C. Sebastian Nutt

Chapter 193 - The Nightmare

Brady Nallis shudders again as the door jumps. Hands clasped down over her mouth, she screams into her fingers, sitting on the trap door of

Brady Nallis shudders again as the door jumps. Hands clasped down over her mouth, she screams into her fingers, sitting on the trap door of the Gal Street tower, the red sky stretching out all around her. All of Danfalla stretches out before her, a city she has called her home her entire life, a place she has put countless hours into trying to make ...

Chapter 192 - Dark Ocean

The building crumbles around me, fire crawling up the walls, smoke climbing and pooling along the ceiling. All the while he wears it, that i

The building crumbles around me, fire crawling up the walls, smoke climbing and pooling along the ceiling. All the while he wears it, that insufferable grin. My staff explodes with flame as I swing it. He meets it with a straight and jagged greatsword that crackles with barely contained electricity. The force of the weapons touching sends a numbing...

Chapter 191 - Bloody Sky

“Promise me, Charlene.” … … “I’ll stay here.” … … “I will only be gone a minute. I will be right back, I promise. Things are going to be oka

“Promise me, Charlene.”
…
…

“I’ll stay here.”
…
…

“I will only be gone a minute. I will be right back, I promise. Things are going to be okay, Charlene.”

This isn’t real. In the midst of a burning city ripping itself apart, all I can feel is the warmth of...

Chapter 190 - What Cuts

Discorporation, the sensation of having one’s body changed into light and moved across the earth, is an odd and novel feeling to Ferro. He reaches out, grabbing at Jess, unsure if he stretches forth with his hand or merely his mind. It doesn’t much matter; she lets go almost as quickly as she grabs onto him.

Then, it is falling. He tumbles away, the sensation of the air lashing at his skin and clothes coming back to him as he plummets from the air. He wheels his arms, turning in the...

Chapter 189 - Insomnia

It is even worse the second time I see it. The city’s screams fade now into the sound of snapping lumber and cracking mortar, the dull moans of a creature suffering a beating, whimpering. I glide forward, riding the wind, my wings a curtain of black behind me. Never do my eyes leave the sight of the tree towering over the city. Eclipsing the crimson moon in the red sky, the tree’s shadow stretches across Danfalla like a dark and twisted hand of too many fingers. Points of fire sizzle in t...

Chapter 188 - Hesitation

Here it comes, the painful pulse, the sensation of his blood racing through his body. He feels it, feels it all, the movements of the world turning around him, the shift of each blade of grass blown into chaos by the power flying about, the way that each strand of hair on his head catches the wind in its unique way. The sensation could drive a man mad, has driven him mad before, but decades have given Illigar the fortitude to withstand it. 

The blood on his hand coalesces into seve...

Chapter 187 - Prize

There is a moment, a solitary instant, after stepping through the screen of light where Tanalious feels every other door he has made in the world. Possibility stretches out before him, pathways through the world, the freedom to leave all his worries behind, to find somewhere else to be. Only, the whispers of freedom are a lie, aren’t they? If he left, if he ran, he would be leaving her behind. How long could they make it, a day, maybe two, before the master found them? No, he would stick fo...

Chapter 186 - Twenty-Three Days

There is something soothing about fire. The way it flickers and jumps almost makes you think of it as something alive. It crackles and pops. It writhes like a living thing, and it even needs to eat in order to live. But that is the lie of fire. It is as dead as a stone, as the clouds that drift across the sky, as water running in a river. Yet, I can’t look away, because it dances. 

“Are you alright?” Athemia asks me. The woman stares down at me, looking at my hand pressed aga...

Chapter 185 - One Down

This was not how it was supposed to go. Ferro jumps back, dodging the strike of a swinging saber aimed at his neck. The woman with the sword advances faster than the mix of magicians and trained guards that trail after her. She holds herself erect, the saber jabbing forward in precise patterns, the tip always aiming for some vital point on his body. 

Despite the confusion raging through the battlefield that the palace grounds have become, the forces of the city are recovering. He k...

Chapter 184 - Struggle and Crash

I hear a groaning, the sound of metal shifting in its housing mirroring the slow build in the back of my mind. My very soul pushes out into the chamber, washing the crystal light red. There is resistance, not from the world, but from myself. I have to force myself to open up my presence, force myself to push it away from me, but every foot is like a mile. It wants to retreat, to huddle in close, and I want to let it. As the aura passes over the two others in the chamber, touching them, they t...

