Maldoror's Blog

AO3 sent me an invite, I have a new account there, Maldoror_Chant, and no idea what I'm doing! Once I figure out the UI, I should be up and running, and catching up with Outlands there. I will also be posting every other long fic I have lying around, and some of the better short ones, from GW, Naturo and One Piece. See you there! Buh-bye, LJ!

Edit: Figured out the interface. Here we gooooo!

I spent a long boring 8 hour drive (long story) examining both Dreamwidth and AO3. They both look great. DW seems to make the journaling aspect of posting real easy, and is familiar after years of LJ; AO3 seems to rock the story structure and fic archive aspects. So for now, I've decided to sign up for both :) I'll update both equally (it's what copy-paste was made for) and if it gets too onerous over time, by then I'll probably know which one I prefer.

My brand new DW handle is Maldoror_Chant. I put myself in for an AO3 invite, which I should get in a week, which will give me time to gather up my courage to post the monster fics I should probably back up onto there...Outlands of course, but I'd also love to have all my larger fics in a handy place. So if the UI isn't a nightmare, I'm hoping to post DR/Kindred, Freeport naturally, Alienation, and who knows, maybe even The Arrangement. Though the latter will require a judgment call. Will I post it "as is", warts and all? Or should I take a sander to the roughest edges? My life needed more hard decisions (yay).

Also, I make not the smallest atom of a promise here, but I recently re-read Source of All Things, and damn it was more fun (and crazier) than I remembered. Then I dug up my notes file on it. First, I was glad to discover I still had a notes file, 3 computers and one disk melt-down later (though I did lose a couple of draft chapters, damn it). What really surprised me is that I still had a fairly good memory of many of the plot elements. How can I forget my mother's birthday every sodding year, but can remember how Heero ends up in a fic I wrote over 13 years ago? It is truly a mystery. Or the sign that I am a terrible daughter.

Well, I'll get Outlands out the door first, but then after that, if the writing bug has well and truly bitten me once more...who knows? I just hope my free time doesn't evaporate again.

Meh, who needs sleep...

*catches up on LJ news*
*headesk*

Next step: Mastering LJ cuts again

Next step:
1- backing up as much as my LJ stuff as I can
2- write as steamy a pile of gay PWP as I can still come up with in honor of our new Russian overlords
3- figure out where to migrate Outlands to...

...assuming anyone is still following this LJ.

Many long years has this journal been gathering dust, but I still get the occasional - and very much appreciated - note regarding my fics, so somebody out there may be interested in seeing me pop up again after a ridiculous amount of silence.

Doing great, so's the kid - no longer a spawnlet, now a very tall sprout full of growing independence. Which suddenly leaves me time for myself again, after a number of years of having no time at all. I recently picked up Outlands again, and gave it a poke. If nothing else, I have several chapters written or half written that I could finish up and post in a week or two. I hesitated though. I'm ludicrously rusty at writing, I still don't have all that much time, can I put in the amount of thought and research needed, can I make a commitment to quality and to-

Oh wait. This is the story of a gay salaryman who finds himself shot off into alternate ancient Assyria to fight trash-bots and Egyptians priests. There AIN'T that much thought, research or quality. It was started in a rush of fun, it can finish (hopefully!) that way too.

So expect an update soon, at least that fully written chapter of the next arc. Drop me a line if you're still following. Though I'll post anyway :D It's handy for me to have all my stuff online when I want to check some weird detail my mind suddenly hangs up on in the middle of the night.

Next step: Mastering LJ cuts again.

Hi all! Holy cow, is it seriously that long since I updated? What the hell happened to the year 2011???



For those who sent comments, reviews, inquiries etc...thank you! Always great to know people enjoyed my fics years later, and yes I am still alive and doing well. Still at the same job, though not quite so busy. Still watching over the Spawn of Mal as she tackles life like it's a rugby match. Still somehow keeping a house going - oh, we do have a new addition. Because my husband and I are clinically insane to the point where someone should probably warn child services about us, we decided about a year and a half ago that our lives were not busy enough until we'd acquired a dog. We went to the city pound and brought back a pair of large ears, four long legs and a big brown nose. I'm told there's a german shepherd mongrel somewhere behind all that. This animal took three days to turn me from an inveterate cat person to a reluctant but resigned dog lover. She also tackles life like it's a rugby match. So much energy bursting out of the house at the seams...The secret to eternal youth -or at least the secret to not feeling considerably older than you are - is to not have dogs and kids, people. Note that.

The running joke that I call 'my spare time' has been filled with reading, movies and playing RPGs (Bioware owns my soul, yes, even after the ME3 ending debacle). I can rec some of the stuff that's entertained me in the past year, if anyone's interested and still reading this journal.

Probably most people reading this are more interested in my creative drive. How's that doing these days? Pretty good! I am constantly making up stories in my head every day, and will probably do so until I'm 101 and completely gaga. But putting down in writing the stories that shimmer around in my brain is HARD. It's a lot of work, of course, and it's also...a little painful. A story is like a brilliant, unique butterfly fluttering around in my head. If it's a good one, I float along with it, wearing a goofy smile on my mug that my nearest and dearest have gotten used to. But to write that story down...I have to observe that butterfly more closely, then I have to capture it, kill it, dissect it, then rebuild a mechanical version piece by small piece over a matter of months, sometimes years. I'm awfully proud of the results (modesty is for the birds). I look back at these everlasting mechanical marvels I've sent flying around the internet, and sometimes I'm amazed - 'Holy shit, I wrote that? It's really good!' Yes, I'm ever so glad I wrote those down, even as I recall sweating blood over every sentence ^^; But...it's not the same butterfly. There's been times, even when I was still writing, when I put my hands around one of those drifting creatures, then changed my mind and released it. Sure, it's ephemereal like that; I won't remember that story a few months from now. But it's not something somebody else would want to read, and also I don't want to go through the process with that one. Let it flutter away. These days, I can't seem to garner up the impetus to nail down these whisps, I'd just rather enjoy them while they last then let them fade.

The storytelling gene is still there, mind you. The urge to share those dazzling bobbing blobs of color and fluff, to make people smile, and cry, and visit another world for awhile...Yeah, still got that, but did I mention it's bloody hard work?

I do have a chapter and a half of the next Outlands arc written, and I would really like to finish up what I have of that story written up in notes. I don't know if I can find the mental space to write in these days, but I'd really like to try over the summer, which is usually slow time for me anyway. I like that series. After that...well, that's the future.

Oh, a few days ago - this is a true story with no exageration - my 5-year-old spawnlet came up to me and in her inimitable punctuation-free way told me a long and complicated tale about the giant rabbit - who was mean to start with but was really nice actually - and he fought off the pack of mean wolves with the aid of a pew-pew gun and a tree, used in ways that were not quite clear to her audience right then and there, but I'm sure it was fabulous. So yeah, the future. Even if I can't come up with anything anymore, just give it another ten years and it'll be fine.

More recs, two manga and a novel. I've just received some more by post...and I've also signed up for LoRTO and NetFlix. There goes the rest of my spare time.

Link to the rec list

These two were recced to me by several of you, and can I just say THANKS! They were both great :) Ah, the only downside is that I spent all my free time reading rather than writing *creeps away to hide* Um, hopefully all these good stories will spur on my inspiration...

Link to the rec list

Wherein Mal lists and rates some of the stuff she's been reading, for those who may be interested. I'll just add to this list, from the top, when I finish something new and then put up a new post linking back to it.




Akumetsu by Tabata Yoshiaki/Yugo Yuuki
This manga is violent, and this is from someone who reads Beserk. Okay, it's not as gory as Beserk and not as many people get raped/mutilated/beheaded/disembowled per episode by any means, in fact the number of casualties is quite tame by that standard. But it's a different kind of violence, a believable close-up involving violence, and it comes packaged in a moral dilemna of the kind I've not faced since reading V for Vendetta 15 odd years ago. A lot of people compare this manga to Death Note, and it does have similarities (it was written a year before), with the protagonist deciding to kill 'Evil People' as a means of saving his society. But it's waaaaay heavier on the socio-politics, and its central tenet which is a quasi justification for targetted terrorism is definitely more in harmony with V for Vendetta than Death Note. In addition, instead of a fantasy McGuffin shaped like a Shinigami, there's a much more brain-tingling SF McGuffin with tons of interesting implications, which I wish the authors had developped more. If you can stand the line-heavy art and the axe-in-the-brains violence, as well as lengthy discourses on the state of the Japanese economy (which unfortunately rings several bells in all our societies...) then you're in for a treat.
Conclusion: Either way, it's fascinating, scary, hilariously morbidly funny, morally reprehensible story and it's a pity that North American post-9/11 publishing houses won't touch this one with a ten foot pole because I would buy all 18 volumes in a heart beat.


