Voyage: Embarkation #6 Norselands

by Zachary Bonelli

Kal is ready to leave his strange home and is about to embark on a journey to even stranger worlds.

After four years of exile, he can finally escape into the metaxia, the unspace between universes, and explore alternate Earths.

Supremely advanced cultures and natural wonders of immeasurable beauty await him. However, there exist also worlds mired in social decay, and those filled with dangerous, exotic forms of life.

Armed only with defensive nanotech and a computer pad, Kal travels from one alternate Earth to another. Navigating the infinity of possibilities, he embarks on a new kind of voyage, a voyage along the catastrophe of notions.

------------

Kal and Tria explore Vanaheim, an alternate Earth shaped like an apple core with a central disc. In the depths one of the equatorial chasms, they discover a habitable ring of land with a highly advanced civilization. At its periphery, however, lies a malevolent nanotech legacy: the jotuns.

Voyage: Embarkation Episode #6 "Norselands" is about 10,400 words long.

41 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 14, 2013

About the author

I grew up in a small town in northern Illinois, west of Chicago. After graduating high school, I dual majored in English Literature and German Language at a small, Midwestern liberal arts college. After undergrad, I turned my eyes towards exploration, and spent many years in Japan, Thailand and Hawaii.

Nowadays, I live with my partner near Seattle, Washington, where I work in the gaming industry.

I love stories. I’ve long been fascinated by video games as a storytelling medium, and I love exploring different cultures, discovering the different underlying stories that different groups of people tell themselves, the stories that define who they are and how they perceive the world.

Reviews

[Madison Keller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Norse Mythology! Hooked me right off the bat. Vanaheim is probably the most interesting place they’ve visited yet. The descriptions of the land are breathtaking, and do a wonderful job of describing an incredibly strange landscape.

I absolutely love the culture of Vanaheim. Its incredibly complex, and the author gives you just enough exposition and details to make it believable and fun without going over the line into info-dumping.

However, my favorite part of this story are the Jotuns. Each jotun is a chimera shape, two animals combined. They are very fun, and all very unique, but still manage to be absolutely terrifying when they attack Kal and his friends.

We also learn a secret in this episode, the secret of why Kal cannot go home. Why he is questing between the worlds, and what he is looking for.

I can't wait to see where Bonelli takes us next!

[Matt Sayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Full disclosure: I was provided with a free copy of the Voyage: Embarkation series)

A civilisation 21000 years more advanced than Earth has to have a cure to Kal's nanoradiation allergy, right? Not to mention the technology required to survive on a planet Ragnaroked to near oblivion. Kal's reasoning is sound, but he lacks the perspective of a society that has repeatedly endured and escaped Armageddon. He will find that their logic does not quite match his...

Sprinkled with more tantalising tidbits about the nature of the metaxia and how Kal came to be exiled to it, Norselands is by far the most visually evocative and delightfully distinct chapter of the Embarkation series yet.

[W.J. Davies · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ive read all the Voyage episodes, and so far, Norslands is my favorite. We're introduced to a fascinating new "alt-Earth" in which Kal befriends a group of Norse people and assists them in a moral quest, fighting against an ancient evil. The world building is excellent, and there is enough action to keep the pace up through the entire episode. I look forward to episode 7.