Yearly Archives: 2022

Fire and Gold Chapter Seven – Unchanging

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

Danica surged upwards, trying to scream but unable to find the breath for it. The spear gave the barest twitch but didn’t come free. Iron and gold collected around the intruding bronze point, trying to heal the wound but unable to do anything as long as the foreign mass remained impaled in her. Her deadened senses were not enough to protect her from the pain. She had to escape.

Forcing her weight of metal away from the spear point Danica built up mass in her right arm. Taking a moment to steel herself, she yanked her right arm, like a child on its belly trying to roll over. The wooden floorboards underneath her creaked. Then, with a snapping motion she felt in her sternum, the spear came free. Her elbow nudged the langets of the spear, partially dislodging it from her body, while the momentum of her yank rolled her over and finished the process. The weapon clattered on the floor and rolled off somewhere. Danica lay on her back and gasped for breath, loosing all track of time as her metal reserves knitted her tortured body back together.

She was dragged back to the moment by an ugly, wet chopping noise. The young gold drinker squinted, her vision swimming. She was staring at a blurry mass of brown and black which quickly resolved itself into a drifting cloud of smoke drifting through the rafters of a wooden roof. Right. She’d reached for a coin on the floor and the spear hit her in the back. That was a bad thing.

Something rolling across the floor bumped into her arm. With a groan Danica sat up and looked to see what it was.

Hernando’s face stared back at her.

His bloodless head had picked up smudges of ash and his mouth gaped open in a wordless scream. Danica couldn’t tell if he was furious or terrified. He was definitely dead.

Dazed, she pushed the head away with one hand and looked around, trying to make sense of what was around her. The floor was dirt and ashes. Hernando’s body lay on the floor about ten feet away; a strange man in blue knelt by it.

The man had spread a kerchief out under the stump of Hernando’s neck and now he held the flat of a sword there. As Danica stared at it a gold coin dripped from the point of the blade and fell onto the kerchief. The man ignored it as he rummaged through Hernando’s pockets. A surge of anger flooded through Danica, whether it was because he’d killed Hernando or because he was ignoring the gold she couldn’t tell. She scrambled to her feet and grabbed the spear just below its head.

Some noise she made while getting up attracted the stranger’s attention because he quickly spun about, remaining in his crouch but turning to look directly at her, the point of his curved sword aimed squarely between her eyes. The stranger scowled. “Pellinore didn’t think children could go through the Change. Sorry to see he was wrong.”

Danica took one step forward and swayed, leaning on the spear haft to keep herself upright. “I’m not a child. I’m a gold drinker.”

The stranger’s eyes narrowed. “Perhaps you’re a little of both, young lady. You sayin’ you won’t renounce your gold, then?”

“I won’t what?”

“You didn’t hear?”

She tilted her head to one side, thinking back, but she was pretty sure she’d never heard the stranger’s clipped, nasally voice before. “No.”

“Pellinore was wrong about the hearing, too,” he muttered under his breath. She resisted the urge to laugh at something she obviously wasn’t meant to hear. He continued, “You can pass back through the Change if you renounce your gold.”

Her eyes narrowed. On the one hand he seemed to know things Hernando had never told her on the other he clearly had it second hand and didn’t know how trustworthy it was. “How would I do that?”

“Its a complicated process but I have exhaustive instructions for how to go about it.” His off hand gathered up the kerchief and the gold coins in it then carefully stood. Behind him, Hernando’s body lay pale and bloodless.

Danica turned her attention from the body to the stranger’s sword point. His weapon was unsettling but she saw small ripples, probably invisible to the human eye, along the flat of its blade. “I suppose you got those instructions from the same place you got your fancy sword?”

He snapped the point in a tight circle that warned her he was very familiar with the weapon. “This? A loaner from an acquaintance familiar with the book I found them in. Now. Will you renounce your gold or not?”

Danica scowled. She’d never have survived her life until that point if she hadn’t had the resilience of gold in her veins. On the other hand, he had killed Hernando and two of his Converts. Danica herself was the smallest and weakest of the de la Feugoes. She needed to be clever. “Wh-what would I have to do?”

“Well, let’s have a look the specifics.” The point of the man’s sword lowered as he reached into his jacket with his other hand. The coins in the kerchief he was holding clanked, focusing all of Danica’s attention on for a second before she could shake herself free. Her grip tightened on the spear. The stranger snorted and shook his head, stopping his off hand halfway, changing the movement to shove the kerchief and gold into his outside pocket. He poked the cloth and metal into place securely with two fingers. He had something else curled into his hand, which he started to put in his pocket on top of the kerchief. Danica squinted, wondering what it was.

When his fingers uncurled to bring it forward she realized it was Hernando’s money bag.

The stranger shoved the bag away. The moment his wrist reached the hem of his pocket Danica hefted the spear and threw it at him with her full weight behind it. The weapon was excellent as it practically flew itself out of her hand. The timing of her attack was as good as she could make it but it wasn’t enough to overcome the man’s reflexes.

He got out of the way but the projecting langets on the spear’s head caught the man’s sword and pulled it out of line. She lept forward, covering the ten feet between them in two flying steps. The stranger tried to ward her off with his free hand but it got tangled in his coat pocket. She slapped his sword arm with the full weight of metal behind the hit. The stranger dropped his weapon.

