SpiralingSilverandEyes

Chapter 51 - Tourist Traps

Excerpt chapter! Y'all thought Raika was the only one having "fun" in the woods, didn'tcha! No such luck!

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“I can’t believe how miserable this all is,” Qen Hou grumbles as he sloshes water out of his boots for the third time in a day. “Couldn’t you have picked a pilgrimage to someplace more interesting? A city, maybe, with some more trustwor...

Chapter 50 - Damn, The Woods' Got Hands

Raika and Maen, sittin near a tree, K-I-lling and potentially being killed by monsters, what's not to love!

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For a moment, she doesn’t feel the leash. For a moment, she doesn’t care about the rest of the world. For a moment, she is not a thing that deserves punishment, she is not slave to those who broke her and the one she owed and chose to help. She...

Chapter 49 - Bear Grylls Ain't Got Nuthin

What's that? A sleep schedule? Fuck you. Have a third chapter today. Enjoy the woods, my beauties!

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It’s an agonizing breath of fresh air, to be out in the woods after all this time. Weeks in a windowless room, a little over two months in a palace with the natural world stuck on the wrong side of windows and balconies, a...

Chapter 48 - Faust, Meet the Man of Monte Cristo

Fuck. I can't help it; I really, really love writing Taurus. And I really, really hope I've done this properly, because I can feel how good and powerful these plot threads I'm placing here are. Enjoy, and if anyone has input, please feel free to share!

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“I know we’ve all been here a bit longer than the norm,” Yun Ka says, gesturing, the whirring a...

Chapter 47 - Sandwiches, Social Interaction, and the Horror of Being Known

Tasty foods, good hangs, and the agony of being amidst both. Raika is holding firm for now, but who knows how she'll feel as time goes on?

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Raika flexes her facial features, again, effortlessly decorating herself with a happier look. “Good to see you as well, Kaena,” she says warmly. “I”m feeling much improved from my maladies. If it�...

Stars and Shadows - Chapter 5

Here we go! Draft one of Stars and Shadows continues!

Sikari collapses against the wall, furiously wiping a stray trickle of blood from her scalp out of her eye and slamming a fresh las-pack into her rifle. The air is ringing with the sound of gunfire, shrapnel, scrap ammo and buckshot ricocheting off of a dozen different walls, pinging over and over in a cacophony only interrupted by the wet sounds they make when they hit flesh instead. The lasfire her and her squad...

Chapter 46 - The Joys of Horrifying Transformation and Agonies of Social Interaction

Chapter 2, book 2, babes! Welcome back and let's keep it going! I'm holding myself back on the more truly eldritch transformations Raika will be capable of for now, but fuck me is book 2 gonna have some of the joys of transhumanism in it. In the meantime, enjoy the journey on the way!

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She stands in front of the mirror. The lines of how it has shattered a...

Chapter 45 - No Rest For The Wicked, No Peace For The Weary

I promise we'll get back to goofy chapter titles soon. I solemnly swear. But for juuuust the start and prologue of Act 2, y'all get music references and portentous statements. Enjoy the new dynamic, and by next chapter we'll have a closer view of Raika's more physical and arcane changes, and a hook into more things!

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Chapter 44 - Radiance, Radiation, and Leaden Hope

Welcome to the unofficial beginning of arc 2! I'm going to be expanding the world to a lot more locations and exploring more of the setting and characters along the way, but don't you worry, Raika, her delightful mind and the things she's changing with it will remain just as central and delightful as always. Enjoy!

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Taurus kneels in the center of an empt...

Chapter 43 - Friends, Enemies, and Things Yet to Come

Alright! The wrap-up of Arc 1, with all the juicy deets and hooks I could fit! I'll see you all again soon for the prologue to Arc 2, but in the meantime I think you'll be well fed with this one. Trigger in the final section (fourth) section for body horror and forced transformation; you've been warned.

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Qen Hou rests on...

Chapter 42 - The Slave, the Beast, and the Chisel

This is more or less the end of what I'm calling Act 1, my beauties! After this, things will begin to change, and the setting is likely to shift. Enjoy!

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He sits, lotus-position, on the floor in front of her. His bulk is very nearly comical, and if not for how ostentatiously oversized everything in the palace is, he wouldn’t be able to comfortably f...

Chapter 41 - The Cause of Pain and Suffering

Ah, Buddha, your quotes always slap.

