Cold Steel (Short Story)

Hardsteel felt the enormous kick of his ‘37 Sethen revolver through the neural pads on his hands and arms. The man he shot crashed through a termite-erroded wall opposite him, sending a shower of dust and wood splinters into the cramped room beyond. Light punched through the hole made by the man’s body, stunning Hardsteel’s iris sensors. He blinked.

The man wasn’t getting back up; Hardsteel’s programming was good enough to know a gunshot to the neck didn’t leave a man standing. With a flick of his wrist and a hiss of air from the pistons maneuvering to his elbows, Hardsteel holstered the revolver in his belt. He kicked through the debris—boxes filled with rotting food, a dirty blanket, a bundle of wool woven to look like a sheep—and stepped into the next room to inspect the man’s corpse.

Red liquid dripped from the man’s neck, saturating the sheets he had fallen onto and collecting in a puddle on the packed dirt floor. Two black swords were criss-crossed on the man’s wrist, a sign of his allegiance to the Thieves of Verholt. Another dead, the commanding initiative within Hardsteel marched on.

A child whimpered from beneath the bandit’s broken body.

Hardsteel’s first and primary initiative—to uphold justice, end the Thieves of Verholt, and return what was stolen—raised his arm, revolver in hand, and pointed it at the cowering child. With one cast-iron finger he cocked the gun, knowing there were still three more bullets in its cylinder . An aiming retina flipped out from the side of his head, and his programming lined the child up with the sights on his revolver.

Hardsteel’s second initiative—programmed with a simple phrase, “Do what is right”—caused his trigger finger to hesitate. His eyes flicked to the boy’s wrist, and sure enough, there was the Verholt’s insignia tattooed on his arm. No doubt the boy had been indoctrinated to them at an early age. And yet…wasn’t he still young?

The boy had matted brown hair, a dirty, round face that had yet to harden from puberty, and short feeble arms that clutched a tattered yellow blanket. He had none of the Thieves’ characteristic survival instinct, no gun, and was hurling no insults. The Enforcer Law dictated that any and all of the Verholt Thieves stolen goods must be returned to their rightful owners. It also dictated that they must be shot on sight.

The primary initiative grasped control of Hardsteel’s processors—this was the way, switching between primary and secondary—and Hardsteel took a step forward. The boy let out a quiet whimper. No, a growl. A sign of aggression, told the primary initiative. He will put up a fight.

Then the secondary initiative kicked in. Look at him. Was that truly a growl? Can’t you see he needs food, water? His voice is gravely. Is that not what happens to human’s voices without proper lubricant?

Hardsteel could not move his limbs with the initiatives disagreeing like this. He narrowed his eyes at the child, studying, waiting for the initiatives to decide what he would do. The boy whimpered again, pulled away, and tried with shaking eyes not to look at the dead bandit collapsed atop him. He peered up at Hardsteel with large green eyes.

“Are you…going to take me away? Am I going to fall asleep, like my Da? Is that what you did to him?”

Hardsteel looked at the man again. The Thief’s blood had soaked through his shirt and was starting to drip onto the boy’s legs. The law dictated that the man should die, that all Thieves should die. The first initiative reminded Hardsteel of his purpose. He twisted back to the child and applied pressure on the trigger.

“Yes,” he whispered. A loud bang shook the room.

The boy opened his eyes to see a bullet hole that tore clean through the wall behind him. Hardsteel holstered his revolver with a flourish, shoved the bandit’s corpse aside, and held out his hand. The little boy reached up with a feeble hand to grasp one of Hardsteel’s cold iron fingers.

“Cover that,” Hardsteel said, pointing to the mark on the boy’s wrist. “I will show you what it means to do good, and you will be a Thief no longer.”

The boy nodded and stood, and Hardsteel took him away. The food would be returned, and the Enforcers would have their corpse. But they did not need to know about the victim of a harsh parent who chose a harsh lifestyle. Hardsteel would take care of him and teach him the second initiative. There were plenty around to do the first.