It slid across the floor a short distance. One step took her over to it and another crashed her heel down on the rippling imperfection on the sword blade. It snapped in half, the point spinning away in one direction, the hilt in the other. The hilt came to a stop by the stranger’s boots. He scooped it up with a casual movement and pointed it her as if the blade was still intact. The brilliant yellow gleam of gold in the center of the jagged, snapped end of the blade drew Danica’s eyes until she forced them away.

“What are you planning to do with that?” She asked.

He grimaced. “I suppose I’ll have to kill you and drain the iron and gold from your blood until there’s nothing but water left.”

“With six inches of sword left?”

He pulled his off hand from his pocket, still holding Hernando’s bag. He slit the side of it open with what remained of his sword then gave it a slight shake, letting the contents spill out onto the ground. To her horror, Danica found it impossible to draw her gaze away from the shining silver coins as the tumbled onto the floor. A strange compulsion overcame her. She dropped onto her hands and knees, trying to find and count how many of them there were. Five- no six- no ten- no –

She reached fifteen when her feet were kicked out from under her, dropping her onto her face once more. This time, instead of a spear, a heavy weight settled on her back and a hand gripped her hair and held her head down. Even in that position she found her eyes still drawn to the coins she could see in the corner of her eyes. “This is your last chance,” the stranger said. “Renounce your gold.”

Terror gripped Danica. Deep within she knew that she was still alive only because the stranger had offered her one last chance to undo the Change. But as frightened as she was of death she was even more terrified of the idea of living in a world where monsters like Hernando de la Feugo existed without the power of gold in her veins. “I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll live without taking blood. I can be your friend, your daughter, even grow into your lover if you want. But don’t ask me to give up the gold. I can’t. I can’t live like that again.”

The stranger sighed. His weight shifted slightly and the broken tip of his sword came into view. Danica tensed but to her surprise the sword just touched one of the coins lying in her field of vision. Then, to her greater shock, the silver in the coin began to flow up into the sword blade, adding it’s own small weight of metal to that of the stranger’s weapon. He repeated this process over and over as he spoke. “Your sire must not have told you much after he Changed you. In fact, you’re so young I imagine you can’t have been a drinker long.”

“What do you mean?”

“Gold drinkers must spend blood to rebuild their body. The stories say most believe they only spend it to heal themselves quickly but the truth is more complicated.” For the cost of only ten silver marks the stranger had rebuilt his sword to its previous size. The weapon moved out of sight. “In truth, the body dies a little every day, and must heal itself to repair the damage for we are mortal. Not even Gold drinkers are immune to this. But one thing you lose in the Change is the ability to heal without a cost of gold and iron. If you forsake blood you will die in a matter of days. It’s more merciful to end it quickly. Your sire didn’t tell you this?”

“No.” Danica whispered.

“And your gold?”

She gritted her teeth. “It is mine. My key to life, to freedom to veng-”

But Danica de la Feugo’s claims to all three ended at the edge of a silvered sword.

Next Chapter

Fire and Gold Chapter Six – The Silver Sword

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

An amused smile touched Hernando’s lips. “Oh? You’re the Giantkiller, are you?”

An annoyed look crossed Harper’s face as he drew a long, straight, thin sword with a large sulfurite crystal in the hilt. “Some people call me that, I suppose. It’s not a title I claim but I can’t take words out of other people’s mouths, either.”

“You Avaloni have such a strange fascination with giants. They’re just big.” Hernando eyed Harper’s sword and estimated it gave his opponent two and a half to three inches of reach advantage. He assumed a duelist stance and began circling the other man warily. “It’s not like they’re majestic like the griffon or powerful like the dragon. They don’t even symbolize an elemental power like the unicorn represents the Depths of Purity. Why a creature that is merely us, enlarged?”

“I don’t know.” Harper made an experimental lunge, feinting a downward cut that suddenly snaked sideways becoming a cut at Hernando’s left flank. The gold drinker back pedaled quickly enough to dodge the worst of the slash. However Harper’s reach and the unexpected nature of the attack was enough to lay open a shallow cut in spite of Hernando’s fast response. Harper returned to a guard position with a casual shrug. “I know the story of Arthur and the Brothers Walking but I’m not sure why the First and Forever King slaying a giant made fighting them the greatest achievement an Avaloni man can achieve. I’d rather leave that honor to him and seek my own path. I don’t think I’m worthy of the calling Arthur answered.”

Gold scabbed over Hernando’s wound in seconds. He probed it with his fingers for a second, more worried at how easily the blade cut through all three layers of clothes he wore than the wound itself. Harper was clearly a competent swordsman. But his opening attack was a poor match for the sword he was using. That kind of slashing attack would have worked better with a little more blade behind it rather than a narrow, straight weapon like Harper was holding.

On a hunch Hernando edged forward and feinted a high cut. Harper answered by raising his blade to block and riposted with a wheeling cut, snapping his wrist around as he lunged again to try and strike Hernando’s shoulder. It wasn’t the typical counter you’d expect from that kind of sword. Based on Harper’s last strike it was exactly what Hernando was expecting and, with no force behind his initial strike, he was able to shift and block it easily.

With a grim smile, Hernando followed Harper’s arm back towards the other man as he recovered his weapon. As Hernando expected, Harper recovered like he, too, was trained with a saber or similar backsword. Curved cutting weapons were, in general, shorter than straight cut and thrust weapons like Harper’s current sword. People who weren’t used to a longer weapon often lost control of their point and the blade went out of alignment, creating an opportunity to trap it against its owner’s body.

