Stellar

I genuinely have no idea what I did to be included on this list of luminaries, since I'm one of the least social people on here, but thank you for the mention all the same.

The interwoven pasts of the Mishith and Jzu Krrm are important lore, certainly. Though, as foundational as it is, the significant connecting elements that link to the rest of what is going on all occur in the time of the hybrid. Jasu Kirmith history can be broken into three basic periodic aspects. Firstly, the era of renewed scientific discoveries and sustained large-scale interstellar expansion achieved through hybridisation, eventually culminating in quantum-based technology. Secondly, the cataclysmic reality-splitting event itself that was produced by that technology and caused the enemy's introduction. Lastly, the course of the conflict up until the war's abrupt -- and not fully explained -- halt at Lucere's siege, and the Sundering being committed. It's those pieces that will be the most enlightening when you can slot them together with greater detail. As we work our way toward the story ending, the information will be less and less obtuse, I promise.

I'm glad I'm proving educational in any sense! Thanks for reading and enjoying my work.

ESCALATION "The next threat arrives unforeseen, with guarded balance turning instead to rising crisis." -o-0-O-0-o- The very moment Admiral Yasir Lugor heard the tactical officer's voice and saw the incoming notification appear directly before him, he understood the deadly peril he faced, and the depths to which they had all been deceived. In that single microcosm of time, it was plain to him. Layer upon layer of duplicity. Ahead was the primary swarm of Disciples a

This is Chapter 9.

Well, the Herald isn't technically dead. Not yet, and 'yet' is the important word here. As Shay says, temporal dilation means that the process of the Herald being crushed into the singularity will take some indeterminate amount of time that's probably greater than the universe's current age squared. This is not any exaggeration either; being so close to that much mass makes space-time absurdly warped to the point that time is near to stopped. In a very real sense, to the outside cosmos, all black holes are forever in the process of collapsing into their singularities, with the inrushing mass frozen in the slowest of slow motions as everything is dragged to the core. A nanosecond inside is equal to a literal eternity outside. However ... the Herald's fate is now sealed, and it cannot influence anything outside of where it is. So, though it's not dead *yet*, it has effectively been removed from the equation. Given that the alien swarm was already following the Herald's specific steps to attack Earth even as it went absent to chase Shay and friends, there's a good chance nothing major will immediately change after the snake's head is removed. The body -- the attacking armada -- has instructions and knows where, when, and how to act. As for the 'spy mission', I'm assuming you're referring to Iskandar meeting Lucas. That just didn't feature this chapter, but it will soon. Not going to say anything else about the Master, because at this point there is nothing for me to say. If your questions are ones that I can provide any commentary or insight on, feel free to ask away!

Even as we jumped to a new location within the Milky Way, the Herald's most recent words would not fade from my mind. Like a shadow that persisted no matter how much light there was, the creature's insight and precognition was insidious. It always saw a way to subvert every plan I made to beat it. It always knew how, or what, or where; even with my best efforts to throw it off. It kept adapting, no matter what I did. There had to be a way to break the sequence. Mira

Chapter 8.

Thank you! I hope you'll enjoy the rest of Spirit of Fire.

I'm delighted, and very flattered that you think so highly of Aspects of Dawn. Thank you for your kind words and for reading my work, I appreciate it greatly!

Of course Darren is playing some kind of game here! There's no way he'd give himself up without an ulterior motive. It's safe to assume his voluntary captivity has something to do with the meeting he had with his family when Mordred delivered the Fear. Araziah's solution to the impasse with Sebby was ... if Torsten won't choose between us, then maybe he'll choose both of us. As the last thing Torsten does is lock the bedroom door, you can assume he likes the idea very much.

