How Online Gaming Influenced My Writing

Hi again, Here Be Magic readers! With my fantasy novel Valor of the Healer dropping tomorrow at CarinaPress.com (about which I'd just like to remark YAY! and also HOLY CRAP I have a book coming out!), I'd like to chat with you all about some of the background of the story. And in particular, my online gaming background that influenced aspects of all three of the viewpoint characters.

Out of all the things I've written to date, Valor of the Healer has the longest-running history throughout my life. Way back in middle and high school, I was writing novels that eventually formed the basis of the backstory for Valor's world. And sometimes I was even writing them during class, while pretending to take notes! (One advantage to writing out a story longhand in a spiral-bound notebook!) I still have those stories, and while they are very, very much the products of a young writer, I keep them around nonetheless for nostalgia. In those stories, you can see the very earliest versions of the nation of Adalonia, and the character who eventually became the Anreulag in Valor of the Healer.

Later on, once I'd gotten out of college, I discovered MUSHes. The name is an abbrevation of Multi-User Shared Hallucination, and they are a type of online, text-based roleplaying game. Generally they were based on the setting of a work of SF/F, and the idea was that you'd be able to create a character in that environment and roleplay with other characters in real time. I played on several of these games, including ones set in the worlds of Elfquest, The Dragonriders of Pern, and Star Wars.

The character of Kestar Eyrian Vaarsen is in fact named after a couple of characters played by my friend Amanda, with whom I roleplayed extensively on PernMUSH back in the 90's. The character in my book was originally a lot more like the characters of K'star and E'rian, but he eventually evolved into his own person. Nonetheless, he's named after those characters, in homage to all the awesome roleplay fun I had with Amanda.

But sometimes the settings were entirely original, like AetherMUSH, which was the creation of Astra Poyser Laughlin, who you'll see called out in the Acknowledgements of my book. The reason? AetherMUSH was the place where the first versions of Faanshi and Julian were created.
I found my MUSHing experience surprisingly useful for developing writing skills. On several of the games I played on, if you wanted to play characters with special abilities or "feature" characters--i.e., the game's versions of characters that appeared in the original canon, such as Han Solo on Star Wars MUSH--you were generally required to create an application for those characters. You'd have to think about questions of backstory for the characters, what they may have done before if you were inheriting them from previous players, and what sort of plots you'd want to roleplay with those characters while you had them. It was immensely helpful for character development skills.

And on the best MUSHes I played on, such as Aether, huge emphasis was placed as well upon one's plotting skills. You'd often be called upon to create "tinyplots", interactive plots where your fellow players could join you in carrying out a particular story. Again, valuable writing experience. You'd need to sketch out the broad details of the story, while also accounting for alternate ways for the plot to go depending on the actions of your fellow players.

Eventually, I got to the point where I kept regular running logs of all of my characters' activities. To give readers of the logs more of a sense of continuity, I'd also write "What has gone before" introductions to them, and sometimes side prose snippets as well to link them together. Once I started doing this, people started telling me that reading my logs was just like reading a novel.

Once I committed to writing for real, I had to give up MUSHing--due to not only time constraints, but also due to how the skills I'd come to feel were required to MUSH effectively were ones better spent on my writing work. But to this day, I look back on my MUSHing time with great affection and I still have my archive of roleplay logs. In those logs, you can find the original versions of Faanshi and Julian in particular, characters that never actually interacted with one another in their first incarnations! Bonus fun fact: the AetherMUSH version of Julian had wings!

How about you, Here Be Magic readers? Are any of you gamers of any sort? Fellow Here Be Magic author Tia Nevitt is a fellow former MUSHer, and I'd love to hear about any of the rest of you who have gaming backgrounds, especially if your gaming experiences influenced your writing in any way. What were your favorite games to play? Do you have any characters from your gaming days who are insisting you tell stories about them now? Tell me all about them in the comments!

Titanic ~ The Mummy's Curse, Premonitions & Other Odd Occurences

Sunday the 14th of April will be the 101st anniversary of  Titanic striking an iceberg and sinking shortly after midnight the next day. I've always been fascinated by everything to do with this disaster. In fact, my award winning SF novel WRECK OF THE NEBULA DREAM is loosely based on Titanic, but set in the far future.

