Teaser: A Kingdom Without End
Greetings, squidlings!
If you’ve reached this page after reading A Maze of Glass, thank you so much for reading!! I hope you enjoyed the story. If you’ve found this page from some other esoteric origin, check out A Maze of Glass, it’s a quite fine serial! (If I do say so, myself.)
Below you’ll find a teaser for A Kingdom Without End, an Oceanrest serial due out sometime in autumn of 2021 (September? October? Around then.) It takes place…around the time it will release, in September/October of 2021.
If you’re looking for something to read before then, check out the teaser for When They Wear the Mask. When They Wear the Mask is the next Oceanrest serial due for release; it should start to come out in February or March, 2021 and takes place August/September, 2020. It features many recognizable cast members for people familiar with The War Beneath, most notably the main character Deirdre.
Without further ado, a teaser from the current (and very changeable) draft for A Kingdom Without End.
…The Present…(as the fallow soil offers up one living thing)
Hyun-jung dug nails into Rashid’s shoulders. Below them, a blanket they’d bought in Cuzco and the cracked dust of the Andean desert. Above them, an infinity of stars spiraled outward. Below her, Rashid bit his lower lip, his hands iron around her hips. “Hyun-jung,” he groaned, pressing up as she ground down, “Hyun…”
A full moon glistened his sweat into pearls. Cool desert breeze stroked his pores to gooseflesh. His neck curling, his back arching, he gripped her. She bent over him, hands on his shoulders, her body rocking serpentine. Breaths escaped them in delightful gasps and awe-struck curses. “Fuck yes, oh, fuck yes, fuck yes, fuckyesfuckyesf—”
“Slow down!”
“—uckyesfuckohmygod—”
“Hyunnnn—”
She felt it like magic. The climax rose through the conceptual and into the material; it pressed itself against the surface of reality ready to become everything. It pushed, liminal, being and not being. Rashid thrust up, she bore down. Nails bit skin. His voice pitched high, grasp so tight on her hips that their molecules met, and the world split open. She shivered and shook, speaking tongues, euphorically out of control.
He groaned, still plunging, his grip rocking her even as she lost the mental wherewithal to do it herself. As his moans dissipated into pants, she collapsed on top of him in a hungry swarm of kisses. They laughed, hands wandering, until she rolled off of him with a sigh.
“Accidental vacation,” she muttered, staring up at the blazing gallery of night.
Intel-Analytics had reported the decent probability of an active and dangerous pishtaco in the region. Since the South American field operatives were already all booked on assignments, Malleus North American’s ASOD caught the case—and Rashid and Hyun-jung caught it from there. They’d landed in Peru less than sixty hours later.
Except Intel-Analytics had gotten it wrong. The pishtaco turned out not to be a pishtaco at all, but a small group of mundane men and women with a willingness, if not a taste, for violence. Rashid and Hyun-jung filed reports with local authorities as anonymously as they could and received the rest of the week off. Since the Advanced and Specialized Operations Division required ten business days of Decompression/Recovery anyway, and since they didn’t have anything to decompress or recover from, they’d turned the entire situation into an impromptu vacation.
Such things were among the very few perks of the job, the byproduct of a field where intelligence and analysis were simultaneously required and, by the nature of their world, essentially dubious.
She kissed sweat from his collarbone, her head on his chest.
“Hyun-jung,” he said, staring up, his chin slanted against her crown. “I…”
She kissed sweat. “Uh-huh?”
“I…” he swallowed, gulped, took a deep, sucking breath. Grabbed for his throat with his free arm.
“What’s wrong? Can you breathe?” she jerked up, kneeling, scanning his body for clues.
The liquid on her lips wasn’t sweat. The drying slick on his chest wasn’t sweat, either. His heart jumped, pumping hard. His Adam’s apple bobbed and spasmed. His jaw clenched. “I--I--I wanted…” his eyes bulged.
Hyun-jung pushed away from him, reaching for--for what? They were on vacation.
“Hyun-junggggg….” the sound stretched as he ground his teeth together. His stomach bulbed, something pushing up against the skin from inside. His lower ribs popped one by one, breaking. She scrambled through their picnic for something to do. Veins bulged down Rashid’s arms and up his neck. He spat, gagging. “I lo—I l—I lo—”
His skin ripped apart, shreds of stomach and liver and unspooling intestine spilling out of him. Twin mantid appendages reached up from his ragged cavity, tearing him open from throat to groin. A skull tried to force its way through his skull. His teeth shattered. His tongue lolled.
The monster crawled out of his empty skin laughing.
Hyun-jung shouted herself awake behind the cashier’s counter. Faint music jingled through the empty gas station. The clock on the register couldn’t tell her when she’d passed out or how long she’d stayed under, but it told her the current time, 8:41 PM. She wiped nightmare sweat from her brow and ran a hand through fear-greased hair.
The Peru vacation had happened over five years ago. Rashid’s death, three years ago.
Her court martial from ASOD and subsequent burn notice from Malleus came only months after that.
Now she worked at a gas station in the middle of southwestern U.S. nowhere. After nine years as a monster hunter, after over a decade of military and ASOD training, after a lifetime spent in the secret shadows of a hidden world…now she worked at a gas station. The burn notice saw to that. The burn notice and a lack of alternative skill sets.