Harper wasn’t an exception. Hernando took full advantage of his opponent’s sloppy recovery, pushing Harper’s sword down until he was forced to drive the point into the floorboards to stop it so it wouldn’t cut his own leg. This was where Hernando’s shorter blade came in handy. It wasn’t stuck and he left the bind to slash upwards at Harper’s forward leg.

With a snappy throwing motion Harper sent the bead of fire in his left hand zipping down to touch the edge of Hernando’s saber where it exploded. A sudden gust of hot air whooshed past him. However the explosion had no force behind it and the heat seemed to focus in the saber blade, melting a hand sized section of it in the space of a breath and spattering molten bronze on the floor. Harper yanked his sword free of the ground and stepped past Hernando.

The gold drinker whirled in an attempt to keep the other man in sight but Harper was too light on his feet, staying just beyond Hernando’s left shoulder. For some reason he didn’t strike. With his saber destroyed and his reach even more reduced compared to Harper’s moving away didn’t strike Hernando as a good strategy. So he threw the full weight of his gold into his left foot and swept it out. With the weight shift added to the force of the spin his leg caught up with and toppled Harper, who did Hernando the disservice of falling on top of him. They both wound up on the ground in a tangle of arms and legs.

A mad scramble ensued where Harper tried to get back to his feet and Hernando tried to get a solid grip on him to keep him grounded. In the middle of the scramble a sharp pain shot up Hernando’s leg. Reflexively he pushed hard to shove the source of it away from him. He’d already put a fair amount of gold in his hands to help him drag Harper as he wished and as a result when he shoved Harper went rolling across the floor like a tumbleweed, elbows thumping, sword clanking, mouth cursing.

A deep cut had laid Hernando’s thigh open. Gold was slowly filling the wound in but it wasn’t moving as quickly as he’d expected. Grimacing, he got to his feet and prepared to lunge back into the fray but stopped short when he saw Harper. He’d gotten back to his feet and was back in his stance. Somehow he’d also changed weapons, his long thrusting sword gone, replaced with a shorter, wide bladed machete. The large sulfurite crystal in the handle glowed brightly but the weapon had no fuller or other way to release it’s power. It was hard to tell from a distance but the crystal looked exactly like the one in Harper’s previous weapon.

Hernando barked a short laugh. “Silver? You bring a silver sword to challenge a gold drinker?”

“’Those who mix blood with gold think they take in the king of all metals,’” Harper said in a flat, absent tone. It sounded like a memory given voice. “’But the truth is that gold is the most promiscuous.’”

Hernando’s amusement drained away. Malice welled up in its place, a gnawing desire to destroy Harper in such a thorough, tortuous way that his words would never be spoken again. “Oh? Where did you hear that?”

“Read it in a book,” Harper replied. He touched a finger to the crystal in his sword and pulled a bead of flame from it. The crystal didn’t visibly dim so it couldn’t have been that much. Nevertheless Hernando braced himself for another attack like that which had destroyed his sword. But Harper just continued to speak in his previous tone of voice. “’The magic of gold goes beyond simply bonding with all metals. It also mimics the magic of that metal. The way iron wars with magic isn’t understood but it is magic and this is why gilded iron does not kill magic is effectively as other forms of the metal. Gold is killing iron’s magic just as iron is killing other magics.’”

Growing tired of Harper’s lecturing, Hernando took a half step to the left, as if he was going to circle around the other man towards Danica, then transitioned from the feint to a vicious lunge. By forcing the weight of metal into his forward foot, he added to his forward momentum creating an unstoppable step-in. Unfortunately Harper did not react as Hernando hoped.

Instead of moving forward to intercept Hernando’s feint Harper skipped back and threw his bead of fire into the wooden floor. It burst into a small flame that wavered weakly. Then Haper pointed two fingers of his left hand at the flame and a spark like red lightning flickered in his eyes and the floorboards burst into flames. Hernando had skidded through his initial lunge, keeping his weight forward. He’d intended to chase Harper and bring him to grips. Instead he got caught in the fiery eruption Harper set off. Scrambling to try and get out of the sudden conflagration, Hernando’s boot caught on the edge of… something and he toppled over.

It wasn’t until he scrambled backwards across the floor that he saw what had happened. He was beating out the flames on his clothes when he realized the floorboards were quickly turning to ash, leaving a half inch depression full of ash growing in the building’s great room. The fire was advancing with supernatural speed, already lapping at the soles of his boots again. The flames on his clothes would not go out.

He had to get away from Harper. The man had some kind of magical control over fire, a power as mysterious to Hernando now as gold drinking had been a year ago. But few magics could be directed with precision without the ability to see what one was doing.

Herando wasn’t the only one to realize this. When he spun to head back to the door he discovered the entire floor behind him was a sea of flames. He tried to think of a counter. His opponent was one step ahead of him. The fire surged forward in a wave that funneled itself towards him, rushing over his head and torso in a seemingly endless stream. The heat was enough that, even with his reduced sense of touch, Hernando could feel his flesh burning.

He screamed.

Then he toppled to the ground. “’The magic of silver is to assume the shape its master desires.’” Harpers voice came from very close by. “’When it binds to gold, both gold and silver will shape to your desires. By binding silver to the gold in the creature’s blood you will gain power over it equal to the creature itself.’”

Hernando’s eyes recovered from being boiled away, although they saw the world through the yellow tinge of the gold that had helped them heal. What he saw was Harper kicking his severed leg to one side. Flecks of gold and iron clung to his blade, gleaming in the light of the brilliant bead of fire cupped in his left hand.