As with any major disaster involving great loss of life, there were many psychic foreshadowings, coincidences and inexplicable occurrences surrounding the sinking of the Titanic. I’m sharing a few of them here today and one more very hair raising, true tale tomorrow over on the Paranormal Romantics website. 

If you were about to board a ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean and you saw the ship’s cat carrying her new born kittens off the vessel, one by one down the gangplank, might you think twice about embarking yourself? I think I would! Yet when this happened in Southampton right before Titanic sailed, only one Irish sailor took heed of the omen and jumped ship himself. What did Jenny the Cat “know” that most of the passengers didn’t?

Fourteen people from one small Irish village were sailing Third Class on the ship, hoping for a better life in America, with more opportunity.  In the days leading up their journey to Queenstown (now Cobh) to meet Titanic, one of the girls, Bridgett Delia McDermott, went shopping for clothes, wanting a new hat in particular. Years later she told her family about an eerie and chilling encounter with a mysterious man in black on the evening before she departed for Queenstown. As the story goes, as she was in the village with a group of friends, she was suddenly tapped on the shoulder. Turning around, she saw small man she didn’t know,  dressed completely in black. He told her she was going on a long journey. He told her there would be a tragedy, but that she would be saved. As Delia turned to repeat his words to her friends, the little man disappeared and her companions said they hadn’t seen anyone.

Delia sailed on Titanic anyway and barely escaped in lifeboat, No. 13, by climbing down a rope and jumping the last 15’ into the boat. She had been safely in line for the boat but went back to her steerage cabin to retrieve the new hat! Eleven of her companions from the village died in the tragedy.

Would you sail on Titanic if for several nights you'd been dreaming of someone throwing cats from a two story window into freezing cold water? William T. Stead, a famous newspaper writer of the times, had that dream, told friends about it before he set sail on the doomed White Star liner. Furthermore, he’d published two pieces of fiction that gained eerie significance in light of his fate on the Titanic. In 1886, he wrote the story “How the Mail Steamer Went Down in Mid-Atlantic, by a Survivor” where a steamer collides with another ship, with high loss of life due to lack of lifeboats. Stead added “This is exactly what might take place and will take place if liners are sent to sea short of boats”. In 1892, Stead published a story called From the Old World to the New,  in which a  fictional ship Majestic rescues survivors of another ship that collided with an iceberg. Foreshadowing of his own death by drowning?

Another supposed supernatural tale of the Titanic that wasn’t true, but a hoax, and which also involved Mr. Stead, was the Curse of the Egyptian Mummy.  Was the cursed mummy of Princess “Amen-Ra”  from 900BC to blame for the disaster? Per the myth-debunking website Snopes, not only was there no mummy – cursed or otherwise – on board Titanic when she sailed, the mummy doesn’t even exist.

Mr. Stead and a friend developed this elaborate story of an evil mummy to boost newspaper circulation at some point in time before he sailed on Titanic.  Supposedly the Princess had been a tortured, unhappy soul and consequently her mummy created death and destruction wherever she was taken.  Mr. Stead claimed to have sneaked her aboard the Titanic. He spoke to some fellow passengers about his alleged “traveling companion”, the beautiful 2000 year old Egyptian princess in her sarcophagus.  Furthermor while on Titanic Stead deliberately broke a superstition of the sea by starting his recital of the mummy’s tale before midnight on April 12^th and finishing it in the wee hours of April 13^th. Of course the ship struck the ice berg on the 14^th.

He did have a kernel of truth at the heart of his hoax, because there is a wooden, painted sarcophagus lid in the British Museum, excavated from the tomb of a high born woman. Sadly her name is unknown. She may or may not have been a priestess or a princess but it has been verified this coffin cover never left the Museum in  1912 and is still  there. Wooden hands were affixed to the coffin lid as if she’s reaching out, which is spooky! And at least one person who studied her and wrote about her died at a very young age so she is known as the “Unlucky Mummy.”