But something was coming, now, she knew.
She’d first felt the magic a couple weeks earlier, the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck all standing static-straight as she drove to work one evening. The car clock had read 3:00 PM and the song on the radio had switched over mid-track. It played ‘Sixteen Tons’ by Tennessee Ernie Ford, not a song that usually appeared on radios anymore. Not long after, she’d found three dead crows on her apartment balcony, causes of death uncertain. Other flares of mystical synchronicity had unfolded from there, warning signs of some major ritual or powerful entity putting its sights on her.
She pushed herself off of the stool and excused herself to the employee bathroom. She excused herself for her own sake, her work-buddy Trey having neither shown up for work nor called with a justification for his absence. On the toilet, she puffed on her vape pen, trying to bury her nightmare in THC. She clicked the pen four times to turn it on, took four hits, and clicked it four more times to turn it off again. She coughed after the last hit, hacking until something gunky formed at the back of her throat. She hocked it into the toilet on her way out.
Back behind the counter, she checked the cashier-clock again. 3:33 ??, it told her.
She blinked, recoiling from the wrongness. 3:33 ?? it repeated.
She blinked again, rubbing at her face this time. 8:58 PM, the clock corrected.
Nine and three were important numbers cross-culturally. People in the know paid attention to cross-cultural patterns, to the coincidences that suggested so much more than coincidence. Ramadan happened during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar; in Christian myth there were nine choirs of angels. Nine looked like Bahá'í completeness, like divinity in Hinduism, like a body curled up, head bowed, asleep or maybe dead. Odin hung himself from an ash tree for nine days and an average human pregnancy lasted nine months. Etc. Or three: father, son, holy ghost; maiden, mother, crone; Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva; neshamah, ruach, nefesh; the three treasures, the three jewels, the trinity. And, of course, nine was a triune of trinities.
Coincidence? Maybe. Sometimes the strongest magic looked like coincidence.
Sometimes that was the whole point.
The hex laid on her during her court martial, for instance: if she ever successfully convinced someone who didn’t believe in the para-normative to start believing in the para-normative, black cancer would eat her alive within weeks. If she spilled the wrong information to the wrong people, she’d rapidly develop brain and bone cancer. It would be terminal, impossibly terminal. Doctors would shake their heads at lab reports that didn’t make sense to them, anymore; they’d try every treatment in the book and every treatment would fail. Sometimes cancer won. Statistically, it happened.
Magic hid in such places.
Hyun-jung reached into her uniform pocket and found her charm ring. Dozens of cross-cultural symbols hung from it. She ticked them off like rosary beads. A spell formed in her mind, a defense against harm. Before the court martial and the burn notice, people had considered her among the best ward witches in the world. Now, few people considered her at all.
The cashier-clock said 9:00 PM.
Tennessee Ernie Ford crooned from the speakers. Hyun-jung figured one of two things was about to happen, and she hoped for the one that meant she lived a little longer. She held her breath. The prepared cantrip floated in her mind, ready.
The gas station door swung open, mounted brass bell dinging.
The woman who walked in was, in many ways, Hyun-jung’s opposite. Five foot eight to Hyun-jung’s five-three, slender and toned to Hyun-jung’s more muscular stockiness, middle-aged to Hyun-jung’s…well, nearly-middle-aged. A white forty-something woman wearing a leather jacket, jeans with subtle armor plating sewed inside, and motorcycle boots approached the counter. She lifted her eyebrows expectantly.
“Holy shit…” Hyun-jung whispered, finally recognizing her.
Zoe had commonly visited Hyun-jung’s father back when Hyun-jung’s father was still alive and working for Malleus/ASOD. The two had had something of a mentor-mentee relationship before Hyun-jung was old enough to pledge. Zoe, Leo, and Shreya had all spent a lot of time in that apartment. But after Hyun-jung’s dad transferred from field work to a desk assignment, Zoe all but stopped coming over. After his retirement, especially. Hyun-jung remembered seeing her only three or four times between her dad’s retirement and his funeral.
“Long time no see,” Zoe said.
Hyun-jung nodded.
“Leo sent me.”
Hyun-jung nodded again.
Tennessee Ernie Ford told Saint Peter not to call him. He couldn’t go.
“We should get drinks,” Zoe continued. “Have a chat.”
“What kind?”
“Well…how would you like to be reinstated?”
(I owe my soul to the company—)
Hyun-jung’s head swam, memories of Rashid screaming into memories of what she’d done to avenge him. She’d killed four people in Florida, left them cold-cased in Missing Persons. It had seemed fair. They’d killed the love of her life, after all. The Arbiters hadn’t seen it the same way. Thus the court martial. Thus the burn notice. Thus, a gas station surrounded by silence and dark. “Wh-what?”
“First, I need some Zippo fluid,” Zoe scanned the wall behind Hyun-jung. “And do you know a place I could get a pack of Djarum this late at night?”
“Uh, no. Not legally. We have some—”
“No, thanks. I’ll just take the fluid.”
“You said…they want to reinstate me?”
Zoe smirked. “There’s a catch. Feel like going somewhere? Talk?”
Hyun-jung closed the gas station early.
Teaser: When They Wear the Mask
Take Me Away from Here
