A Sneak Peak of my Latest Book
Enjoy a sample chapter in my latest Kincentric Mythological Retelling: A Plain of Pillars.
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This week we were blessed and honored to welcome my latest book, over in year in dreaming, into the world! Thank you to all that participated in this project, who supported the tale upon its release, and loved us from a distance. Thank you, thank you. You know who you are.
Book Description:
An ancient people discover the brutality of peace in The Plain of Pillars, a sweeping mythological (Irish) fantasy and climate sci-fi series that “weaves a vibrant tapestry of hope, resilience, and magik” (Literary Titan), and interrogates the roots of colonialism and heritage.
Below is an excerpt from the Prologue. If you have interest in reading more, click here!
You can purchase / download the full Audiobook of The Plain of Pillars here!
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Prologue
He was too close to the man next to him to smell the blood rivering down his forearm. A weathered old hand of war, he grimaced only slightly as a tapestry of arrows reverberated overhead, piercing the air and whistling to finish what others had started.
“They talk, we fight,” the veteran next to him whispered to himself. His shirt was torn at the seam, threads broken and bitten through.
“But we are here. We may as well win,” another man laughed to himself, a breathless bubble rising in his crooked neck.
“We will die,” Luchta muttered back, his eyes scything across the line of hunched soldiers. There was drawn anger, empty scabbards hanging loosely below empty hearts.
The men around Luchta were painted in crimson with striped and symbolized sketches etched across their already blood-crusted and spear-shaved faces. Symbols that mattered when war was a contest in fearlessness. Symbols that mattered when battles were fought between men and not for men. But today, it was to be a mêlée to scythe souls. A devil’s mirk, rent beyond repair.
Behind them sat men on horses with swords, and behind them sat great men on great horses with no swords at all. Men leading men from behind. Stations and ranks defined not by accoutrements or valor or skill, but by the lack of red, like ochre paint, that spilled around them.
Another volley of arrows ricocheted in the cloud-spat space between me and Luchta’s men.
That’s right, I am here too. I am the Raven above the field of battle.
The landscape was a patchwork of infant woods and limestone shelving wolds, still undecided if they would be glens, meadows, or moist moors.
“Moist moors,” I thought as I flew above it all. Tonight, they will be moist.
It was evening, and the grey light was abating fast. Soon, a red Sun would rise above the open plain to the west, and the battle would begin.
“You are the son of a god?” the man who stood next to him inquired. “Do you have no power?”
Luchta did not answer.
“No,” another returned, angrily and answering for him, “he is the son of a wri—”
“—a wright that was a god,” the first asserted quickly and without turning his attention to the second man. He was tall and carried a long scar down his exposed chest, browning as it aged, a remnant of a rusting spear that came close to edging him away.
Luchta was quiet. His heart was elsewhere. A fungi finding root, it sought the rolling range of the bald Mountain that overlooked the great wolds of his peaceful Land. An upturned island, the Land under the Rim of the world waved in multitudes of grasses and river reeds that sang with the willows’ many wands in a revering rhythm. Music was everywhere, and the soft winds carried her song. This was the Land of his life, and it was this Land that his heart sought.
He held memories clad in mist and deepening dusk, covered, just barely, by the upland forest’s moistening duff. His family would often venture to the edge of the rock-scared cliffs that overlook the great plain of their people or the great wolds that echoed their chimney’s breathless gauze back to them in order to witness the grandmother’s rise. Their people held the Moon in common and often found her night-water intoxicating when steeped high in the heights.
They would walk to the cliff’s edge and then turn around, placing the plain far below to their back. The Mountain’s supple and cool breeze would waft them eastward and up into the settled nests of the Crow-Ravens.
Their hearts becoming full in the Moon’s night-water. Their hearts becoming high on the Mountain’s loving heights.
We would dine together.
On the Mountain, they would visit me. At home in the village below, they would close their eyes and fly with me.
But today, their eyes would be rent from their bodies, and I would descend to walk with them, stepping their deaths together.
When Luchta looked back over the events woven through his life, these were the deepest. Like the oak on the Mountain, his memories drew down past the stones and their stalwart agelessness into the heart of the Land. An unhewn dolmen, the seat of grace, the living marrow of their life’s music. The village. The clan. His family. Her face.
Lips a supple pink, tasting the fire’s winter red heat. Her heart, a deep pounding red, reflecting shimmers of yellow and bronze against the once pale hearth. The eggshell color of her words. Her life planed and now curling in his arms. Her lips, fibrous and playful. Her calloused hands feeling his.
Her arms now waving him home.
His visions disappearing into a grey mist.
“You are Luchta, then?” the man next to him inquired. The man paused as if to think, to taste the thought for its salt. He shifted his spear to his other hand, gripping its shaft a little higher. His forearm bulged red under the strain. “You are Luchta, the son of a god?”
“It is true if you say it is,” Luchta replied without looking. His eyes were busy and shut. He was dreaming of the valley’s wind lifting with laughter, and he was dreaming of flying with me. “You are right,” he replied as he opened his eyes after a moment, reality snapping like bone.
