As Moishe walked around the park, speaking to the gathered people there, he realized that many of them were not from Cyrus’s Orientation.
It shouldn’t have surprised him; once he, Cyrus, and Christopher Smith had made their way through the buildings and gotten a better look at the crowd, Moishe could see there were hundreds of people milling about.
What united these people, instead of a shared Orientation experience, was the fact that they had all been in town for an internati...
2024-08-16 17:00:06 +0000 UTC
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Gravity sucked the bird and the butterfly straight down from a dramatic height.
They had been close to the mountain as the battle played out, but not close enough to land high on the mountainside when they fell.
A part of Adon wanted to worry about how he might land—human concerns that had still not completely faded yet, despite his rebirth as a butterfly.
He quickly suppressed that ridiculous feeling and instead focused on the pleasant touch of the wind. The air whipping ...
2024-08-15 03:30:31 +0000 UTC
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Adon felt a return to the status quo as soon as he pursued the Golden Eagle into the air.
Even though the eagle was wary, shooting looks in all directions as it rose into the sky, and even though it was wounded, with Adon’s spines sticking out of its body, the butterfly knew he was at a severe disadvantage as he pressed the fight.
He charged in and tackled the eagle with his Mana-reinforced body once again, and bounced off just as before. He tried getting to near point blank ran...
2024-08-15 03:28:23 +0000 UTC
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Moishe Rose reached out and touched the Skin Balloon.
It was the last minute of Orientation, and he knew that it was there for him, one of James’s creatures. He didn’t know to what purpose, yet. Wrapped around his other arm, Moishe’s tamed viper hissed at the strange monster—which the Skin Ballon thankfully ignored.
“It’s all right, Cecilia,” Moishe murmured in the low, soothing voice she liked.
His hand took a firm grip on the Skin Balloon, to ensure that they...
2024-08-14 17:00:08 +0000 UTC
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Author's Note: This is also an updated version of chapter 9. Changes are relatively minor. If you already read updated chapters 10 and 11, you probably don't need to read this.
James slept for a full eight hours, missing most of the day after the battle.
When he woke, Mina was lying next to him.
As he stirred, she rose up, left the room, and brought him a tray of food.
When did we get that? he wondered silently.
But he ate and quick...
2024-08-13 14:25:26 +0000 UTC
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Dave looked around the packed room.
He was surrounded by a crowd of people now, all waiting with rapt attention for the Fisher King to begin his speech.
Only Dave already knew at least something of what James was going to say.
Memories of the fateful night flashed through his mind again.
“Are you afraid to kill us, Dave? It’s the only way you’ll escape this place alive…”
He heard the words in the voice of the vicious thing that ha...
2024-08-13 04:06:40 +0000 UTC
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Author's Note: In response to some (frankly very logical) feedback, I rewrote certain parts of the story, to reflect that James would explain to his citizens a certain key piece of information about the aftermath of last book's battle. So the chapter (10) "Funeral Oration" has been rewritten and broken up, and the preceding chapter, "Casualties of War," was altered too.
The day after the last of the coma patients woke up, they held the funeral.
There were a couple...
2024-08-13 04:05:28 +0000 UTC
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Mina felt a harsh tension impose itself on the air in the community center.
She saw how Cyrus locked eyes with James, and she realized suddenly that Cyrus was using an ability of some sort. In the fraction of a second before some unknown disaster befell them, she opened her mouth—and it was too late.
Cyrus’s eyes closed, and his body seemed to go limp even as he remained on his feet.
James’s eyes glowed a bright golden color, as it had in the forest on the night they k...
2024-08-12 01:11:19 +0000 UTC
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Adon fluttered in the air just above the mountainside, helplessly staring down at the gap in the rock face that led into the Golden Eagle’s eyrie.
He was still processing.
What just happened? Did my Mana ball just miss? No, I know that didn’t happen. I was right behind the eagle. And the way it looked—it looked like the energy ball just got blown off course somehow. A freak gust of wind? That I didn’t feel on my body at all? Sensing the attack can’t explain this. Tha...
2024-08-10 17:01:55 +0000 UTC
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As Adon held the brown feather in the air, thinking about how he might move it through the air with his Telekinesis, a shape emerged from the crag he had been watching.
In an instant, his focus left the feather and locked in on the brown shape.
The Golden Eagle was back.
A single, powerful wingbeat took it to the skies above Adon. As the butterfly instinctively began flying after it, slightly stunned at the sight of the majestic creature, the wind that the eagle left in its ...
