A Standup Philosopher

And So The Eagle Conquered 01

Riverwood.

Built beside a river strong enough for industry but weak enough not to be dangerous, teeming with fish but bereft of water-going predators. Built amongst a forest large enough and rich enough to provide everything that they might need and a bit more to sell, but not so large or so thick that they had to worry about bears or wolf packs attacking the village people or their small stock of chicken and goats. Close enough to the Imperial fortress-town of Helgen to be save from ma...

Shall We Play A Game? Chapter Seven

Shall We Play A Game?

Chapter Seven

########################################

Shai watched from on high as Hasamelli, Yuri, and their companions made their way out of the palace, in the company of one of her most proficient generals and his highly competent sister. It was almost funny, really, how teasing Bakara had side-tracked things enough that Ramses hadn’t gotten mentioned in connection to the defense of Hasamelli’s caravan. Even more interesting was the fact that Ne...

Shall We Play A Game? Chapter Six

Shall We Play A Game?
Chapter Six

##############################################################

Paramesse, -though he much preferred Ramses, thank you very much!- rubbed at his temples in an effort to banish his growing head-ache. There were times where being a ranking officer of the Kemeti military simply wasn’t worth it, and by some strange coincidence, many of those times coincided with whenever he had to deal with that idiot Horemheb for an extended period of ti...

Shall We Play A Game? Chapter Five

Shall We Play A Game?

Chapter Five

###############################################################

 Ankhesenamun glided through the palace corridors like she was floating on a cloud, her steps light and her heart even lighter, her sandals whispering across the polished limestone floors. The cool evening air whispered through the open colonnades, carrying with it all the rich, sweet scents of her palace that rode on the night-time breeze, which only broadened the smile t...

Shall We Play A Game? Chapter Four

Shall We Play A Game?

Chapter Four

########################################################

Akhenadin, former bearer of the Millennium Eye, Maker of the Millennium Items, and (amongst many other things) uncle to the current Pharaoh of Kemet, was seething as he left his niece’s private wing of the palace. His rebellious, disobedient, naive niece, who seemed to be doing her level best to bring everything that he and her father had built crashing down around their ears! Bad e...

Shall We Play A Game? Chapter Three

Shall We Play A Game?

Chapter Three

#############################################################

The first five days of courtship had been brutal, at least for the other suitors. I, personally, had found it very amusing as she eliminated more than half of their number over the course of those five days for various reasons, ranging from their delusional expectations (such as a certain fourth prince from a Babylonian protectorate) to the no less than seven t...

Shall We Play A Game? Chapter Two

Shall We Play A Game?

Chapter Two

######################################################

It was not unusual, in fact it was very common, for Ankhesenamun and her closest companions (and lovers, though they didn’t advertise that fact, not that there was anyone in the palace that didn’t know that the Pharaoh and her Guardians routinely spent their nights in bed together, sleeping or otherwise) to bathe together. Without handmaidens, more often than not, because wh...

Shall We Play A Game? Chapter One

Shall We Play A Game?
Chapter One

##############################################

Ankhesenamun felt the muscles of her jaw flex in irritation as yet another would-be suitor -this one a fourth prince from some satrapy of Babylon. A fourth prince, of a satrapy, for the Queen of Kemet!- wrapped up his long-winded, self-aggrandizing introduction before waving forward a small cluster of mouse-like slaves laden with treasure, which they laid at her feet. As if her bed, and he...

Shall We Play A Game? Prologue

Shall We Play A Game?

Prologue

################################################################

Ankhesenamun Nebkheperure Kanakhttutmesut, daughter of Akhnamkanon, Pharaoh of the New Kingdom, Ruler of Tâwîî and, by the Grace of her Divine Father, Ra, Queen of the Remtju ni Kemet, snarled in outrage as she hurled yet another half empty goblet of wine against the stone wall of her bedchamber, a crash and a series of clatters echoing through the palatial room as the badly ba...

Crown of Slaves 025

As it turned out, getting Vette safely and -relatively- comfortably lying down in the ritual room barring the path to Khem Val was more complicated than I had expected it to be.

No, that wasn’t quite accurate.

Better to say that getting her comfortably lying down without putting her at risk of an unpleasant electrical surprise or coping a couple of feels was more complicated than expected. Especially the groping part, because goddamn was she one hell of a beauty. Exotic, ...

Shadows and Dust 18

Cassandra looked around the Normandy’s briefing room with a faint air of windswept exhaustion, which seemed to be more or less how those filling the rooms seats seemed to feel. Save Wrex, of course, who looked more bored than anything else, but if she was going to be honest the old toad looked like that at least eighty-five percent of the time. Though at least he hadn’t looked bored at her pseudo-induction to the SPECTREs, looking on instead with something that distinctly ...

Nothing Is True Chapter 28

Clarke had thought that she knew what a Coalition celebration looked like, after the they had killed that mutant gorilla, and before that she’d thought she knew what a Coalition celebration looked like in the evenings after the Conclave’s daily events were over. As it turned out, all of that combined paled in comparison to the atmosphere and activities that had consumed Polis -and, she would wager, the settlements that had already heard the news- when Caris had won her third Conc...