“’This is the way I, Sir Albert Oakshott, successor of Pellinore, first slew the creature of blood and gold.’” Hernando lunged forward, hoping to drag Harper down to his level. One of his arms struck Harper’s leg as he sidestepped the lunge and something clattered to the ground. For a moment Hernando thought he’d succeeded. Then he pivoted on the stump of his leg to follow up on his success to discover Harper, still on his feet, coming forward to slam his boot down onto Hernando’s chest.

“You can still renounce your gold,” Harper said, leaning over him. “Even if you don’t know the way, Albert did.”

At a total loss, feeling his reserves of gold and blood vanishing as they tried to replace his leg, Hernando tried to think of a response. He could only think of one.

To his surprise, Harper only sighed when Hernando’s spittle hit his boot. “So be it.”

Then he raised up his weapon and swung it down through Hernando’s neck.

Next Chapter

Writing Vlog – 02-09-2022

Posted by natechen on

This weeks writing vlog is more of the stuff you’ve come to expect!

Fire and Gold Chapter Five – The Hunter

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

Hernando stormed into the ranch house, his temper barely in check. “Janice. Janice, what are you doing? Where is that boy? We should already have the ritual under way!”

An eerie silence answered him. The furious energy animating Hernando drained away as he walked cautiously into the great room, eyes scanning the room and nearby kitchen for any signs of Janice or the rancher’s son. The building smelled faintly of smoke. An uncomfortable feeling settled in his stomach and his hand absently went to the sack of coins he’d taken from the pay box and stuck in his coat’s inner pocket. There was barely any gold left there, which he’d put aside for the ritual. Most of it was silver coins and offered him little extra power if things turned against him.

“Janice?” He called once more. Softer. He wasn’t expecting a response and he didn’t get one.

Careful, cautious steps took him through the dining room and into the kitchen. The bucket from earlier was no longer by the sink and he saw the edge of a puddle of water spilling out from around the kitchen table. Edging over to the kitchen wall, Hernando peered past the table. Sure enough, Janice’s body lay on the floor there, her skin unnaturally pale.

No enemy was crouched there, waiting, so Hernando allowed himself to relax. Just a bit. When he knelt down by Janice he discovered that, although her head was still attached to her body, her throat had been cut open. It hadn’t been immediately apparent, since there was no scent of blood or gold anywhere on her body. The inner flesh was almost the same color as her skin. There was a vaguely familiar whiff of metal in the air but it mixed with the smoke and he couldn’t pick it out.

He saw the bucket, lying discarded under the kitchen table. An odd place for it to wind up but it rested on its side, so it may have gotten kicked or just rolled there. Another odd detail he couldn’t figure out.

There were differences from Larry’s killing, too. Janice had been impaled through the chest, leaving a wound almost as wide as two fingers together. There were also slashes at bother her wrists. The entire body was damp, suggesting the puddle nearby had started when water was poured over it. Danica had mentioned Larry being wet, although he’d dried out by the time they investigated. Hernando poked two fingers into the puddle and smelled them. There was a vague smell of blood iron in the water but not a strong one. Curious.

Digging his fingers under the body, he lifted it just a bit and looked underneath. There was a deep gouge in the floor, roughly under the hole in her chest. He lowered Janice back into place and studied her again. The body looked like it lay where it had fallen, arms akimbo, although there were signs her legs, at least, had thrashed about, leaving scuffs and splinters on the wooden floor. He checked her hands for injuries but found none. Finally Hernando stood up and studied the kitchen and dining room again with a critical eye.

No matter how he looked at it, there hadn’t been a fight. No furniture was moved or broken, no scorching marked the walls, there was no smoke or blood or any indication of violence beyond what had killed Janice. That suggested she was taken by surprise or met someone she knew, and he knew he hadn’t killed her and Danica wasn’t capable of it.

Not because she didn’t want to, but because Janice was heavier in weight of metal and her elder in order of Changing. Either one of those would give her significant power over Danica, both together was impossible for such a young gold drinker to resist.

But Janice’s body hadn’t been posed like Larry’s was. Was it some kind of ritual? Had his coming just interrupted the last part of it? Or was the change in the posing of the body a part of some grand design he simply couldn’t see? Whatever it was, Hernando decided, it didn’t matter as much as finding Danica and getting out of there as fast as they possibly could. He had few advantages left to spend against this mysterious foe and he didn’t want to loose any of what remained today. It was time to cut losses and leave.

There would be time to rebuild their reserves of blood and gold. Foolishly staying to try and exact revenge or recover what was lost when he knew so little about the situation as a whole was just going to get him killed.

With that decision firmly made, he turned back towards the ranch house door to go out and look for Danica. He only got as far as the dining room before a deep rumbling swept through the room, like an earthquake but somehow less intense. Hernando swayed on his feet but managed to keep them but he heard a clattering noise from the loft.

Hernando froze, hand on his sword hilt.

The rumbling passed quickly, lasting little more than five seconds, but Hernando didn’t move for nearly a minute. He stood motionless, weight on the balls of his feet, straining his enhanced hearing to its utmost. Was someone in the loft? Or had something fallen over up there during the shaking? It wasn’t impossible but nothing on the ground floor had. He strained his memory to try and remember what Janice had told him she’d seen when she looked around up there.

He couldn’t remember any of it. There was no way to know whether there was anything up there to fall and clatter without going up there himself and that was something he wasn’t anxious to do. So, after no noise came from the loft for a full sixty count, he decided to just leave the house. And perhaps chain the front door shut. The slaughterhouse had plenty of chain to work with.

