Dukerino

Princess of the Void ch 70 - Blood

Six Cycles Later

Grant looks out his window at the Imperial City. A horizon crowded with airlanes and towering buildings built upon buildings built upon more buildings. Great marble edifices and grand skybridges.

Somewhere in that building directly across from him, Sykora is giving an address to the rest of the Void Convocation. About her activity since their last meeting, and her imprisonment, and the annexation. Behind her on stage, he knows, are a group of Eqto...

Princess of the Void ch 69 - Emergency

Hroq practically sprints into the emergency emigrant station. He’s ready for a milling crowd, ready to throw elbows, but the path up to the line of clerks is clear.

“Flights out. We need one.” He finishes his run at the lip of a clerk’s desk. “I don’t know if the public ones are back or what but if we gotta do private I can pay.” He slaps a wad of cash onto the desk.

She was just staring into the air as he was approaching. Now she looks startled down at his desperate...

Princess of the Void ch 68 - Dance

Sykora cries in his arms that morning.

“I won’t be afraid,” she whispers, when her eyes finally dry. “I’ll get up and I won’t be afraid. I won’t be, I won’t be. I won’t be weak.”

“You can be weak in here. It’s okay. Fall to pieces and I’ll pick them up.” He strokes her hair. “You told me that once.”

A weak giggle. “You remember that?”

“Sure. I mean, I was drugged up and dryhumping you. But I’m a good listener.”

She feels ...

Princess of the Void ch 67 - Dawn

“Arms pop turn step bend tail step turn—shit.” Sykora’s graceful dance skitters to a halt. She shakes her head like there’s a fly buzzing around it and resets, breathing heavily.

“You’re jerky, Majesty,” Vora says. “Drop the left quarter turn. It’s too helter-skelter.”

“Noted, Majordomo.” Sykora bends into a forward fold and touches her toes, swaying back and forth to loosen up the muscles in her legs. “So it’s arms, pop, step, bend, tail.”

�...

Princess of the Void ch 66 - Lost

The first thing Ynaqi notices when she wakes up in the clinical-white room is—okay, the second thing she notices, because you can’t really discount those harsh lights that poked through the skin of her eyelids to wake her. Pale as slit-goggle tundra and bright enough to give you a goddamn headache.

The second thing she notices: no ache. Not in the head and not in the stomach. Not anywhere. Which is odd because last thing she remembered was the feeling of her life l...

Princess of the Void ch 65 - The Struggle

Tymar is given a roomy office within the temple of the omnidivine. The deaconess happily surrenders it with a gentle bribe and some ungentle insinuations. Grant wonders aloud to Sykora about whether they ought to keep hiding their operations from the eyes of the clergy, but she declares the skulduggery at an end. “The Prince of the Pike will order and the Pike will obey,” she says. “Simple as that.”

She’s finally allowing Grant out of their bedchamber, but she’s sticking to ...

Princess of the Void ch 64 - You're Home

The Black Pike’s gradual stretch across the horizon matches pace with the gradual widening of Ipqen-mek-Taqa’s eyes.

“How fucking big is this ship?” she breathes.

“Bit under two kilometers.” Ajax’s voice is flat, but Grant’s gotten good at telling when the marine’s grinning beneath that garnet glass. The physicist’s awe is bringing him no end of satisfaction.

“Eqt’s tits.” Ipqen deflates in her seat.

Grant pivots in his copilot's chai...

Princess of the Void vol 4 poll

Hello generous patrons!

We are nearing the end of Volume 3. Just a handful of chapters remain!

Volume 4 has a narrative that I'm pretty sure I know the direction of as far as the continuing development of Grant and Sykora. I'm interested in hearing what you guys would like to explore as far as the world-building aspect. Below are a few directions I've been thinking about, as well as the characters we'd probably see spotlit during those explorations. We may have room for multiple, ...

Princess of the Void ch 63 - music

Oorta’s team picks up on Grant’s jittery fervor; the Taiikari researchers work double-time to map the xhurr leaf into its chemical components. The results are back from the lab within the hour.

As Grant requested, they’ve cross-referenced it with Eqtoran blood samples, controlled against standard Taiikari blood and the synthesized stuff that the Pike carries for Maekyonite transfusions, just in case. They pull samples for every member of the village, whether they chew the leaf or...

Princess of the Void ch 62 - Leaf

The ventilated Eqtoran cruiser is too large and haphazard to bring into the hangar. They leash it to the outside of the post instead, where it hangs derelict in space, leaking its primitive fuel in slick rainbow ribbons that a hose sucks away into the depths of the station’s disposal tanks.