After all, Hardsteel was learning what it meant to do good himself.

This was the first-ever story I wrote for my writing group, all the way back in February of 2023! The prompts were, “Western setting; The legally correct thing to do will drastically hurt someone else; Part cyborg”. I wrote a sequel to it as well which you can read here! Hope you enjoyed!

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Ready For It (Short Story)

A dead body is lonely company. Stinks, too. Bremmer shifted in the grave, feeling the freshly shoveled dirt settle in over his very much not dead body.

Some people never learn, he thought. They try to kill you again and again, then get confused when you’re still alive after the tenth time.

Bremmer tried to sigh but swallowed a mouthful of grimy dirt instead. He thought an earthworm might have made it in there, too, but with the plethora of things he’d consumed intentionally and not in his long life, it didn’t make much of a difference.

He would have to wait down here until nightfall—until the ground was stiff and cold—and escape under cover of darkness if he wanted to avoid being mistaken for a zombie again. So, he settled in, distancing himself as far as possible from the rotting corpse of his most recent cohort, and found a position that may be described by some creatures as comfortable.

And he waited. For what was Bremmer’s life but waiting? Waiting for rivals to die of old age, waiting for a recession to end, waiting for the collapse of a kingdom and the rotting of their prison so he could finally leave and see the sun again.

Hours into his rest, he felt the phantom pang of hunger echo in his gut. Despite it being over a millennium since he had needed to eat, that tiresome desire still reared its ugly head every now and again. Bremmer salivated, remembering that delicious pastry he had eaten in France a few hundred years ago. Maybe that’s where he should go next and get a little taste of what the country of romance had to offer nowadays.

He had given them enough years to ripen into something new. Maybe they weren’t in a revolution right now, and Bremmer could actually get his hands on a delicacy without having hundreds of tiny bullet holes poked in his clothes.

Maybe, he thought. Or maybe they’ll just be trying to kill each other again. Humans: so obsessed with life and death that they can’t see that life is only worth living if you stop worrying over the lengthening of it.

Finally, the ground cooled enough that Bremmer knew the sun was no longer shining. He’d give it a few more hours before poking his head out of the ground. Make sure all the angry mobs chanting “witchcraft!” were dispersed, all back in their shacks without a thought for broken ground.

When he clawed his way to the surface and left the body behind, he was greeted by the brisk night air of a moonless night. Bremmer shimmied out of the ground, dewy grass disturbed by his scrabbling hands. He had never been more grateful for the apathy of men to pack dirt when it comes to digging holes.

Bremmer turned back to his cohort’s grave and slowly set to putting it all back in order: first with dirt, then with grass, aligning each stalk to look as though it hadn’t been disturbed by an ageless, deathless creature of the night.

When he had finished, Bremmer stood, dusted the dirt off, and looked about the cemetery. Then he took a bullet to the chest.

Bremmer was immortal, yes, but he was not immune to the punching force of a .38 caliber rifle. It threw him violently to the ground, disturbing his careful work and causing a phantom ache in his chest. Bremmer coughed and looked down.

Was that…blood pooling on his chest? He clawed at his clothes, tearing them open, to find a gaping hole where his ribs should be. There were even a few poking out.

Laughing cackled through the night air. “Really?” came a voice. “That was it, all along? Bismuth-tipped bullets is all it took?”

Bremmer looked up in horror, and from the shadows came a figure he had dreaded seeing for some time: Joseph Frell. The man had a nasty grin on his face that stretched all the way to his ears. He cocked the large dark rifle in his hands a second time before standing over Bremmer’s collapsed body.

The man scowled at the wound in Bremmer’s chest. How come Bremmer wasn’t feeling anything? Wasn’t death supposed to be painful? Joseph shook his head. “My father, and my father’s father, and whatever generation came before him have been searching for this answer for their entire lives. And I found it!”