He was five feet from the door when Danica flew in and nearly bowled him over, her short arms wrapping around his waist as she screamed and yelled in fear. Or perhaps frustration. Either way, trying to stay quiet or pretend he’d left looking for Janice long ago wasn’t a viable strategy anymore. “Calm down, Danica,” he snapped, trying to pry her arms off so he could move freely. “What is the matter with you?”

She finally let go of him, took a deep breath and said, “I just met two people who had the rancher’s son with them. I tried to get him back but one of them turned into a tree and the other sang. They collapsed the canyon and nearly buried me alive. I came to find Janice and see what happened to her. We need to find those two and pay them back.”

“No, Danica,” Hernando said, his tone harsher than he intended. “We’re leaving.”

“Hernando!” Danica seemed horrified. “We can’t leave, you said we’d be Changing the rancher’s children and adding to-”

“Janice is dead, same as Larry,” he snapped. “All her gold is gone and there isn’t a drop of blood in her veins. We can’t afford to spare the resources now.”

Danica froze. “What?”

“You’ve been changed for two weeks, so you haven’t learned this yet but we’re ‘gold drinkers’ because we have to drink a little gold with blood iron in order to keep it under our control. The ritual starts you with a fair amount in reserve so you haven’t needed it yet.” He pointed to her wrist, which she was absently rubbing as the late afternoon sunlight glinted off of it. “And sometimes we have to spend it on things like that. That gold is going to flake away with the blood you healed yourself with. All it’s power is gone. I try to keep a stockpile in my veins but changing you and Larry ate up most of the coin I’ve found so that stockpile is running low. We don’t have much to replace it with. Now Larry and Janice are gone and I can’t reclaim their gold so we’re not changing anyone else until we can get more one way or another.”

“So… so we’re just going to leave when those two killed Larry and Janice?” She demanded, folding her arms over her chest. “You said gold was the king of metals, greater than even iron’s power to kill magic! It should let us kill two people! Gold is the ultimate power!”

“It is,” Hernando said between gritted teeth. “But we can only use that power if we have gold. And right now we don’t.”

Danica’s face screwed up in a way that told him a tantrum was coming.

He opened his mouth to head off whatever she was about to say. It didn’t matter. Before either of them could get a word out a clear, brilliant tone rang out through the great room. Both of their heads swiveled around to latch onto the sight of a single golden coin, bouncing once, twice, then a third time before rolling along the wooden floor. For a brief moment Hernando felt the siren call of the metal. He fought it down and shook his head to clear it, only to find that in the brief moment it took Danica had started towards the rolling coin, her eyes wide.

“Danica! That’s bait!” He took a single step towards her but then his feet turned towards the coin, forcing him to stop himself before he fell into the same trap she had.

She reached down to scoop up the shining piece of gold. A loud, whistling roar filled the room and a winged spear flew down from the loft, the jet of fire from the sulfurite embedded in the head wavering in odd ways, until it struck her square in the back and drove her to the ground. The coin bounced free from her hands and rolled away. With a direct threat to focus on Hernando found it easy to tear his attention away from it and look up to the loft.

The fire jet from the spear arced up and stopped at the hand of a figure there. The glare from the flames made it impossible to see him clearly. But it was a man, in a short brimmed hat and a suit, with one hand outstretched as if to grab the fire out of the air. In less time than it took to describe the propulsive blast from the spear went out. Danica tried to push up from the floor but failed. The point must have driven into the wood below her. It couldn’t have been some power of the spear itself. The sulfurite in it was dull and dark. Instead, an angry bead of red-orange light hovered a few inches away from the man’s palm.

With a single motion Hernando drew his own sword, a cup hilted saber, and ignited its own sulfurite crystal. The weapon’s fuller filled with fire. The man in the loft ignored Hernando, leaping down to land on Danica’s legs with an ugly snapping noise that interrupted her attempts to push herself up and pull the spear point free of the floor. With a single stomp on the winged langets of the spear he drove the head deeper into her back. Hernando was in the process of lifting his arm to launch an arc of flame from his weapon when he remembered what the man had done to the blast from his spear.

Cursing his own stupidity, he hooked his thumb around the vent lever of his sword and pulled, expelling the sulfur power of his weapon harmlessly and shaking it to make sure it was extinguished. The man turned his back on Danica and faced Hernando with a wry smile. “Not a bad decision,” he said. His voice had a strange tension to it. The man himself was on the short side, dressed in a tailored but worn blue suit with a sword of some kind at his waist. The bead of fire still hovered over his left hand as he took a step towards Hernando. “Now I’ve accepted a commission to bring the lot of you in but how I do that is up to you. If you – either one of you – choose to renounce your gold, pass back through the Change and turn yourself in as humans I can assure you fair consideration will be given to your circumstances. You probably didn’t choose to Change. But otherwise… well, you sound like you’ve already seen the other two of your group.”

Hernando laughed, bitter and flat. “And who are you to make such demands?

The other man reached up with his free hand to push back his hat a couple of degrees, so as to better make eye contact. “Just the best firespinner for hire in ten counties. My name’s Roy Harper.”

Next Chapter

Fire and Gold Chapter Four – Innocence Lost

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

Danica hurried out of the barn, her eyes scanning the field, not looking far ahead towards the gulch that funneled down into the valley but rather studying the grass just a few feet ahead. It was quite muddled with hoof prints and boot prints from the last day’s activities. But there was a clear set horse tracks on top of it all that hadn’t been there before. With a satisfied grunt she followed them.