It must be noted that most air dragons are not naturally as friendly and understanding as Sebby is being here. Like all dragons, they look down on humans to a degree, and the sky children tend to be like fairy folk -- playful, curious, glamorous, witty, but also like the fey kind, they can be very alien and inhumanly unpredictable too. If you were to get on their bad side or cause an offence to an air dragon you did not know well, they might act capricious, cunning, mercurial, and perhaps whimsical in a cruel way. Having said that, our Sebby is more acclimated to humans than most, and it is because of his interest in Torsten in particular that he is unusually warm to those around him. If it were not for that interest, he would be more detached and probably still living his best dragon life, exploring and sleeping his way around Europe. Sebby's treatment of Araziah is even more extraordinary though, because though they might be rivals, their experiences are uniquely similar. It's a sort of irony that Sebby understands him perhaps better than anybody else. He's a lovable individual, and one of my personal favourites.

Well, the word is simply referring to punishment, but in a more historical sense it has often been used in specifically religious terms, usually referring to divine retribution, such as Attila being called the Scourge of God for a devastating a large area of early medieval Europe. With regard to everything you quote relating to Sebby and Xander fighting, I will explain. Torsten is with Viktor, both of them distant from the conflict and outside the fortress, with Torsten safe on the gunship. Torsten sees what is about to happen and convinces Viktor to intervene in order to prevent disaster. So Viktor, unable to physically cross the distance in time, uses water magic and creates a spear of ice. He hurls that spear across the gulf to strike Xander, which succeeds in distracting the fire dragon long enough to prevent him reaching the tower top where he would have turned the tables and effectively killed Araziah. This distraction allows Sebby time to catch Xander and attack him. What type of dragon is Sebby? He is an air dragon, and his magic -- as we learned a chapter of two ago -- is based primarily around illusion, which is what he uses here. Xander attacks a decoy, unware it isn't real, which is why it dissolves -- it's just a mirage that Xander believes is the air dragon assaulting him. Then Sebby does a magical flex just to prove how cool he is, binding Xander with lightning chains and executing him through electrocution. Lucy gets a lot of flack and isn't a favourite, but she's still a loyal friend to Torsten and her presence in the story is absolutely essential. I think you are confusing two very different concepts here. There is 'father' in the meaning of a literal parent, the male whose genes you inherited and who (in most cases) was involved in raising and caring for you as their offspring. Then there is the more biblical figurative 'father figure', and is used in a symbolic way to speak of a deity as a parent who protects and guides. The only ones that could claim the deities as actual parents were the firstborn in the legendary times that have long since past, so this is no longer the case. In the current context, you will see the dragons of each type refer to their creators as 'mother' or 'father' respectively. You will also see each type described as 'children' of a deity; i.e. 'children of flame' or 'sky child'. Even occasionally one type will refer to one of the other types as 'cousins'; water dragons may speak fondly of air dragons as their cousins, because they regard the two goddesses as sisters. None of this is purely literal -- these relationships are the biblical figurative type. All these described family connections are symbolic in nature. HOWEVER ... sometimes the dragons may be speaking about their real families, and you must use context to differentiate when this occurs. This mostly applies to the Seventh House since theirs is at the story centre. For example, Darren talking about Kaia, Faye, and Mordred, or those three referring to Darren and his brothers; these are blood cousins to one another. Similarly, the big grey dragon that shows up at the end to pull Mordred out of trouble is his actual father; he is the one nicknamed Smoke-touched that appeared at the airstrip where Minato was in the previous chapter. At that time, he was currently on his way to the fortress to meet his children, Mordred and Kaia, but he made a detour when he spotted some humans camped out along the Corridor. Naturally, he had to stop and deal with that. So, he arrived at just the correct time to get his boy out of the difficult situation. I should also say ... all this is to stop the dead god being resurrected. He wouldn't just show up like this randomly in a new body before the pieces are even in place and with no explanation. His rebirth would be a big, complicated, messy, ceremony, with an explosive climactic spectacle.