Chapter 183 - The First Failure

Perhaps, this was not as one-sided as Athemia first believed. Her arm swings, the heavy axe clutched in her fingers snapping through the air before she sees the attack coming. There is no other way to be about it. 

She only catches the crash in the aftermath, her mind racing to keep up with the flow of combat. Metal crates at the side of the room groan, knocked back by the figure tumbling into them before falling still. Then, she registers what happened, that woman leaping at her f...

TIFU

So, I learned today that if you schedule a bunch of posts to release simultaneously on patron, it does not release the posts in the order you created them or even in alphabetical order. Instead, patron seems to just release them in a random order. This has led to the group of chapters I released to the rank 3 members to appear in a random order with no way on my end to correct it. Sorry guys, it is bizarre to me that the cite works this way.

But, now I know. All of the chapters d...

Chapter 182 - The Battle of Danfalla

I move alone through the tunnels of brick and refuse. The dark is nothing to me right now, the power flooding through me sharpening my perception to the point that even the faint glow of the magic seeping out of my pores is enough to see by. The smell, the rot, are awful things, attacks on my senses so powerful that they should leave me gagging. Only, it is not so difficult to push those sensations aside, to compartmentalize the information in my head. That wasn’t the only odd thing.

...

Book Three: Prologue

Nelif Manipas was never supposed to be involved in important events. He liked his job in the adventurers’ guild, liked his position in the heart of Ramacalla. The pay is nice, the people are courteous, and his entire family was able to enjoy living in the capital, where his children would receive the best possible education. He was his father’s dream, the man having saved his entire life to purchase Nelif a set of essentia, one that allowed him to join the guild and begin his journey thro...

Book 3 Release

Hello everyone,

For the last few weeks I have been working to make certain that the start of the third book drops and kicks into action right away. The Battle of Danfalla will be an explosion of excitement, and today it will begin to be released here on Patreon.

More than that! Today, I am officially carrying through on the promise I made when I first started this Patreon and allowed people to support me at the $10 level. For the last months, those that have supported me as Rank 3...

Chapter 181 - Apotheosis

In the vast expanse of the emerald colored sky, an island of craggy stone lists, tumbling through the air. It was much the same as the other mounds of stone, moving slowly above the riven earth like a field of asteroids a dozen miles above the surface. There was nothing particular about this single island of rock; it possessed as many broken homes and shakes littering the surface, four massive craters of steel took up the centers of one side, the fires burning within dead and dark like all th...

Chapter 180 - Exeter

Once, when I was no more than eight and the sisters of the church still found me precocious, I ran into the church to pray. Jaesa Morningale had just thrown mud at me from a bridge, and when I cried, she and all the other girls laughed and pointed. I went to the church to ask Glis’Merinda to smite them, to conjure up a storm that would tear their houses up by the root. Sister Samantha found me before I could start making demands of the gods. She listened to my complaints for a time and help...

Chapter 179 - Breaking the Limit

I can practically hear it —a sharp, grinding noise, metal running over stone. The scrape is a long rasp that peels off into a tinny ring. Floating, suspended as much by the metallic wings on my back fixed into the iron of my encroaching coffin as I am by the three blades digging into my body, the ring of the imaginary noise is more real to me than anything else.

Motes of light spin through the veins that make up the construct before me in my mind, a representation of my own body that ...

Chapter 178 - The Knell of War

Rime rings the scales of Sagistan’s imperial make armor. Each tiny piece of the armor is a work of enchantment so intricate that it would put the weapons of most magicians to shame. But then, he was the imperial prince; it would be criminal to go into battle in anything else. The monster on which he stood, a massive collection of skin stretched over hollow bone, soars through the sky so high up that the air was difficult to suffer, even for him. 

“Almost there now,” Jav Cla�...

Chapter 177 - Collapse

There it was again, that burgeoning sense of excitement setting her core on fire with its buzz. The world is made so strange in the moments she lets go, lets her last vestiges of humanity slip away to reveal the thing hiding deep within her soul. The relief is like the first taste of air after being trapped beneath the surface of the water, a rush of coolness so powerful it blots out other sensation. 

Then the other feelings begin to return: the slickness of the blood sticking to h...

