First Chapter

I feel like I start every blog these days with, “I dropped the ball…” I gotta be honest, y’all, I don’t even know where the ball is. I can say I’m still here, taking a stab at indie life, if not a very good one. I don’t have any super exciting news right now, except maybe I’m considering running all my Kindle titles on a sale after Thanksgiving, with the hopes this past year hasn’t taken as much wind from your sails, my friends, as much as it has for me.

Alas, I haven’t posted anything here in a while, so it’s about damn time I do. I’ve decided to share the first chapter of the first novella in a series I have been working on with my creative partner. The whole project is probably still a long way off from seeing any sort of publication, but when it gets there it will be mixed media and something a little different. That being said, I’m still interested in getting some readers in on the project that is currently sitting at five novellas total from different points of view.

I have shared from this series here before, from the second installment. Today I’m going to post the very beginning. A short overview, the setting is a spin on post-apocalyptic, the fall of a society that would’ve been described as cyberpunk, and there are also strong fantasy elements to go with the tech. I would actually really love feedback on how the story starts, so feel free to leave me comments or messages!

The last thing I want to say before we start the part is … happy Halloween, spooky friends!

An excerpt from “Dirty Synth”, featuring Wen Daniri

Chapter 1

Most of us didn’t remember what life had been like before the demons came. There were some who did, the elves and the dwarves, but they kept those secrets in the space behind their borders. There were hints of the old world in the great cities that reached as far up as they did out, but they were crumbling ghosts.

Surely there were others who wondered about that world like I did. How did those people live before most of the planet became a wasteland? Was basic electricity so scarce? What had society been like before there was hell filtering through the blood of the masses?

The history passed down on the streets of Srong Sevina where I grew up was iffy. Some said the demons opened a rift for themselves, hellbent on death and destruction. Some said they came because our world had corrupted so much it wasn’t redeemable. No one knew for sure. They were too busy navigating crime-filled alleys and whole communities made of broken down train cars and subway systems.

It wasn’t until after I enlisted that I learned the Crown and the Cabinet weren’t even as old as the Fall. They were a result of it, a last-ditch effort to bring some order to a world that had fallen to chaos. I didn’t learn much later that it was also a point of contempt for some that the current Queen was herself of a hell-mixed descent.

The Queen’s military recruiters found me six years ago. The offer they had made was hard to beat. Relative stability, a steady stipend, a solid roof over me. It wouldn’t take much to beat slum life. That had been the plan anyway. Except when they put me through the initial screenings for basic training that plan changed.

Somewhere in those interviews I caught some important eyes. I met with increasingly ranked members of the military, eventually even the General and then the Queen. I never made it to basic but I was listed as a member of the 1st Division, the Queen’s Guard. Instead, I was assigned to tutors for reading and writing and, eventually, I started learning Elvish from the Queen’s personal language tutor. The General himself oversaw my martial training. I didn’t realize then how strange all of that was.

Over the years I met with the Queen regularly. It took me a while to realize she was grooming me for something specific, which came roughly two years ago when she gave me the title of Race Relations Adviser and strong armed me onto her Cabinet. That was when it occurred to me that she had made me a poster child for enlisting, the success story most folks would only ever dream of. I’d never regretted my decision once.

Despite all of that education, the history I wanted wasn’t taught. The closest I ever got was exposure to technology that the general population would never see, and contact with races who pretty openly despised humans. The tech had been rebuilt from that old world, mostly by the dwarves who stayed behind the walls of their industrial complex. They dealt grudgingly with the Crown because the royal machine was the only entity with enough resources for commerce. In turn the dwarves shared a small part of the electricity they produced with the Throne and the masses.

Hearing their concerns was my job. Though it was rare for them to make anything formal. It was hell when they did. They didn’t appreciate speaking to a human woman in her early twenties, by my best guess at my age, about official business, and their ambassador never missed an opportunity to insult me. At least they weren’t as bad as the elven ambassadors who simply refused to speak to me at all.

Still, my royal life was far above my younger years in the slums, scraping for food and scrapping with the competition for it. I didn’t have to worry about where my next meal would come from anymore. I had access to clean water and, for the most part, the struggle of the general population didn’t touch me.

I had spent most of the years after enlisting in the capital city, Caris, where the population was more heavily human than the demon-mixed streets of Srong Sevina, and the city’s infrastructure was kept in a little better repair. It had been, what, six months since the Queen had relocated me and other key players with her to Srong Sevina to try to get a handle on the heavily-demonically-influenced seat of violence and destitution. Srong was a hard place and it was getting worse.

The city was also home to a large cell of the Retribution, a human purist group who believed it was their right and mission to exterminate any and all hell blood from what was left of the planet. They took matters far past regular demon hunters, who tended to focus on pure-blooded demons. The Retribution would target anyone of mixed descent, too. As far as I was concerned, they were little more than terrorists. However, they had managed quite a seat of power before they began blipping on the royal radar and now they were a holy pain in the Throne’s ass.

Those were just the biggest items at the top of a list of problems that rolled on seemingly forever. So far, our presence in Srong hadn’t made much difference at a street level. Most folks in the city had little use for anything royal, they were much more concerned with survival and our resources were already stretched too thin to do much for them.

I checked myself in the mirror. My long red hair was down against my shoulders even though I knew by midday the city would be so hot I’d regret it. I was wearing a short white jacket-vest with a high collar and actual metal buckles over a black midriff shirt and a knee-length skirt. Fashion was something not always readily available to everyone, especially something like the chunky white boots that matched. I had just gotten that outfit.

The Queen, of course, had her own tailors who also made my clothes. The general population often had to settle for more general trends they could find at the market. Often times they also made their own modifications to those trends.

I nodded satisfactorily at my reflection. I wouldn’t go to my scheduled meeting looking like I had also just come from the commoner market. Cipher would be hard enough on me as it was.

I picked up my handheld and headed out the door of my apartment. The tablets were one of those bits of technology that were far from common. They had lit screens and keyboards, connected to a wireless network that only worked inside the Paaj Military Compound that had been our makeshift home for the past six months. Mine beeped to remind me of the meeting.

I silenced the alarm with a sigh. I sped up my steps. I’d never hear the end of it if I was late, and it wasn’t that uncommon for me to be late. I wouldn’t give the dwarf an easy jab. I might even be a little early.