I thought he might grow on you. He is my favourite, in some ways. Araziah is an extraordinary individual, and a prodigy by most accounts. Unfortunately, beyond being the seer, Triskeleth had no special strength. She was alike any other dragon in that she could not escape the torture of such a device. I'm glad the lore is appealing to you. I put the background into this world for a reason! Little house dragon? Are you looking for a small pet, like a cat-sized one? Or are you looking for a live-in boy, like Sebby, who knows all the tricks?

I should point out that what Shay is attempting to do now is different from when the Herald resurrected itself. When it died in orbit of Dagen's Grace, it had lost internal control because of Mira and Elia, becoming rudderless and allowing Shay to damage the superstructure and cause the internal meltdown that shattered it into a gazillion bits. Here, however, he wants to disassemble it through heating until the constituent atoms come apart. Essentially, he is attempting to kill the Herald in a manner that it cannot return from, because the reversal would be too extreme to manage. Whether or not using a star to vapourise the leviathan would have been enough is an open question because it adapted before the theory could be tested. On the other hand, the swarm lingering near Earth is not quite so unkillable, but it is still a swarm! They can die due to railguns and standard human kinetic weapons, but their war is one of simple attrition and unforeseen traps. Different combatants, different arena, different strategy. To answer the last thought you pose from this quote first: they don't. Shay led them away to protect the others on that planet in the first place, so by necessity he won't return until he's victorious. As for your other questions ... will the Jzu Krrm help with this? What purpose will they serve? Well, I should ask a couple of questions back. Why might it be so critical that these two divided halves meet up again? Why did Dagen use the term 'Yugan the Unifier' when mentioning his descendent to Lucas? And perhaps most pertinent of all: if Yugan succeeds in reversing the Sundering, what must happen to the Mishith and the Jzu Krrm?

I did tell you anybody could die, didn't I? But Sebby isn't dead yet, so if you want to find out, you'll just have to read on. Crawley has the glove/gauntlet device, and he's nowhere near Overmountain. That collar is simply a restraint to stop Araziah transforming. If any rescue or escape attempt is to be made, they'll have to find some way to get rid of it, absolutely.

One of those three dragons (Mordred) approached him in the open deliberately, and Araziah witnessed him with no problem. The other two (Faye and Kaia) arrived suddenly as part of a trap out of the Corridor's cloaking effect, so they weren't detected, as that was the entire point. So, I'd say he didn't really fail at all. In fact, he turned the tables on them and escaped in spite of their ambush! Well, teleportation is his signature and he wasn't about to stay there and probably be killed. Alcohol is creating problems, as it so often does. Well, Prometheus as a project was halted, but you are correct that Overmountain is going to have some answers.

Aww, I'm sorry you've had to wait so long. Thanks for being patient. It's a real monster, no doubt about it. Something will have to be the barrier that the unstoppable force can't smash through, but Shay is working his way through the various types of cosmic ammunition to throw at it. One of his greater strengths is his ability to understand the motivations of those that oppose him. The alien enemy is harder to divine than human opponents, but patterns of behaviour can still be used to draw conclusions, and Konstantin is doing his best to read an otherwise inexplicable foe. I've been more motivated recently than I have in months to get more written, so here's hoping.

Here's Chapter 7.

Yugan perceived the intention only seconds before it happened. One moment, they were between the shattered remnants of Yahet, the planet torn apart by Shay's quantum manipulation of gravity on a scale greater than anything previously seen. The next, they had jumped to a new place, distinct again from all prior locations. "Analysis: extreme luminosity detected," the AI stated. "Photosensitivity adjustment applied. Radiation resistance enhanced across relevant wavelengths." A star came i

I would not say I was offended so much as surprised that a single trivial word was worth mentioning in such a way. I know the functional difference in meaning between the two terms, and I don't think I hesitated at all over the artistic description when I originally wrote this section because it sounded correct to me at the time -- and it still does. Much of the elemental imagery describing the gods warring one another drew inspiration from thoughts of how fire, water, ice, rock, lightning, poison, etc., are used in fantasy games as skills/spells. The idea of the Spirit of Fire's fall put me in mind of a giant version of 'summon meteor' or 'meteor swarm'; an enormous hot lethal mass rushing earthward, wreathed in flame. The classification difference here is down to the interpretation of tense and how it mixes with artistic expression. I very rarely use present tense -- but this particular scene was written in this manner deliberately. If I was using the past tense, as most of the rest of the book, and was so inclined to keep that imagery, the word choice might have been 'meteorite' instead.