It quickly became apparent the horses had riders, for they moved in a very straight line towards the boardinghouse. Nor did they cut into the center of the compound, which would allow them to reach the boardinghouse door fastest. Instead they stayed in the field, which made them less likely to be noticed from any of the buildings.

Not good. Danica picked up speed and followed the tracks to the point where they were moving past the back of the boardinghouse itself, clinging stealthily to the lee of the building. She was so focused on watching the footprints she almost didn’t hear the people coming the other way. Two horses rounded the corner, a tall, fair haired man on one and slightly shorter woman with similar features on the other. The woman had the son of the rancher family in the saddle in front of her wrapped in a blanket.

Danica froze. The man’s face split into a smile. “At last! Another survivor.” He got down from his horse and handed the reigns to the woman. “Hold these, Cassie.”

“Be careful, Brandon,” the woman murmured. “Something sounds off here.”

Danica’s eyes darted back and forth between the two of them. She wasn’t sure what the Cassie woman was hearing that sounded off but perhaps she was picking up on the noise of Janice looking for the boy. Either way, Brandon didn’t seem to take her that seriously either. He got down from his horse and carefully approached Danica. “What is your name, young lady?”

“Danica,” she said, doing her best to appear harmless and frightened as she answered. “Danica de la Feugo.”

Brandon looked down at her with a mix of concern and compassion, neither of which were as big a concern to her as his incredible height. Danica estimated he was more than twice as tall as she was. The extra weight of iron and gold in her veins was an equalizing factor but given the extreme size difference she wasn’t sure she could more than equal his weight.

As she finished sizing him up, Brandon also finished with her. “You look like you’ve been hiding,” he said, picking a bit of dust from the boardinghouse floor out of her hair. She flinched but he didn’t seem upset. “I don’t know how much you saw of what happened here but you’re safe now. Was there anyone else hiding with you?”

“No,” she said, guessing at what Brandon thought had happened to her. “I was alone.”

“Brandon!” Cassie’s voice had an odd strain in it. “Brandon, come here for a moment.”

“Just a minute, Cassie,” he hissed, half turning away from Danica to look at the woman. The shift in his bulk was enough for Danica to make eye contact with the rancher’s son and see the spark of recognition there. In that moment she knew she couldn’t lie to the pair anymore.

Danica gathered as much of her metal reserves in one foot as she could and lashed out at Brandon’s knee. After that things happened very fast.

Brandon rolled with the impact, flopping over onto his side with a grunt. The momentary contact between Danica’s foot and his knee was strange and spongy, almost as if she had kicked an old tree stump rather than a human body. She gathered herself to spring for the rancher’s son only to pull up short when Brandon grabbed her arm. The man had sprung up from the ground like he was a spring, his legs seeming to pull at the ground, with no sign that he felt any pain from Danica’s kick. Shocked, she yanked on her arm once but found it impossible to break his grip.

“What’s this?” He demanded. As she watched his chest and arms seemed to swell, the buttons on his shirt and vest straining to stay closed. His cuff links pulled loose and his shirt sleeves sprang open to reveal a strange, greenish brown color spreading down his body and over his hands.

“What are you?” She retorted, giving up on pulling away as the strange color closed over his hands. She was vaguely aware of a change in texture, but her sense of feel was too dull to tell her more. It was time to improvise. Pushing the metal in her veins back down into her feet she pushed away from Brandon and towards the wall of the boardinghouse she jumped up, braced her feet on the wall, and vaulted over Brandon’s head. This gave her enough torque to pull free of the man’s grasp, although she lost most of the skin on her left hand in the process.

By the time she landed on the ground again she’d shifted her weight of metal back up into her hands and, balling them together, she slammed them into his knee again. The impact had the same strange feel to it and this time he didn’t even respond to it. Then he pivoted to face her. In the process he lifted one foot and Danica saw the sole of his boot fall away, strange, rootlike tendrils pulling up out of the ground and into his foot. His other boot remained rooted and twisted unnaturally as he pivoted. Finally he slammed his foot down and spread his arms wide and lowered his center of gravity and sneered at her.

His face was unrecognizable. It had transformed into the same brownish green color as his hands and his eyes and mouth had shrunk and twisted down to small, strange orifices like knotholes on a tree. Shocked, Danica scrambled back from the strange creature. “What’s this?” His voice creaked with wooden overtones. “Did they change you as a child?”

Talking wasn’t really going anywhere so Danica ignored the question. She did know that Hernando wouldn’t be happy if the boy escaped. She wasn’t sure he wanted to fight with the incredible tree man or whatever Cassandra was, he’d made it a habit of avoiding people he assessed as dangerous magicians, but they’d already collected all the ranchers once and letting someone he’d captured slip his grasp was not something Hernando believed in.

So she turned away from Brandon and jumped up onto his horse. Pausing for just a moment on its saddle, she aimed herself towards the boy and jumped again before the animal began to prance in distress. A sharp, piercing sound, unbelievably loud, pierced her head and for a moment her vision disappeared entirely.

Vague impacts told her she’d hit something solid, like a horse, then something even more unforgiving, like the ground. A series of hard impacts on her back told her she’d gotten trampled afterward. In spite of her best efforts, Danica couldn’t get her arms and legs to do as she told them for a good four or five seconds, by which time her vision had come back and Brandon, the Walking Tree had scooped her off the ground and wrapped her into a constricting bear hug.