Angel Desentsu by Yagi Norihiro, manga
Let's be blunt: the art in this 1992 manga is hard on the eyes, and it doesn't improve all that much by its conclusion. But since the protagonist is a guy who puts the UGH in ugly - in a seriously frightful way - I suppose that's not as big a negative as if it were about a Handsome Prince or some other rubbish. The story concerns a high schooler who, due to looking like some coke-addled eyebrowless file-toothed homocidal maniac, is treated as such by everyone in his new school, even though inside he's a pacifist and as gentle as a lamb. Because of his looks and a series of stupidly outrageous concidences, everybody is quickly convinced that this is a deliquent on a scale no-one has seen before. The first half of the series is completely a comedy because of those stupid coincidences. You are not meant to take any of this seriously, you just wait with baited breath to find out how poor Kitano is going to get out of THIS fight against 20 deliquents without 1- actually hitting anyone and 2- losing his accidental reputation as the greatest badass around. It's light enough to read for the chuckles at first.
Slowly, though, the coincidences lessen as Kitano picks up friends who are willing to do the hitting for him (without poor, gentle Kitano actually being aware of this). Halfway through, I realized that I was not only hooked on this manga, staying up Way Too Late to finish it, but that I was also touched and somewhat troubled at how easily I could believe all these people - including adults who you would hope would know better - could be taken in by appearances. There's also a subtext about violence and our acceptance of such that is interesting...Well, I don't want to make it sound too deep, it still reads mainly for laughs as misunderstandings pile up around our poor, angelic devil-faced protagonist. But if the end doesn't make you crack a wee, feel-good smile on behalf of the poor bugger, then you're made of sterner stuff than I am.
Conclusion: Despite the eye-watering art, damned if this manga didn't worm its way into my heart.


The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, Fantasy novel
I'm torn down the middle by this one. On the one hand, the society in this book, the history/religion, the branches of magic (and the powers and limitations of same, which explain why mages don't rule the world) are great. The story is fantastic, and I really want to know more about the Chandrian and their thousand year old plot. The downside, however, is the Gary Stu qualities of the main characters. Let me qualify that. I don't mind that he's outrageously brilliant, because that's presented as part of the story in the outset (if he wasn't that bright, he wouldn't have had all the opportunities and adventures he's had). If the author had toned it down a bit, it'd have been even better, but to make up for it, the character does do some pretty boneheaded things from time to time that are both funny and human. As far as that goes, the author balanced things out well, so his uber-brilliant character is palatable. But then he breaks that delicate balance with too many coincidental incidents happening to his character that jolt my suspension of disbelief. People he just happens to run into, enemies he just happens to make virtually the first time he runs into them, events he just happens to hear about...there's just too much happening to this one guy! If the author had linked all these occurences to the character's outstanding abilities or personality, so that the incidents piling up where a natural result of the character's existence, then I would have been okay with it. But too many times, these happen only because the character happened to be at a certain place and a certain time, and opened his mouth when it seems his 'education' up to date should have made him more cautious...I think a lot of readers would not mind these things, especially since the writing and pace and the characters are all brilliant (well, except for the requisite Mysterious and Beautiful Woman *sigh*) But since I'm particularly sensitive to coincidences like that, I found it a struggle to finish the book. I did finish it, though, and that's saying something...
Conclusion: So-so from Mal's POV, but I would still recommend this book as its positive points far outweigh its negatives. The story is really good and its not about some bloody quest to go and retrieve some bloody McGuffin from some bloody temple and destroy it in a bloody volcano. What else can you ask for...


The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold, Fantasy novel
If I listed all the reasons I liked this book, I'd spoil it massively. Let's just say, it avoided all the pitfalls that my cinysism usually associates with fantasy novels, and it has a nearly-middle-aged and overly tired hero who was right up my alley. Bujold also respects the strictures imposed on women by her world, which means her heroines are not Sues, but they're all the more admirable for being effective within the constraints of their society. Also, thumbs up for an author who finally recognized that someone who gets knocked on the head does not get up two hours later as if nothing happened. Damn, you see what I mean by spoilers? The only downside to the book is that the end ties up a little too tidily, but I'm a hypocrite in saying this: if it'd finished in any other way, I'd have been massively put out, as I'd become genuinely attached to the characters.
Conclusion: Mal really liked. Thanks for all who recced it!


Gokusen, by Kozueko Morimoto, manga
I'd been recced this before, but I'd been turned off by the art, and the fact that it's a knock-off of GTO. I don't really like GTO all that much; I read it, because it's kinda fun in a very dumb way, but I don't rate it that high.
On the second or third rec, I did try Gokusen, though. And discovered, to my joy, that it seems to capture all the things I did like about GTO, while getting rid of the gross-out humour, panty shots, ludicrous extremes and other annoying baggage. Sure, the art isn't as pretty, though I did get rather attached to its simple lines in the end. The story is also pretty simple, but it's got some lovely moments, as well as laugh-out-loud funny ones. It's also more realistic than GTO, with less of the extremes. In GTO, the kids are all diabolically clever classroom terrorists. In Gokusen, they're simply the dregs of society, dumb as posts for the most part, and the only victory our heroine is ever going to obtain is to get them to stop reading porn mags in class and actually graduate to go flip burgers at McDonalds. In GTO, every teacher without large tits is part of The Establishment and against our brave hero. In Gokusen, the other teachers are somewhat hapless at times, but reveal their own strengths, and have their own trust and belief in their students. Even the putative 'Bad guys' can show their good side in the end, or are given a chance to grow. And - since this is above all a comedy - I find that the humor is a little finer in Gokusen, though I grant you, GTO also makes me laugh a lot when I read it. If GTO is a loud shonen manga, Gokusen is its josei counterpart, and this actually makes it the better book IMO (a highly personal opinion I doubt many people will share, particularly fans of GTO...)
If nothing else, Gokusen rocks because it's got a strong female lead who's definitely not your cookie-cutter canon beauty, but who can kick ass and take names in the best of styles. The male lead is, refreshingly, smarter than she is, apt at thinking them both out of trouble, yet nowhere near as strong. He only saves her life twice over the entire series, versus the twenty-odd times she saves his chewed-up butt :P Gotta love that! I also liked the fact that the Yakusa side of our heroine is not just an excuse for giving her super-strength and an attitude. It's not only her roots, its her day to day living, and half the manga is spent in the Kumi. Of course, her Family are the more noble version of Yakuza - no drug dealers or pimps here - but in the background, you still see that they're pretty brutal and none too bright (criminals usually aren't). Hence their need for a bright lawyer. Nowadays lawyers are a part of the landscape for any criminal organisation, yet this is all too often ignored. Though pretty simple, Gokusen hides these little gems of humor and realism and sentiment which I really enjoyed.
Yes, there is romance. But it didn't particularly bother me. The Final Confession and the Reaction To Same were pretty much what I expected from those characters by now, and made me laugh. What else can you ask for?
Conclusion: Judging from the long-ass ramble, Mal sure did like this. Thanks for the recs!!! I am hoping this will eventually be picked up by a North American distributor, as I would love to have this in my library.




'Noblesse', Son Jae Ho/Lee Gwang Su, Manhwa webcomic
If I told you this is a manhwa about a gorgeous vampire who wakes up after 800 years of sleep and enrolls in an elite school, you won't read it. Hell, I won't read it. Yet I did, I cannot remember why. I think because of a little warning at the end of this umpromising synopsis regarding the odd format and how readers had to be careful to read the whole page - a very valid warning as it turns out.
So out of curiosity, I read it. And it is good. It is gorgeous. It is also comedy gold.
Despite the hero being an utterly impossibly beautiful ageless vampire who does not, for some reason, drink blood or hurt people (noooo, he does not sparkle), this story is definitely not a teenage shoujo brooding vampire crapola-fest à la Twilight. Mostly, it's shonen, with bloody fights, manly friendships in the face of death itself, the requisite '9000 douriki!I can't believe he's so strong, who is this guy?!', and so far no romance for our vampire at all, unless you pick up on the faintly yaoi-flavored fanservice. The fights demand to be taken seriously, but none of the rest does at all (just make sure you keep reading until you catch onto that fact; I almost gave up when Frankenstein appeared, before I realized I was supposed to take the whole story with a ton and a half of salt). Most of the comedy comes from the fact that the authors don't hesitate to poke fun at the story and their own hero, without stooping to fart jokes or anything crude. Rather, they're logical about it. Their ultra-tough vamp has slept for 800 years. So he's quite good at the fighting and character judgements and all this noblesse-oblige stuff, but finds himself defeated by...an electronic lock on a door. Or a cell phone. Or a banana. And this is played COMPLETELY STRAIGHT, even though it's bent like an angle ruler, and the drawings and comedic timing and the warping of the shonen/shoujo clichés had me personally in stitches. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but if the odd occasional comedy skit doesn't hold you, the eye-exploding beauty of the art might. Pretty much everybody is droolworthy, even the requisite Geeky Friend. And the manwha/webcomic format itself is worth a look. It's in banner format; each chapter is only six pages, but the pages are as long as your arm and only as wide as one frame. It makes for some intriguing action scene layouts, let me tell you.
Conclusion: Read the first twenty chapters on manga fox (it won't take you that long, they're pretty short chapters). If your brain is as warped as mine, you'll probably read the rest, be it for the strange humor, the action or the eye candy, or a happy combination of all three (yum!). I'm currently trying to find out where I can 'buy' this webcomic online from, in order to support the author, as this is in no way, shape or form publishable in this format and thus will never wind up in my local manga bookstore...