The wind’s clap on the cliffs distilled with a white snap, and the waving music fell into the parched Land at his feet. The sounds of children echoed outward and away. Always slipping away. The rolling range of the Mountain and the Moon’s night-water and his family’s fired hearth, memories that had colored his vision, fell before him and disappeared as the sullen and swollen plain solidified. Then, dullness and focus. Fingers wrapping not around wood or shaft but wrath. Metal clanging on shields. Hearts closed under chain and mail. Anger rising like rain but sour and red.
“But you should thank my brothers, the smiths of Art and steel, for today, they are all you have,” Luchta muttered.
No one heard him.
Mountains of soldiers shuffled, and a great dust drifted over the stifled plain. The men in the front suffocated. The men in the back were pierced by arrows. A worm inching forward but losing its tail, the copse pushed forward in a violent panic and men fell over each other, toes kicking heels and men kicking men.
Those with swords and on horseback circled to the left and gathered into a charge.
Then, dust.
Screaming Earth.
The great moor opened for its quenching.
The moistening began.
And then, red.
It fed me for days.
The battle began in a rush of hoarse laughter. Guttural shrills screamed legs into the dust, a hurricane throwing debris back on the Land. The sky was quickly clearing and the clouds reclined. The dusking Sun, now red, shone brightly in the west, but the Moon was quiet and dark. She was not interested in culpability, so her face looked elsewhere.
A deep clamor panged across the plain as the two armies met each other at first in theory and then in reality. The enemy’s forces seemed to have swelled in the reddening dusk, and Luchta thought he could see even more men filtering in through the valley cut behind them. An infinite mass of men ready for mayhem to etch its face upon this strange arena.
Men clad in heavy panoply swarmed about the Mountain’s feet from end to end. Their lines stretched the width of the plain, and it pulsed like a wave on a pier—in and out, swirling at times.
Luchta’s line stood, waiting. A volley of arrows released from behind them with a shrill that cast many into ruin, but their enemy’s ranks refilled quickly like ocean sand and then appeared to double. One down, two in their place.
A clamor of color rose to meet me, and I flew higher to avoid the arrows. I am not impervious to your pain.
I landed on an exposed and phallic perch just above an escarpment of river stones. A perfect pew to watch. To bear witness.
Oh, how I watched hungrily.
The enemy charged first. Their great host roared the sea. Their ranks collapsed nearly into a single file like a host of ants following the scent of death.
Deep drums echoed commands, and they waved over the plain like the tide. Slowly at first, feet stepping the rhythmic boom, boom, boom of the deep—a song that only sailors feared. Until today.
They surged in mounting steps with banners pressed forward. Their long spears held at the waist beamed a white light under the red westward Sun. The butts of their spears sat in leather cups sewn into their belts, freeing one of their hands for fighting and the rest of their body for spiking and thrusting. A full-bodied press, their onset would be fierce. Some carried javelins, and others carried blunted instruments, striking death with mighty blows. Destruction living in the descent. Others even carried horror itself.
They charged, curling like gravity. A force ready to crumble like feta off its block, and some were crumbling even now. A deep doom quickened their pace, and the mass cantered, closing the space between.
A hare loosed to the left, startled. It was huddled in a patch of heather that was attempting a settlement, purpling the bog with teardrops fashioned like bells. It rang with every step of the advance, signaling for life to leave.
I saw it run. I saw its fears. I wanted to give it wings. I heard its cry when it was smashed like dry sticks underfoot.
“There they are, the many of them,” Luchta’s superior asserted as he rode in front of their line on his brown war Horse.
She brayed under him. Although young and fresh, the Horse was clad in greying metal and leather billets fraying after years of stropping. The campaign had cost her rider seven Horses, all shot out from under him, and the men started to wonder if he was a god.
“If he was,” one man whispered, “he would protect his Horses.”
“If he was,” Luchta muttered back, “why would he need us?”
The drums stomped faster with a doom and boom, and the ensuing hurricane gathered into a twisting stampede of rain, wind, and debris that stumbled forward chaotically.
“Today, this evil will die. Let us give it to them, men!” the horseman screamed as his Horse reared onto its hind legs, bouncing up and down like a top. “Whatever happens, men, stand and fight!” His words trailed downward like stones sliding into a pit as he galloped off. No one seemed to believe him. The line seemed to take a step back.
The dust was almost eye level now, and her floating particles suspended specks of light in twisting and twinkling collections of red and orange. Squinting, one could almost see flecks of yellow dotted with ochre reds and silty seafloor browns. If the poets were here, these would have been colors to write about. Alas, they were shot through last week for their bardic powers were greater than their fighting skills. The poets’ necks and chests had lengthened to find the air above the miasma, and her arrows landed to give it to them. They laid with papers strewn across their chests, black ink spilling red around them, a fifth appendage shafting breath anew.