The wounded woman is floated in on a hovering gurney, eyes closed, breath shallow. “Hypovolemic shock,” Pentine reports. The private is one of the Pike’s most promising combat medics, to hear...

Princess of the Void ch 61 - Contact

“We’ll send word to the Pike immediately.” Oorta hurries in Grant’s steps as they enter the ready room, to a ripple of deep bows from white-clad researchers. “They can dispatch an interceptor on triple-burn and it’ll be here in minutes to blow them out of the sky.”

“No,” Grant says. “We’re not wiring the Pike. We don’t have time and they can’t depart Taiqan anyway. They swept in. If they find us, they only have to sweep out again, and we’re hosed.”

2025-05-23 17:58:50 +0000 UTC View Post

Princess of the Void ch 60 - Male

“It’s called a Gordie Howe hat trick,” Grant says. He’s getting the second canto under his fingers; talking while playing helps, he finds. “You get a goal, an assist, and a fight in the same game.”

Ipqen-mek-Taqa is holding up a sheaf of stapled pages translated from the Book of Journeying. Like every Eqtoran holy book, it’s in song. Grant’s spent a few hours getting used to Eqtoran notation, but it’s simple and intuitive, and he’s caught on quickly. It’s written f...

More character illustrations

In this round we've got Majordomo Vorakaia and the Countess and Count of Korak.

First pic of a Kovikan!! Huzzah!

As always, I'm open to suggestions on the characters you'd like to see next, noble patrons.

Princess of the Void ch 59 - Retrofit

The Book of Renewal is a slim volume in carnelian red. Its pages are dogeared and crinkled. Someone’s gone over it with a highlighter and pen, scrawling notes in the margins in a spidery hand. In the conference room, which has steadily reobtained the workday clutter that was cleared away for the previous visit, the listening post researchers huddle over it, murmuring and passing instruments over its quilted-cotton cover.

“The subtitle is Songs of the Coming Thaw.” Oorta g...

Hyax and Waian

It's been fun getting back into practice on this! I'll be back to my writing grind very soon. Just getting some reference images for the Black Pike's esteemed command group.

Dance Practice Sykora

I went and dusted off the ol' Apple Pencil to get some canon pics of the command group ready in order to get commissions of them. Most of them are gonna stay on Discord, I think (Join the discord!!!) but I was pleased with how this particular Sykora came out. Have a lil princess for your timelines, team!

Princess of the Void ch 58 - Renewal

The first day they have no luck. Even with Ipqen by their side, the translator needs only to say Tamuraq for whatever wary Eqtoran they’re communicating with to clam up and close off.

“Do you reckon there’s a different way we should go about this?” Grant conferences with Tymar outside the meetinghouse, in the artificial violet of the evening.

“Just be around them today, I think,” the cleric replies. “Just be present. We can’t blame them for being insular.�...

Princess of the Void ch 57 - Brother

Brigadier Hyax turns a heretofore unseen shade of purple when Sykora announces her intention to accompany Grant off the Pike.

“I’ll turn right around.” Sykora buttons the topmost fastener on her flight suit. “I just want to give him my goodbyes.”

“You can give him your goodbyes on the hangar deck,” Hyax says.

“I’ll hardly be in any danger.” Sykora rolls her eyes. “Arnak’s flying me. He threatened to resign his commission otherwise.”

Hyax’s a...

Princess of the Void ch 56 - Another way

Sykora steeples her fingers against the soft curve of her lower lip. “You’re asking me to do something against doctrine, aren’t you?”

“I’m not asking you to do anything. This is all me. I’m only asking you for permission. You’re the only one here who outranks me. Remember?” His knuckles brush her midsection. She leans into the touch. “I think there’s a way to reach them. I think there’s a different way to go about this, a way to get them to capitulate without hav...

Princess of the Void ch 55 - Moonshot

“People of the Eqtoran Republic.”

The voice from beyond the stars cuts through the Rivenland’s bridge vox. It’s grammatically perfect and smooth, and unmistakably alien. There’s no grit to its vowels, an uncanny softness to its trills. And there’s no music under it. No war drums, no pomp, no nothing. Ynaqi pops the hatch on her gunnery station. Tennek has frozen at his controls.

“An offer has been made for peace between our people. A place is kept for you as citizens...

Princess of the Void ch 54 - Ailov yu

Grant sidles up to his wife as she watches Waian storm off the command deck. “Chief Engineer’s kind of intense about the membrane, huh?”

