The Clockwork Raven

by Samuel Chapman

Read this book for free here! www.theclockworkraven.wordpress.com

For ten years, Karla and Kio have known nothing but Nashido–the castle, floating thousands of feet above a vast ocean, that protects them with a combination of unreliable technology and unfathomable magic. Every day, they tend the massive vines that produce the oxygen they breathe, hunt birds for dinner with spring-loaded spears, and charge the castle’s engine battery by steering through lightning storms. They don’t remember much about when there were other people on Nashido, and the parts they do remember, they don’t talk about. Ever.

One thing keeps them going: Raven, an ornithopter they’re patching together in the hope of one day reaching the surface. Both of them have promised that they’ll set out for land together, or not at all. But then a skeletal winged beast attacks the castle without warning, reminding Karla and Kio how little they know about their flying prison…or about one another.

Unknown Binding

Published December 2, 2016

About the author

I've been telling stories for as long as I had a mind to think with. I was always that child who couldn't watch a movie without coming up with an idea for the sequel, or who wanted the games we played in my cousin's backyard to have long, complex plots. Growing up in Austin, Texas, I'd hide in the grassy flood ditches at the edge of my cul-de-sac and read for hours.

It was in this unlikely library that I read the end of *The Amber Spyglass*, and decided I couldn't accept it. What Philip Pullman did to Lyra and Will was so awful and wonderful at once that I had to write another book just to right that wrong. Stephen King says in *On Writing* that fantasy became a genre so authors could bring Frodo and Sam back from the Grey Havens; I think that's as good a reason as any.

I grew up. I got better. I went to college and learned to use a sword and sail a ship and wrote a thesis on reading fantasy ecologically and how it can influence our views of the real world. And now, at last, I'm trying to become an author myself.

I'm starting with a web serial called The Clockwork Raven, available online for free. Here's the link: http://www.theclockworkraven.wordpres...
And here's the Patreon page funding it: https://www.patreon.com/samchapmanser...

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy it!