A Promise Soon Delivered

A Promise Soon Delivered

I am reminded this is my newsletter as well as my blog and I should be enticing you to buy my stories not just going on, and on about my errant thoughts and life events.

I do thank you for humoring all that and hope it has been as enlightening for you to read as it has been for me to share.

And.

I am not going to stop doing any of that. However I did also tell you there were some stories coming out this year, with the second of three edited and the third deep in development, to say nothing of the other projects, it’s time I delivered, no?

Well very near time.

So consider this me planting my flag as it were. March 14th A Meeting Of Monsters will be available for all who desire and it will begin a series of releases and Rereleases to total seven stories featuring my favorite love birds, Al and Urk.

Now March feels far away, though for publishing it’s around the corner, still I’ll leave a bit of a preview here so you have some idea of what to expect.

Enjoy the Teaser.

——

Kill Steal

It wasn’t the smell of ash and smoldering wood that aggravated her nostrils—she’d sadly gotten used to that—it was the smell of filth. The creatures were worse than pigs, leaving a trail of waste in their wake. Be it food, goods, or people, goblins used what was immediately valuable and ruined everything else. The footfalls of boots on stone and the rustle of steel links pulled one of her long ears to the left as Harmen approached.

“Well?” asked the human as he surveyed the wreckage of the small farm. “Which way Al?”

Al’rashal looked down at him. She supposed Harmen was tall for a human though he barely came up to her bust. The centaur aimed her spear toward the low hills nestled at the base of the mountains. “East. Moving fast, the spacing of their hops shows—”

“Then you’d best run them down,” cut in Harmen. He puckered his lips to release a series of hisses to draw the attention of Ynae. The woman’s head snapped around at the sound, ears pointed at Harmen, and eyes wide in wonder before narrowing in embarrassment. “C’mon kitty, you’re up.”

Ynae’s feline body bristled, vibrating in discontent as she came up to Harmen and cast aside the shinny bit of metal she was inspecting. “What?”

“Al says the goblins are moving fast. Get after them, kill ‘em if you can, slow ‘em down if you can’t, we’ll be after ya soon as we can.”

“Don’t be long, or we won’t leave anything for you,” warned Ynae as she bent to the ground. Like all lykin, Ynae was comfortable walking upright, but her arms and legs were equal in length, so she ran on all fours. Al watched her friend go, displaying speed and nimbleness in equal measure.

Harmen laughed before turning to Al. “You’d best get going, or she’ll take your cut.” He emphasized this with a slap to the centaur’s rump.

Al suppressed the urge to rear, and the urge to kick Harmen in the chest, before racing after her friend.

***

Al filled her lungs with the rich scent of leaves changing with the coming of autumn and tried to ignore the acrid odor of their goblin prey. For a moment, she was sorry for Ynae. A lykin’s sense of smell was superior to that of a centaur, so the stench must have been nauseating for her. “Stop,” called Al, pulling up short.

Ynae listened, halting her charge by racing up a nearby tree and looking about for signs of danger. “What is it?”

Al aimed her spear forward at a thin rise in the earth before them, which she’d first taken to be a leaf-covered root but now was certain was a thin rope stretched between the trees. “Trap.”

Ynae climbed down the tree and slowly approached the wire as Al turned her gaze on the nearby shrubbery to hunt for ambushers. Ynae plucked at the thin rope, shaking the leaves off then drew a rapier and swept it along the ground past the rope. Beneath the fallen leaves were several broken bits of metal. “Looks like they weren’t in as big a hurry as we thought.”

“Which means they aren’t as far ahead as we feared either.”

Ynae swept the bits of metal aside and cut the rope. With a nod to Al, the two continued forward, moving with purpose, not haste.

They found more challenges, simple things to slow down pursuers and dangerous things to harm them, from trip lines to fallen logs to broken daggers coated in dung. Removing the impediments was time-consuming, but the two took solace in the fact that setting them up would have cost their quarry more. It was not long then before Harmen and the others caught up.

“I thought you people moved quick,” grumbled Ord the older of the two dwarves as he approached.

“We could have gone much faster, and left you to fall into a pile of shit,” said Ynae. “But you smell bad enough as it is, so we thought we’d do Harmen a favor.”

Ord stepped forward with a growl, a hand moving to the blade sheathed on his back but he was halted by Harmen grasping the blade’s handle and pulling the dwarf to a halt.

“Don’t be a bearded baby,” said Harmen. “If Ord thinks it’s stupid to take care of the traps, he can go first and find them for us.”

The dwarf muttered something beneath his breath but turned away.

“Thought so.” Harmen gestured for Al and Ynae to continue. It made for slow going, the sun crawling from its zenith to but a few hours before setting when they came within sight of the goblins’ camp.

The camp, such as it was, was set up beside a broad slow-moving river that wound from the low hills in the north to the human villages toward the south. The trees nearest the camp’s edge had been felled to create low walls that several goblins rested along, though they were probably supposed to be guards. A trio of fires sat near the riverbank, with something cooking over two of them, and several tents of different sizes were arrayed within the perimeter.

“It’s a damn village,” growled Ord.

—

Hrm, Al, Goblins, a place of mountain and forest. And who’s this Harmen guy, and lykin, what’s a lykin?

Just a few hundred words from the first chapter “Kill Steal” and much, much more to come.

I hope you enjoyed the preview, take care my dear readers and God bless;

~S. Wallace