Crown of Slaves 24

This was it. My final trial had begun. The trial that would solidify my place as Zash’s apprentice, though at this point it was essentially a formality. The rest of my pool was dead, missing, or were Kory, and Zash hadn’t been subtle in our conversation that she favoured me taking the post. Which was exactly as expected and as it should be, of course, but -despite knowing why she was doing it, what her motivations and intentions were- I still found it to be incredibly gratifying. It did n...

Shadows and Dust 17

Wrex, Battlemaster of Clan Urdnot, was not a particularly common sight on the Citadel, and with damn good reason. He wasn’t a big fan of all the noise, the bright lights, the perfect cleanliness, the facade of enlightenment and civilization. It was disgusting, a putrid, filthy, wretched lie wrapped in a beautiful illusion to keep the masses ignorant and happy, unaware of -and uninterested in becoming aware of- what lay beneath the skin. It was a trap, the Citadel, d...

Nothing Is True 27

It was the last day of the Conclave, and excitement was at a fever pitch in and out of the palace alike. The feast a few days past, featuring as a center-piece the yong pauna that had been hunted down and slain personally by their Heda and her guests, had been a welcome surprise, and the revelry had continued well into the next morning and had resulted in a postponement of the day’s scheduled events as everyone, from the Heda on down, nursed hangovers, post coital bliss, bruises, a...

Crown of Slaves 023

Fortunately for me, my injuries were sufficient to earn me a brief stay in a bacta tank. Whether that was standard protocol for an acolyte in my position, advanced in the Trials and having successfully completed the trial that had so badly injured me, or it was due to some string-pulling by those above, I didn’t know. Nor, honestly, did it make much of a difference. The only thing that really mattered is that I was back on my feet in a day and back in my room, where my Kory was waiting for ...

Shadows and Dust 16

The initial Council meeting was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bit disappointing. They had confirmed, after it was over and the audience had dispersed, that her candidacy was still valid and that her evaluation was still underway, but without further information on the attack and why it had happened, the three most powerful people in the galaxy (officially speaking, anyway) hadn’t been able or willing to do much more than pledge humanitarian aid and investigation efforts. As much as Udin...

Nothing Is True Chapter 26

None of them had been terribly surprised when Klark had, upon getting out of bed the next day, insisted that they collect a larger detachment of soldiers and hunt the yong pauna down. Though she only admitted to wanting to do so to prevent it from hurting anyone else to stumble across it -something she did truly mean, of course, there was no dispute about that-, they all knew that a very large part of her wanted to avenge the guards that had died ensuring they could all escape. A per...

Crown of Slaves Sequel Poll

Those of you from my Discord got some small forewarning about this, so here it is: this poll is to determine what you, my loyal readers -paying and otherwise- would most want to see out of a sequel for Crown of Slaves. We're still a ways off from Crown being finished, of course, but I would like to start storyboarding/outlining sooner rather than later.

The first option would be Original Trilogy era. The main character would be Luke Skywalker, with the Skywalker family being very, VERY ...

Crown of Slaves 022

Hope should not, in fact, have sprung eternal. Although, in pursuit of fairness, I did have to admit that this wasn’t quite what I expected to have happen, because while the slaves were not, in fact too busy to ignore me, they unfortunately weren’t alone either.

“Sorry about this, girl. We like you, we really do. But Harkun promised that we could go home in one piece if we made sure that you didn’t make it back.” Twin One told me sadly as I stepped out of the fin...

Shadows and Dust Chapter 15

Introspection, deep introspection, had never been something that had given Cassandra a great deal of trouble, at any stage in her life. ‘To serious and quiet by half’ had been a common refrain by adults in her life, which had been balanced out quite nicely with their exasperation and plaintive questioning of God why their ‘serious and quiet’ child had an unfortunate tendency to get herself into trouble and act like something of a ‘chaos gremlin’ -to use Aethyta’s charming...

Crown of Slaves Chapter Three

###################################################

Crown of Slaves

Chapter Three

#####################################################

Nearly a month had passed since I had been made a member of Asmu-Nikal’s personal staff, and I had discovered quite a few things that had not been readily apparent out on the grounds.

This world was not entirely like the one shown in the game, though in hindsight that should have been obvious. The games, movies, a...

Crown of Slaves Chapter One

Crown of Slaves

Chapter One

#################################################

I didn’t expect to die the way I did. Granted, I don’t exactly remember how I died, but I doubt that it was how I had expected to die. In fact, my first feeling when I awoke into my new existence was an overwhelming sensation of sheer, overpowering incredulity.

Then I felt pain. Pervasive, overwhelming, soul-deep pain. I screamed a scream beyond anything that had ever been t...

Crown of Slaves 020

This wasn’t at all how I expected things to go when it came to rescuing someone from the Sith Academy, and it wasn’t what I had expected whe

This wasn’t at all how I expected things to go when it came to rescuing someone from the Sith Academy, and it wasn’t what I had expected when it came to making my way to the Tomb of Tulak Hord, either. Still, I wasn’t going to complain, given all the myriad opportunities that this provided to me, and if I recalled correctly, one of those ...

Crown of Slaves 021

The stench of ozone, roasted flesh, and scorched chitin clung thickly to me, filled the air around me, and I resisted the urge to gag only t

The stench of ozone, roasted flesh, and scorched chitin clung thickly to me, filled the air around me, and I resisted the urge to gag only through more experience than was remotely preferable with exactly those scents as I surveyed the destruction that had been wrought in my efforts to feed the Red Engine thus far. To my surprise, and no small amou...