<=Photo: English: Cover of 1909 Pearson's Magazine featuring the story of the Unlucky Mummy (British Museum ref AE 22542).  {{PD-US}} – published in the US before 1923 and public domain in the US

I'm doing a Titanic and WRECK OF THE NEBULA DREAM themed giveaway on my blog, including a reproduction Third Class mug and an actual (but tiny) piece of coal salvaged from the wreck in modern time.
Please feel free to hop on over and leave a comment on my blog for a chance to win.

The Fine Art of Procrastination

I have many talents. I write (obviously). I scrapbook. I am a great cook. But where I really excel is at procrastination. Not the best talent to have, especially for a writer.

I remember in school when I'd know about a paper for the entire term and wait until the week it was due to write it. The last week of my senior year of college I think I got something like 6 hours of sleep over three days. I had a lot of papers to write. My husband ended up driving me to campus to turn stuff in because he didn't trust me driving. Probably a smart move on his part. But I got the papers turned in and graduated with a more than decent GPA.

Even now I'm procrastinating. I should be writing but I'm blogging instead. And checking twitter. And my email. And Facebook. And...well, you get the idea. I've had to find tricks to work around the procrastination. I come up with rewards for myself when I meet certain writing goals. I also downloaded a program called Freedom that shuts off the internet on my computer for however long I tell it to. The only way to shut the program down early is to reboot the entire computer. Let's face it, as wonderful as the internet is, it can be a major time suck if you let it.

So that's my confession. What about you? What talents do you have that you wish you didn't?

-Kathleen Collins

The first book in the Realm Walker series comes out in October from Carina Press. To learn more about Kathleen Collins and what she's up to visit her on the web at www.kathleencollins.net It's a great way to procrastinate.

Loki vs. Anakin Skywalker: Writing the Tragic (Anti-) Hero from Patricia Kirby

Today we have an interesting post comparing Loki and  Anakin Skywalker, from Pat Kirby, Author of The Canvas Thief:

A few nights ago, after dinner, I crept to my writing cave to string together some sentences and my husband, absent his live-in film critic, popped Star Wars, Attack of the Clones into the VCR. Within minutes, I heard the audio pause as he fast-forwarded through the romantic stuff. Honestly? I'd do the same.

In my office, I cranked up the volume on iTunes and got to work on a steampunk WIP. I also tinkered with an ongoing Thor fan fiction story. As I worked, I was struck by two things: first, how disappointing the Star Wars prequels had been, and second, how the Thor movie (2011), got the whole tragic hero thing right.

As I see it, Loki's descent into supervillainy in Thor, is what Anakin Skywalker's, in the Star Wars prequels, should have been but wasn't.

When it comes to storytelling, one could write a thick doorstopper of a book on the many ways that the Star Wars prequels went wrong. The excruciatingly, unromantic love story between the future Vader and Padme Amidala, for one.

Most notable is the ruination of the man in black himself, Darth Vader. George Lucas took one of cinema's most iconic villains and turned him into a whiny little boy in need of a nap. For a big-bad who will go on to run a galactic empire that terrorizes all freedom-loving people and blows up entire planets, Vader's youthful self doesn't inspire much confidence in his future in villainy. Mostly, Anakin makes my fingers twitch with the urge to deliver a resounding slap, a la, Cher in Moonstruck: "Snap out of it!" I can't, for the life of me, figure out what Padme saw in the guy, except that they shared the same remarkable ability to deliver lines in dull wooden tones.

When Anakin isn't chatting up his older lady love with oaken dialogue, he's complaining about all the stifling Jedi Order rules to his mentor, Obi Wan Kenobi. And that, in a nutshell, is the sum and total of Anakin's angst, the reason why he will eventually throw a tantrum on a volcano, and try to kill the guy who saved him from a lifetime of digging Tatooine's sandy grit from his eyes.

As I write this, Season Three of Game of Thrones (GOT) is beginning, and many viewers are hoping for the timely death of Joffrey Baratheon, Westeros's version of Anakin Skywalker. The resemblance is striking. Neither youth has any reason to be such a douche canoe. Joffrey is the coddled, spoiled child of royalty. Anakin is the coddled, spoiled Jedi wunderkind. Yeah, Anakin did a short stint in his youth as a slave, but when Obi Wan found him, Anakin wasn't exactly chained in a shed, covered in bruises and starving. His master didn't hand out cookies and milk, but the boy's hands probably weren't thick with calluses from hard work. He had enough free time to build C3PO and R2D2. I'm no slave, but I barely have enough time to get my hair cut, let alone put together an adorable robot duo. (The kid is like a small, male, midichlorian-enhanced Martha Stewart.)

