Gluttony sends three of her bodyguards after Lust, presumably to kill her.

Seeing no better option for survival, Lust plays into the desires of Greed, who’s always had a thing for her, and buddies up to him, using a considerable share of charm magic to wrap him around her little finger. It’s a game she doesn’t want to play, but it’s better than the alternatives; Greed wishes to possess her, but the others likely want her dead for political reasons.

Nonetheless, manipulating the feelings of a man doesn’t sit well with her, because she actually feels guilty about it.

The three figures solidify at the corners of a triangle, free, rather than on the two binding circle pallets that stood ready to catch them.

One is the mutated cat form of Insanity at full-strength, wearing the wedding dress, as planned. The Hunter’s human form is next, but she immediately collapses. The last is Alice.

She Seeks Peace, Week #7

“I don’t get it.” Evie’s big brown eyes wobbled with doubt and glistened with imminent tears, “You say my friends are gone, but they’re right there!” She pointed at empty space, then adjusted her pointing finger to some empty air beside the Hunter, “You say Crayton is gone, but he’s here, too!”

  – Excerpt from She Seeks Peace.

She Seeks Peace is volume 4 of Ashen Blades.

You can read a short description of She Seeks Peace to learn more or you can read short summaries of each day’s writing on Mastodon

Here’s links to the rest of my blog entries on She Seeks Peace, in chronological order:
    • September 12-13
    • September 16-20
    • September 23-26
    • September 30-October 4
    • October 7-11
    • October 14-18


Chapter 32: No Sanctuary

The upstairs portion of the The Last Sanctuary turns out to be nothing but mummified corpses and they head downstairs, finding the great hall a little different.

First, the fire is much smaller and there’s a sort of nest of orange monk robes laid out, where someone has been sleeping. That’s surrounded by little, hand-carved wood figures that are very artistic.

The bear statue has had a pair of glasses drawn on with charcoal and one whole wall is covered in charcoal drawings. They start primitive at one end and slowly transition to being very well made, hinting at a progression over time.

The incense is all gone, presumably all used up. The weapons and tools are rusty, but still serviceable, with sings someone has been looking after them.

Near the tree is a chopping block with an ax and carving knife (it’s a magic tree that rapidly grows back, by the way, providing limitless wood for the fire).

The room smells of a child. The Hunter moves closer and sniffs the nest, confirming they sleep there.

They’re surprised to hear a child ask, from behind, “What are you doing?”

The Hunter turns to look, but no one’s there.

The child points out, from behind, “I’m not there.”

Whirling again only causes the kid to giggle from all directions.

Yet again from behind: “Who are you and what’s that rittle furry thing on your shourder?”

Note the spelling. The kid pronounces L’s as R’s, using a Chinese accent.

The Hunter turns Mashu’ra around on her shoulder, so he can watch her back.

“You just gonna ignore me?” The child asks from every direction at once.

Tiring of the game, the Hunter closes her eyes, focusing her mind entirely on smell and magic. As it turns out, the kid is using a technique very similar to the Hunter’s shadow-stepping spell, but instead of a mix of Smoke and Void magic, to make shadow, the kid uses Void mixed with Life, forming a ghost-walking spell.

The Hunter gets an idea where the child is next to appear, based on smell and magic, grabbing their clothes. The result is four years old, with brown eyes and a shaved head, in a child-sized orange robe.

Introductions reveal her name is Evie and it soon becomes clear the girl can see spirits and doesn’t realize they’re dead, because she asks “Who’s the man in the gray suit?” and points at empty space.

They don’t know, so she asks him and says he’s “Crayton Simmons.” The Hunter is shocked by the revelation that Simmons is so very close, yet so far away.

Evie points all over the room at people her guests can’t see, naming them, including a mixture of Western,m Chinese and Russian names, though the name ‘Will’ turned into ‘Wirr’, which will probably confuse, not that it matters.

