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Missed Update Notice

Hi all,

I'm in the middle of some mental health struggles; relatedly, it's midterm season and I'm super overwhelmed with my schoolwork.  Apparently it's very difficult to write in this state.  Tempest chapter 5 is about 70% complete, but I don't think I'm going to have it ready until midterms are over next week.

So this is official notice that last week's update and this week's update will be skipped.  Chapter 5 is tentatively scheduled released for October 15 for p...

3.4 - Dolphins are Assholes

So no shit, there I was, standing in the middle of the ocean with my commanding officer's severed head, and a dolphin had just speargunned a demigod in the back.

And now it was laughing at me.

Comm translation isn't perfect, but even though it struggles with stuff like with puns and music, it's still mostly reliable… between humans.

Comm translation works by artificially establishing a link between the speaker's intentions and the sound of the speech, bypassing normal proc...

3.3 - I Don't Wanna Fight a Mermaid

The dockworkers told us the Fool's Errand had left with the morning tide. They'd been scheduled to stay a few more days, but Erid had skipped out on her docking contract, leaving her deposit behind.

Abby had a quick conversation with the dockmaster and re-emerged a few coins lighter. The monetary cost wasn't even worth mentioning—Val had worked something out with Feril's Law of Nonconservation to duplicate an arbitrary amount of drobol.

It works like this: from a certain point o...

3.2 - Moonlit Parley

Of all the times someone tried to kill me, this one easily took second place.  The only thing better than fending off an enraged sea captain was what I did to piss off Sarah Melbrook at her seventh birthday party.  You had it coming, you little bitch.

Unlike Sarah Melbrook, Captain Erid had a sword and some inconvenient convictions about where it was supposed to go.  We’d have to agree to disagree on that—I just got this body, I didn’t want scratches on it.  I ...

3.1 - Interlude: Veles

The spear was old.

The haft might have disintegrated by now, if it had been allowed to age true.  It was self-translated nightly to maintain its condition.

Silver oak.  Extinct, and then re-engineered back to a viable growing population.  The head was early steel, set with twisting patterns, interlocking like chains or knots.  Scratches lined it, use markings, sharpening markings, and a brown filled the deepest scratches, the furthest indents in the design. &nb...

Director's Commentary: Kives, Predestination and Divine Psychology

Hey everyone, this is the first of the promised behind-the-scenes posts for the interim period between Lancer and Tempest.  Unfortunately, finals week ran late—right into my family vacation—so this will also be the last post before Tempest drops on Saturday.  Let me know if there are other topics you really wanted me to cover; I can probably slip one or two of them in while Tempest is ongoing.

In these posts, I'm going to do a brief over...

Book 3 scheduling information

Hey, everyone!  At time of posting, the last chapter of Lancer just went up on Patreon, and will be posting to RR next week.  That means it's time to talk about next steps!

1.  End-of-Book-2 AMA

To celebrate the end of book 2, I'm doing an AMA on the Godslayers discord.  That's happening on Saturday, July 29, something like 3pm eastern time.

Feel free to ask questions about the serial that you don't feel...

Lancer — Epilogue

I dreamed about the gods again as my comm ferried my soul back to the Ragnar.

The dream was always the same.  They were ragged, bleeding, hungry.  I saw a rabid fox with rotting teeth—a vengeful warrior with a broken sword—a hollow-eyed girl, bleeding from a gash in her neck—a spider—a leper—and above them all, a matriarch: contemptuous, sadistic, and furious.

I surveyed them all and I knew that they could die.

Ageless columns of stone stretched ...

Coda: Wake

The world cracked.

Cades had seen a broken pane of glass once.  The craftworkers of Vitareas were ingenious and thorough; the glass had been coated in translucent lacquer to prevent total fragmentation.  It was like a spiderweb, but the clean lines of the world became jagged and disjointed in its cracks, and if it met your skin, you bled.

The weight of his sins had driven him to his knees.  He stared up at his Empress, who had withstood the spiritual pressu...

Lancer 2.50

The problem with the pentathlon events was that it was really annoying to cheat.

An Eifni deicide team is a precision instrument designed for slow insinuation into a culture.  We are the boiling pot, introducing change so slowly you don’t notice before it’s too late.  You don’t know you’ve been visited by godslayers until you wake up three hundred years later and no one believes in the old religions anymore.

