philtucker

IGS #4, Chapter 51

The Nightmare Lady

The tenebrite gave them no more problems.

Instead, it coursed ahead like an eager hound, surprisingly agile on its tentacles, hauling itself across the ground and maneuvering over rocks and outcroppings with liquid ease. Its crown of golden eyes took in everything at once, but the Nightmare Lady felt their focus upon her especially.

It didn’t deign to talk to her, though.

Simply led her and Nox deeper, ever...

IGS #4, Chapter 50

Jova

There were just too many of them.

It wasn’t a question of fury. She had plenty of that. Willpower. That was endless. She tore boulders from the quarried ground, flung them, directed them, allowed her power to do the rest. Her will was made manifest in the heavens as the rocks and shards and fragments spun and sheared and sliced and crushed the Silverines—but there were just too many.

For a moment there, however, she’d thou...

IGS #4, Chapter 49

Leonis

The hour was upon them. From outside the temple came the sound of voices, hundreds, thousands of people awaiting his emergence. The world was inhaling, drawing him forth, demanding he appear and prove himself equal to the moment.

All his struggles. His sacrifices. The wash of blood so many soldiers had expended upon the earth in his name, for his glory, for his immortality. All of it culminating in this moment, this hour, his hour, ...

IGS #4, Chapter 48

Leonis

They encountered resistance on their third day out.

All joy was gone from the expedition. The nascent camaraderie, the humor around the campfires, the sense of hope and exhilaration.

What speared toward the Tomb of Sadness now was a crew of grim, focused Great Souls who were supremely aware of the cost they’d already paid. The cost they might yet pay. They kept double watch. Jova entombed the crippled Philosopher within a sh...

IGS #4, Chapter 47 (Revision)

[This Chapter will appear after Chapter 46, wherein Scorio is thrust into the Cube's Gauntlet and initially fails to fight off the blockhead . A new edit introduced during his first exchange with Anseline is the revelation that Myla's real name is 'Fionna'; Myla, it turns out, is an assumed identity. Here is Chapter 47, following Scorio's own, from her POV.]

Fionna

It wasn’t fair.

She’d never asked for any of this...

IGS #4, Chapter 46 (@Gambit asked for a bonus)

Scorio

Scorio exhaled slowly, finding his center, his control. If this was indeed a Gauntlet run, then he had time. Death was assured, certainly, but that meant he could learn, adapt, get better at whatever challenge was coming his way.

Unlike most Great Souls, he’d learned not to fear death in the Gauntlet. His time with Leonis, Lianshi, and Naomi back in the Old Academy had taught him that.

It might hurt. It might hurt terribly. ...

IGS #4, Chapter 45

Scorio

How often had he been here?

How many times had he found himself flinging himself into the unknown, without much of a plan, deprived of allies, alone, and pitting himself against all of Hell?

Despite the growing exhaustion, Scorio flew on, resolute, grim, his mindset barbaric, savage. For days they’d been flying, Myla occasionally passing forward one of her waterskins. At times she fell asleep upon his back, but never so deep...

IGS #4, Chapter 44

Dameon

Hospitality was not one of the Silverines’ strong suites. Never had been. But Dameon had never spent quite this much time simply sitting to one side watching them at play.

In previous lives, sure, he’d had plenty of interactions. But those had usually been surgical, either fighting his way south to the Lustrous Maria or, obviously, that one momentous life when he’d reached Imperator and helped construct the Red Road.

But...

IGS #4, Chapter 43

Leonis

Jova led the way, her plinth spearing out low and fast above the Unfathom’s interminable silver sands. Leonis sat at the rear of her platform, gazing behind at the subtle plume of dust their passage disturbed even at the height of some ten or fifteen yards. In the near distance, powering along to keep up, ran Druanna’s eidolon, its six blades flashing as it ran while carrying Kuragin, Nyrix, Kelona, and Druanna herself.

The mood...

IGS #4, Chapter 42

Naomi

How do you process a selfless deed you know you don’t deserve? As Naomi struggled to keep up with Nox, she wrestled with what was happening, the deed he was doing, the contest he was eschewing, and came up short.