Bremmer didn’t hear the rest of his spiel. What was one more villain, one more crazy person with it out for him? Except, this one had worked. He was…dying. He choked on his own blood. His…blood.

What was it that he was thinking earlier?

Bremmer remembered the taste of that pastry again and wished he really could have gone to France one more time. Hell, wished he could have done a lot of things. What had he been doing all this time? Why hadn’t he cared?

Most people were given 80 years. Bremmer was given several thousand. He wasn’t ready. He didn’t want to go. He couldn’t go, not like this! The eager darkness closed around him, pulling him down, down, deeper than he had ever been.

I don’t want to die, thought Bremmer.

Yet some things come whether you’re ready for them or not.

There’s another story I wrote in my writing group! This prompt was one I thought up:
Your story must begin with the line, “A dead body is lonely company,” and end with, “Yet some things come whether you’re ready for them or not.”

The rest of the group produced really excellent writing from this one. If you want to check out one of the other writers, you can find him over at isaacphilips.com! He posts short stories, commentary, and even has one of his books self-published through Amazon! I would particularly recommend his “Tales from the Deep” series, and keep an eye out for when, Lord-willing, he publishes his next book Heart of Ice!

Check out the teaser for his book here!

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The Greatest Man in All the World (Short Story)

There was a man, say, a few hundred years ago, who thought very highly of himself. By all accounts, he deserved it; by his gauntleted hand, kingdoms fell, countries were razed, kings deposed, and assassins betrayed.

No one knew much of how he managed such a feat. Though he was just a man, there were none who could compete.

He traveled this land, which we now call Fervale, and came across a storyteller who had heard nothing of his tale. So the man spoke, his account long and detailed, of all the things he had done, over what men and places he had prevailed.

The storyteller listened quietly, patiently. For storytellers know how to wait, and wait this storyteller did.

When the man was complete, his legend wrapped up, the teller began his own tale; one somber, close-up. The hero did not like this story and tapped his feet and rapped his knuckles. What do heroes know of waiting, when they have replaced their brains with muscles?

He did not let the storyteller finish, holding a hand in the air. “Now hold on, friend, this isn’t fair. I told you an exciting story, one of victory and lore. You dare to return me with something which is such a bore? My tales are of brilliance! Why, they tell you of a man known by millions, nay, billions! The greatest man in the world!”

The storyteller frowned—his story had meaning. Particularly, one the hero needed gleaning. But the man was too impatient, gathering his things to carry on his way. So the storyteller conjured one more phrase, the last thing the hero heard him say.

“You blather and boast, but I know the truth. At the end of the day, you’re nothing but a boy in a suit of armor who was taught not manners, but to be crude. You believe yourself above everyone else, set apart, amazing. But travel wide and far; you will find yourself lacking. You will come to understand this, it I swear. Now off with you, since that is all you care.”

So the hero left, his time wasted, and paraded off to a kingdom he had vindicated. There was a woman there, in his passing, he had adored. Not thinking of the storyteller’s warning, he searched high and low for her, finding not message nor ward.

He approached her home, her father awake in his smithery, and the hero asked, “Hello, sir, isn’t the air wintery?” When the man did not respond to his jovial words, the hero continued, “I’ve not come here for swords. I remember your daughter, young, and fair. I believe she had an interest in me, and I now, I appear!”

The smith’s eyes were ringed, deep and black. “I have no daughter, you selfish hack. Be gone with you.”

The hero was not used to such treatment. What had he done to deserve this man, so vehement?” So he asked again, but to no success. The man had only weapons to sell, and further regrets.

The hero moved on, disturbed, but convinced. “That storyteller, old coot, he must have done this!”

He stomped to the gate, so tall and embellished with bronze, but found it, strangely, and incoherently, gone. The guards weren’t there either; it was a strange sight. So the hero walked on, straight into the night.

A mile down the road, he glanced backward. He stopped, swayed, gaped, and staggered. There was no kingdom behind him, no walls or towers. Just an empty field, and a valley full of flowers.