'Psyren', Iwashiro Toshiaki, Manga
Manga is just as hard as regular books to recommend, because even something that's got all the required bits in the right order might just be missing that je-ne-sais-quoi that's necessary to push my buttons. And that je-ne-sais-quoi is different for everybody. That's why I always say to people who start reading One Piece "well, I loved it, so I hope you like it. You might not. But give it a try."
Psyren is yet another of the adventure/action shonen clan along the lines of Bleach, though it borrows some effects from Gantz and Battle Royale. It didn't look promising at the start, but I know from experience that these kind of manga take five to ten chapters to actually reveal their personality and get going into their eventual direction, so I witheld judgement until then. At the point where I give up a lot of shonen series, Psyren had already subtly shifted my expectations, and by chapter 30, I was hooked. You can read summaries of the story online, so I'll just tell you the bits that kept me actually interested. Contains mild spoilers.
. It's a coherent, evolving story, not a series of video-game like layers of pure fighting. I believe this story is actually going to have an end, and as it currently stands at chapter 130, I expect it will wrap up before it hits 200. This relative brevity is due to the fact that each fight doesn't take up a volume and each overall battle doesn't take up entire arc onto itself (so, not so much like Naruto and Bleach, then...)
. Psyren involves frequent time travel back and forth from present to future. This gives the battles two arenas: the present, driven by info from the future; and the future, shaped by actions taken in the present. It does NOT go too heavy in that department, this is still a fight manga above all, but the way this device is utilized does keep the storyline fresh and sometimes fairly surprising. Cameo characters from the past become major players in the future, major players from the present disappear or reappear in different roles in the future due to some small shift in the continuity. The fact that the hero can see serious long term results from his decisions gives the struggle he's involved in a bit of heft.
. The hero and heroine are not quite as one-dimensional as I expected, or at least, they and their sidekicks cannot be entirely summarized by a single defining role, motto or wangst. Think Kekkaishi rather than another Bleach clone. The heroine actually does her share of the fighting once the first few chapters are over, and rarely, if ever, requires saving after that. She's also quite pleasingly flat-chested and completely uncaring about her appearance until beyond chapter #90 or so. She has her Angst thing going, but gets over it in two chapters rather than requiring an entire arc of moping around while buddy-boy fights the thirteen horsemen of the Apocalypse to save her whiny ass. In short, she's not Rukia. I kinda like her for that.
Conclusion: Fairly classic shonen action manga but with a little something that made it fresh and appealing to me. As said previously: I loved it, so I hope you like it. You might not. But give it a try.


Love in the Mask Manga
Yeahhh...So, the lead of the story is this girl dressed as a boy who's been trained to be a professional bodyguard since she was eight. She can beat up half a dozen punks without getting a scratch or showing an expression. Then she meets the guy who is going to be the male lead, who is just a rich, intelligent, juvenile deliquent (huh-uh) without any formal training whatsoever other than something like kendo. They fight, because of course they would. Naturally, professionalism and a life of training gives her the edge and she takes him apart like an overcooked chicken. Oh, no, wait. Sorry. Sorry, sorry, wishful thinking. They fight, because of course they would. And he beats her, for no reason that I can decipher. Then he shows her his sensitive side. And after that, every time she gets near him, she doesn't understand why but her heart starts to beat real hard and her combat instincts and her mission-above-all training starts to crumble.
Conclusion: Mal no like. Go figure.


David Brin's 'The Practice Effect', Science Fiction
Not every book has to blow my mind, change my universe or convert me to soy milk. Sometimes, a pleasant afternoon read is enough. I got this book out of the $2 bin at my bookstore, and I definitely got my money's worth. Though it stays very light, Brin does his usual number on SF clichés. The villain is not a mwhahahaha moustache-twirling lunatic, he's simply a ruthless, imaginative, ambitious man the likes of which history is quite replete. The hero is a top scientist in his field, which means he's extremely bright but physically weak and morally neutral (going so far as to knuckle under to the villain for awhile since he judges, quite reasonably, that the guy is no worse than a lot of warlords in earth's history, and indeed better than quite a few). The heroine...is a bit of a walking stereotype, but not painfully so. The book trots along at good speed, darting around overused tropes for the most part, while still delivering what you expect from this kind of light fare. My only gripe is that in several instances, it belabors the fact that it's avoiding clichés ('If I was an SF&F hero, I would do something heroic at this point', thinks the hero, 'but since I'm not I'm just going to run away') which got tiresome on the second or third repetition. But since this was written in 1984, the author might have been justified in thinking his readers needed a helping hand with a book that was not purely pulp.


Thank you all for the recs! I am currently working my way through a few, as they come up in my library and/or bookstore.

Have you ever eaten oysters? Ever had the experience where three bad ones in a row turned you off the species entirely and maybe even permanently?



Ten years ago, I stopped reading books. Those four simple words cannot convey how startling, desperate and wretched this statement is. To convey their weight and portent, I'd have to switch them for four other words like 'San Andreas Fault ruptures' or 'Apocalypse of Fish Now' but then you wouldn't understand what I'm on about. Probably. All joking aside, this was no light matter. Since before I could read, books and stories were my life, particularly the boundless, free realm of Science Fiction and Fantasy (SF&F). But then I had too many bad ones, or, to be exact, my tastes had sharpened and honed themselves until most books I read revealed themselves to be the monstrously over-simplistic - oft mysogenistic - wish-fulfilling, cliche-ridden pile of donkey turds they really were. I had the misfortune of reading three particularly loathsome or disappointing ones one after the other, and that was it. A lifelong love affair, over.

I can list on my fingers the SF&F books I read and enjoyed since then (hell, replace 'enjoyed' with 'was actually able to finish instead of hurling it across the room in disgust'). The Harry Potter series. 'Babel 17'. 'Slaugtherhouse 5'. 'To Say Nothing Of The Dog'. 'The Lies of Locke Lamora'. Diskworld novels. Hmm, there's another one or two in there that I cannot recall. That's it.
[Edit: I remembered the others I read. Temeraire series, one Miles Vorkosigan, and Card's Pastwatch]


[Note that I did read history books, philosophical treatise, a book about food, travelogues, the Aubreyad, comics/manga and other literary fictions and non-fictions in the meantime, but hell, even those got thin on the ground, particularly after I started writing fanfiction, and disappeared almost entirely once the Spawn devoured my time on toast with ketchup.]

It's heartbreaking, you know. I still go into my SF&F bookstore out of decades-long habit and nostalgia, I stray within those gleaming, colorful aisles. I remember the depth and beauty of my old addiction, how much pleasure it used to bring me...and I just know - because I've been there and tried - that 99% of the books on these shelves will make me want to cry. Worse, they'll destroy a piece of my childhood memory of enjoying them. Blah.

I tried reading books only if I had good recs for them. This worked for one book, failed me completely for another (click on this rant for Why Mal Didn't Like The Dresden Files, but only if you don't know or didn't particularly like the books, or if you don't react defensively when your favorite book is skewered...) Literature, like music and art, is so intensely personal, that even a positive rec is no guarantee that someone will like the book. You cannot base yourself on popularity of the book alone to decide which might be ahead of the pack, either, because if that were the case, I'd have to read the Twilight series, and that would give me an aneurysm and then I would die. You cannot even judge if you'll like something because it's stood the test of time and has become a classic: though I will be ready to grant you that uber-classics like Stranger In A Strange Land, The Book of the New Sun and others are sacred beasts for a reason, that does not mean that I liked them or was able to finish them (I wasn't).