She wanted to protest, but feared his withering scorn if she pressed too hard that he abandon her. Somewhere, somehow, he’d become a true friend. Even his willingness to bring her to the Radiant Pools of Gold could have ...

IGS #4, Chapter 41 (no more bonus chapters after this one)

Scorio

Myla drew back, eyes going wide.

A gust of wind blew dust across the plain and howled through the fluted rocks about them, setting up a mournful wail that perfectly matched Scorio’s mood.

“Now, you can do your corpse teleportation trick a few more times, or shift into a crimson mist, but I think we both know that’s not going to get you far. And this conviction I’ve got, that you’re weak and innocent, that’s your To...

IGS #4, Chapter 40 (Last Bonus chapter, for real)

Scorio

Scorio flew through the Silver Unfathom skies in a daze. His emotions were too mercurial, too powerful, changing from loss to grief to fury to helplessness at any given moment. Myla was a negligible weight upon his back. He barely thought of her. Instead, his mind replayed the last moments again and again and again, and tried to wrest some meaning, some purpose—something, from the catastrophe.

How had it all gone wrong so quickly?...

IGS #4, Chapter 39 (Bonus!)

Jova

Jova narrowed her eyes and poured her wrath into the stone before her. It was pliant, but sweat soaked her hair, her robes, and her Heart was pushed to the point of exhaustion. Any moment now it would gutter. Reason said she could just rest. Reason said there was no longer urgency.

But damn reason to hell. She wanted out.

So she continued striding forward, step by inexorable step, tearing the rock before her into fragments and s...

IGS #4, Chapter 38 (Bonus!)

(Adding some bonus chapters today as the cliffhanger nature of Chapter 37 would be intolerable otherwise, and not the way the actual book would play out.)

Naomi

The Pools of Radiant Gold were right ahead. Naomi could tell from the pale effulgence that glimmered in the sky beyond the hummocks of encrusted hillocks, the way Gold mana swirled in the air in a great, languid, glorious vortex, and from the hundreds of toads that were cl...

IGS #4, Chapter 37

Scorio

Scorio slumbered. Fingers interlaced beneath his head, he’d lain still for what felt like ages, gazing up unseeing at the shifting clouds, fragments of conversations playing in his mind. Emotions arose and then fell back into nothingness. Warmth and purpose, loss and pain. Leonis and Moira, Aezryna and Lady Krula. The mysteries of Acherzua, Myla’s doubts, his own few but rock solid certainties.

Eventually his eyes closed, and he...

IGS #4, Chapter 36 (BONUS!)

Scorio

The days became rhythmic. An hour or two of flight behind Braxofitz punctuated by time spent camping as Scorio regained his mana reserves. Xandera would crouch, hands pressed to the rock, eyes closed, as she channeled Acherzua’s strength through her palms. Some of their number would train, engage in light sparring, while others focused on their meditations and mana control techniques. Their Silverine guide was stand-offish, and would fi...

IGS #4, Chapter 35

Scorio

“Then we’re agreed.” Scorio glanced around the small group. “Swear the Heart Oaths, and we’ll head out into the Unfathom.”

“Great!” Myla rocked onto the balls of her feet, hands linked behind her back. “Happy to swear anything that’s not weirdly personal or makes us your indentures servants or whatever.”

“Not what we’re looking for,” said Druanna, smile wry. “Just clear yourselves of the Herdsmen ...

IGS #4, Chapter 34 (Bonus!)

Leonis

How did one come back from the dead twice?

Always in this life he’d felt haunted by his past self, the last-dead Leonis, the man who’d fallen to Manticore and been the friend of heroes, the source of Praximar and Dameon’s true fixations. Deep down—and he could admit it now—he’d felt a ghost in this life, walking two steps behind a larger than life figure, the true Golden King.

And now?

Leonis inhaled deeply a...

IGS #4, Chapter 33

Dameon

Damn it.

Damn it all to Hell.