Eventually, Evie asks why they’re there and Mashu’ra tells her they’re supposed to take her to her family. She gets excited about it finally being time for “her adventure”.

Like a child with a short attention span, she looks at the Hunter and asks if she ever speaks.

The Hunter nods and an amusing exchange happens, in which the Hunter intentionally baits Evie with the only phrase she can say, until she’s annoyed the girl, getting her to ask, “Is that the only thing you can say?”

The Hunter nods and Evie grumbles, “That’s annoying. You’re annoying!”

The Hunter is quite pleased at this outcome, because she tries very hard to be so.

Evie briefly tries to erase the Hunter’s curse, but fails, because it’s “rearry strong”.


Chapter 33: A New Lens

The Hunter leaves the Sanctuary with Evie in two, surprised to see that the courtyard hasn’t changed, but the scene across from it has.

The rope bridge now crosses a creek instead of a deep chasm. The Hunter doesn’t know it, but the Sanctuary connected them with an area near Alice Springs, Australia, because the magic of the Sanctuary sensed that was vaguely near where they needed to go.

The Hunter leaves the courtyard and steps onto the sandy bank of the Todd River. The background is desert scrub brush, including sparse grass, low brush and hardy trees.

S/he looks back, but the Sanctuary and rope bridge are gone, leaving her in a very short panic, thinking she’s lost Evie.

Evie steps out of thin air beside her, amazed by everything she sees. After asking lots of questions, she wishes she could draw it, even though she left her “drawing warr” behind.

The Hunter gives her a clipboard with some paper and a box of crayons that came form the hat.

Evie draws the most violently-rainbow variation of the landscape, using every color she can, because she’s never had colors to draw with before (she’s used to charcoal).

After that, she draws it again, using more appropriate colors, and produces an image like unto a photograph, despite using only crayon. She makes a gift of it to the Hunter.

She wonders aloud what’s next and Mashu’ra is forced to admit he’s not sure, so Evie asks her grandmother, reveling the fact that the spirits of the monks followed.

After a pause (our heroes can’t hear Evenlyn speaking), Evie says, “Yeah? I can do that.”

She raises her arms and pours a mixture of Spirit and Void magic into the air, causing the landscape first to waver like a heat haze, then melt into a puddle like overheated crayons!

Mashu’ra and the Hunter get violently sick and she retches. Rolling on her back, she looks up at some monks, Evenlyn included, plus Simmons, standing over her and discussing her illness.

The magic reverses and the melted landscape flows upward, into the shape and form of a hill they’re now on top of, which give them a nice view of Alice Springs (though they still don’t know where they are).

There’s a brief conversation in which Mashu’ra asks Evie to warn them before she does that again.

Evie settles in to draw, while the Hunter starts to cry, because seeing Simmons ripped her half-healed wounds open again. Evie notices her sobbing and hugs her (the Hunter’s protective spells curiously don’t stop that, indicating her mother refused to intervene).

Evie starts a discussion about the Hunter’s tears and Mashu’ra tries to explain that she just lost a friend. Evie doesn’t understand and they begin a long conversation about death, but the Hunter suspects Evie will not understand, because unlike everyone else, she doesn’t perceive the divide between the living and the dead.


Chapter 34: No Home

Close to an hour late, Mashu’ra has made no progress getting Evie to understand the concept of death and he tries saying, “Ghosts can’t be touched by the living.”

Evie proves him wrong by shaking the hand of the unseen ghost of Simmons, though she unknowingly uses a little magic to pull that off.

Mashur’a gives up, “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

They decide to enter the city, but just as Mashu’ra is saying he’ll be fairly quiet, he vanishes, whisked away by Lara summoning him.

Evie gets an explanation from one of the ghosts haunting them, most likely Simmons, though the Hunter only hears half the conversation.

The girl leads the way into the city, following directions given by her grandmother.

They arrive at a brick house and Evie knocks. A gruff-looking man answers, but smiles at Evie.

