tobiasbegley

The Effaced: Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Alyphize is a Demonic Heir.” I told Haidya, before turning to Kelly and asking him a question.

“How much do you know about Demonic Thrones?” 

“There are eleven and the realm of demons is known as the Fallen Void.” 

“Eleven main ones,” Hadiya interjected. “Lots of minor ones. Then there’s the two Sundered Thrones, but that’s… Off topic.” 

“Right,” I said. “So a Throne is the title for the strongest demon of whatever soul-a...

The Third Gate: Chapter Thirty-One

When we arrived at where Dusk had been digging, I noticed something a bit strange. 

“Why is Dusk’s… Primes, there’s no way to say this and it not sound weird. But why – how – has she dug so deep?” 

Though visually, she didn’t seem to have dug much deeper than Kene had, volume was always hard to estimate. Still, looking over the piles of soil that she’d dredged up, there was a good bit more than the piles Kene had. 

“The gates,” Meadow sai...

On the boat, what does Malachi train?

He's got a few days on the boat before he gets home, so what is he going to focus on training?

The Third Gate: Chapter Thirty

As it turned out, setting up a permanent teleportation platform in a random park was strictly against city law, which was… Frankly, completely reasonable. It sucked a bit to have to take it down, after I’d just spent so much mana on creating the platform, but since I was already going to have to do it almost forty more times anyhow, what was two more? 

I tracked down Kater to ask about the possibility of setting one up inside the sanctuary. 

I would have preferred Th...

The Third Gate: Chapter Twenty-Nine

I flicked my fingers and reached into Dusk’s realm, summoning a pen into my hand. A few days before, I’d knocked a pen behind a desk, and I hadn’t put it back because now I remembered knocking it back there, and if I put it away, I’d forget where I’d put it, but now I’d have to try and remember that I’d called it to my hand and put it back away. That was going to be annoying. 

I signed the contract and pushed it back over to Orykson. 

“Just… don’t do ...

The Effaced: Chapter Twenty-Seven

As Hadiya and I floated through the skylanes and moved towards where we’d left the automobile, I worked on my wounds. 

I wasn’t a doctor or even a field nurse, but I’d had to learn a few tricks in the arena, and I was using one of them now as I unwove thin threads of metal and stitched together the cuts that my false copy had left. 

“Let’s hide in one of those buildings,” Hadiya said, pointing to one of the slightly rundown warehouses on the mountain that was...

The Effaced: Chapter Twenty-Six

The Arenamaster rounded the corner of the far end of the hall, about twenty paces behind Fake-Mist. She had a glowing red orb over one shoulder, and flows of red and blue light were streaming into, or maybe out of, the orb, connecting to each of the dead bodies in the hall. 

She hadn’t summoned Alyphize, but I knew the demon would be watching through the Arenamaster’s eyes. 

I was glad that I had split my focus, as I allowed my panic and dark thoughts to fill one sid...

Quick, and Large, Update!

Hey, hopefully this should be nothing, but there's a ton of severe weather where I live, and it's caused me to have to evacuate. I've got a hotel, and I should be okay, as well as my family, but running around like crazy and packing to leave means I've struggled to write a lot.

The next two chapters of the Effaced are done and scheduled, but there may be a delay in chapters for Mana Mirror or for the Effaced next week as I'm forced to catch up.

Thanks for your understanding!

The Effaced: Chapter Twenty-Five

As the explosion rocked the hall and Hadiya and I were thrown to the ground, I immediately started shaping my aura around me, but while I was fast, I wasn’t fast enough to outpace an explosion. Still, as I rolled to my feet, I was already shifting the weave of my shirt into the most protective one I could manage with only my shirt. A half a second later, I grabbed metal from all around the room, fed it into the into the crude knife that I’d made from Horse’s slagged gun, and shaped it i...

The Third Gate: Chapter Twenty-Eight

The next several days passed peacefully enough. I fed mana into Dawn each day, and she was slowly growing stronger. Dusk took a shine to her sister, and often fed the little dragon some of her own power. They weren’t quite bonded in the same way I was to each of them, but a strange sort of occurrence did begin to happen in Dusk’s realm as Dawn grew.

The silver flame that was the sun in Dusk’s world was in a state of near-perpetual setting, though it seemed to glow brighter or soft...

Vote Number Two

Does Dawn accept the feeling of trust and companionship with Dusk and Malachi? Or does she take Octavian up on his offer to sever their bond?

Vote Numer One And A Voting Update!

While there are a few major votes that are still yet to come, like the focus(es) that Malachi is going to take his death gate, which of the three sepulchers they're going to dive first, and that sort of thing, I want to give all of my voting tier patrons a warning that we're reaching the part of the story where Malachi's foundation and his path is quickly becoming fairly firmly established.

What this means is that votes will slow down. They won't stop - I guarantee at least one vote a ...

The Third Gate: Chapter Twenty-Seven

It took us the better part of an hour to completely regroup, and to my surprise, the last one that we were able to find was Meadow. She was standing over the bog, leaning on her staff, gazing into several shards of what seemed to be crystal, and felt like incredibly intense mana that was even more unusual than it was intense, with aspects of mental, knowledge, death, and other things that still didn’t feel like anything I knew.

She looked up, her eyes landing on the spirit dragon that...

The Third Gate: Chapter Twenty-Six

I focused and extended a tendril of spatial mana into the spirit dragon, then reached within me to where I could still feel the last empty space that needed to be filled. I channeled it through the bond, and the tiny spirit dragon looked at me, fear in its eyes.

I could feel its heartbeat against my mana senses, weak and faint. It wasn’t a heartbeat in the sense I was used to, energy pulsing through the heart, but it was there, a thin buzzing against my mana senses, and it was fading ...

The Effaced: Chapter Twenty-Four

“I’m booooooorrrrrrreeeeeeeddddddd,” Kelly whined, flopping his head against the pillow of the chair. 

He had really expected that staying in a magical laboratory full of experimental magical stuff was going to be fun and cool, but instead it was incredibly boring. He’d walked around the facility already and looked into all of the rooms that had windows to allow for entry. Rhys had lectured him about some, and some of the researchers had been happy to talk about their work,...

The Effaced: Chapter Twenty-Three

The White Rooms territory looked like any other part of the undercity, at least at first. The moment the White Rooms themselves appeared, it became obvious. 

I wasn’t sure how White Lily had managed it, but the White Rooms were one of the more impressive spots in the underground. Much like the arena had come from a sunken and converted, well, arena, the White Rooms had originally been a hospital, a century or two ago, before it had sunken into the ash and muck. 

White ...

The Third Gate: Chapter Twenty-Five

So, I wouldn’t normally do this, but this is an instance where the vote was tied, and in those cases, I like to try and roll for the distinct result, but include something of the other path as well.

Given that this was also a vote where the options were somewhat obscured, we’re doing something of a… runoff round… you could say. The timing is going to be pretty cramped, so if you don't get to vote on it, I do apologize. I just can only write so ...