SF&F books seem to fall into one or - joy! - several of the following pitfalls.
. Derivative. Quest, anyone? (A good antidote to anyone who's hungover after too many of these is a strong coffee with a dollop of the Evil Overlord list, such as this one, to quote one of many)
. The Neverending Story That Never Ends, Even When You Beg It To Sieur Jordan, I am LOOKING AT YOU. Thank you for pretty much singlehandedly inventing the genre that now inundates our SF&F aisles in their watered down and derivative multitude.
. It's just SF&F! Wherein you can make a trilogy or an entire endless series of books based on a couple of undeniably good SF&F concepts, and be lazy when it comes to characterization, plot, logic, realism (yes, realism, because if, for eg, magic in your world can do Everything, then you need to explain why there's still problems and/or limitations that it should be able to address, or else I am going to laugh at you snidely and walk away) or other bookish necessities that are pretty basic IMO. Eg, my rant on the Dresden files, as well as Mercedes Lackey and other pot boilers.
. Wish Fulfillment A bitter, bitter game I play with myself is to see how many books in a row I can pick up in my SF&F store before I find one that does NOT include a bingo concept in the summary. My best streak was hitting THREE BOOKS IN A ROW where the hero's future love interest or female lead was both beautiful and mysterious, exacly those words. I shit you not. That being said, I've discovered since then that summaries are written by morons in the publishing bizz who are trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Still, most of the books in this category hold the promise they made on their cover...
. Experimental: The polar opposite of all of the above. These books are written by highly intelligent authors (and boy, do they like you to know it) who see SF&F as a way of freeing themselves from conventions, including literary, and who write brilliant books with the legibility of Ulysses (Joyce, not Homer). I will grant you that these are undoubtedly very clever and profound. They are also illegible. When I want a dense book about philosophy or life, I'll read a treatise or poetry or non-fiction essays. When I read SF&F, I kind of want to read, you know, an actual story. That makes sense. And is engaging and makes me want to turn the pages rather than take an aspirin. I'm just crazy that way.
. Take me seriously or I'll disembowl the puppy!. This shit is everywhere, not just SF&F. But SF&F has the freedom to take this to new highs (lows). Authors need to remember that if the only way they can engage their readers, or shock them, or make them feel something, is to throw in a gang-rape-by-aliens, sexual abuse as a child, extreme traumas/phobias, whatever...then they are probably not very good authors. Worse, though, are those who use the freedom of SF&F as a 'just because I CAN!' card, wherein you get pages of kink-ridden sex, bizarre sexual mores, torture-porn, you name it. Y'all know I'm not scared off by NC17 level material, right? I can tolerate gore and a lot of other stuff too. But only if it actually brings something to the story. Trust me, most of the times, it's only there for fanservice, or because the author seems to think we won't take him seriously if he doesn't put it in there, or because that's the only way he can think of to motivate his protagonist or generate wangst. It's juvenile and pathetic. Even if you DO think it's necessary to advance your plot, dear author, please keep in mind that it's ten times easier to get it wrong than right, which is why I don't touch NCS type scenes in my own writings with a ten foot pole.

To make matters more complicated, there are books that you could fit into some of the above categories, but which I managed to enjoy, and other books which did not go into those categories which I still could not finish (though in that case I merely judge that the book and I lack compatibility, but hey, author, thanks for at least writing something original, and I'm sure you'll find fans for it out there, you deserve it).

Since Spawn came along, I'd formally and completely given up on SF&F books. Just not worth it. And then...

And then...

Then I had to go to the US with the Spawn for three days, housebound in a place full of very early sleepers without internet or watchable TV, and I forgot the book I was reading at the time (The Philosophical Baby, a great non-fiction read if you have young kids, though the irony of me forgetting it before a half-day plane trip with my own adorable nuissance is not lost on me)

I went into the airport newstand hoping to score a thriller, one that would not be so bad I would hand it to the Spawn to torture for collage bits (thrillers and crime novels are subject to their own pitfalls...) And in some fit of insanity, I picked up a fantasy novel instead, because the cover and title caught my eye, and the summary sounded halfway intriguing. Also it was a new york times bestseller, which was why it was in an airport newstand in the first place.

It was great. Not flawless, but then no book is in my - hur hur - books, because as you may have discerned by now, I am something of a critic. But it was readable, engaging, realistic, with interesting believable characters, good ideas, and a fantastic ending.

Hot. Damn.

The surge of hope this caused made me buy a book that I'd heard heartily recommended, even if it had all the hallmarks of a Mary-Sue/Gary-Stu ridden pile o' crap.

It was even better.

I read the sequel, and it was pretty kick-arse too.

I had now finished more SF&F books in one month than I'd read in the entire previous three years. I have a couple of others sitting on my desk, and hell, I'll even forgive them if they're crappy, because now at least I know there's something out there worth looking for. I might even be a bit more lenient, I think, since you're more ready to forgive faults in a loved one than in someone you've fallen out of love with. And SF&F may have just snuggled back into my heart again.

As long as I don't eat too many bad oysters.




Enough crap, Mal, get on with the recs.



The book I got at the airport ten minutes before that boarding call was Lev Grossman's The Magicians. The author takes no particular pains to hide what he wanted to do in this book, which was to nut JK Rowling. Well, I exagerate, there's no hate here. No, all he wanted to do was write something akin to Harry Potter, but for grownups, and the guideline 'Okay, but what would it REALLY be like?'. He mugged Narnia too, and that may be the flaw in the book: slaugthering two sacred cows like that left a lot of beef lying around, enough for three books rather than one. But other than a couple of slow chapters two-thirds of the way through, it does not hurt the story any.

Now, other than the epilogue and some much-needed editing of books 5 and 6, there's nothing wrong with HP. I like the books, particulary the first four. They're written about a schoolkid and reach across to pretty much all generations, that's fine. Grossman's characters go to magical University rather than school, and the magic, like the relationships, has depth, logic, twists and turns, and all of it, even the sex, actually does serve to either illustrate the protagonists or advance the plot. And there's moments that are...simply brilliant and absolutely chilling.

What may turn some people off, but was for me the selling point of the book, was the structure of the story. For most of it, nothing much happens other than the lives and adventures of students attending a magical university and then entering into the magical workforce and facing a life as magical salarymen/women. There's enough imagination there where pace is not lacking, but for people who are used to rapid buildups with obvious directions that will lead to Quests and Drama and Adventure and a Crisis Point with - most crucially - the protagonist being the boy who lived the center of the action...you might find yourself at a loss. Because there IS a plot, there is something creeping around in the background, there IS a villain here that can knock Voldy-bloody-mort into a cocked hat...but the book is Point Of View immersive (another bonus IMO) so you, like the main protagonist, will not realize what's truly going on until very near the end. And because of this, the end was quite amazing and left me with a curious smile on my face for the whole afternoon, just at the sheer tidyness, logic and rightness of it.

This book has flaws - the protagonist does spend a bit too much time navel-gazing, even for a highly intelligent and sensitive young man - but it reignited my love for fantasy. Can't say more than that.


The next book I took, the real risk, was The Witcher series (The Last Wish, followed by The Blood of Elves, by A. Sapkowski). I loved the PC game that was based on the books, and was intrigued by the background. Other fans of the game said that the books were really good, and they are apparently a bestseller in their original Polish. The thing is, a lot of people think Eddings and Jordan and Hamilton are fantastic writers, too, and...well, a brief of the game and the book is that the protagonist is a spell-wielding kick-ass mutant fighter universally despised by all, until he protects them from monsters. In all his white-haired, weird-eyed glory, Geralt sounded like Elric of Melniboné's lil' brother. With bells on. But it gets better! In the second book, the Witcher collects himself a protegee, a young girl who is a Child of Destiny and both a witcher in training and a magician and a powerful medium and a princess. I'm completely serious here. There is no way in hell this can be good, right?

Yeah, as a matter of fact, it is. Very good. For starters, Sapkowski writes in the style I've always aimed for but can only dream of achieving. Well built sentences that carry gritty realism, biting humour, occasional elegance and yet a pleasing simplicity. The lead is a bit of a Gary Stu, but only on the edges; he makes plenty of mistakes, gets his ass handed to him and is rescued by ordinary people on some occasions, and his dilemnas and resolutions are ones that resonate with me. Yeah, he's pretty cool and tough, but not anywhere enough to be annoying. The Mary Sue has, in the first book of the trilogy, completely failed to do anything particularly remarkable with all her extraordinary abilities, and regularly behaves like a confused and narrow-minded tween. Maybe she'll become insufferable in the next two books, but for now I can read her without any problems. As for the obligatory Beautiful Woman, well, she's quite a character piece too...The real politiks is as good as I would expect from someone hailing from Poland, the chew toy thrown down between the East and the West for decades, and even the villains have personalities, some virtues and foibles. It's not a revolution in the genre or in literature, but the story is good and the style is a complete and utter pleasure. I really enjoyed these books!