2024-08-10 16:57:41 +0000 UTC
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James found himself suddenly in an unfamiliar ecosystem.
The first thing that struck his eyes was that it was a vast, open space, and brightly lit, as if there was no cloud cover—and little distance—between himself and the sun.
Then he blinked, and he realized the reason why there was no cloud cover.
All around him was an open blue sky—he had noticed that at first glance. And he stood atop a cloud.
Somehow, what should have been only a loose gathering of water va...
2024-08-07 13:55:14 +0000 UTC
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Author's Note: I'm still deciding where to put this interlude, and it may need more edits. I just wrote it, but it should definitely come well before it's currently placed. Open to suggestions as to order...
The Spider walked across the gaps between worlds.
His long, supple limbs strode across the void with practiced ease and self-assurance, finding footholds in places where nothing perceptible existed.
Along the way, he grabbed useful items and tucked...
2024-08-07 02:14:44 +0000 UTC
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The butterfly came out of his feeding trance only to discover that he had consumed almost everything and settled himself on a tree branch after doing so.
His trance must have bled into torpor.
Aside from flecks of dried blood that he had to kick off his feet, little visual sign remained that he had killed and eaten the eagle-owl and consumed its prey, the pine marten. The animals were reduced to bits of feathers and fur respectively, held together by a thin layer of mostly-intact ...
2024-08-06 01:10:52 +0000 UTC
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As the religious folk filed out to let the King and his council confer, James smiled to himself and rose from his seat.
He moved from the central chair to walk around the edge of the table, trying to make it look like he was pacing. When he thought he was far enough away from the council members not to be heard, he whispered to Hester.
“All right, you can finish that thought,” he said.
“Lord Anansi thinks that you should trust the masked man,” Hester said. “‘At l...
2024-08-03 04:31:08 +0000 UTC
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The dinner conversation was mostly light and relaxing, a welcome break from Rosslyn’s near interrogation by her father in the chapel.
The spiders gave the King an eager update on their progress with Mana, and Rosslyn’s father showed his usual genteel manners despite the worries that Rosslyn knew boiled beneath the surface.
The spiders ate their raw poultry, sickeningly slurped after being liquefied, while Rosslyn and her father had their usual multicourse meal.
Just as s...
2024-08-03 04:03:32 +0000 UTC
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The third day after the masked man’s arrival began.
James and Mina fed their children and descended from the royal apartment for a council meeting.
Today was the day that they were to address the religious group’s continued residence.
The previous evening, James had requested Cyrus’s presence.
[Cyrus, I hope you and your group have had enough time to come to a decision on whether you want to stay or go. Tomorrow, we are having a special council meeting to...
2024-07-31 22:21:45 +0000 UTC
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After Rosslyn and the spiders saw Adon take off and begin his open air flight practice, Rosslyn carried the spiders back inside.
She spent another hour working with them, overseeing their magical practice.
She tried to be encouraging, though it naturally felt like somewhat slow going after having witnessed Adon’s exploits. While the butterfly had somehow gotten the basics of fire magic down in a matter of hours, the spiders demonstrated a much more normal pace of development.
2024-07-31 16:00:10 +0000 UTC
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“Welcome back to my laboratory, son,” Zora said, smiling brightly. She turned to Mina and added, “Good to see you, too, Mina!”
Mina offered her usual small smile in return. Zora thought she looked a bit nervous, though that wasn’t out of the ordinary in her experience.
I can have that effect at times. Worse now than it was before all this System stuff. Whoops…
James and Mina followed Zora into her workspace. She led them down the same dark path she had t...
2024-07-29 16:47:28 +0000 UTC
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The great bird’s body partially unfolded as it yanked up on the pine marten’s tail.
But despite what it had been doing underground before, the pine marten had become fully focused on the surface once it felt a firm grip on its tail. It must have dug in its claws to resist the bird’s pull, because its body only barely shifted with the bird’s exertion.
As the creature moved, Adon saw two horn-like feather protrusions sticking out atop the bird’s head. The first thing he kn...
2024-07-29 15:05:45 +0000 UTC
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On the morning after the martial arts demonstration, Mina accompanied James to a big meeting on a subject close to his heart.
He seems more serious than usual, she thought as they walked in silence to the community center, where the meeting was to take place.
She knew that as far as James was concerned, this would be the first major new initiative that he had set in motion since he established the basic necessities within the Fisher Kingdom: food, water, shelter, and secu...