She asks if his surname is “Warrace”.

He corrects her by saying “Wallace” and says yes.

Evie hugs his legs and says, “I ruv you, cousin!”

I’ve had a lot of fun with Evie’s Chinese accent, so far, because it makes some of her words amusing and this struck me as one of the cutest things she’s said so far.

The man pries her off and looks to the Hunter for an explanation, but Evie explains, “She can’t say much of anything, due to a magic curse.”

The poor man looks at the both of them like they’re insane and slowly back into his house, before shutting the door and presumably calling the police.

The Hunter grabs Evie’s hand and takes here away from the place, while Evie asks if she did something wrong.

In the hunter’s mind, it’s more a matter of what she hadn’t done wrong.

Again, one of the spirits explains, but this leaves the Hunter vaguely disquieted, because she isn’t sure what they’re telling the girl.

Meanwhile, Lara is in the New York branch office of the Order, helping with the cleanup and moving operation, while she waits.

She steps into Verda’s office, noting the woman’s bloodshot eyes, because she’s hardly slept since Wrath exploded in her face.

They discuss Verda’s fresh case of PTSD for a short while and Lara offers a little advice: Verda should go out and kill some weak demons, to do some good and reassure herself that she’s not useless.

Verda agrees to try it.

There’s also a brief internal momologue from Lara about her own experiences with PTSD (after she was rescued from Hell by her husband) and the way that very specifically didn’t happen after she died and was transformed into a vengeful fey spirit, because fey don’t get traumatized by death and instead seek revenge.

Verda asks if Lara has heard from Mashu’ra. The answer is no, so Verda suggests Lara try summoning him again, even though only three hours have passed; she wishes Artemis were around. That’s a little hint that Verda would feel safe if Artemis were present, because she once killed Wrath.

Lara summons Mashu’ra into her body and relays recent events to Verda, who is very interested in The Last Sanctuary, which has been effectively sealed from the inside for 200 years.

Verda speaks of sending witches in through the “back entrance” to assess the place and get it running again.

Lara tells Mashu’ra she’s on her way to Australia and releases him.

The scene ends with Verda asking if Lara needs a flight arranged.

Lara decides against it: “Nah. Shooting Wrath into space gave me an idea I’ve been looking for an excuse to try…”

What she’s referring to will be revealed, later.

Getting back to the hunter and Evie, they’ve tried three more distant relatives of the Wallace bloodline, who (sadly) want nothing to do with her, though they were polite about it and her childish enthusiasm is starting to fade and she grows slightly older (I mean this literally, not figuratively) with each rejection.

They bump into a young woman in the street that’s eager to talk to them, because they’re obviously foreigners.

Evie learns a few new words/phrases, including ‘American’, ‘Australia’ and ‘the world’, each requiring explanation and the Hunter produces a globe from her hat as a visual aid.

This leads the woman to make a joke, “You the magician or the little one’s lovely assistant?”

Amused, the hunter leans into the idea and pulls Mashu’ra from her hat, grateful he’s back, because she doesn’t entirely trust the ghosts to give Evie current and correct information, even though Evelyn, at least, is oddly up to date on where her family is.

She does a ventriloquist-like act, allowing Mashu’ra to talk in her place, which actually works a little too well, drawing attention.

Meanwhile, Evie is confused, thinking the world and the globe are the same thing.

After an explanation of the difference, Evie shakes the globe and is very much relieved when it doesn’t result in an earthquake.

The Hunter grows uncomfortable with the crowd she’s accidentally drawn and leads Evie away.

When they’re alone, Mashu’ra asks if they’d had any luck and Evie bursts into tears, because she feels like she has nowhere to belong.

The Hunter hugs the girl and finally realizes she’s grown attached, much to her frustration. She’d intended to get the job of delivering Evie to family done, without emotional involvement.

Mashu’a comforts Evie. The Hunter also cries.


