Despite the fact that there were hours of daylight left, they searched the city no further that day. Instead, every effort went into finding the young man, but there was no luck there. There were moments when Simon smelled a whiff of sulfur in places besides that living room that made him think that there was more going on than met the eye, but he never saw enough to support his suspicions.
In the days that followed, Simon’s new situation stabilized and quickly became normal, and every interaction reinforced what he’d already suspected: that his initiation had been anything but normal. He saw it in the way that other knights looked at him during meals, and whispered about him as he passed. He might be Sir Enis, but the word was pronounced with a sneer half the time it was spoken to him.
For four more days, Simon was treated to some version of these events. He was healed and bled, he was fed and drugged, but always, he was questioned and spied on. The focus of the questions changed each time, but they were always waiting for him whenever he woke up. He told them as little as possible when his head was clouded. He eventually admitted that his name was Enis and that he wanted to be a warrior to help people, but he kept th...
Normally this is the sort of post readers see right before their favorite story goes on haitus. Life happens, delays pile up, and backlogs run out. Then suddenly, your weekly jolt of escapism vanishes.
Fortunately, that is not happening. I'm not slowing down my posting at all, actually. While my backlog for Bloodstained Blade is running low, I think we will still run through the finish line. I just needed to vent.
This year, my New Year's resolution was to write less. Weird, right...
It was dark well before they reached the little hamlet of Elem Field, and they smelled the smoke of recently torched homes and fields long before it came into view. As they got closer, Simon smelled the scents of roasted meat too, and though he knew some of that would be farm animals, the corpses started appearing after that, showing where the men of the village had ended up, or at least pieces of them.
After the challenge was delivered, there was very little delay. Sir Derinholt put a few things on his horse, then came out of the stables with his sword drawn. While he didn’t quite have a murderous glare, his expression was certainly closer to anger than appraising, but Simon was ready for him.
He had his sword out and was dressed in battered leathers. Neither of those was any more impressive than the man who wore them, but Simon d...
After a couple of days, Simon spent very little time meditating or trying to understand what they needed to do next. The reason for that was very simple. Meditating didn’t burn many calories, and he knew what he needed to do now. He needed to get back in shape.
So, by day he cut down firewood, and by night he hunted goblins. He didn’t try for any large or daring battles. It was more about stalking or lying in wait than it was ab...
The group’s trip back to the coast, and the trade city that sat on it, was slowed by Aranna’s mother, Lorinda, more than it was by Simon’s wounds. While he was definitely moving slower than he was used to, she was moving slower still. He used his icon at night by the campfire to speed up healing, but the location of his wounds made it hard for them to close completely when they were walking ten or twelve miles a day, so infection was an ...
What a year 2025 was. Mine was pretty hectic, but I hope everyone had a great day and a good year.
While I already handed out my presents to you in the form of bonus chapters, as we wrap up, I would like to thank all of you for reading, and for your support, both monetary and emotional. My life is slowly growing less complicated.
I had some setback in 2025. Looking for a cheaper apartment in Germany was a bust for a variety of, mostly cultural re...
The leap from seeing nothing to seeing the auras around him was not a subtle thing. For a few months, Simon could only see them if he pushed himself to the limits of his endurance. After that, if he meditated for hours, he might benefit from expanded vision for a few minutes, but slowly but surely, it became a normal thing.
One day, he just woke up, and he could see Aranna’s dark aur...
Simon relayed the men’s order to his cook, then took the backstairs up to his room to retrieve a few things. If they’re going to track her, then I need to mark her and give them an alternate target, he reasoned. In this case, the target is my horse. Let them chase it around for a few days, and maybe hope she got eaten by a bear.
As a plan, it wasn’t complicated. The hardest part would be convincing Ar...
Simon went down the coast, stopping in a number of fishing villages on his way to Abresse, but he didn’t quite make it there before he turned around. It wasn’t the condition of the roads, or even the weather, that turned him away, either; it was thoughts of the Black Dog Inn.
The whole trip, Simon had been trying to decide what he’d do when he got to the wealthy city-state. Part of him had decided that a lumber mill j...
Simon didn’t get married in the year that followed, but he wasn’t quite driven out of Rivenwood either by the efforts of women who were trying to change that. What he did do was start making preparations to leave. Rather than adopt another town and put down more roots, he decided that he needed to move on.
If I keep this up, there will be a Simon living in every town in Brin in another hundred lives, he chastised hi...
The first clue that Simon was waking up in Rivenwood and not his cabin was the pain. It was worst in his head, but as soon as he shifted slightly, the pain that came from his arm consumed all of that and more, making the breath catch in his throat. For a moment, he willed his heart to stop beating so that the lack of motion would quell the pain that blazed brightly in his arm.
He instantly brought the word of healing to his lips bu...
After a short lifetime of training, Simon still didn’t feel ready, but he still opened up the trapdoor and threw himself into the fray anyway. That wasn’t because he was sure he’d be successful, but because he knew he had to sink or swim. Waiting forever, until he was good enough, was a dangerous game, and neither his doppelganger’s magic nor his own training could mend his broken confidence.