She looked over to see Cassie’s horse cantering up the canyon away from the ranch. Her hearing was returning slowly and she caught the last few words the woman was saying. “…both know you’re not going to do anything to hurt her. Put her down and come away, Brandon.”

“Harper said there was a way for them to change back. We can-” Danica pulled her iron up into her head and snapped it backwards, cracking him between the eyes. He sputtered and his grip loosened but didn’t let go entirely. She braced her feet on top of Brandon’s knees and snapped her head forwards and back again. This time Brandon managed to move his head so the blow landed on his cheek rather than between the eyes but his grip loosened again as the two of them twisted in the grapple. Finally Danica pushed her blood metal back to one foot and stamped on his knee.

The third time was the charm. She felt something pop as her foot came down and Brandon let go, falling flat on his back. Danica scrambled away from him and after Cassie, staggering back and forth as she tried to find something like balance again. At first it seemed that her difficulty staying upright was just a result of the damage to her ears. But then she realized a deep, baritone rumble was building in the ground beneath her feet and she could see fist sized stones rolling down the canyon as it shook.

The rocks parted around Cassie as she moved up the pass.

They didn’t do the same for Danica. In fact, as they came rolling along she realized they were actually funneling towards her. Putting her hands over her head she packed her arms full of iron and gold and did her best to ignore the impacts that pelted against her arms, legs and torso. The rumbling suddenly stopped and Cassie called, “Come on, Brandon! He told us to bring away the survivors and not worry about the gold drinkers! Leave the man to his work!”

Danica lowered her hands enough to peek over top of them just in time to see Brandon canter past on his horse. She wasn’t sure how he’d gotten up and into the saddle but his strange, treeish abilities certainly made it possible. For a moment she considered chasing them further. Then Cassie stood up in her stirrups with hands clasped under her diaphragm, new harmonics layering into the rumble, and the canyon walls began falling apart, filling the canyon with rubble from gravel to man sized rocks. Cassie’s horse whinnied and shied backwards, Brandon’s increased its speed to a mad gallop.

The rocks avoided both of them, their horses misgivings aside.

A bitter taste filled Danica’s mouth and she knew she wasn’t going to catch either of them now. With a final, baleful look at Cassie she turned away from the canyon and ran back towards the ranch house with the rocks and rubble nipping at her heels. Hernando wasn’t going to be happy. But she knew that his wrath was momentary and mostly harmless. Getting buried alive was much, much worse.

However, she wasn’t going to forget what happened. One day these interlopers were going to pay for meddling in the affairs of the de la Feugos.

Next Chapter

Writing Vlog 01-26-2022

Posted by natechen on

This week’s writing vlog catches us up after my brief bout with the ‘rona.
https://youtu.be/oNX294fCiAc

Writing Vlog 01-12-2022

Posted by natechen on

After a bit of a hiatus, I bring you a general project update in this weeks writing vlog.
https://youtu.be/gEr1miez3SY

Fire and Gold Chapter Three – Drained Dry

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

The ranch house was quickly becoming Hernando’s least favorite part of the homestead. Janice was spending most of her time there. Something about the ramshackle pile of sticks created a powerful attraction that kept her there. He found her standing naked in the kitchen when he returned. A bucket of well water sat on the counter beside her as she carefully adjusted the coils of hair on top of her head. Soft whimpers came from the master bedroom. Hernando scowled.

“What are you doing?” He demanded, striding through the great room to the tall cabinet by the root cellar door.

She hesitated, a long pin closer to a weapon than an ornament half impaled into her hair. “You said to clean up after-”

“Why haven’t you eaten yet?” Hernando demanded, irritation lacing his voice. “You’re as bad as Larry. It will take time for the gold to bond to new blood and give you command of it yet here you are playing with your food instead of eating it.”

Janice turned to face him, arms folded under her breasts. “Hernando, what’s got you so wound up? It ain’t like you to rush through things so much, you ought to be lookin’ at your diary and plannin’ out our next trip but instead you’re all fired up to move on tomorrow.”

“Today, if possible,” he snapped. “The people of Columbia take their holy orders so abominably seriously that we can’t hope they won’t look into the loss of a Watchpost. I thought a day here would let us lay in some iron and gold for emergencies. We’re hours past that and we’ve barely started on the process.”

“They had ranch hands up on the ridge,” Janice said with a helpless shrug. “Did you really want more people escapin’ to rat us out?”

“No,” Hernando snapped. “It’s not anyone’s fault that things didn’t work out perfectly. It is your fault that you won’t do as you’re told. Now go and finish your meal so we can put him with his sister and go about turning them.”

Janice perked up. “So you will give him the change?”

“Only if you have him ready for it before sunset.” With a disgusted shake of his head Hernando rummaged through the cabinet until he found the box he’d spotted there on his initial pass through the building the day before. He took it out and moved it over to the dining table in the great room and emptied the contents there.

“What is that?” Janice asked, still ignoring his instructions to gawk at the pile of paper and tools that spilled out.

“Maps,” Hernando said. “We’re on the edge of territory I know well, I’ll need to look over the counties north of here before I can decide where to go next.”

“Why not go west to Winchester county?” She asked. “There’s a bunch of skytrain stations there. We could fly anywhere in Columbia in four days time.”

“Because the Storm’s Watch is likely to bring in a team of their own to investigate what we did to their Post. Any team they send is far more likely to know a gold drinker than regular men are. And the Storm’s Watch can move their team a lot faster by sky train than by foot or wagon, so we’re going to stay as far from them as we can for the next few weeks.”