I'll make an aside at this point to wholeheartedly recommend the game, if you can still get it (it's old, now, the enhanced unedited director's cut - the one you want - was out in 2007 if I remember right). It's a breath of fresh air in the RPG market dominated by straightlaced PG13 games (before the advent of Dragon Age ♥) I like to think The Witcher was the necessary first step towards RPG games finally getting ready to talk to adults. Before The Witcher, you saved princesses who gave you a courteous kiss. The Witcher gives you the opportunity (but not the obligation) to shag anything in a skirt. Fairly graphically. Other RPG games are straight as they come. The Witcher doesn't have GLBT relations, but when the hero tries to find a male colleague of his, a NPC snarls "What's wrong, worried about your boyfriend?" Other RPGs don't go higher in the rating than 'Damn'. The Witcher swears both graphically and ornately, and is as consistently rude as the people and the epoque demands it. Plus, it's frequently funny, and the quests are not black and white, good and evil: it's more along the lines of, 'Am I going to help freedom fighters here, or aid and abait terrorists?' And no, there is no good or bad answer to that question, it depends entirely on your point of view and either decision leads to something fairly grim.





So, I've got a couple of other books lined up; a David Brin I've not read yet, but he's always reliable in creating something intriguing, realistic and different, even if I might not like it, and some other one I grabbed purely on instinct. I'll rec them if I like them and anyone is interested.

But I'm also looking for new recs, to direct my reading. If I haven't scared y'all off with my rather abrasive analysis of all the things I DON'T like previously. Mainly I'm looking for books with a heroine who is NOT beautiful and not necessarily kick-ass, at least not in a Mary Sue way, and who does NOT have all the men fall in love with her. She'll be the star of a story where only a thin percentage of the time and plot is spent on her romantic escapades (if any! Come on, surprise me). Someone who FEELS like a real person, with personality traits, foibles, irrational beliefs, sober reasons and other charactertics, rather than the author's self insert going on an adventure. The book equivalent of Balsa from Moribito, is what I'm looking for. Anyone...? Seriously, if you can give me back the faith that SF&F can create a female character who's not an SI, a Sue, a wish fulfilled or a walking cliché, well, I'll be very grateful. That's, like, my holy grail, but other than the older Barbara Hambly books, I've yet to find anything that really scores.

Thanks! Mal over and out.

[A little addendum, for those who were wondering. I do not write fiction because of my problems with SF&F and fiction in general. Sure, occasionally I write a story in an effort to deliberately break a cliché that annoyed me in a book or fanfic, and I do TRY to avoid some of the pitfalls that irritate me. I'm not always successful, and even if I am, that doesn't mean the result is necessarily good. I'm just an amateur, I don't claim I can do any better than anyone who get published (okay, anyone not called Meyer, maybe). I write to satisfy a different set of urges than the ones satisfied by reading.]

I managed to squeeze this out, go me. Being on holiday undoubtedly helped. Thanks for all the encouraging reviews and typo-spotting!


Link to all chapters





Haaskoning jabbed a finger at thin air. "There, that's the crucial bit right there, do you see it?"

Ryou frowned around a growing stress headache.

"Don't try so hard. You're tensing up again."

I’m sorry if I find performing brain surgery on my boyfriend a little nerve-wracking, Ryou internally snarled. Outwardly he showed nothing, and forced himself to relax. He craned his neck against the knot forming there, and as an afterthought cracked open an eyelid. Darius sat in his low chair, one leg crossed over his knee, looking relaxed. Though what Ryou and Haaskoning were doing was potentially dangerous, it was painless to the subject. In fact bar a bout of dizziness and one instance of 'whoa, weird stuff happening to my vision’, Darius was completely unaware of what the two magian were doing to his mind at a level beyond his perception, and was now getting heartily bored. The procedure had been going on for over an hour. It was exhausting, but Ryou was gaining a treasure trove of knowledge about the gift of Zaratusra and its applications as a tool of translation and as a weapon.

"Okay, there. You need to do this," Haaskoning said. In the mind’s eye, the magian’s focus shifted from one aspect of the problem to another, illustrating what he meant without interfering with the spell himself. At the same time he was gesturing again, poking at an empty spot two inches above Darius's head as if there was something there. Ryou found the mannerism distracting. He himself was sitting on the chair opposite his lover, with his hands drawn into his lap. This gesturing was useless, and Ryou resented its implication that what they were doing was somehow connected to anything physical. That was a ridiculous and misleading notion. What they were manipulating did not have an existence in terms a human mind could fully comprehend. Gesturing about it was like using one’s hands to describe the binding of oxygen and hydrogen atoms in water. Ryou's chemistry teacher back in school used to do that too and it had driven young Ryou up the wall.

Ryou felt about with his magian senses. In his imagination, Darius's mind was a three dimensional puzzle, and this fake Gift was locked onto certain parts of it. Ryou tried to ignore the image the same way he ignored Haaskoning's finger-twiddling as being irrelevant and not up to the task of adequately representing something outside the physical plane entirely.

What he had to do was feel. Feel which parts were Darius’s senses, his door to the world, and which parts had been artificially forced over them, distorting their signals to the point that Darius could not even read or write words anymore, as well as understand his native language or speak it. Ryou had to map out the limits of these additions, their connections to Darius’s mind, and find the key that could unlock them. And then he had to take them and gently...ever so gently...

Haaskoning’s voice had sunk to a whisper. "There. And there. You've got it. And now it's gone."

Darius looked around, chin lifting from where he'd rested it on his fist. "You must have done something, Ryou, because I just understood the old man."

"And the old man can now understand you," said Haaskoning dryly. "Welcome back to the land of communication, Lord Ghan."

Darius gave him a curt nod and glanced at Ryou. "You okay?"

"I'm fine." Ryou picked up a wine glass from the low side table with a hand that was shaking a bit. It was early afternoon in the cool of Leyam’s private quarters, but he was sweating.

"Stay here and rest," Darius said. "I'll go talk to Leyam. Now that I can." He looked pleased as he got to his feet.

Haaskoning, who’d been tiredly rubbing his eyes, stirred and glanced up. "Ah, Lord Ghan, I did not have time to discuss this with King Leyam, but there are some things I would rather we kept amongst-...ourselves," he finished with a frown, staring at the door Darius had shut firmly behind him.

"In case you haven't figured it out, he's angry with you," said Ryou, leaning back against the low chair rest and closing his eyes.

"...I am sure it was a stressful experience, and I do regret that it took me three days for Andrap’s message to reach me. I was outside Asha Mainyu at the time, attending my duties."

"He's angry because you knew about the Ancients," said Ryou composedly, "and you failed to give us even the slightest word of warning. I'm angry about that too," he added as an afterthought. And yeah, he was also angry about each and every horrid day it had taken Haaskoning to get here, with Darius hiding in Leyam’s apartment, an outcast and a stranger in his own home, unable to even ask for food and drink without Ryou to babysit him.

"Oh? And what should I have told you?"

Ryou cracked open one eye and examined Haaskoning, who looked back without the smallest sign of remorse or embarrassment.

"That some crazy Egyptian magians could drag us out of the Outlands and to god knows where at the drop of a hat. That would have been a good place to start."

"And if I'd said that, would you have been able to defend yourself?" Haaskoning asked reasonably.

"Well...I could have been better prepared."

"How?"

"...Just knowing about them would have at least put me at a bit less of a disadvantage when I was talking to the creep," said Ryou, since there was little a control freak disliked more than being completely blindsided. "And that's just for starters. If you didn't wind everything up in a cloak of mystery, if you'd prepared me and given me more control over my powers, I would have been able to help Andrap fight off the initial attack. I would have felt what was happening when our kidnapper changed the area around the circle, and if they still managed to get a hold of us, then I could have at least shielded Darius from that mental affliction we finally scrapped just now."

"True, I could have given you much more in the way of knowledge. But then again, what power I would have been handing them if you'd joined them."

Ryou's lips tightened at the memory of that ancient spider frozen at the center of his surreal web. "I would never join those creatures."

"They could have threatened someone close to you."

"They did," Ryou bit out, too tired to care about the import of the admission.

"Then you are made of stronger metal than most," Haaskoning answered gently without evincing any surprise. "As for giving you a heads-up, I did warn you not to use magic; they would have found you easily that way, as would other things. Your jumping around the dimensions and letting your powers run rife in our Circles is what put their servants on your trail in the first place and helped them locate you."

"Fine, but you could have warned me I was in danger even if I was not going to use my powers."

"I wasn't sure you’d believe me. You could have easily interpreted further warnings as a means of pressuring you into joining my order by waving all kinds of threats over your head," was the dry retort, the accuracy of which left Ryou without much to respond with.

