September 2021 Short Story Vote

Time for the first official short story selection vote! Pick the story you like, and I'll write whichever one gets the most votes! (If, for plot/character/continuity reasons, I can't make the first story work, I'll write the second choice.)

All your options this month are Mage Errant stories, but you'll get other options in the future! Some of the stories are marked as science puzzle stories, in the vein of Fool's Silver or To Secure a Vault, but given how heavily science-inspired my writing is, almost all the stories are science-inspired to one degree or another.

You'll also get two other options: "Surprise us!" and "None of the Above". If "Surprise Us!" wins, I'll write a totally different short story than any on the list to surprise you all with. If "None of the Above" wins, I'll give you a whole new list to vote on. (For time management reasons, "None of the Above" won't reappear on the second list. Likewise for time management reasons, if "None of the Above" takes second place, and I can't make the first short story work for whatever reason, I'll skip to the third place option instead.)

• The Battle of Lothal: Ampioc defends Lothal against two Havathi great powers, as mentioned in book 5.
  
  
• The Castle Thief: Solintus the Patient is ironically named, because he’s anything but patient. What the colossal great power wants, he gets, and he’s sent his servant Lane to the frigid karst city of Calo’s Watch to negotiate the purchase of the city’s fortress. Lane has a week until Solintus arrives, and one way or another, their master is taking the castle away with him. Something is rotten in Calo’s Watch, though, and it’s not the peat mines.
  
  
• Glory Days: Three Helicotan Lords Citizen tell stories around a campfire, as they rest on their hunt for a notorious face-changing outlaw. Set during the glory days of Helicote.
  
  
• The Shape of Memory: Drysa of the Vault is summoned to investigate the theft of a mysterious substance from a Tsarnassan military alchemical lab— and no one gets to leave the lab until the theft is solved. To make things worse, no one wants to tell Drysa exactly what was stolen. (Science puzzle story.)
  
  
• Who Killed Seltivor Cloudscale?: In the waning days of the Ithonian Empire, bandits and rogue great powers swarm like flies in its provinces. Seltivor Cloudscale was one of the worst of the lot, performing daring raids deep into the heart of the Ithonian Empire, and earning himself a bounty large enough to buy a small city. When the dragon is finally slain, though, there’s one problem:
  
  No less than a dozen mages claim to have been the true dragonslayer.
  
  
• The Lich Days of Summer: The construction of a lich demense is an undertaking of years, even decades, requiring a fortune in labor, alchemical reagents, enchantments, and expert advice. So when a brash young mage named Zophor singlehandedly creates his own demesne in the Ylosa Delta, setting himself up as a much needed trade port and ship layover, he takes the whole continent by pleasant surprise. There’s just one problem: Zophor isn’t the only great power contending for rule of the Ylosa Delta, and the kraken pirate queen Salgos Deep-Spear and her fleet have no intention of losing territory to some upstart tree mage. (Science puzzle story.)