There's also no indication that Anakin's teen years were troubled. Yoda grumbles that the boy is to old to begin training--what exactly is the usual age for inclusion in Jedi school? In utero?--but Anakin gets accepted into training nonetheless. Now, if Lucas had dug around in his sofa cushions, found some change and bought himself a clue about character building, he might have written Anakin a backstory that included alienation and bullying during his times in the Jedi academy. A justified reason behind Anakin's ambivalence toward the Jedis. But that didn't happen. So we're left with a privileged young man whose beef with the universe is pretty much, "I don't like rules."

Disdain for rules is reasonable motivation for stealing lipstick from Wal-Mart ("reasonable," not "justified"), but hardly a reason to plot bloody vengeance against the organization that has clothed, fed and trained you for many years. Had George Lucas put as much time into Anakin's character arc as he did into the CGI, Anakin's descent into darkness would have been emotionally wrenching. Instead it's his very short journey from bratty youth to deranged and still bratty youth--Now with cybernetic limb action! (Yes, Anakin's mother is eventually murdered by Tusken raiders, but all that plot thread does is demonstrate that the supposedly "noble" Padme is happy to ignore her boyfriend's slaughter of innocents because...love.)

Contrast that with Loki's dive into madness in Thor, which, coincidently, is a meatier story arc than the hero's. Like Anakin Skywalker's, Thor's character arc is only visible under a high-powered microscope. Thor, however, isn't an insufferable prick. But he is arrogant and it's fortunate that he's "The Mighty" Thor, because it must take immeasurable strength to haul that ego around all day. Therein lies the first of Loki's justifiable issues with Papa Odin.

Thor didn't just wake up yesterday and--Abracadabra--become a blundering jock with a penchant for violence. He's been running around kicking sand in the faces of 98-pound weakling realms for centuries. Odin knows this, but still dotes on him and decides to hand him the throne. This is followed by Odin acting surprised and butt-hurt when Thor storms off and attacks Jotunheim. Okay, so Thor was egged on by Loki, but it wasn't like the mischief maker had to expend much effort to get his blowhard brother to thunder off and make things dead.

There's also the problem that Loki's main strengths--intellect and magic--aren't respected in the land of testosterone-y warriors. (In this, Loki is like GOT's Tyrion Lannister.) It's sort of how people smile condescendingly and say that writing isn't a real job. If I heard that for a millennium, I'd probably start kicking puppies, so it's easy to see why Loki might be a smidge put out by the endless degradation of his abilities.

The coup de grace comes when Loki learns he's adopted. For Loki, the cutesy, inspirational saying, "It doesn't matter what you look like on the outside; it's what's on the inside the counts," is a cruel irony, since on the inside he's a frost giant, a member of a race so [purportedly] awful that their homeland had to be turned into an icy glass parking lot, which is now treated like the ghetto of the nine realms. His dad is none other than king of frost giants, Laufey.

Brother is an asshat, but no one else seems to care? Check. Skills disrespected on an hourly basis? Check. You are the monster in the fairy tale? Check. None of these are reasons to inflict maximum breakage on a little blue planet populated by fragile mortals, but one can see how Loki's mind might be like a frog in a blender, set on "chop."

Which is why Loki's character arc is what Anakin Skywalker's should have been. The story of a smart, talented, young man who allows himself to be warped by unhappy circumstances. Loki's story arc is especially relatable for anyone who's ever been the outsider, the geek pushed around by the jocks. Anakin, on the other hand, is the obnoxious jock. Heck, he even gets the girl. There's no gravitas in his characterization and the only darkness in his personality is an inability to accept that you can't always get what you want.         

On thing can be said for George Lucas. He could teach a master class in how not to write fictional characters.

The Canvas Thief :

Maya saw her first demon when she was seven. She learned to hide what she saw, ignore the paranormal beings around her and build an ordinary life. But she had to tell her secrets somehow, so she began drawing, creating her own world, her own characters.

