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Duskbound 2- Chapter 3

The guild hall was nothing like Velik had expected when he’d first arrived in Cravel. He’d expected it to look something like an enormous hunter’s lodge, big enough for a hundred people to stay in. In his head, he’d pictured a huge gathering hall with a massive fireplace on one end, trophies of various hunts mounted on the walls around it. There would be hunters of all origins sitting at tables, swapping stories and enjoying good food.

The reality was a lot more mundane and a bi...

Keiran Afterword

And so ends this series. It didn’t end up being as long as I planned, but I think I covered everything I wanted to get done. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thank you for your patronage.

In regards to the future of Keiran, yes, I do plan to return to this world with a sequel series. Keiran himself won’t be the protagonist, but he’ll still be a prominent character. I’m sure you noticed the groundwork I’ve laid down in these last few chapters ...

Book 5, Epilogue

300 years later…

I appeared on the teleportation platform of Senica’s demesne, just as I’d done every decade on schedule for the last few centuries. In the early days, she’d been there to greet me, but she was far too busy now. It used to be that she at least sent someone to meet me, but for the last fifty years, she hadn’t even bothered with that much.

It was a bit rude of her, if I was being honest. But then, I supposed it wasn’t unreasonable to expect me to...

Duskbound 2- Chapter 2

It wasn’t enough to just avoid the bull. That was easily done a few different ways. For one thing, Velik had a significantly higher physical and a class that focused on both power and agility, so it was trivial to just stay in front of the monster. He could literally outrun it as it chased him, but that wouldn’t keep its attention once the rest of his team started trying to murder it.

He had to hurt it, and do it enough that any damage the rest of his worthless team did wouldn’t m...

Book 5, Chapter 64

It took me thirty years to reach this point, almost to the day since I’d defeated Ammun and dispersed his soul to the afterlife. There had been unexpected windfalls and setbacks, and I’d found some unlikely allies along the way. I’d hoarded enough mysteel to finance multiple kingdoms and set foot on all five of Manoch’s moons in a bid to harness their mana for this purpose.

I stood in a mile-wide underground chamber buried so far under the planet’s surface that even the bottom...

Duskbound 2- Chapter 1

The split tailed bull stood ten feet tall at the shoulders and was wider than any three people standing abreast. It had horns like spears and hooves that could crush stone. The steel bars holding it back looked far too flimsy to keep such a monster confined, and Velik was sure if it had been given any room to gain momentum, it would have easily crashed right through them.

He stood as part of a group of thirty-two iron-ranked monster hunters in a field just east of the city of Cravel. If...

Book 5, Chapter 63

“You know, you could have saved us a whole lot of work if you’d just… not knocked the damned tower down,” Querit told me.

“You’re not even doing the digging. Why are you whining about this?” I asked.

I’d found a use for Ammun’s legion of golems after all. There were several thousand of them below us, slowly digging through and transmuting the remains of Ammun’s tower as we burrowed to Manoch’s core. They’d been at it for about four years now and had made a ...

Duskbound Chapter 79

“If you’re going after the rest of those champions, you should do it immediately,” Torwin said between bites of sausage. “I’ll delay my return home as long as possible, but I already sent messages ahead about the corruption. I can guarantee I’ll be receiving orders to report everything in person in the next few days.”

“Don’t you want some of the seeds for yourself?” Velik asked.

The old hunter chuckled. “I’ve got a decades-long career of hunting monsters an...

Duskbound Chapter 78

The temporary camp was all but abandoned by the time Jensen made his way back there. He’d spent most of his night in Beldrit, helping refugees get settled in. It was somewhat ghoulish to slot people into the homes left behind by the victims of monsters in this town, but that was how it went. He still thought it made more sense to send them back to Deshir, but given the state of the town, he could see why the people who were supposed to be living there weren’t eager to return.

Beside...

Duskbound Chapter 77

They’d been running hard all night, and Sildra knew if she stopped to let herself think, she’d break down. So many people had died, or worse, been killed by Torwin. She’d recognized some of them, even if she didn’t know their names. And [Eye of the Moon] had condemned them to death. Every stop, it was the same thing. Torwin killed at her direction while she hid like a coward and the townsfolk directed their anger at the monster hunter.

It was an hour before...

Duskbound Chapter 76

The spear wasn’t getting through that layer of bone, not at the angle Velik was working from. Maybe if he’d been fresh, it would have been a different story. But that wasn’t the case. His hands were trembling with fatigue and his breathing was ragged and labored. So, the bone wasn’t the target. The fleshy tendril trying to haul it back into the ceiling was.

The blade parted the skin-wrapped muscle easily, and the sphere of bone crashed to the floor. Cracks radiated outward from ...

Duskbound Chapter 75

Something had occurred to Velik in the last few seconds, something that he wasn’t sure he was right about, but if he was, it was very, very important. Even with a full cavern to spread out through, and with literal miles and miles of flesh that composed its body, for some reason, all the faces and mouths were concentrated here. They hadn’t even spread out to take up positions on different walls or the ceiling.

It was possible that was a meaningless choice, that the faces could appea...

Book 5, Chapter 62

I walked into the alchemy lab Querit was using two days later. He’d come out of the fight unscathed, though the combat frame I’d built had lost about a third of its functionality when he’d put down a pair of reanimated skeletons made from literal giants. Each of them had been close to thirty feet tall and Ammun had taken some pains to give them a bit of extra power.

The fight sounded thrilling, to hear Querit tell it, all desperate weaves around lumbering punches or dodging thrown...

Duskbound Chapter 74

It wasn’t until the monster started moving that Velik truly appreciated how much bigger than him it was. It had to way a few thousand pounds, and its weird arm-leg hybrid things were each long enough that the trunk of its body was at eye level. Its movement was awkward to watch, like it couldn’t quite figure out how to move its body, but that didn’t stop it.

Velik didn’t stand still and wait for it to run him over, of course. He couldn’t have stood his ground even if he’d wa...

Duskbound Chapter 73

Maybe someone like Torwin would have known what was going on. The man had decades of experience and he seemed pretty smart, so he’d probably seen all sorts of weird stuff throughout his career. No doubt he’d have three different stories about giant brain monsters and what that meant.

Velik was a simple man. He knew that monsters, like people, generally needed brains to survive. There were probably a hundred exceptions when the monsters were made entirely of earth or were undead or w...

Book 5, Chapter 61

The few dozen refugees streamed through the portal I’d set up to bring them to New Alkerist. Most of them were young mothers with small children, those who couldn’t fight or run on their own. My own family came through last, Nailu in the lead and Father bringing up the rear.

“—never could have imagined so much water in one place,” Mother was saying as she stepped through the portal next to him.

“I know! It just went on and on, endlessly,” he replied. “I get why Gra...

Book 5, Chapter 60

“First, my name is Andyla Felstbater,” the Order mage said. “I am one of the ranking archmages left in the Global Order of the Arcane, a Third Order archmage.”

That was better than Bakir’s Fifth Order, but I’d never determined exactly how they structured their cabal or what qualifications were required to advance up the hierarchy, so that didn’t tell me anything beyond that Andyla was closer to the top than most, though not quite as high as the leader of Bakir’s group ha...