Luchta’s eyes fell to his right and saw continental mercenaries on horseback gathering to flank. They twisted and circled in anticipation, stamping their hooves clean of the day’s muck. The strange men worked to stay aboard the jerking and twisting mares, each whickering the adrenaline outward. The riders carried long swords crafted in the ancient technique with thick, straight blades. Weapons to cast blows and strike steel. Weapons to provide contest. Weapons of Skill and Art.
But today, they would slice like hasty butchers.
The brown Horse and her rider were gone, drifting somewhere into the rear, out of range of arrow and lance.
“They talk,” one man whispered.
“We die,” another returned.
It was not long until their line broke. Luchta leapt forward, his free arm splitting the forest of thrusting spears aside. He heaved his weapon deep into the skull of another. Its edge split the helmet and his force ushered from handle through hilt fractured the neurons. Sparks flew like heated iron against Earth’s anvil when man met man.
I could see it from up here.
I could. I felt bursts of heat when sparks sent souls my way.
The message was clear and cast salty liquids like falling Waters that pooled at their feet and dowsed the smiting smiths. Luchta slipped to a knee, the soft white becoming a solid brown when the stale muck converged with the buckskin covering his legs.
He lost his spear in the mud. He must have dropped it when he fell or when the sparks burst deafening colors. Crawling feverishly, fingering for the metal and wood, his anxiety admixed with terror when the pulsing mass above him began to move laterally.
A doom echoed above and through him. Another boom. Then silence.
“Another charge?” he screamed out loud. “Why?” he demanded in words reeking of pain.
He scurried below as the muck of the filling red pond grew deeper. Chaos chortled through him and overtook his senses. Another soldier had fallen nearby, a young body brimming with arrows. It was the man that had been next to him in the beginning, the man who thought of gods. His body now slumped forward as though praying, seated on a stone ledge and overlooking the mangled corpse of a young girl.
Luchta’s last sight was the man’s blood flowing into a fall from the arrow’s fletching into a hole in the girl’s skull. Every patter, a splash. Every splash, a network of ripples over the landscape. Red, her brain mixed with the mayhem, the muck.
And then the muck rose to meet him. A great, flat foot was thrust into his back, and he fell face-first into Earth. At once, the rippling stopped. At once, the mayhem stilled into perfect silence. The greenish and toeless hoof sent gangrene up his spine, and then everything was calm.
His heart knew movement—he could feel the retreat. His senses felt vibration—he could smell the drum’s second charge. The devil’s mirk, writhing and wiggling. He could not move.
The charge ricocheted the line backward, the men recoiling against the surging wave. The Company wedged their spears behind them for ballasting, but the curling shape of the consuming wave consumed them. Feet slipping and men falling, twisting and becoming flat under the metal soles of already petrified souls.
“Stay strong, men,” the superior’s command boomed over the field. It was a strong voice and carried on trumpets that blasted positions and movements that no one could hear. What was to be never was had.
“Stand firm!” It screamed.
“Sweep left to close the punctured whole bleeding the enemy through.”
“Pivot to brace the flank!”
“Form ranks! Shield wall!”
Voice without avail. Voice for souls that were already gone. They were overtaken, and their ranks collapsed like the rings of trees, readable only in death and readable only when it matters not at all.
A pond of miasma, a crusting entrail slithering itself straight. Thousands of men and women crawled like crippled insects, and some even were missing torsos. They walked around while others fought beside them, looking for their stomachs, reeling them back in like eels.
They tumbled over their heads.
I hopped the scotch of men and enjoyed the putrid potpourri that exploded like grenades when my claw punctured with a pop their swollen bellies. I tasted green and smelled the already pulsing white wiggles of life locomoting in the legless and writhing millions of maggots.
Larva making life.
A metamorphosis twisting the fibers.
Will they remember?
Will they ever?
Men converged like a nest of twigs, overlapping often with limbs so entwined that biting was all they were able to do. Noses and ears dotted the landscape like stumps, and many were discovered in the days that followed with their heads plowed in the dirt. Inverted bodies swelling in the heat. The last effort to get away, it seems, a frenzied and freakish attempt to become clay, sooner.
One man writhing, still, his face in the mud and sinking under the retreat.
A muffled malaise drowning on once dry Land.
Then, stillness.
The battle raged in colors even you could have tasted, but he was still, his legs flapping only subtly as the mortis set in, his outstretched arms with hands clutching the last bits of Earth. The black muck filtered through bloodless fingers, his body oozing downward, becoming clay, the worms swelling and swimming upward.
Luchta, the wright, the son of a god, was dead.
He drowned in the dirt.
Quivering storytelling, i felt really connected through the Raven’s dialogue, feeling Raven as animal and god, feeding on the actual flesh of the dead and receiving their slain souls… riveting! Also humor of epic proportions when comparing an army to a crumbling block of feta cheese!..for me that was a relieving moment of chuckling amidst the thrilling horror of battle ensuing. Really looking forward to ordering a copy and reading.