“Let’s not get tetchy with her over it.” Sykora sighs. “It’s her job, after all. And she knows what happens when a membrane’s integrity fails. She was a specialist on a ZKP that broke up in an engagement with rebels on the north spin. Two hundred deaths. She floated in a vacsuit for three days, trying not to bleed out from her lacerat...

Princess of the Void ch 53 - War God

Ynaqi floats to the Rivenland’s cramped bridge deck and grips a handhold by the nav computer. No navigator today. War crew only. That’s her and Tennek and Suqen, who’s already at her missile banks, checking and re-checking and re-checking again.

Everyone has their rituals, Ynaqi guesses. She looks out at the huge splinter of dark metal that has lodged itself in her world’s orbit and wishes she had more of one.

Tennek is strapped into his captain’s chair. She nud...

Princess of the Void - Next side story poll

Hey gang! Okay, here's a sequel to the last poll, where it was expressed that additional PoVs might be something you're interested in. Starting in Volume 4, we are going to have some intermittent Sykora PoVs. I'm going to save them for big moments and certain situations (such as scenes where Grant might not be present).

It's crazy to think about but we're more than halfway through Volume 3 already. WOW, time flies. I'd like to take a mo at this point to think about whose PoV we're going...

Princess of the Void ch 52 - Show of Force

“We begin,” Hyax says, “with a show of force.”

She hits the trigger on the command deck table. The Eqtora system unfurls from its projector. Eqtora itself is so small in the three-dimensional star map. Like a little bauble, and not the massive world before them.

Grant’s view of the genuine article’s great blue span is marred, somewhat, by the ships. There are more of them than he can count, filling the digital windows around them like a dot matrix. Lumpen and cubic an...

Princess of the Void ch 51 - Welcome

“It’s some kind of misreading. It has to be.” Sqorvik stares at the readouts beside the stellar map. “Some sort of stellar interference showing electrostat where there shouldn’t be.”

“It’s accelerating, Sqor.” His partner is dialing a number on the observatory tower’s bulky cadmium-orange radiovox. “It’s fucking steering. Don’t play anything right now. All right? I got a call to make.”

“Not even quiet?” Sqorvik looks up from his console. Yq...

Princess of the Void ch 50 - Probe

On the first day:

The comet streaks across the crushed-velvet sky above Reueq, the largest landmass on Eqtora. It craters into the Southern Ice Sheet. Its flames boil the frigid ocean beneath. Its passage is marked by a sparsely populated meteorological outpost, manned by a husband, wife, and their keeper. The throuple’s instruments tell them the impossible.

They pile breathlessly from their skidship at the site of the crash. They’ve been beaten, to the great wound in the ice...

Princess of the Void PoV opinion poll

Hey folks! So we're about halfway through volume 3. As I start to cogitate on volume 4, I wanted to take a quick poll of the crowd.

When I first conceived of Princess of the Void, it was (unlike all my other books) a single PoV story from Grant Hyde's perspective. But over the course of the first couple of volumes' publication I've gotten a number of comments, DMs, et cetera, asking if I'd ever consider adding other perspectives. Ajax's little side-story was an experiment with that, whi...

The Love Song of Jaxy & Meena - pt 3

Their fourth date is on the agro level. Tea among the hydroponic hedge mazes and riotous blooms. He asks her about her family back on Aodok, her funny sister who’d visit sometimes.

“Her wife is some kind of big-deal recording industry exec,” she says. “They dropped a bundle on zygomatic encoding and now they’re on their second litter.”

“What about your brother? How’s he?”

“They fired him from the drydock and he had a breakdown,” she says. “He’s in a...

Princess of the Void ch 49 - This is Practice

The Princess of the Black Pike is hanging upside down. Grant’s hands tuck under her shoulders to keep her stable. Grant’s face is buried in her crotch. Grant’s airways are being constricted by her legs as they wrap in desperation around his head, calves crossed at the nape of his neck. Totally worth it. If he dies, he dies.

Sykora dangles desperately. “Ohmygod Grant—”

“Shhh, babe.” He kisses the flexing tendon of her inner thigh. “Hold on, now. Okay?”<...

The Love Song of Jaxy & Meena pt 2 - Perfect

A rush-ordered fleet of drones in various states of construction splay their metallic guts across the hangar floor. Sparks fire and rivet guns slam. Ajax watches the hangar crew skitter between workstations, calling and whistling. It’s nearly the end of shift for half the workers on the floor, and a carnival air has filled the hangar.

The recruits have been training in a ZKZ class hangar bay for a decacycle at least; Ajax shouldn’t be surprised at how well they’re integrating. But...