Twenty years after that first demon entered her life, her normal existence is shattered when she's faced with two of her comic book characters come to life. Living in our world for years, each has his own agenda.

Benjamin Black, sexy thief with a cause, wants to get back to his own world. The world Maya thought she created. Only now he says she's his reason to stay in this one.

Adam Richards, once a cop, now a ruthless crime lord, wants to be immortal and he'll do anything, including hurting Maya's loved ones, to get what he wants.

The problem is, the men are inextricably linked through Maya's drawings. Ridding the world of Adam means Benjamin disappears from Maya's life forever...

Available at Amazon

Here Be News

No new releases this week but we do have a cover reveal!

How Beauty Loved the Beast, out May 13, has a cover. It's currently available on NetGalley for any reviewers to check out, too!

Links of Interest

About the ruling on the ReDigi case: Reselling Digital Goods Is Copyright Infringement, Judge Rules

The Fantasy Cafe is running an excellent series of posts this month about women in SFF. Seriously, go now and check it out.

Book experts weigh in on the publishing industry’s revolution. Authors, agents, librarians and others who ‘live by the book’ talk about what‘s changed and what it means.

Wisdom for Writers From Steve Jobs (Yes, THAT Steve Jobs) by Tiffany Reisz: "We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make 'me too' products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it's always the next dream."

Elizabeth Naughton on self-publishing: " For a determined writer, for someone with book business sense who wants to make a living doing what they love, this is a fantastic time to be an author."

About the Night Shade bankruptcy: Struggling Indie SF Press, Night Shade, Pushes Asset Sale

Here Be Magic Group Announcements

Giveaway – Win an Actual Piece of Coal from the Titanic!

Veronica Scott, author of  the award winning WRECK OF THE NEBULA DREAM, is doing a Titanic-themed giveaway this week to commemorate the 101st anniversary of the ship’s sinking.  Grand Prize is a  reproduction Titanic Third Class Coffee Mug plus a piece of coal salvaged from the actual wreck (Certificate of Authenticity included), an autographed copy of WRECK OF THE NEBULA DREAM and a $10 Amazon gift card. She will award $10 Amazon gift cards  to the 2nd and 3rd place winners. Comment on her blog to enter http://veronicascott.wordpress.com/ , all winners randomly selected. Giveaway is open April 8th through the 14th.

From Jeffe Kennedy: My story, Negotiation, a spin-off on The Twelve Kingdoms adult fantasy trilogy coming out in 2014, will appear in a Seventh Star Press anthology “Thunder on the Battlefield.” The anthology will be available in digital form around June 1 and in print shortly thereafter.

Inspiration – where do you get yours?

Inspiration – where do you get yours?

Recently the Wookie and I went out for International Tabletop Day, a wonderful event held by local gaming stores and encouraged by the likes of Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day – a chance to try out and enjoy games that you might not usually try and hopefully buy. We went down to Morgantown to a faboo gaming store, the Four Horsemen in Morgantown Mall. If you're in the area, I highly recommend them for all your gaming and comic needs!

Anyway we found two new games – Smallworld and the X-Wing Miniature game. Both very different from each other but I came away from the day re-invigorated and ready to leap back into my current work-in-progress with plenty of ideas of how to make the story better.

Now I hear you saying – what? How can playing a fantasy game along the lines of Risk and a shoot-em-up dogfighting game help encourage the muse?

As most writers will say – it's the story, stupid. Not only was I playing these games and making up stories in my mind about this and that I was watching others play Warhammer and WarMachine and Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon and… well, you get the idea. So many stories waiting to be told and so many different universes all colliding in one store and in my wee widdle mind.

So we came back with more games for our already over-stuffed game room, myself with a heedful of new ideas and thoughts and the thrill of finding new games to play. The next time you find yourself searching for inspiration consider digging out that old copy of Scrabble or better yet, get thee hence to your local game store and check out all the wonderful games waiting to suck you into their reality.

Good luck and keep on having fun!

Round Robin: Part Eleven

Delphie and Dash consummated their whirlwind marriage in the previous episode (http://herebemagic.blogspot.com/2013/03/round-robin-part-ten.html), but now they have to save the kingdom... Note: You can find links to all the episodes at the Round Robin tab at the top of the page.