Even the heaviest ship will turn if given a slight push...

Lancer 2.49

Twas the night before Sportsmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring except for—

“You motherfucking Silence cultists, I swear to Darwin,” I said, waving Lilith at the fuzzy blur that my MDO said was an enemy.  “What did you think was going to happen here?”

The blur didn’t move.

“I can’t fucking hear you,” I sighed.  “Come on.  Is it a knife?  Are you holding a knife?  I’ve got reach on you, hiding isn’t goin...

Lancer 2.48

By midmorning the next day, the boys caught sight of the city walls.  The commander had suited up in formal military dress, which was her custom when preparing for a deicide strike.  I’d never seen her do it myself—that little op in Salaphi didn’t count—but Markus had told me before.

The Eifni Organization’s formal uniform was multilayered, a tunic-like long belted shirt over slacks.  Over all that was a hakmir, a sleeved ankle-length outer garment half...

Lancer 2.47

Abby raced through the midnight streets of Bulcephine like a ghost.  Her ethertech boots made no sound as she swept over the cobblestones, translating the noise into conceptual energy and storing it in the force batteries that powered her exosuit.

She wasn’t conceptually undetectable—the technology to completely obscure your presence had to be built into your actual soul, like mine was—but a hundred and fifty years of infiltration experience made up for that.  It was the...

Lancer 2.46

The benefit of taking it slow over the last week was that the commander had thoroughly probed the city’s defenses—etheric and otherwise—with the ship’s sensors.  We had a good idea of what we’d be facing from this end, but the walls represented enough of a barrier that our intel on the other side was limited.

The etheric defenses themselves were grand and intricate; no human had wrought these.  There couldn’t be any ambiguity about that; pre-ethertech civilizations...

Lancer 2.45

We were definitely gonna need Val to program a moirascope filter for “giant sea monster ambush” when he got here.  If this happened a third time, the commander might turn the car around and go home as a matter of honor.

Our immediate situation wasn’t great.  We’d just exploded enough octopus meat to stock every sushi restaurant in Japan for about eight years, and they probably heard the boom all the way back in Vitareas.  There’s no way they missed that over in ...

Lancer 2.44

They’d only posted one Oathkeeper tonight.  She was hanging out on the south wall, right next to Roel’s bedroom.  I could handle one Oathkeeper.  If I saved the cloak until I got close, it’d limit the time they had to respond with their stupid little dowsing rod.

Think things through.

It wouldn’t work, would it?

They definitely had the Lilith detector on the premises.  That meant it was either with the lady outside of Roel’s window, or ...

Lancer 2.43

Lirian’s appearance made everyone jump—one of the Jeneretes negotiators actually screamed.  From the smirk on her face, she’d absolutely intended it that way.

Her time in the Oathkeepers’ custody clearly hadn’t been too hard on her; her dress was a pristine number on par with anything sported by the guests in the next room and not one hair was out of place.  There was a brief pause as we all oriented to her dramatic entrance.  She pushed off the wall, flicking b...

Lancer 2.42

Morning dawned on judgment day.  The Vitares estate was boiling over with activity, the staff—bondsmen, I corrected myself—scurrying every which way, carrying supplies and decorations.  I imagined the Jeneretes estate must have looked the same way in the hours preceding the Starlight Ball my first night on the town.

We’d decided to show off the virtues of our House another way.  An ornate fountain had been assembled in the middle of the courtyard; they were currentl...

Lancer 2.41

“Merisites?  You’re sure?”

Roel’s face was intent.  My comm easily picked up the skepticism she couldn’t keep off her face—classic conduit theory, embodied ether reacts more strongly.  Kuril was in obvious pain; Bofa was inwardly uncertain, but outwardly presented the reserve that Estheni men were supposed to cultivate.

“I’m sure that Cades is sure,” I said.  “We’ll have to make a call on what that means.”

“A truth of the eyes,�...

Interlude: Severance

Kuril was in a bad mood, and Roel almost regretted that she was about to make it worse.  Almost.  But the blade was descending and they had precious little time to get out of the way.

“I’m busy,” Kuril said without looking up from her desk.

Bofa stopped pushing Roel.  “If it’s not a good time—”

“No,” Roel said with finality.  “Kuril, we need to talk now.”