Chapter 35: Family

Evie and the Hunter are guided to several more homes of distant relatives by the ghost of Evelyn, but none of them works out, because the people in question have no room in their life for a random relative they didn’t know existed.

They decide to quit for the night and Evie is directed by the ghost of Simmons to the local branch office of the Order.

They meet Riley Wallace, the man in charge of the place. On hearing his name, Evie runs to him and after a short explanation, he hugs her. Riley admits he saw Evelyn in a dream, months earlier, in which she asked him to look after a girl.

He wasn’t sure about the dream, but his own grandmother (a witch) advised him to do as he was told, so he prepared a room in his home for her.

It’s a rather emotional moment when he tells Evie she has a home. Evie is so happy, she cries profusely and thanks him.


Chapter 36: Brekky

Lara is on a sub-orbital spaceflight, in the form of a missile, the quickest option she knows to get to Australia.

At the apogee of her flight, she admires the incredible view of both the Earth and the stars.

She falls back into the atmosphere and changes form, to give herself a heat shield, sacrificing some skin to handle the friction of re-entry. Lara survives the friction burns and turns back into a missile for a while, performing a retrograde burn (reverse thrust) to slow herself down.

When the conditions are right, she turns into an eagle and flies to the ground, where she re-takes human form.

Her arms are badly burned and she’s low on energy, so she lays down to relax and accidentally falls asleep.

Three aborigine men find her, two you fellows and one old guy. They saw her come down like a shooting star and even watched her change shape.

The first hypothesis floated is that she’s an angel, like some catholic guys once mentioned to them.

Next, they consider the possibility that she’s a monster.

The old guy eventually decides that no angel or monster would look English and finally settles on a correct answer: she’s a witch, a kind of magic foreigner woman.

They still debate what they should do, but ultimately decide to help her, because she’s less likely to harm helpful people, on top of it being the neighborly thing to do. They gather herbs and treat her wounds.

When she wakes, she’s fully healed (mixture of medicinal herbs and her own regenerative magic). The local men have gotten a fire going and they sit on the opposite side of it, eyeing her. Not stated, but they put the fire between themselves and her as an extra measure of protection.

She thanks them and gets up to go, but her stomach growls and they kindly offer her brekky (Aussie slang for breakfast).

She’s given a handful of live bugs to eat, including a fat caterpillar. Not wanting to be rude, she actually eats everything, though it all tastes disgusting.

The two young guys roll on the ground with laughter, while the old one produces a can of beans, a small cooking pot and a can opener, which he’s been hiding behind himself.

He asks, “Would ya like some beans, mate? After what ya just ate, I can imagine ya’d like something normal to help ya forget.”

Lara can’t help but laugh at their practical joke, while the old guy opens the can and dumps it in the pot.


Chapter 37: Home at Last

The Hunter waits for Evie to wake as morning arrives. Evie sleeps in a bedroom setup by Riley, wearing pajamas that feature a little, black-furred, helicopter pilot kitty, flying through a sky filled with violently-colorful stars and rainbows that offend and wound the Hunter’s sense of fashion.

Evie goes from having the body of a prepubescent twelve year old to that of a fifteen year old, having matured a bit more in the instant before she wakes.

The Hunter helps her dress, because she needs assistance with certain feminine undergarments that hadn’t previously been necessary. Riley stocked the closet of the bedroom with clothing ranging in age from infant to adult, because he didn’t know the age of the girl he was to care for.

They step out of the bedroom, where Riley makes breakfast in the form of fried eggs. Evie tries an egg and pukes ten minutes later, demonstrating her digestive tract is setup the same as the Hunter’s.

Riley and Evie talk and the Hunter gets up to leave, because she’s finally certain Evie will be safe and secure. As the Hunter waves and opens the door to go, Evie finally comes to understand loss, in the form of losing a friend.

She begs the Hunter not to go and even offers to let her see Simmons if she’ll stay, an obvious attempt at emotional manipulation.