“This can’t be right,” he said with a start. “It was right there! I couldn’t have forgot!”

Yet checking all around, he found no sign of a city. Feeling horrified and confused, he moved on in a jiffy. “It must be a trick of my imagination,” he thought, carrying on. “Not that old storyteller, how far I believed he had gone.”

And so the hero pushed forward, and walked, and walked. But never did he run into another town, until eventually, he stopped.

“This isn’t right!” he cried to the sky. “Where has everything gone?” His victories were vanished, his kingdoms, kaput. All that was left, strangely, was himself, and he looked upon the rest of the world.

The sky was a dull shade of white, no, grey, no, black. His backpack was almost empty, wait, no, there was a crack, in the bottom of it! Something was very wrong. All of his things were gone.

And he was alone, standing in a void, wondering where to go. The hero wandered here and there, but found nothing.

He had believed himself the greatest man in the world. Well, now he was. For he was all alone, alone in his realm, and there was no one else to bother.

The storyteller laughed from his seat. “And that’s why you always, always, when a man tells you a story, let him complete.”

That was a short story I wrote when meeting with my monthly writing group! We try to stretch ourselves with prompts, time limits, and challenges. You’ll see more of my stories that were produced through that group over the coming weeks, mainly because I’m working hard on refining and adjusting The Final Hero and have a backlog of them.

The prompt for this particular one was, “Write a story that might be told around a campfire.”

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Procgen Arcana (Cool Tools)

Today is something of a double-feature! I wanted to introduce to you all a wonderful tool I found recently, Watabou’s Procgen Arcana. It’s incredibly useful for generating maps for caves, dungeons, cities, and even full realms!

You can try it out the city generator here: https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator Let me shout out some of the awesome parts: it’s customizable, it’s easy, and it’s COMPLETELY FREE! Stick around and I’ll show you what I’ve made with it already!

I recently needed maps for two of the cities in The Final Hero: Gansmead and Sonmore. The former is a port town, densely packed with buildings and a large trading plaza. Sonmore, on the other hand, is a ramshackle city that was forcefully enacted as the “capital” for a region by a corrupt judicial/political force, the Knights of the Alliance.

Originally, I was going to draft up the cities myself, but I knew the best attempt I could make is a blob thrown together in paint.net (a tool I’ll talk about in a later article). In fact, I still have the original attempt on Sonmore, as seen below.

It worked well enough.

But I wanted something more. Something that I could show to my readers, or even players of a campaign in this world, that I could be proud of. That’s when I stumbled across Procgen Arcana. And with a few minutes of work, I generated this:

Go ahead, look at it. It’s wonderful. It’s stylized. It has individual buildings, rivers, roads, the whole shebang. Is it exactly what I had scribbled before? No. Do the buildings make a ton of sense when you look at them really closely? Not exactly.

But it took me minutes. And the incredible part is that you can change most of it. Any line, road, twist, or turn you can shift around and edit until it’s the perfect size. You can change fonts, and colors, and even the types of roofs the buildings has!

There are of course some places this won’t work with. One of the cities in my world, Rakuken, is made up of thick stone pillars that surround the top of a mountain. Pretty weird. Procgen Arcana is excellent at making cities that could actually exist. Rakuken is…unrealistic in a world without magic.

Next is Gansmead!

I loved this one. If you want to try Procgen Arcana’s citybuilder out with the settings I used for this one, follow this link! You have complete control over names, areas, and I just regenerated the city a few times (hit Enter) until I got a city that had the ocean on the right side. (The black boxes were because I didn’t turn off the Solids option under Roofs.)

You can make all sorts of things, and I encourage you to give it a try. Don’t be daunted by a city you want to make. Use Procgen Arcana to get an idea, then jump off from there! It’s especially useful if you’re running a campaign and you want a quick house or cave map.