Haaskoning settled back into his chair with his arms crossed, looking tired. "The reason I am not too concerned about what you’ve told King Leyam, or what Lord Ghan will tell him now, is because I know the king to be a very intelligent man. I am certain he will tell you to not spread any information about all this, if he hasn't already. The people in the Outlands are as a whole very superstitious, and feel helpless in the face of supernatural forces. The average man in the street is not personally affected by the Ancients, no more than any other coterie of powerful schemers, and he would not be able to defend against them if he did. Yet how many dire myths and rumours would spread if they knew about these people? What consequences could this potentially have? Come, you know history, and I’m afraid that one of the sad constants of any human society is their reaction to a fear that cannot find an appropriate target. It will find a scapegoat instead; hedge wizards, wise women, strangers and even minorities will suddenly look very Egyptian to the man in the street. Travel and trade would also suffer if people knew what lurks within the Veil beyond the circles. No, it may seem unfair to you, but ignorance has its advantages. We have a policy to keep these matters internal to our order as a result. If you'd been willing to join us, you would have learned about them, but you did not seem all that interested, and thus I was constrained by our code. In those circumstances, I did the best I could. I gave you what information I was allowed to on defensive magic, I asked some friends here in Sura to keep an eye on you, in case you were contacted by these people under false pretences, and I also placed Andrap at Mooncrest to watch over you while you crossed the border to another plane."

"He's considerably more than a simple Passer, isn't he.”

"Correct. He is someone who has a lot of experience with these people, these Ancients. I would have placed him at Mooncrest even if you had not been involved, simply to keep an eye on Lord Ghan, who had already been targeted once by these people. Unfortunately, both Andrap and I underestimated how much the Ancient order wanted you. I did not think they would be so unsubtle, or take the risk they did. And it was risky, opening a Path of that nature to that land beyond the Veil. It was very risky for you and it was also risky for the magian who performed the manoeuvre. I did not expect them to do that."

"Yes, I'm sure it was something of a surprise," said Ryou, watching him closely, eyes narrowed, "and yet somehow I cannot shake off the feeling that I was being used as bait."

Haaskoning glanced at his hands briefly, then he looked Ryou right in the eye and said, "Yes, as a matter of fact, you were."

"Fancy that," Ryou muttered.

Haaskoning tilted his head to one side and his gaze went blindly to the window of the king’s quarters as if he were seeing something considerably more sinister than the gardens and the strutting peacocks outside. "These Ancients are our enemies and have been for millennia. What they call Ma'at is a corruption of an ancient Egyptian concept referring to the established order; what most humans think of as reality, as well as the structure of human society and the natural world. Needless to say, the Ancients believe they're at the very top of Ma'at, this natural order, and just one step away from being above it altogether. The magic they use is...powerful, complex and fascinating." The old magian's tone had dropped to almost a whisper with a hint of strong feeling beneath it. "...Truthfully, every single member of my order has at one time or other wished we could have even half the freedom to research, explore and spin wonders as they do. Our code feels constraining to all of us at times. But after looking more closely into their schemes, you quickly realize that some of the explorations and experiments they do would horrify even Assyria's more notorious kings, the ones who'd have the skin of their enemies scraped off with pottery shards.

“Maybe you can say it is the price they pay for their power: the way they cut themselves away from humanity like everybody else is a lesser creature. Their whole magic, and that Sign of Amun on their minds, as they call it...they are very warped people. And also very narrow-minded. Blind, you could say. Creatures that are merely natural beings, if from another plane than ours, are considered gods by these fools. They just...Everything they do and see, this huge power they have, is twisted and forced into a mould that dates back over three thousand years, and they are unable to even see this to be the case. Because their indoctrination is heavily biased with religious mystery - it's virtually brainwashing - their newer members just become more clones of the Ancient ones that came before them. They can bring very little that is new to the order even if their highest hierarchy are in theory free to experiment and discover as much as they want. They can find new and pretty gruesome ways of using their power, but they can never find a new way to think, to evolve..."

Ryou took a sip of wine, pondering Haaskoning's words and also the Son of Zaratusra's unexpected flow of information...hopefully this wasn't hiding anything sinister this time, it was just a return for Ryou's complete description of his brush with the Ancients, a story Ryou would have given him anyway in case any small detail might have helped uncurse Darius. Leyam considered Haaskoning’s presence here as a loss of face, as having to give up whatever leverage had been left over the Per Gathas in order to bargain for his brother’s health. Ryou was ready to see it as starting anew on an equal footing, where they could share information against the common enemy they’d now discovered.

"How come nobody has ever heard about them?" he asked, taking advantage of Haaskoning's unexpected information bonanza. "Everybody I've talked to knows for a fact that the Outland Egyptians were wiped out."

"Invaded, enslaved, and then their country resettled and Romanized ages ago," Haaskoning corrected. "And I don't think the Ancients gave a damn, or they would have helped their countrymen against the invaders. That is because they had no loyalty to those countrymen, quite the contrary. Their history is complex. When Zoroaster led an enclave of Egyptians to the Outlands, the only ones who were desperate enough to come with Him were the servants of Aten. Amenhotep, known as Akhenaten, the king who'd empowered their religion, had died two decades previously. The followers of his god were being subjugated once more by the priests of the older Egyptian religions. In the refuge of the Outlands, their culture and beliefs flourished. But they had enemies in their midst, priests of the Old Gods who had been entrusted with destroying them from within. These men – no more than a dozen to start with – followed them to the Outlands to pursue what they saw as a sacred task. One of them discovered himself to be a magian, unfortunately. This was a time when the Per Gathas did not even exist, it was Zoroaster and a few disciples alone. Our two orders grew together, if you will. But the ancient priests stayed hidden within the worship of Aten, converting to their cause any priest of Aten who did not have as much faith as he should, as well as any who showed promise of powers over the Veil.

"It was when the religion of Aten was brought to Rome that the Ancients truly flourished. To this day, their principle players remain hidden within the shadow of the cult of Aten, even though they retain their initial contempt for the Atenites, as well as for the Romans and just about everybody else. The cult of Aten is one of the three central powers of Roma Praetorium, along with the Emperor and the citizens of Rome, as represented by their senate. This gave the Ancients access to a huge empire, and presented them with ways of finding new magians not yet discovered by the Per Gathas. They're very good at seducing people into their ranks with offers of power and freedom that most Outlanders can scarcely imagine. They have no real leaders to their order, they are organized into a loose coalition of members ranked according to their abilities, which grants them great autonomy and influence. Those who have not yet risen above such things can choose to live like great lords, and their vices are given as much license as their experiments."

Haaskoning held out his palms, fingers wide as if physically giving Ryou the evidence of what he was saying. "I knew you would interest them, and they'd make a gambit for you. I helped you prepare as much as I could, which wasn't much since I had to take into account the fact that you might join them. They have means of persuasion," said Haaskoning in a way that made Ryou not want to question him further on the subject, not when he remembered the way the bodies and psyche of those dog-headed creatures had been twisted by someone else's will. "In fact, you were lucky, oddly enough," Haaskoning added dryly. "If you'd had a run-in with one of their leaders who still live in the Outlands proper, well, it could have been nasty. These people are ruthless and without any mercy whatsoever, and someone used to dealing with normal people would have made sure you were under their power in a prosaic way - chains and manacles - as well as a magical one. But, probably due to the presence of Andrap and others around you, they brought out their big guns for you, and so you ended up confronting their strongest but least flexible magian. Menkaperreseneb tends to think everything will be as he decrees just because he says so."

Ryou blinked. "Meka-who?"

"Menkaperreseneb. That is the name of the man you met, back when such a thing could still be applied to him. Well it's not his original name, I think he's from Hiberia originally, but it's the Ancient name he adopted when he gained his powers. I'm sure he thought you would be so crushed by his presence, and so tempted by his offer, that he never considered you'd try to run away. It certainly never occurred to him that you would be able to leave that place under your own power. Hah, truth be told, I can still scarcely believe it either, but for Menkaperreseneb it would be inconceivable that you could break out of that dimension when he himself cannot."

"He's stuck there?" Ryou asked, surprised, then remembering a brief stir of intuition he’d had back in the higher plane when facing the Ancient Priest.

Haaskoning rubbed his face, looking a little tired still. "It's hard to describe in words- no thank you," he added when Ryou indicated the wine jug and an extra cup, suddenly realizing he'd been an abysmal host to the man who'd helped him heal Darius. "I never drink alcohol, it's discouraged by our beliefs. In these old countries, I cannot tell you how tired I get of explaining that I need well-boiled water with a dash of sugar and vinegar."

“Why sugar and vinegar?"

“By increasing the acidity of the water, vinegar halts the growth of whatever bacteria survived boiling.”

“I see. And the sugar?”

"It helps hide the taste of the vinegar," said Haaskoning dryly. "Back home - Asha Mainyu - I usually drink tea, that's quite safe."