Dameon hitched his pack nervously and glanced out of the stairwell into the entry hall. Even at this impossibly early hour a few people were up and serving themselves some of the fine slop that Lady Krula had trained the domestic Silverines to produce. Nobody important, luckily, so if he affected an air of sublime indifference…

He marched down the last few steps, through the archway, and w...

IGS #4, Chapter 32 (BONUS!)

Scorio

In the bowels of the Red Keep lay a great hall, long abandoned, devoid of furniture, and vast in scope. It was deep underground and reached by means of a winding staircase whose endless steps became mesmerizing as one descended for what felt like ages. Down and around, down and around, until at last they opened up into what felt like a twin of the cavern beneath the Silverine warren, but this one all of worked stone.

Aezryna met him...

IGS #4, Chapter 31

Scorio

“So is this what happens when you move up in the ranks?” asked Scorio, sitting back in the armchair and balancing his cup of liquor in his knee. “Endless rounds of talking and talking?”

Half of Druanna’s face was lit in warm tones of the leaping firelight, the other cast in shadow. Her gaze was pensive, her smirk subtle. “I consider myself fortunate in getting a moment of your time. Seeing as you’re in such demand and...

IGS #4, Chapter 30 (Bonus!)

Scorio

The large hall on the ground floor was filled with even more faces when Scorio descended to find his friends. The central firepit was blazing, and knots of people stood here and there in low conversation while others were eating meals at the tables proper.

Dinner time? Scorio’s stomach grumbled as he realized he’d lost track of meals, hours, days, even. The Silver Unfathom was the first place in Hell he’d visited withou...

IGS #4, Chapter 29

The Nightmare Lady

Naomi lost herself to wonder.

Traversing the Lustrous Maria was akin to wandering through an endless dream. Acherzua had been many things thus far, from the dour impressiveness of the Fiery Shoals to the grim bleakness of the valleys in the Iron Weald, the instinctively homelike Farmlands and the ethereal enervation of the Silver Unfathom.

But it had never been endlessly, impossibly beautiful.

Nox led her thr...

IGS #4, Chapter 28

Dameon

This wasn’t a disaster. Far from it. This was an opportunity. If he could play his cards right. If he could keep them both from killing him.

Dameon closed the door to his suite and pinched the bridge of his nose. Damn it. With each passing month he missed having the assembled might of Manticore at his back all the more. Confidants. Friends. Allies. Now he had to go it alone. Sure, some of them had only been there for him to manipu...

IGS #4, Chapter 27

Scorio

“Wait,” said Scorio. “Wait, wait, wait. You’re saying—you’re saying you want to explode the Suns to free your missing sister?”

Lady Krula leaned back in her chair. “A century has passed, and my sister remains absent. She lives, but where? My patience wears thin, especially if I am waiting for an eventuality that will never take place, or not take place before Bastion is consumed by the rot. Either I act now, or I res...

Throne Hunters #3 is live!

Exciting news, everyone! Throne Hunters 3 is now live in both ebook and audiobook format. If you're part of this Patreon, you've no doubt already read those chapters, but I'd still love for you to grab a copy via KU for the launch day rank boost, or snag an audiobook if you'd like to enjoy Harald's adventures in t...

Updated cover by YAM

Here we go - the last of these cover posts, sharing the final iteration based on everyone's feedback. Thanks for helping out, you guys!

IGS #4, Chapter 26

Scorio

A firm rap on his door dragged Scorio from his dreams—something about chasing the Nightmare lady through the depths of the Chasm, calling her name, begging her to turn around—and he sat up with a gasp, momentarily disoriented, but glad to be torn from that dream.

Chest heaving, he looked about himself, dark vision revealing the confines of the minimalist room, and then the door rang again with impatient knocking.

“One mo...

Second take, different background, other covers for context

Thanks for all the help with this one, guys! If only I was as confident about artwork as I was worldbuilding and character arcs...

Cover for IGS #4

What do you guys think? (Typography from Book 1 used to give you an idea of what the final might look like). Does it 'work' as an IGS cover, or are you not a fan? Really looking for some honest feedback here, as I've yet to pull the trigger on deciding whether it's a done deal or not. Thanks everyone!