2024-07-27 01:59:46 +0000 UTC
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Adon used Color Change to become effectively invisible once more.
He knew that in the open air, a massive bird like the Golden Eagle would have a speed and power advantage over him. If he was to stand a chance, in the event that they actually fought, it would have to be by using his unique gifts—in particular his nigh-invisibility.
With that done, he rose through the sky, testing the air currents with his body, until he found an altitude where the winds felt so powerful that the...
2024-07-26 19:18:38 +0000 UTC
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Adon looked around uncomfortably for another minute or two before he thought about next steps.
He felt like he was in the middle of a crime scene. The hollowed out, feathered husks of his prey were the evidence of his butchery, and he had the ridiculous impulse to hide or bury the bee-eaters’ remains.
That’s silly, he told himself. You’re part of the circle of nature. The decomposer animals will be out in force later to clean up after you. Relax. It’s time to ...
2024-07-24 21:38:44 +0000 UTC
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Leo DaSilva stepped forward perhaps a little more eagerly than he should have.
He had always enjoyed fighting as a boy. In the neighborhood where he grew up, you had to be good at it. And he rumbled with the worst of them.
He had been in principals’ offices and detention over and over, expelled from the first couple of schools his parents enrolled him in. The same thing happened in his last, subpar school, except that the teachers there had seen boys like Leo a thousand times. T...
2024-07-24 17:00:07 +0000 UTC
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The bird’s species name displayed for Adon. It was surprisingly far from intimidating.
Rainbow Bee-Eater (Male)
Well, the first part of the name makes sense. Does this guy realize I’m not a bee?
But if the bird knew what sort of creature it was dealing with, Adon could tell that it did not care. Adon had hoped that the name of the bird’s species would give it some clue as to his next steps. Instead, the name was totally unfamiliar to him, and ...
2024-07-23 21:36:29 +0000 UTC
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“I don’t know what he meant about that either,” James said for the third time. It was just as true this time as it had been the previous two.
It was after they had put the children to sleep, after Mina had fed James Junior. The husband and wife were rehashing James’s conversation with the “Unknown Entity” who called himself Bear.
Bear’s obvious knowledge of their situation meant that James had to take what the masked figure said seriously, but the advice was vague, e...
2024-07-22 23:37:25 +0000 UTC
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Adon’s torpor the rest of the evening was slightly uneasy.
He was awakened much more easily by subsequent stimuli than he had been by the moth.
The pitter-patter of raindrops falling softly for around a quarter of an hour. The soft scamper of a weasel across the small number of dead leaves that had already fallen to the forest floor. A handful of Little Brown Bats flying through the air, not even aware of Adon’s presence and giving his tree a generous berth.
Each time, h...
2024-07-20 21:27:55 +0000 UTC
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Mina and James were walking back from the service when they came upon the unknown.
Others, including Yulia, were still there, eating and talking. When Mina planned the service, she had asked several people with the Cook Job, including Alba, to prepare a dinner to follow the funeral.
But James had decided to make an early exit, and he expressed the preference to Mina tersely.
“I think we should go now,” he had said quietly.
Observing that her husband seemed a bit di...
2024-07-19 22:06:07 +0000 UTC
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This is an old version of this chapter.
Dave looked around the packed room.
He was surrounded by a crowd of people, all waiting with rapt attention for the Fisher King to emerge from behind the stage. Yet he felt alone, uniquely burdened.
How many other people in the audience could say that they personally were responsible for one of the coffins at the front of the room?
He could try to tell himself he’d had no choice, but that hadn’t worked any of...
2024-07-18 16:07:20 +0000 UTC
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Yes, this is definitely familiar.
Adon floated in a wide circle above the palace and saw the now-tiny-looking building from several different angles. It was while he was wheeling around in the air that he looked down from a certain position that changed his perspective. It was as if a gear suddenly clicked into place and gave him access to the specific memory that made the view feel familiar.
I flew above this place as a dragon, he remembered. The image floated i...
2024-07-17 17:00:07 +0000 UTC
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As Adon shared his feelings with Rosslyn, he felt anxiety boil up within him alongside shame.
He had never openly told anyone how he had felt about his brother and sister in his previous life before.
How inferior. Like an insect or something, ironically.
On the one hand, it was a relief that Rosslyn seemed to understand his feelings, somehow, despite clearly—at least from what Adon had observed—being her father’s favorite child, and incredibly gifted at the things her ...
2024-07-16 01:17:18 +0000 UTC
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