“We can talk at dinner.  The Jeneretes—”

“Can wait. &n...

Lancer 2.40

The Renathion had come and gone.  Markus won his third set of laurels, our improvised alliance with the Voranetti finally pushing him past his sudden unpopularity.  We were all politely ignoring that they’d been the cause of that in the first place, but that was the price you paid for being of grace in the Estheni empire.

Unless you were Kuril, of course.  My adoptive mom was holding it together in public, but in private she really let it fly whenever the Voranetti came...

Lancer 2.39

Content notice: there's some sex-shaming in this chapter.  As always, the perspectives expressed by Godslayers characters are theirs alone.

*****

I was going to pulse Roel in a minute.  Honest.  It had just been a long day.

Running my own op was emotionally exhausting.  When I was following the commander’s orders I could just focus on doing my job, but being in charge of everything was a whole different ball game.

Back home I would have...

Lancer 2.38

The Estheni didn’t just have business meetings and leave.  That would be rude!  It would imply they cared about business but not about neighborliness, and what self-respecting graced would honor Varas but reject Gamal?

It wasn’t like we were all pretending business wasn’t the point of the visit—although I could see Veleans pulling something like that—but you couldn’t let it be the only point or you were a bad host.  So we adjourned from the meeting ro...

Lancer 2.37

You know how some rich people just, like, don’t live in fancy houses?  Which, you know, kinda makes sense.  Houses are freaking expensive.  I always thought if I got rich someday, I’d live in a normal house and save a bunch of money.

Anyways, the Voranetti were not that kind of rich people.  They were the other kind, whose builders had wandered past the intersection of Extravagant and Loaded to settle on Wealthier Than You Boulevard.  I didn’t eve...

Lancer 2.36

I gotta admit, I got goosebumps when Abby dropped that line about cutting heaven and earth.  I released a slow breath.

“The skill you will learn tonight is called ‘Growing the Mountain from the Roots,’” Abby said.  In Velean it was only three syllables, ak ha var.  “It is an extension of the blade-lords’ discoveries about the self.  It is applicable both to honing your true self and to enlivening the cover identities that we adopt in our line of ...

Lancer 2.35

I followed Bofa and Roel as they left the meeting.  At a distance, of course.  I walked casually, greeting the staff as I passed them but staying out of sight of my quarry.  Eifni had these sick ether-linked goggles that could show you where your target’s attention was pointed, but I didn’t have any on me, so I was just falling back on my Academy training for this.  It was pretty easy mode—Bofa was blocking Roel’s line of sight, and Roel was commanding his attentio...

The story so far

It's been awhile since the last chapter, so this post is intended as a catch-up.  If you're a future binge-reader, you probably don't need to read this.  I hope the internet is nicer in your time.  For everyone stuck in the present, here's your refresher!

SPOILERS UP TO LANCER 2.34!

The Team

Our heroine(?) Lilith is a newbie godslayer on her first non-probationary mission to a planet called Theria.  She works for the Eifn...

Update: Billing Notice and Refunds

Hey everyone,

Patreon doesn't allow continuous pausing of billing.  It pauses for thirty days and then you have to manually re-pause it again.  And it looks like between the November pause ending and the December pause starting, Patreon charged a bunch of you.  This is exactly the kind of situation I'm hoping to avoid in the future.

Since I didn't intend to charge anyone until updates resumed, I'm refunding everyone charged this way.  

State of the Serial: December 2022

Welcome to the end of hiatus!  There's a bunch of stuff to cover, so I'll try to be concise.

1.  Godslayers is resuming this month.  

For Patreon, the first update will be Tuesday, December 13.  Since everyone probably forgot what was going on, I will release a summary of the current plot before the chapter goes up.  That will take the form of a publicly available post on Patreon.  Billing will remain...

State of the Serial: November

Hey everyone,

Just an update to keep y'all in the loop.  My break has been good, my life's in much better shape, and I'm working on Godslayers again.  I was supposed to be prepping for NaNo, but that was not a wise decision, so all of my writing time is going toward the serial instead.  My plan is to try to finish Book 2 (which is still on track to be 50 chapters total) this year.  Updates will resume when the book is done; billing will remain paused until then. &nbs...