Chapter 176 - Quick Negotiations

A feeling like electricity races up Sigrid’s leg as she stares up at the throne erected in front of her. To either side of her, the guards who walked her into the room turn venomous glares in her direction, the one on her left moving to draw his weapon. She can’t help but smile; the charge in the room is just too great to bear.

“Sigrid,” a man from one of the tiered balconies calls down. “What have you done with Evilynn Ca’Mari?”

She refuses to take her eyes from the...

Chapter 175 - Attack

The walls surrounding the palatial estate of Duke Mari maintain a constant vigil. Guards patrol the perimeter at all hours of the day and night, a small barracks just inside the gate is always manned by three men, and at all times, at least three dozen of the duke’s elite soldiers reside within the complex itself on week-long rotations. However, on this particular night, Ferro finds the lack of greeting at the gate a bit odd. Standing in the full-moon light, looking up at the perimeter wall...

Chapter 174 - Gambit Begins

Jaeda ran, ran for everything she was worth. A scream cut through the dark behind her, the shrill shriek of a woman slowly distorted as it drug on. The interior of the adventurer’s hall is always kept well-lit; there are duties in the night that people have to attend to, but tonight the flickering lights embedded into the wall failed to cast enough light, failed to infect her with the feeling of safety she was so used to. 

Footsteps behind her. Fear makes her turn, finding Car Am...

Chapter 173 - The Last Night

From atop the mound that looked down upon the column, Dovik couldn’t help but sigh. Once again, he was leaving Danfalla in the company of adventurers, rough people eager to find some things to kill so that they could make some better pay. They would be sitting around fires this very evening, talking to one another about what they will do once the money comes in: settle down in some backwood, spend a year in a tavern drinking until they black out each night, apply to a university to try and ...

Chapter 172 - What Genius Requires

…

…

“Galea, are you still there?”
“I’m still here, Mistress.”

…

…

“I’m so tired.”
“I know, Mistress, but you must stay awake.”

…

“I know. How long has it been now? No, don’t tell me.”
“You are doing so good, Mistress. Just a little longer now, I’m sure.”

…

“I think…I think I’m going to die here.”
“You won’t.”
“It’s so hard to stay awake.”
“Pull away from it...

Chapter 171 - What We Really Know

Quiet discomfort has become the theme of the sprawling estate in which the duke’s palatial estate resides. Even within the bounds of the northern district of the city, the duke’s palace stands apart, an expanse of gardens, administration buildings, and places of leisure intended to evoke the feeling of a mansion erected in a lush valley, instead of an exhibition of lavish expense in the heart of metropolia. Only the spectacle of the fountains and the manicured landscaping that once impres...

Chapter 170 - Passing in the Night

There is a color to the night. Ferro wonders how he never truly noticed it before, the deep violet of the heavens that somehow crosses a boundary to bleed back into red. The city itself seems abuzz with his passage, the way before him parting, people pushed almost unconsciously aside by the force of his advance down the street. The traffic clears, just a little at a time, as night fully takes the rows of dark brick into its embrace. The dirt vanishes in the cover of dark, the unsightly people...

Chapter 169 - Carnival

One Week After the Coffin Closed

They laugh, the children, dancing in the meadow. There is something in the sound that unsettles his heart. Ferro can only remember ever hearing that sound from far off, joy has ever been a distant thing for him. There is a game to their movements, the rules he has never been able to puzzle out. He isn’t a very smart man, dull to the point that even children’s games evade his understanding. No, that isn’t true anymore, is it?...

Chapter 168 - Going Nowhere

6 Days After the Coffin Closed

The real shit of the city only comes out in the daytime. The elven obsession with order lends Danfalla a strange quality during the nighttime, black brick laid out in order. But the sun lays it all shining brown. Accumulated grime traps the sunlight and shines it back. Even the barest patch of accumulated dirt stands out with light cast upon it, sinking back into the shad...

Chapter 167 - Crypt of Light and Shadow

3 Days After the Coffin Closed

The most grand cathedral in the city of Danfalla lay in the northern district, a building of dark brick and inlaid gold dedicated to the Goddess Glis’Merinda. Safe from exposure to the destitution beyond the district's inner wall, the austere building stands tall in the daytime like a sentinel of propriety, every bush trimmed in perfect form, every speck of dirt dutiful...