***


PART FORTY-ONE
By Angela Campbell, http://www.angelacampbellonline.com/

Delphie couldn’t tell from the outside if this portal would lead them to the djinn dimension or the portal dimension or Gadleybazook. She only knew it was worth a try. She squeezed her eyes shut and tiptoed into the cold freezer, hoping this portal would land them nice and cush, preferably without a shock of lightning or being torn to pieces or in a pit with snakes — she hated snakes. Deep breath.

And voila!

One second she and Dash were standing in that deep freeze. The next, they were standing in, um…a blue forest-y type place?

“Delphie!”

Delphie held up her hand, halting the question she knew was coming from her husband. “I didn’t say I knew where the portal went, just that it was likely a portal.” Hands on her hips, she twirled around and examined the area. “If we can figure out where we are, maybe I can use my pixie powers to find another portal and—”

“We’re in the Gormuaine Forest, outside Ainmire’s castle.” Dash pointed through the gnarled trees at the classic fairy-style castle—really, were the djinn copycats or what?—festooned with white, flapping flags. “You can see the wedding decorations from here. The white pennants mean the wedding hasn’t happened yet but it must still be on.”

“Then I did it,” she concluded proudly. It made sense that a portal leading out of the djinn dungeon to Earth Two would be combined with a portal back into the djinn dimension. Sometimes they worked in pairs—like she and her husband.

Whooping with victory, Dash scooped her up, spun her around, and gave her a kiss she’d like to continue before setting her back on her dainty feet. His eyes glinted with desire, but he made no move to further things. Party pooper. He grabbed her hand and pulled her after him. “Come on, my little pixie. We have a wedding to stop and then a proper honeymoon of our own to enjoy.”

She pulled back, freeing her hand. “Why the rush? Besides—” she flicked her wrist dismissively “—so what if they have the wedding? They can get a quickie annulment or a divorce, like normal people.”

Dash shook his head. “Djinn weddings are forever, or have you forgotten?”

She hadn’t forgotten. She just didn’t believe it. She stepped closer and fingered the top of his pants. She did want to help Aurora and Stride, but she had other things to accomplish first. “Surely we have a few minutes?”

A few minutes in which she could get some information out of him.

Dash had told her Aurora’s secret wasn’t his to share, but for crying out loud, they were married now. In every sense of the word! If she was going to run off with him to stop a royal wedding and risk getting themselves killed—because no doubt Ainmire the Worst King Ever still hoped to execute her husband and herself—she wanted to know why.

“Now, Delphie, er, what are you doing?” He grabbed her hand before it could do her naughty bidding. “Holy barghest, woman, you’re insatiable. Not that I’d be complaining under normal circumstances, but…”

She stretched up on her toes to give him a peck on the mouth, making sure she pressed herself against him in all the right places. “But what, dear?”

“But we, um…” He gripped her closer, distracted.

“Why is it so important to stop the wedding? We’re married, dear husband. That makes us partners. I deserve to know, don’t you think?” She sprinkled her words with a kiss or two along his jaw.

He grasped her shoulders and firmly moved her away. “Nice try, wife, but I’m afraid we don’t have time for this. The wedding could be happening right now.”

Crossing her arms, Delphie stomped her foot. “I’m not moving from this spot until you answer some questions.” She heaved a dramatic sigh and told a little lilac lie, the kind that’s mostly true but needs a bit of scent to spruce it up. “I’ve figured out a plan to stop that wedding, like this.” She snapped her fingers. “But not until you tell me why I should.”

Dash’s brow furrowed as he shook his head. “This isn’t a game, Delphie. Lives are at stake. An entire kingdom is at risk.”

“You don’t trust me. Your own wife.” Delphie pretended to buff her fingernails, completely unmoved. Not quite, but she had to pretend like she was unmoved. Honestly, her new husband was beyond stubborn. Whatever was she going to do with him?

A frustrated groan erupted from his chest as he stalked closer. “Aurora is already married to a commoner. But the only way to end the wish feud between the two clans was to agree to become betrothed to him.”

Seriously? That was the big secret? Delphie rolled her eyes. “If she’s already married, she can’t marry Ainmire. He’ll have to get over it.”

