These past few weeks, work has been going on in the wings to merge HSSJ with Stalker7 and create a single site for both fiction and games. Prune the excess, get it all under one roof, make it easier to tend.

I want to thank everyone who’s spent their valuable time to subscribe, read, or stop by in these past 13 years. Words cannot express my appreciation, let alone define the contribution your input, encouragement, and mere presence made in my work and person. It’s is good to create, to get recognition and even money for it; but even deeper is the comfort of knowing you’re not alone.

This may well be one of the last posts here, so I’ll post a portion of my latest WIP. Someone online commented that there was no ‘dungeon crawl’ fiction, so I started writing some. Here’s the prologue and first chapter of Shiver and Funk – Five Torches.

Enjoy. Have an excellent day.

And furthermore, it is hereby decreed that the act of opening, entering, exploring, or otherwise disturbing the grave, tomb, crypt, sepulcher, or any other final resting place – or its immediate environs – for the purpose of obtaining valuables, artifacts, or any items sacred or common interred with or near the departed, shall be punishable by summary execution, without appeal.   

CONFEDERATION HIGH COUNCIL – FIFTH MONTH. YEAR 879.  The Decree against the Desecration of Antiquities and Property, both Private and under Royal Custody. (Grave Robber’s Wrack)

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From this day henceforth, it is deemed permissible for property owners, their immediate family, heirs, relevant concerns or duly appointed representatives, to enlist the services of professional surveyors to determine the full and intimate extent of any tract of land under their purview, and for said surveyors to explore its topography, entering any enclosed spaces, caverns, tunnels, structures – man-made or otherwise, above ground or subterranean – in the course of the aforementioned survey, and to retrieve any items, assets, or commodities found therein at the discretion of their employers.

CONFEDERATION HIGH COUNCIL – NINTH MONTH, YEAR 879. Decree for the License of Salvors and Surveyors. (Grave Robber’s Writ)   

The dream.

Mikal is back in that cramped room under the manor: crumbling masonry, warped floor, bowed ceiling timbers draped with cobwebs. The smell of soil and ancient stone.

The five of them are gulping down the heavy air after a mad, blind sprint in the dark. They took a wrong turn into a short hallway that ended here. Corbin, his good arm dangling and dripping, wedges the door shut in its crooked frame, bars it with his boar spear. “It won’t hold them.” His eyes are wide and desperate.  

Mikal doesn’t know what to say. All he has left is his war pick and a ripped canvas sack that’s leaking gold.

Howling in the corridor.

The last torch flickers on the floor, glints on the spilled coins, reflects wetly in the blood spreading under Holm’s legs because a huge skode ripped his belly open in one swipe, and now the swordsman’s guts are looping over his thighs like coils of purple, slippery rope. Freda kneels beside him, cursing and crying, trying to put them back in.

More howls, nearer. Paws scrabbling on flagstone. 

Corbin gropes for a boot dagger with his off-hand. Stepan is pressing himself like a lover against the shuddering door because the pack has found them, snarling, heaving against the dry-rotted planks. Claws tear at the gap next to his face.

“Find an exit,” the archer shouts over his shoulder. “Hurry.”

An exit to anywhere but this death trap of a family crypt the contract said was small and empty, but instead was maze-huge and full of feral skode mothered by the largest pureblood bitch any of them had ever seen: all teeth and teats and bristled fur.   

The room is narrow and low, a wine cellar wrenched by a century of quakes and the manor’s granite weight. All the angles are skewed, the walls cracked and canted. It’s little more than a closet with nothing in it but rickety shelving and empty wine casks. There’s slime and mud, but no window, no grate, no door, save the one that’s splintering under a snarling frenzy.

Corbin is stabbing. Stepan is yelling for Mikal to hurry. Holm is muttering, “Tell Vera. Tell Vera- -.” Freda is on her feet, shrill. Her blood-slick hands glow with magic, twine in anguish. Energy roils between them like the mouth of a furnace.

All the sounds roar in Mikal’s ears. He is at the back wall, franticly smashing casks, begging any god who will listen. He rips down a shelf and spies a fissure where two walls should join; a floor-to-ceiling gap in a corner that might lead somewhere. Might be wide enough for a person if they strip off their gear, leave everything behind, and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze sideways one at a time.    

Mikal turns to tell them, looks back to see the door come apart. 

Skode boil in, dozens of them, dark furred and blood-mad. Corbin slashes at the tide with his dagger. Stepan’s shout is cut off. Holm is on the floor, staring into the next world. Freda stands above him, weeping, her molten hands raised.  

Mikal plunges in the crevice as she screams a word to make a sliver of sun explode.

Murderous heat punches the breath from his lungs. The inferno reaches for him with blistering tongues. He shoves himself deeper in the crevice like a terrified animal, thrusting his body through a vise of earth and stone, squirming away from those raging flames, that terrible room where everything has turned to cinder and ash.

He’s half-seared, half-crushed, but an arm’s length ahead the heavy black is cleft by a jagged slice of blue night. Mikal sees it but he can’t move. He opens his mouth to shout, but he can’t breathe. Darkness is edging in, bright spots flare in his vision like candle flies. The fire and earth, the rocks and new ghosts say, Here is where you die. With us.

But panic is a rabid dog and Mikal pours it all into one last push. He thrashes forward, bucking and straining inch by bloody inch until he bursts out of the crevice, out of the ground, out of the dream to find himself wrapped in sour sheets, staring at moonlit rafters in his bedroom.

Awake again.