Status Updates From Niall of the Far Travels Co...

"The Coming of the Sword" is the "best" story in the collection, if only because it ditches Niall's connection to the gods entirely, so he actually has agency, and maybe marginally less plot-armour (but not really). However, he's also very unlikable, callous, and unsympathetic, unable to comprehend others' grief. "Hey, why so sad, lady? Let's go loot the ruins of the hometown you're mourning." Not recommended.

"The Lure of the Golden Godling" was more coherent than most of them, though it's still the same structure of "the gods are warring, and Niall is their pawn." No real agency for the character. In this one, he also grins a lot. The plot is that a god wants to trap another god by using a gold statue, so Niall has to keep the statue out of the bad god's servants' hands.

"Only one thing may overcome him." She shuddered. "You must go to him, offer him your body! Go without weapons, naked. Let him enter you!"

Numbly, Niall said, "Give myself to him. Let him take control of me. That's what you mean, isn't it?"

"It's our only hope."

===
Why is this their only hope? Adonair ran away screaming when Niall hit him with his enchanted sword before, so why not just keep doing that?

The green being lifted what was its head. Niall felt the impact of burning eyes. "So, then. You have followed me. That is good," it bellowed.

Simple tip. If you want me to read the character's lines as if he's bellowing them, don't wait until *after* three sentences of dialogue to tell me he's bellowing them! And maybe also try using some exclamation points. You don't generally bellow quietly.

"In a soft voice it whispered, 'Now, how can you know my name? Certainly there is no mention of me in any human records. Men would never remember me after all this time. How can you know my name?'"

This is the kind of sloppy writing I've come to expect here. Fox can't even keep straight that Adonair *told* Niall his name in the previous chapter:

"Ahh, it has been long—long!—since the race of men knelt to Adonair!"

So he accidentally frees an evil god who the other gods had imprisoned behind a brick wall in Niall's basement, with nothing but an ordinary pickaxe (great divine protection there), when he was just trying to expand his wine cellar. Then his lover, the goddess Emelkartha, freaks out that he freed the god. And why didn't she ever mention there was an evil god in Niall's basement? "I had forgotten," she says.

"The Cup of Golden Death" had a high priestess character who was entirely unconvincing. Her bland personality, lack of skills, and lack of any personal goals or interests made her no different than any of the other generic maidens Niall has saved in previous stories.

"A thousand centuries ago, Yellixin dwelt here on this moor, in a castle the ruins of which have sunk into the soft ground over all the years. There is a tale told of how a man who worshiped Humalorr came to Yellixin and stole the cup. It was after the cup was stolen that Humalorr destroyed the castle Yellixin had built and all within it..."

If it was stolen first, why did they find the cup buried here in the ruins?

"She had been right behind him with that dagger before they had eaten. Of course, she had said she was merely going to cut the steak. But that might have been an excuse thought up on the spur of the moment."

YOU were the one who thought it up, Niall!

He grinned at her. "You going to cut me—or that steak I'm cooking for your meal?"
She seemed to emerge from a daze. "What? Oh. The steak, of course. What else?"

Once again, in "The Cup of Golden Death", the demon-goddess Emelkartha is the real protagonist driving the plot, with Niall just being the "hired muscle" drifting through the story with no volition of his own. These stories should be called "Emelkartha of the Eleven Hells and her Dancing Meat-Puppet Niall".

"The Cube From Beyond" had a decent premise, but Niall's abrupt retreat, the fact that getting back out of the cube was set up to be a problem to solve but ended up not being a problem at all, and the fact that Emelkartha saves the day YET AGAIN, not to mention the anticlimactic ending, and the total lack of concern of an immortal losing her immortality all combine to make this the worst story in the collection.

The author uses a phrase in this series that I think is supposed to give a little flavour to the setting. Instead of just "No", or maybe "Nay", characters say "Na, na." Everyone says it here: The hero, the evil wizard, the goddess who helps the hero, etc. "Na, na."

"He had no eyes for the golden censers and silver athanors, for the chests heaped high with strange and almost unobtainable magical condiments."

Magical condiments?