And this is just the city maker. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the other generators Watabou offers, but I wanted to share this one with all of you. Cheers!

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Foundryside (Book Review)

It’s time for my first book review! I considered retroviewing an older book I had read, such as The Final Empire or The Blade Itself (two of my favorites), but it’s been too long since I read those and it wouldn’t be fair to either side of the review spectrum since I have an intensely positive bias toward both Brandon Sanderson and Joe Abercrombie, and have read those series in their entire.

So, Foundryside. This is the first book of Robert Jackson Bennett’s I’ve read. And goodness, did I enjoy it! I’ve heard about his Divine Cities series, but Foundryside really caught my eye. I just finished it last week, and this book continued to surprise me!

As this is my first book review on the website, I need to explain my rating system. The system rates seven categories, each out of seven, and then combines those categories into one final rating. There is also a weighted rating because books have different focuses depending on genre. The weighted rating is of course more arbitrary than the overall rating. I chose a seven-point system because there are misunderstandings with the /10 system that I want to move away from.

Here’s what each rating means:
7 – Excellent (near-perfect)
6 – Recommendable
5 – Satisfactory
4 – Average (neither particularly bad or good)
3 – Unremarkable
2 – Inferior
1 – Irredeemable (just plain awful)

You’ll notice I don’t have a “perfect” rating. I don’t want to be the sort of reviewer that never gives anything a perfect score because “nothing can be perfect”, so that’s not even on the rating scale.

It should also be noted that the individual categories will not have overt spoilers in them, but I’ll have a warning before the section at the end. Anyways, on to the ratings!

Characters 7/7

Sancia, Gregor, Orso, and Berenice were positively wonderful to follow. My favorite was Gregor by far, but Sancia consistently carried the plot and lots of laughs, and Orso’s character growth over the course of the book was just wonderful. You really dislike him at first, but he grows on you. It’s been a while since I’ve read punchy, realistic characters whose actions both make sense and are interesting to follow, but these four manage to keep you invested!

I’m excited to see where Bennett takes his characters in the following books, though I’ll be taking a short break to finish some of the other books on my to-read list. He left lots of room for growth, change, and inner conflict, which is a good place to be in for the end of book 1.

Plot 6/7

While characters and magic were certainly Foundryside’s strong suit, the plot for this first book is exciting! It takes a while to get going, but once you’re in it, you’re in. The ending kind of reminded my of some of the “Sanderlanches” in Cosmere books, which is always a good thing!

I did end up seeing a few of the mid-book twists coming—which was slightly frustrating when the characters weren’t as quick to pick them up—but once we reached the final quarter, I was blown away by every turn of the story. The tone was also an interesting one, but I’ll get into that in the message section.

Worldbuilding 6/7

I really enjoyed Tevanne and the frequent glimpses into the far past of Foundryside’s magic-mixed-with-tech civilization. With four merchant houses all reaching for each other’s throats across the city, the book achieves a similar feel to Mistborn with all the politics but manages to set itself apart with how unique the merchant houses are.

Each house feels distinct, and by the end you pretty much know where each of them stand and what they were known for. There aren’t eight other houses to inevitably forget. And you can’t really talk about the worldbuilding of Tevanne without…

Magic System 7/7

The magic! I love me a good hard(ish) magic system! Although I tend to enjoy writing the most solid magic systems known to man, the Scrivings of Foundryside manage to breach the gap between hard and soft perfectly. It has many rules that Scrivers must follow, but you also don’t learn how exactly the magic works until you get further into the story.

In Foundryside, anyone can “scrive” objects and essentially convince them to act in ways they usually do not. The classic example is a Scrived carriage wheel which has been told, “You’re on a slanted surface, so you should be rolling!”, and so the carriage wheel rolls forward whether it’s actually on a slanted surface or not.