Or could she? Did djinns believe in polygamy? Did Dash? Cause she wasn’t the sharing type. If he expected her to be, he had another think coming!

“It’s not like that for the djinn.” Dash ran a frustrated hand through his hair, glancing between her and the castle with the flying pennants—white for the wedding, she assumed. “If the wedding goes on as planned, Ainmire—everyone—will find out about Aurora’s secret marriage. It’s likely she and her husband will be executed. Aurora’s entire clan of innocent women and children will be bound in servitude to Ainmire for a year and a day. He’ll take over her entire kingdom and all the people in it...and he might not stop there.”

“Why on earth would she be executed for such a thing?” Delphie scoffed.

Dash looked beyond annoyed. “Djinn royals aren’t not allowed to get married without the approval of their clan. They need to remain single in case their marriage can aid the clan as a whole, like putting an end to a disastrous wish feud. That’s why an unsanctioned marriage like Aurora's, to a commoner no less, is punishable by death.”

Delphie whistled. Geez. Harsh.

“If we don’t stop the wedding and get to Ainmire before he exposes Aurora, she’ll be killed and her kingdom will fall into that scoundrel’s control. I cannot allow that to happen.”

She’d heard of some convoluted marriage and royalty customs among the supernatural dimensions, but rarely did the law extend to executing someone for marrying! The situation did seem very serious. And urgent.

“Well, come on then, for Smurf’s sake! What are you waiting for?” Grabbing him at his bicep, she dragged him along after her. They headed for the castle through the thankfully sunlight-dappled blue wood. All they needed was some nighttime barghests and other critters trying to chomp down on them.

As they trotted, Delphie mused. “It sounds to me like Ainmire might have planned this all along. If he knew Aurora had a secret marriage, he could have started the wish feud with this goal in mind.”

“I don’t believe he knew,” Dash said, “else he’d have exposed her before now. And Ainmire is always starting wish feuds. Are you sure you don’t want me to carry you?”

That would place them at the castle quite quickly, what with Dash’s dashing ability. She needed a little more time to work out the details of this morass in her mind...as well as the best way to un-morass it.

“So you say.” Delphie remembered quite clearly how Aurora’s soldiers and maid had turned on her during the kerfuffle yesterday. Had it only been yesterday? Dash had been suspicious too but had refused to discuss it. “I just have one question.”

“What’s that?”

She blew her bangs out of her eyes. “How exactly will having the wish compulsion cure help Aurora? She’s still...” puff puff “...illicitly married to a...” puff “...commoner.”

“She was thinking of it as a bribe to call off the wedding. If Ainmire had the power to avoid wish compulsion, he could gain all the power he wanted without executing Aurora and her husband and enslaving all her people.”

“I...” puff puff “...think he’s...” Delphie skidded to a halt, breathing so hard she couldn’t talk. Wow, when you relied on fairy dust and your wings to get you all the places you wanted to go, a pixie could really get out of shape!

Dash took pity on her and swept her up into his arms, tossing her onto his back. “Hold on, wife. We can’t waste any more time. I’m going to try going faster than I usually do by tying my shapeshifting magic to my speed ability.”

Well, she wasn’t getting any more answers out of him if she was too winded to ask the questions! Delphie twined her fingers around his neck and pressed close to Dash’s back. Closing her eyes, she felt the wind whizzing past them as Dash began to glow blue and...dashed.

He really, really dashed.

Then there was a jolt and a bump and a sudden halt. She heard his sharp intake of breath and opened her eyes.

Crap.

They were inside the castle, close to the wedding, all right. They were standing right in front of Aurora, Ainmire and the abbot who’d performed her and Dash’s wedding. To the left was Stride, kitted out in bronze armor and holding a very large, hopefully ceremonial scimitar. Behind them were about five hundred wildly dressed, yellow eyed, funky haired djinn Delphie didn’t recognize at all.

*****


Sounds like Delphie and Dash have finally made it to the altar...and the big show-down. Will Stride be forced to fight them? Is Ainmire as evil as all that? Who is Aurora's husband? Find out in the thrilling conclusion to the sadly untitled pixie adventure in two weeks!


Jody Wallace
Author, Cat Person, Amigurumist
http://www.jodywallace.com  * http://www.meankitty.com