The mirror burned with the complicated magic his twin wrote there. For a moment, it was jut those lines of power, but as the spell took hold and the inscribed runes faded, and the mirror burst to vibrant life, Simon’s vision was wiped away by the intensity of it. For a moment the mirror wasn’t a mirror anymore; it was gateway of dazzling light, and he blinked hard as his eyes watered.
The journey to return the corpses and lay them to rest took only a couple of weeks, but Simon didn’t come back until the end of summer, after the harvest, when the weather had started to turn stormy and tempestuous. Instead, after he gave his condolences and told the deceased’s loved ones about how a sudden illness had struck them down, he said his goodbyes.
He didn’t give them the details, more than anything, because he alm...
During Simon’s third year in Charia, the first of the mines he’d argued for and sold the rights to began serious operations, increasing the wealth at his disposal dramatically. Most of this went to pay for the papermill he was constructing, though, so it changed little about his life. Rather than make single pages in artisanal batches as merchants did now, he planned to make them in huge sheets that would then be cut and dried into th...
The sunken city that had been this demon prince’s seat of power for who knew how long had stood untouched in its timeless way, but now it was completely devastated. It took the blade some time to figure out what had happened, let alone why or how. First, though, it looked to the cyan wreaths of the damned souls that lingered above it.
Before they had hung above the city as a churning, luminescent spiderweb. Now they had clumped ...
Simon cast a hundred spells that month, before he returned to Adonan and saw Eddek’s serious face again. It might have been more than that; he didn’t exactly keep track after the first few clanholds; he was too distracted by how much hidden evil had been under his nose the whole time.
If I’d had my sight, I would have seen all of this at a glance, he thought regretfully. He’d been so sure the problems of this area were geo...
Hello everyone, at long last, I returned home this past weekend. I spent a few days in bed recovering from the jet lag, but now things are pretty much back to normal. While I was in America I overindulged in Mexican food, saw some family and friends, did a lot of packing, shipped a 1,000lb pallet of stuff to Germany (mostly books, clothes, board games, and other sundries), and then I tore apart my van so I could sell it (RIP). It was a busy three weeks.
One hundred Life Force was a lot of power. It was the value of the average human soul, or the vitality of a strong man. A hero could have double that, or even more, and orcs often had several times that amount for it to drain, but it was still a lot of energy, and the blade burned that in a single instant, feeling the dark thrill of that much power burning through it.
When the time came, he invited a delegate from every clan that might have a claim, but only half of them came. He supposed he didn’t blame them. Though he’d gotten clan Aldor to back his play, his vague wording about proposals of mutual interest largely fell on deaf ears; that might have happened even if he hadn’t been an outlander, though.
It was fine. Simon wasn’t looking to make a fortune here. He was looking for people ...
The blade’s wielder tightened its grip on its hilt at that word. Serve. It was an insult nearly as bad as coward or traitor. Still, it didn’t know exactly what had happened. It couldn’t miss; such a result defied credulity.
Still, it had, and as it regarded the man, other guards started to make themselves known, pushing through the crowd of dancers while Prince Cerirvall stood there smugly. The fact that he made no mo...
A few weeks after his trial by combat, the snows started in earnest. Up until now, every day had been getting drearier and grayer as the temperatures fell, but soon, the scattered flurries were replaced with sustained storms that would often fill up the streets of the capital with drifts that measured several feet high.
In Ordanvale, the winter wouldn’t have even started for another month, and in Brin proper, it might have been a ...
The Ebon Blade had been slightly concerned that it would have to walk across the bottom of some vast lake until it reached the island it sought. That proved not to be the case. Like everything else in this circle, the water was filthy and shallow. The worst part of it was the way it sucked the metal knight that carried it even deeper than the firmer mud of the shore had.
At first, that was only to the knees, and then the ank...
The shouting and acrimony vanished almost as soon as the drinking started, which amused Simon greatly. If these people could just get this level of unity when fighting monsters and other kingdoms, they’d have it made, he decided as hostility dissipated into hospitality.
While he knew almost nothing of the specifics, even without magic, he could see the fault lines that divided this place. Every valley and every clan worked t...
So, as most of you know, I'm an American who lives abroad because I made the unfortunate mistake of marrying a wonderful German woman a couple of years back, which means my old life is in North America, and my new one is in Europe. While I love my wife very much, there are many complications related to being an expat.
The language, the visa... The taxes alone... man, I could vent for a page about that, but I will spare you.
Today, though, I will be taking a flight to the USA for...
While the Iron City wasn’t quite a burning crater when the blade left, it was a close thing. The demonic denizens of the place were apparently as fearful of leaving it as they were of it, and it torched the place until there were no hiding places left, killing demons by the score. In the opening rounds of that conflict, they would occasionally get brave enough to fight it in mass, but by the end, they just fled, no matter how many it found ...
In that moment, all Lucas wanted was to find somewhere quiet so that he could be alone with his new wife, but he wasn’t given that option. They managed to hold hands for a little while, but after only a few waves of well-wishers, they were separated by the crowd as different people came to pay their respects to both of them. Sometimes they were reunited, but more often they were separated as Lucas was barraged with handshakes and pats ...