Even once you get some of the rules, the scope of the magic isn’t quite set. However, where Scriving shines is its internal consistency! Once you’re introduced to a mechanic of the system, the proceeding uses all fall in line with it, creating a Sanderson-like system where you can predict and figure out how something might work. Bennett gives you the tools quite a bit slower, so it’s hard to predict some things, but I assume the further books will continue to grow on the art of Scriving.

Honestly, I loved this system. It gives me so many ideas for my own magic systems, and I loved how the act of scriving itself is a little “soft”. Every time Sancia pushed away an explanation, I grinned and wished she had let the person talk. Not only was the system wonderful, but it was tied so well into the world and story as a whole. Absolutely wonderfully done.

Cohesion 6/7

While Foundryside starts off slow, all the pieces and bits of information wrap so perfectly into one full and cohesive story. It’s nice to have all the threads pulled back together at the end, and not let much hang besides the setups for the next book.

I’m very grateful for each character’s consistency, and that while the magic played a huge role in the story it was also consistent and twists didn’t come out of nowhere. There was a logic to everything that continued on through each plot point and story beat.

Prose 5/7

Foundryside was an easy read, which is always a blessing with some high fantasy books. Its prose wasn’t particularly impressive, but actions scenes were punchy and easy to follow, which is a must-have with stories like this. I’m a fan of Rothfuss-style prose, but there’s not always a place for it.

Message 5/7

Now, you might be wondering what I mean by “message”. As you might see in my About page, the themes and messages of stories are what make them worthwhile to me. When approaching a book either to write or read, I want to get something out of it.

Of course, we don’t want our books to preach at us, but you can artfully weave in messages that speak to the art. They’re what make creation worthwhile.

For Foundryside, it took a while for the message to emerge. In the first half of the book or so, you’re mainly being led into the world of Tevanne and into each character’s life, and it doesn’t seem to focus on a major theme. But as you get to know everyone and the stakes get higher, messages of freedom, individualism, and doing the right thing regardless of the cost bubble up to the surface.

Those moments are by far my favorite, but it’s sad that they’re so few and far in-between. I hope that Shorefall and Locklands, these messages are stretched and expanded, but they were hammered home well with the solution in the finale.

Overall 6/7

Weighted: 6.12 (High Fantasy)

This was a wonderful book. There were some problems with it, of course, but it was a joy to read and had some truly ingenious twists and systems. I look forward to the next two books in the trilogy, and will be sure to pick them up once I’m through my burning to-read list. This has also made me want to go back and read his Divine Cities series.

I’ll be storing and sorting all my book reviews in a Google docs, found here! Right now it just has Foundryside, but I’ll try and go back to add the other books I’ve read.

Ahoy, there be spoilers ahead!

 

 

Here’s how these will work: I’ll rant for a while about anything in the book, so keep that in mind if you haven’t read it yet. The spoiler banner is for the entire book.

Gregor is the best. I loved his plotline of clashing moral and work-related duties, and how he has this intense need to bring justice to the world. I think it’s due to the lingering memories that have been wiped again and again because of the Scrived plate that keeps resurrecting him. I’m so excited to see where his character goes and how he finds redemption for his guilt.

Near the end of the book, Sancia uses a Scrived plate which can alter a thing’s gravity by providing it another mass (say, a hypothetical earth with 6 times earth’s mass). This obviously draws the object wearing the plate towards wherever the hypothetical mass is, and essentially allows them to fly. BUT, near the end of the book, Sancia sticks it to a building and tells the gravity plate that it is the object to affect, and tells her its gravity is essentially infinite.

This essentially makes a black hole for a very, very short period of time. It’s insane, and when you’ve been following the system, it makes perfect sense. I love those awesome, epic uses of magic systems that fit perfectly with their established rules. And we could have seen it coming!

I get the feeling that Clef is Crasedes, one of the ancient heirophants. (essentially masters of scriving that wiped themselves out) He was a great character, which I did not expect at the beginning.

I have other thoughts, but those are the big ones. Wonderful system, Gregor is the best, and I can’t wait to read more.

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