There's no need to memorise everything. The text is going to remain if you cannot recall what is what. But, if you can't distinguish the important parts out of what's been described here, then I'm not sure what else to tell you. Are you actually critiquing my use of English here? Firstly, I have used the word 'meteor' once in this chapter, and it was metaphorical as much as literal; to describe the Spirit of Fire's descent from the sky to the earth as his physical body died and fell through the atmosphere. Much of the language through this entire section is a mix of figurative and literal, since it is more a mythic retelling than a historical account. Secondly, 'meteor' can describe any astral body plunging to Earth and lit by friction, and this is exactly what I have written -- note the use of present tense in that sentence. Thirdly, if I was describing it after this point retrospectively and considering his corpse as if it were a giant chunk of rock, I would use the word 'meteorite'. This doesn't happen though, because I am not speaking in the past tense, and I am also referring to a dead god, not an impacted asteroid, and so the scene moves on to the Tempest and Xajarkith.

You'll have to do what I did with my phone; every time I used the word fucking (and I cuss frequently in text messages) it would try to make it ducking, because, of course, the text editor would not default to a profanity. I would go back and make sure to change it, every single time. Eventually my phone started autocorrecting using F instead of D. Yep, I taught it how to swear! So, it is possible! You might just have to make yours learn who Sebby is!

I'm glad! It's been quite a while since I wrote this, but I believe at the time my rationale was that Lucy got Crawley's cellphone contact details after he shot Darren when he was escaping the school. Well, in this instance, Torsten was not riding, he was being carried. Literally, Araziah had his right hand wrapped around Torsten's upper half on the journey home. However, riding is possible! Dragons can have backbone spines, but in this version, some have places close to the shoulders that are broad and flat enough for a person to sit on and comfortably ride. The thing that really matters here is getting the permission of the dragon in question! Even the most human-friendly individuals don't tend to let humans take a ride. Dragons have big egos and their pride doesn't like them being a vehicle for humans. But Torsten? You could say he's going to have special privileges due to being a favourite. Well, Sebby made Araziah realise that he had to make a choice between the Conclave and whatever the future with Torsten would bring, but he couldn't have both. So, whatever Torsten represents to him is clearly more valuable. As arrogant and headstrong as he is, he couldn't let go of that. Now, as for a love triangle? Well, maybe! Sebby clearly seems interested, but Araziah? I guess you'll just have to read on to find out. You're welcome!

I should remind you that Araziah can teleport. He has used this power to both watch and trail others from a distance, and judge their behaviour without being seen before acting himself -- this was essentially how he was able to interrupt Theo's pursuit of Torsten. Once he saw what was happening, i.e. that Torsten was running away from Theo, Araziah intervened and their fight for dominance occurred. You can assume something similar is happening here. Araziah wasn't just at the Barents-Whitehouse building by accident; he had been observing Darren's minions pursuing Torsten and chose to step in when he thought the moment was right. His actions will be elaborated upon more in the next chapter, as Torsten -- quite naturally -- has questions for him. What makes you think Sebby had just arrived? All I'll say about this is that air dragons are very stealthy. They are the ninjas of Spirit of Fire's setting. Similarly to the above with Araziah, more information about Sebby's activity will follow this chapter. Natalia is a wonderful mother, and a role model for her son. She's in a tough spot though! You're welcome! I enjoy seeing your comments!