That, more than threats or promises of forbidden knowledge, was what Haaskoning should have said awhile back to try to entice Ryou into the Per Gathas. Fortunately the magian leader missed the look of longing that managed to wash across Ryou's tired features for a second.

"So, coming back to my old foe, yes, he is stuck. What those fools call rising above Ma'at is in fact creating a bubble in the higher dimensions that suits their needs, a place subject only to their own ability to mould it with their mind. They do not live there like you and I would understand the term, though. They...pour themselves into a shell they made for themselves there, out of what is left of their physical body. I am not allowed to go into the details of the process as it involves mysteries of high order, plus to tell you the truth it disgusts me profoundly." Haaskoning looked down at his hand, flexed it. "This body they despise so much, this humanity, even our limited life span...Zoroaster taught us to love them and cherish them, not corrupt them and soil them. Ah well, that is what you call a difference of philosophy. The end result of this process is that yes, they can live quite a long time, but they cannot separate themselves from that domain they inhabit. You can imagine what that does to their minds, to live in constant contact with the things, large and small, that you can encounter there."

"Very large," Ryou muttered.

"Yes indeed, that creature you described. I know that one. It’s a calcified colony of smaller organisms, a little like a coral reef that’s beached across several dimensions. To think they believe this thing to be a god; it’s really rather pathetic. Though I rather envy you the chance of having seen it," Haaskoning added, with an apologetic gesture that said he was fully aware Ryou would not share his point of view. "I love to study these extra-dimensional creatures, but I have to concentrate on those that are a danger to men and magian, and I can't spend as much time as I would want to on fascinating fauna that is perfectly harmless and almost entirely out of the reach of someone of even my power. Ah well. To come back to mundane matters, now that I have shared quite a lot of information with you freely and that you understand what you face, I believe you have reconsidered your refusal to join us."

Ryou looked up from the wine glass he was refilling. "Why do you say that?"

"You refused them," Haaskoning answered as if stating the obvious. "Their offer was heavy-handed, but you are an intelligent man who probably figured out a lot of the ins and outs of all this before I even spoke to you today. You know what we offer and what they offer, and you have already turned them down. Power without purpose does not interest you."

"No, actually, I don't give a damn about either their power or your purpose," Ryou answered measuredly. "I just want to be left alone to mind my own business."

Haaskoning blinked in surprise for a few seconds, then he scratched his chin, fingernails combing his beard. "Hmm. Well, that may be difficult. Everybody belongs to one camp or the other. But I suppose you have time to think this through carefully and take a measured decision."

"That's what you said last time. What's to stop this Meka- Menka- Ancient one from kidnapping me again?"

"I am," said Haaskoning.

Simple words, and there was no change in the elderly man’s composed expression when he said them, yet Ryou, mouth suddenly dry, found himself believing him. 'Useages' had drilled into Ryou that discretion and shielding one's mental signature in the higher planes was the ABC of any magian's defence, but Ryou hadn't really considered what that implied, since he'd never met another self-declared magian before Haaskoning. The old man had been applying 'Useages' himself. Unlike the Ancient priest who'd stunk of power, Haaskoning could have been anyone's amiable old grandfather. But for an instant, when he'd said that, Ryou had caught a glimpse of the might that backed up those words. In the higher plane in which their abilities existed, most men were nothing more than molehills, while Ryou, in his current untrained state, was a sizeable hill. Haaskoning...Haaskoning had the power of mountains...

"I think you misunderstand the respective position of our two orders," Haaskoning said. He spoke normally, his aura once more cloaked, an elderly Dutch gentleman with his hands crossed in his lap. The echoes of that presence, that power, still hung in the air like the silence after a bell’s toll, and his soft words sounded louder for it. "The Ancients use their abilities in ways that we have voluntarily forbidden ourselves, and I'm sure that when they had you in their clutches, they made themselves sound very powerful. But they are not. They're parasites living off of the Grand Design, and they survive by carefully avoiding us. Indeed, the only reason we do not destroy them is because the kind of open warfare this would entail would endanger what we have sworn to protect."

That was at least reassuring to know. Ryou had figured out that the Ancients had lied to him, or at least underestimated the Per Gathas, when Haaskoning had shown up this morning to tell a concerned Leyam and an increasingly frantic and guilt-ridden Ryou that getting rid of Darius's curse was really 'not that big of a deal', then proceeding to do so in an hour. Ryou now suspected Haaskoning could have done the work entirely by himself, but had insisted on Ryou doing the job under his supervision in order to arm Ryou against this kind of thing happening again. Ryou wondered if Meka-whoever back there had deliberately lied to him when he’d said Haaskoning couldn’t help, or if the man simply could not believe that anyone, including a servant of the Gathas who accepted to live a mortal life, could do something that he himself could not.

"The Ancients normally stay hidden within the Roman Empire and conquered territories, scheming their little schemes and doing their little magic, but they are very careful to stay under our radar and not provoke us. If they allied themselves fully with Rome, things would get messy, so it's fortunate that they despise everybody and refuse to stoop to forming alliances. Every once in awhile in the past three thousand years, they have broken this unspoken covenant, and tried to move against us or actively take over some country in various ways. It seems Assyria was next on the menu if you and Lord Ghan had agreed to their proposal."

"Fat chance."

"I'm sure they thought they were making the both of you a very good deal," said Haaskoning dryly. "As I said, they're rather cut off from the way normal people think. Well, it is obvious that once again, they have crossed a line. Not when they kidnapped you; I'm afraid that magians are considered fair game under the conventions of this cold war of ours. But trying to kill Lord Ghan and blame us...We have still not found out which of their leaders thought of that - certainly not Menkaperreseneb. That was crude but also clever and messy and bolder than they are wont. It could be an indication of some powerful new man rising to prominence within their order. I will be looking into that very carefully. But the alliance Menkaperreseneb offered Lord Ghan was also outside allowable bounds and now, if you will grant me a favour, the Per Gathas have the means to strike back."

"Favour?"

“When we first met, I gave you my pendant. I would very much like to have it back.”

Ryou kept a tight hold on the sharp “What?” that tried to slip out at that point. He was too much of a businessman to show surprise that easily, and though it was true that the meeting rooms of Ujiie S&T were far away and getting further all the time, Leyam had kept him on his toes in that department quite adequately. Expressionless, Ryou dug out the pendant he’d been wearing all this time, slipped it out over his neck and held it out. Just not quite far enough. Haaskoning, who’d reached out his hand, measured the distance between it and the pendant, and the look in Ryou’s eyes, and settled back in his chair.

“Maybe I should explain.”

“Please do.”

“I mentioned that Menkaperreseneb is in a bubble of pseudo-reality beyond the Veil, yes? We need to find him in order to neutralize him, and it’s not that easy. Andrap called me to Mooncrest the moment you disappeared with Lord Ghan, you know. I was there mere hours after your kidnapping. But even with our combined powers, we could not follow you in order to help you. We could do nothing but hold the initial breach in the circle open, in case you managed to make your way back. Paths, particularly those breaching into and out of the Veil, create a lot of, ah, unwanted attention from the denizens of other planes. You may remember from that nightmare you had in Essin. Passers walk the Paths that exist naturally in the Veil – and even they can sometimes run into things that are quite dangerous in those uncertain areas. Magians, who can create new Paths, have to be even more careful. So when Menkaperreseneb took you, he naturally closed the Path behind you, very professionally I might add. I couldn’t see much beyond the first few steps. But even if I’d been able to follow the Path he’d created, I would have been stuck once outside fractional space – the spiral, you remember I mentioned it last time we met. Beyond the Grand Design...well, the rules go out the window. The bubbles the Ancients create out of their old existence can be anywhere, in any plane, hidden amongst an infinity of them. You cannot cast your senses across this- this multiverse of dimensions. No human has ever had that kind of perception, not even the greatest prophet our race has produced. Unless you can align yourself with that plane’s existence, you cannot even sense its presence. Unless you know where to look, you can never find it.”

“So how are you going to ‘neutralize’ him?”

“The pendant you carried. All the Per Gathas of the highest circles carry one, since we, ah, tend to occasionally go to odd places, and do odd things. Sometimes we do not survive them, and a Passer finds our body washed up in the water bisecting one of their Circles. The pendant contains a crystal embedded within the gold, a very pure crystal with properties we have developed. The Outlander magians in Asha Mainyu call them Tears of the Prophet, very poetic and mythical. But us Inlanders call it the Black Box, which will give you a better idea of what it’s used for.”

“You can use it to find out where I’ve been.”

“Correct. The kind of gross displacement through the Veil you were subjected to will have warped the purity of the crystal, much in the same way it must have warped your perception and mind for a few moments. A human mind recovers, heals; a crystal does not. The flaw in it can be interpreted, and give us an idea of where you were taken when you went beyond the Veil.”