A bargain is struck through gesture: the Hunter will stay for one day, then she leaves, regardless.

The spirits brow-beat Evie for her behavior and she apologizes to the Hunter for manipulating her feelings.

Eventually, Evie brings up the subject of death, because she wants to understand.

To address the subject, Riley takes them to a cemetery and the grave of his parents, who died in a car accident the year before.

He explains that their bodies are buried there and why (mostly cleanliness).

As a result of the conversation, he mentions “passing on” and Evie asks for an explanation of that concept.

Riley explains his views of the afterlife and a primitive variation of eternal joy vs. eternal punishment.

Evie asks why her friends haven’t passed on and Riley suggests she ask them.

Riley and the Hunter step back, while Evie does exactly that, for quite some time. Evie begins to cry at what she learns from them.

She returns to her living companions with a guilty expression and explains they haven’t passed on, because she won’t let them (it’s a mixture of their own unfinished business, needing to see Evie safe and happy, plus her magic anchoring them to the living world).

She’s deeply troubled by the idea of letting go of her friends.

Audio Teasers

In the past few weeks I've put together some AI-read audio samples for these two books (the links will take you to the right pages for the clips):
Troll Song
She Hunts Demons

I took the time to do this carefully, with a separate voice for each character, so there's a little something special and fun about them.

Everything was done with an open source text to speech engine named Piper. The voices are even ethically sourced, which makes me real happy.

I just wish I could produce entire audiobooks for publication, but no store will take them, at least that I know of.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these teaser clips! If you want to know what happens next, you'll have to buy the books!

She Seeks Peace, Week #6

"Mashu’ra muttered, 'When did all of this happen?'
Evelyn looked the kitten in the eye and sighed, 'After your old master freed Pride to return to Earth, but before your current master was born.'
'How can that be, if you’re human?' The kitten asked, “The boss was born one-hundred-twenty-six years ago! You can’t possibly be older than her!'
'Aren’t you a clever little imp?' "
– Excerpt from She Seeks Peace.

My sixth weekly update on She Seeks Peace has been posted to my blog.

She Seek Peace, Week #5

"Glancing at Simmons, who was shrinking back to his human form, she was surprised she’d never really felt homesick in Vietnam, coming to realize home had somehow changed from a place to the company she kept."
– Excerpt from She Seeks Peace.

My fifth weekly update on She Seeks Peace has been posted to my blog.

She Seeks Peace, Week #4

" 'Dead or alive?'
'As dead as possible.' "
– Excerpt from She Seeks Peace.

My fourth weekly update on She Seeks Peace has been posted to my blog.

She Seeks Peace, Week #3

"Illegal toxic waste disposal in violation of environmental standards, land fills, ‘recycling’ that turned out to be another term for garbage, plastic that was impossible to recycle, disposable everything, especially electronics, had all become commonplace in the human world, trends encouraged by demons, because what better way to taint the human soul, than to introduce a measure of unavoidable waste in the life of everyone, while turning a massive profit?"
– Excerpt from She Seeks Peace.

My third weekly update on my work in progress novel, She Seeks Peace, has been posted to my blog.

She Seeks Peace, Week #2

"Reggie demanded, 'Where do you think you’re going, boys?'
'Oh, you know, out.' One of them shrugged.
Another shadowed demon supplied, 'Begging your pardon, but we got other business to attend to.'
'Ab-so-lute-ly!' The third added, 'We’re ever so sorry to have intruded on your time, sir.'
'Weasels.' Reggie muttered, with distaste."
– Excerpt from She Seeks Peace

My second weekly update on my work in progress novel, She Seeks Peace, has been posted to my blog.

Dark Moon in Print

Volume 4 of The Wizard's Scion is available in print.

I've been waiting for the cover to update on Bookshop.org, but it's been available for purchase through them for weeks.

You can learn more about the book on my website.