TKO Creations

Rumil (and you readers) get a quick crash course in the Solarian religion here in Chapter Fourteen, even if Timothy isn’t exactly the most… enthusiastic teacher.  He knows most of it is pandering exaggerations (if not outright lies), and that anything they may have actually gotten right was more by blind luck than any understanding of the planes of existence beyond the mortal.

But it’s the parts they have got right that are what’s important… especially as they pertain to our poor Arcadian hacker who is about to find herself the central piece of a massive power play within a completely alien race.

A little bit of a present for all of you; a project I put together along with another writer by the name of Mary Ebert for the NaNoWriMo event two years ago.

This story doesn’t lie within the Gate Cycle universe, it actually is an Terra-centered piece of science fiction, exploring corporate malfeasance, the nature of hatred and racism, and (at its core) a shameful reminder as to how easy it is for people to forget simple decency… and that the line between the good guys and the bad guys are tragically thin indeed.

Go ahead and read it here.

And, on schedule, is Chapter Thirteen.

In this chapter, we finally get to see one of the Erani homeworlds.  The Solaria surface, in and of itself, is 98% desert, but has a very sound ecosystem underneath said surface.  The idea of advanced life thriving in places normally deemed inhospitable was a concept that amused me from the time I first heard of the theory that life could exist under the ice shelf of Europa.  Solaria allowed me to explore that concept to my fullest.

We also see the first tangible presence of one of central plot point of the series, a Gate to Bannor; or more specifically what is left of one after Bryan Honore, Julius Feroz, and their strike force managed to neutralize it.  This is a story that will be told in full in a later book.

They are meant to be largely unknown things, even to the believers who pore relentlessly over the words of their prophets looking for insight… the only thing that the Erani can “prove” in any reasonably conclusive manner is that these gates link to someplace that no mortal being really should want linked to their plane of existence.

And the Erani believe there are seven more of these things somewhere in the galaxy.

It’s not meant to be a particularly pleasant thought.

And Chapter Twelve is now live.

An interesting note for this particular chapter; it was initially meant to be two separate chapters… hence why this chapter is a bit longer than the others previous (12 pages as opposed to 7 or 8).  But as I was actually putting the manuscript together, there really wasn’t any logical break point that worked for me.

Along with my reluctance to add superfluous content in order to make the two individual chapters meet the length I had decided the pages should be… I erred on the side of one larger chapter.

See ya next week.

Another week, another chapter, this time #11.

I hope all ten of my readers had a pleasant Mother’s Day, whether with family or blissfully without.

See you all next week.

P.S. Do I even have ten readers?  I honestly have no clue.  I can’t follow the stats page on this blog to save my life.  And I thought the WHIP stat in baseball was hard to decipher.

Chapter Ten is now live for reading.  One may do so here.

This is where you really begin to see a difference in the methods and personalities of the two Knights, who I had tried to play largely the same coming from Rumil’s perspective in these early chapters.  They really have much in common, yet are also so very different.