This one is ever so slightly under 2k words, and is more an exploration of Raika dealing with the aftermath of a really bad hit to her mental stability, and some of the conclusions she draws. 42 coming out soon!

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She is not let out of her room.

She doesn’t care.

It is a pretty room. T...

Chapter 40 - Promises, Promises...

You ever have a moment where you think, wow, this checks all the boxes I need, including boxes you didn't know you had? This really changes things and will dramatically affect the story going forward, and feels like a genuinely powerful moment? And then you kinda have to do it?

Well. Sometimes the work needs a lamb on the altar.

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Her legs...

Chapter 39 - Misdemeanors Against the Laws of Physics (And Cops)

Alright my pretties! It's time! I aim for two more chapters by tonight, let's build this fuckin backlog! Enjoy a little biohorror and a little escape sequence!

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“That was not a very good plan,” Raika tells Maen as they sprint the last stretch towards the cliff.

The first part had gone well enough. Maen has walked in, confident and direct, clai...

MISC 3: Little Red Wolf

The huntsman was so proud of his axe. Of the bloody, violent thing he had used, to carve her grandmother from the beast’s great body. He had a smile on his face as he swung, as he carved open the massive creature, the Wolf of midnight black, towering larger than any bear.

It did not occur to him, then, that a man such as him could never have slain such a beast. He considered himself ever so mighty, with his height, tall for a man, and his build, wide and strong for a man, but the Wolf...

MISC 2: The Office Party

An eldritch corporate employee, speaking to her boss about recent troubles and potential acquisitions in the cutthroat world of dark urban fantasy.

The wine in her hand, she reflects, really does taste better with a view. Standing on the ledge, hand on the rail, a city draped over the landscape in full splendor, the security of success, and the taste of a beverage older than she is by close to a century; altogether it makes up one of the sweeter...

MISC 1: Santa Calibre

An exploration of mysticism and consciousness in a quick Cyberpunk flash-fic!

She unscrews one of the panels carefully, opening up the weapon’s innards. It’s sleek, black and sexy, a little engine of ballistic destruction, weighing about twenty pounds and capable of holding forty 5.56mm rounds at a time and send them almost six-hundred yards with tremendous precision at a rate of 40 rounds per minute in burst form, and 600 in fully automatic firing pot...

Stars and Shadows - Chapter 4

Sikari can’t help letting out a grumble as she walks into the building. The structure itself is glorious and blocky and ornate in a subtle, powerful way, as one would expect, but it hardly makes its shadow any more comfortable today than it has in the last time she was here, a long time ago. A towering building, half bunker and half spire, the architecture is even more blunt and aggressive than the utilitarian constructs in the lower Hive, especially against the alabaster backdrop of the ma...

Stars and Shadows - Chapter 3

The hive reeks. The occasional broken pipe and the general smell of a city made entirely of metal and built around manufactorums fills the air with a caustic stench, the rust of thousands of hundreds of metal sheets left unattended throughout the structure, adding a coppery tang to it. Part of that is a byproduct, millions of chemical refinements leaking into the air, but there’s also the matter of disuse, corridors left untouched by anything other than vermin and outcasts in decades, left ...

Stars and Shadows - Chapter 2

In an orgy of glory-gloating and propaganda and pretty people dressed in clothes worth a week’s rations for an army, the speech continues. It goes on for a few hours, dragging out the time with little of consequence, and when it’s done, she turns, she marches smartly away alongside the others, and heads out to a bar.

It’s practically universal, the pressures of performance and the allure of shore leave putting everyone in a festive mode. Still, most other squadrons tend to avoid h...

Stars and Shadows - Chapter 1

The morning dawn has come, and with it, a gorgeous view of the city and the bustling movement that flowed through its streets. The day is bright, surprising even the planners of the event, who consulted countless analytical databases, pulling from dozens of reams of old reports and the most accurate meteorological data they had. The thick, dense clouds of dark smoke that cover the sky don’t give way, really; they never do on Utoria, second hive world and mining colony of the Alderine sector...

Stars and Shadows Intro

The world is cold, and the Emperor Divine watches over his children.

Thousands of years in the future, during the third wave of colonization into space, Sikari, a lowly Guardsman of the Empire is forced to confront the horrors not just of what she has chosen for herself, but the consequences of age-old horrors beyond her reach. As the world around her crumples under the face of an unknown threat and the impossible destruction levied against it by those who care not for her ...