Janice sighed. “When you put it that way, I guess we’re gonna have to avoid the skies. To bad. I never been flyin’ before.”

Hernando didn’t mention the other problem with flying – as gold drinkers collected blood iron under the sway of the gold in their veins they quickly got heavy enough to fall right through the floor of most skytrains. To say nothing of what that weight did to throw them off balance. Although he’d taken most of the blood iron Janice drank she was still far heavier than she looked, and probably wouldn’t ever be able to fly without giving her nature away.

Not that her weight was a topic he was eager to broach.

This same difficulty made horses or stage coaches impractical, so they were going to have to walk wherever they wanted to go. “We need some place that is sparsely settled but close enough we can reach it in two or three days. Any ideas?”

“Honey, we been farther north than I’ve ever been since you changed me. But I know ranches, and they’ll have a map with their routes for cattle drivin’ somewhere. There’s usually some kind of way station along them routes we could lay low in for a few days. No one’d miss ’em for weeks.”

Hernando grunted, unhappy with her familiar language but willing to let it pass. Her plan was sound, if he could find those maps. “These don’t look right.”

“Nope. Those’re claims and deeds. The route maps are proably in the boardin’ -”

“Hernando!” Danica charged into the house, eyes wild. “Hernando, they got Larry!”

He set aside the paper and sighed. “Do you mean Larry is missing? Has a group shown up and captured him?”

“He’s dead.” She skidded to a stop and pointed frantically towards the barn. “They cut his head off and all his blood is gone!”

Hernando pursed his lips, stymied. “His blood is gone? How is that possible?”

“I don’t know,” Danica said, “but I couldn’t smell any in his head or his body. He’s pale, Hernando. So pale…”

He didn’t understand how it was possible to exert control over a gold drinker’s blood. The tome he’d discovered that laid out the gold drinker ritual was long on process but very short on details of how that magic worked. It basically laid out the need to feed and how acquiring blood iron would allow them to concentrate their power. It was possible to restore a badly injured, or even decapitated gold drinker, with enough time and blood iron.

However if Larry had lost his blood somehow Hernando was certain he couldn’t restore him with the resources he had on hand. He glanced at Danica. “Did you collect his excess blood before he died?”

“No,” she whispered.

“It can’t be helped.” He loosened his sword in its scabbard. “Did you see any signs of who killed him?”

“No…” Danica seemed to be coming back to herself now. “But I did notice something smelled charred. The barn was smokey.”

Hernando grunted. “I’m surprised we didn’t hear anything. Most sulfurite weapons are on the loud side. Perhaps a spear? Some of those are on the quiet side.”

“Does it matter?” Janice asked.

“I’m wondering how many men are out there. If they were a large group I don’t think they’d be so sneaky about this, they’d already be beating down the door.” He gave Janice a look. “Get dressed, Janice. We’re going hunting.”

Once she was given sufficient motivation Janice could move very quickly. She got dressed and retrieved her machete. It was more tool than weapon, without even a mounting spot for a sulfurite crystal, but it was deadly enough at close range. Hernando had tried to train her in the use of a sulfurite blade but so far she was more a danger to herself and her allies than their enemies. So for now the machete would have to do.

They found Larry right where Danica left him. Hernando glanced at her. “Has anything changed?”

“No, he was like this when I found him. I – I just got scared and ran to find you so I didn’t look at him that closely but he looked like this as near as I remember.” She knelt down and studied the floor. “I think he was in a puddle before but it may have drained away or dried out?”

Hernando squinted his eyes and looked around the barn. “Where are the horses?”

“I don’t know. They weren’t here when I found him.”

Janice walked to the back and looked through the rear door. “They’re not in the fields, either. Do you think it was horse thieves?”

“Simple horse thieves wouldn’t know how to do this. I’m not even sure how this was accomplished.” Hernando knelt down and studied the stump of Larry’s neck. The cut was not particularly clean. In fact it looked more like the last bit had been torn off more than cut through, suggesting the blade that made the cut was on the dull side. Larry didn’t have enough blood iron to be unusually durable, so decapitating him wouldn’t have been any harder than cutting the head of a normal man. But that was still a difficult task.

Hernando picked up Larry’s head and set it aside to reveal a second wound in the stomach, not a cut but a deep stabbing wound. “That would be the spear,” he murmured. “They moved the body for some reason.”

“Maybe as part of how they removed his blood?” Danica said. “And they used the water to wash away the evidence.”

“I don’t understand why they would be so secretive,” Hernando said. “It’s a lot of time wasted for negligible return. Still the kill itself was quite masterful.”

He studied the two women with him skeptically. For all his erratic nature he was a dependable fighter when the need arose, where as the womenfolk were very early in their training. He definitely didn’t have the resources to revive Larry so he was going to have to be left behind. “I don’t think this is a fight we want to have. Janice?”

She turned away from the doorway. “Yes?”

“Go collect the boy, eat your damn meal and take him to his sister. Danica, look for the horses. If you can’t find them in a quarter hour, meet me at the slaughterhouse and we’ll perform the change on our new members.”

“Where will you be?” Janice asked.

“I’m going to find those maps.” Hernando grimaced. “It’s time to move on.”

“We’re runnin’?”

“Yes. I’m not tangling with the unknown when we’re this far in the red. One day there will be a reckoning for this, but it’s not today.”

Next Chapter