“I see. I really was bait, wasn’t I,” said Ryou, even as he deposited the pendant into Haaskoning’s outstretched hand.

“Yes, but this protects you too,” Haaskoning assured him, quickly putting the pendant away into a metallic box he’d produced from inside his tabard. It looked like it was lined with lead. “Menkaperreseneb is going to be destroyed. It was going to happen sooner or later. That creature has been alive, if you can call it that, for over four hundred years; his thought processes have calcified. Because of their loose hierarchy, we’re only cutting off one head of the hydra, but it’s the most powerful one to date, so this is definitely going to hurt them. When they recover, however, you will be in their line of fire.”

“That sounds very scary.”

“...It is,” said Haaskoning, eyeing Ryou in surprise at the latter’s obviously unimpressed tone of voice. “You say you will not join them?”

“Never.”

“Then you have two choices: join us or go back Inlands. They cannot cross there easily, they have no interests there, and they feel very uncomfortable away from their power base.”

“When did you cross over from the Netherlands?”

Haaskoning was caught short by the abrupt change of subject, but he answered gamely. "It was in the spring of 1980, while I was on a business trip to Liège. Much the same as you, I was driving back to my hotel in the middle of the night, mostly asleep at the wheel and dreaming of a house which would exist in several dimensions at once, and all the advantage therein." It was said with a smile that was rueful and also a little nostalgic.

“Did you know the Berlin Wall fell since you last were there?”

“I've heard of this, yes.”

“Politics and business have changed a lot. They are no longer black and white, Us or Them.”

“I...don't think I see your point.”

"My point," said Ryou, pushing up his glasses, "is that we're only just beginning to talk."





“I admit I am as confused as Blessed Haaskoning,” said Leyam with a perplexed look. “I don't understand this...this 'freelance contractor' notion either.”

Ryou settled down in the opposite seat. They were back in Leyam’s apartment after that evening’s feast. Most dinners held by Leyam’s court were formal affairs. This evening had been particularly ceremonious and grand to celebrate the ‘return’ of his brother, as well as the presence of a Per Gathas notable. But now Haaskoning had departed, the Assyrian nobility had been left to nurse their cups and argue lineage and provincial borders, the King had retired, and Ryou finally had the time and privacy to bring Leyam up to speed with the latest developments. They were alone. Nicodeme was organizing a masseur and a bedtime companion for Leyam’s nightly routine, and Darius was out and about, talking to his men, giving them one more reassurance that he was back to normal. He was also getting them ready for another attempt at rejoining the army in Ayengosor. Because the struggle against Rome and its allies was still ongoing, though it now seemed a little secondary. The trip which had been so abruptly derailed had to be taken, for the same reasons as before, though this time Ryou and Darius would not only make sure that the Mooncrest Path was open towards their destination, but that Andrap and possibly Haaskoning himself was with them from the first step of the trip to the last.

“Is it like a mercenary?”

“Not really, no. It’s more...hmm... More like the way you and one of the Free Cities can be said to be allied. You're much stronger, but they still bring some usefulness to you, a usefulness that would be lost if you expended the effort to conquer them. So you help them discreetly, you maintain good relations, while on their end, they can get away with acts of aggression towards Roman allies that you could not, since you and Rome still pretend to be on speaking terms.”

Leyam’s brow wrinkled. “That seems an adequate description, but how does it relate to you?”

“I do not want to join the Per Gathas. I have no interest in their struggle against the Ancients, or preserving their Grand Design. I have agreed not to use my powers to benefit Assyria, since that would lead the Per Gathas to shut us all down. However, I have the right to defend myself if the Ancients try to harm Darius or me again. And since Darius is intrinsically tied to your reign and to this country, well...I’m going to assume I have some latitude over what I can and cannot defend with my magian abilities.”

“...Sounds like the deal is mostly in your favour. Why would Haaskoning let you off so easily?”

“He will benefit from this too,” Ryou said dryly, “and already has. To start with, even if I’m not going to join the Per Gathas, I am going to be somewhat allied to them. I have to learn more about my powers. It’s not just this ancient war, there's lots of other dangers for magian out there. I’ll automatically be closer to whichever camp is willing to teach me. I would prefer the Per Gathas, of course, I am definitely more philosophically aligned with them, but if they give me nothing to defend myself with, I'll strike a deal with the Ancients out of self preservation.”

“Haaskoning bought that?” Leyam asked with a shrewd glance at Ryou that said the King, for his part, did not. He knew what Ryou thought of the Ancients.

“He could not afford to do otherwise. Whether I like to admit it or not, it seems I have a lot of power and innate abilities,” sighed Ryou. “It means the Per Gathas and the Ancients both want me to join them. Even more than that, though, they do not want me joining the other team. Haaskoning cannot afford to be heavy handed in this. He’s hoping to reel me in some day, I am sure. He’ll make sure I stay alive and on their side of the conflict in the meantime.”

“Either that, or he’ll kill you,” said Leyam, before popping a fig from the after-dinner fruit platter into his mouth. “That’s what I’d do,” he added as he chewed.

“I somehow doubt so, My King,” Ryou said, to Leyam’s amusement; there weren’t many people in the entire Pariya region with the gall and liberty to correct him, and it seemed to tickle him when Ryou did so. “You wouldn’t destroy a powerful weapon unless you were sure it was more likely to turn against you than serve you. The Per Gathas are the same.” Plus slightly more civilized, Ryou inwardly added, though he was not ready to bet his life that the Per Gathas would let their Inland or Zoroastrian ethics get in the way of preserving their Grand Design. “Needless to say, I’m going to have to tread carefully, but unless I cross a line, the Per Gathas will not harm me. No, it’s the Ancients who are going to try to kill me. And that’s to the advantage of the Per Gathas, since it will help them to pinpoint these more aggressive elements. Haaskoning and his colleagues cannot strike out directly against these Ancients because they want the world to ignore the very existence of this war they’re engaged in. The Per Gathas are the great stabilizing influence in the Outlands. If it became known that somebody can challenge them...Someone not as attached to neutrality and rules as they are...You can see where that could get very messy. Nobody could predict the results with any certainty, which is why both the Per Gathas and their enemy have kept this fight in the shadows for over three millennia. But now, some new cabal within the ranks of the Ancients is trying to strike at the established order actively, and the Per Gathas are short on discreet means of stopping this from happening. This is where I come in. Whether the Ancients intend to take a shot at me directly, or just take aim at the Alliance, they’ll probably try to remove me first as a precautionary measure. If they break cover, I can move against them as an independent agent, and the Per Gathas can back me up from a distance, lending me the firepower while staying hidden within my shadow. I’m going to be the lightning rod, as it were. Ah, you don’t know what that means. I’ll-“

“You’ll be the goat in their lion hunt, I get it, and though it’s buying you your independence, I think the price may be high. You better hope Haaskoning prizes you and your abilities as much as you seem to think. Now I see where your earlier analogy comes in...But this means that, for all you have no interest in their struggle, you're still allied to the Sons of the Path. You've implicated yourself in his war by default, the same way you’ve implicated yourself in our fight against the Imperium by hopping into bed with my brother.”

Ryou, quite used to Leyam’s inappropriate comments about his love life by now, merely shrugged. “As the saying goes, choose your friends well, because your enemies will choose you.”

“In view of what you face, some would say you could have chosen your friends a little more wisely.”

“That kind of wisdom leads to places I would rather not go. Hell, if I was wise, I'd have stayed Inland. Sometimes you have to go with your gut and hack out your own path your own way.”

“You know,” groused Leyam, “I was hoping some of your restraint would rub off on my wild-headed brother, not the other way around.”

“Sorry,” said Ryou, unrepentant.

Leyam judged him moodily over the rim of his cup of warmed wine. “You seem overall satisfied for someone who just dropped right into the middle of two separate wars.”

“They're not all that separate...but yes, oddly enough. Maybe I’m in trouble, but it's trouble of my own choosing.”

It would be challenging, but Ryou found himself looking forward to those challenges, with allies at his back, Darius at his side and this feeling of anticipation before him, something he’d not felt in a long time.

“You're as nuts as my brother.”

“Yes, that was the other possible conclusion,” said Ryou, helping himself to one of the figs.

“What?”

“Nothing, just thinking out loud. Good night, My King.”

Ryou walked away from Leyam's simmering curiosity and went to see what Darius was doing.




End of the current arc


PS: Question for you all. I have the next arc - a small one, 5 chapters, 3 of which will be fairly short - half written out. The other half is not written out at all, so it'll take me awhile to get it posted. Would the readers prefer to have the first few written chapters out in a couple of weeks, and then a certain time to wait until the next section is out? Or should I wait until most of it is written until I start posting? There's no cliffies in this arc, it's more a series of indepedent one-shots.