Topher Lydon

He might have a tiny-tiny problem... and Flynn's credit card.

High Maintenance is definitely Poitr's brand.

Hic!

The phone rang three times before anyone picked up. Flynn stood at the kitchen island, the business card in one hand, his cell phone pressed to his ear. The sun had set an hour ago. Poitr was sprawled on the mattress, still wearing Flynn's clothes, still staring at his own hands like they belonged to someone else. The frog card was still on the nightstand. The WKD was still next to it. A woman's voice answered. Low. Rough. The voice of someone who had been smoking since before Flynn

I have added it as per request.

If you're going to ask anyone about linking multiple jump drives together, there's no one better than the first man to ever pull it off.

The Black Star, a Luck God, and a wish

The sample cup was warm. Dimitri Ryder-Bell held it in his palm, feeling the heat of his own body radiating back at him through the thin plastic. The sensation made his skin crawl. Every morning, for five years, he had stood in this exact spot—outside the station's medical bay, under the harsh fluorescent lights that made everyone look like a corpse—and waited for the medic to open the door. Every morning, he handed over a piece of himself. Every morning, he pretended it didn't

It is a lot of fun, high energy, and chaos. Darien trying to keep the peace between England/France and his Norman neighbour Lord Belleme.... all the while trying to raise his son... train three squires... and not get snowed under by all the ledgers that Julian insists he looks at... while Ser Val and Ser Lloyd tear up a Tourney having the time of their lives... all on Darien's dime. Oh and Ashot and Stephen's domestic ... I would say Bliss... but Stephen now has two street rats to deal with.

She is also very much Granny to the boys:

Adele is a force of nature, and 100% Darien's mother in the same way. The fact that she is not intimidated by him in the slightest, cuffs him around the ear, and makes him eat... so yeah, definitely Mom. Her and Wylan has this Catty thing going on of mother-in-law / son-in-law... they just like riling each other up. She treats him no different than she would any Daughter-in-law... love Adele. The castle has two main keeps, the Dowager and the Maiden... she's so potent she has a fortress within the castle named after her. Though she does love reminding Wylan he's the "Maiden" of the two.

Skinny, prone to beating up Norman lords with Ginger hair (It's a whole thing) and utterly untamed. He and his dog Scrap (Bran's pup) are utterly unrepentant in driving Darien bonkers. The old curse: One day you will have a son JUST LIKE YOU, or a Daughter who marries a boy JUST LIKE YOU... I don't know which fate is worse.

HA, I'd be more worried about the Dowager Baroness (Lord Haskal's wife, and Darien's defacto Mother) She is 100% team Wylan.

Utterly adores Wylan, hides behind him when in LOUD yelling matches with his dad. Wylan's the favourite.

I think you are going to like Seb. Pragmatic, loyal, and honourable in a time when the world has lost its mind.

It came to me as I wrote the final chapter. I had already established what Wylan was, the fight between Wylan and the witches was one of the first scenes I wrote for the book, and I planned around that. But as I was sitting there, knowing that I wanted Darien's illness to be silicosis I was thinking.... well why wouldn't Wylan do something. Darien persists into the next few books (I am working on book two of the Second Trilogy as we speak) and I make sure his ailments keep him grounded. He can't keep up anymore, that it's his Three squires (Tomas, Cas and Rico) and his son who have to face what is coming. It makes for legacy. But Wylan gets his husband, despite the vibrating anger of the local bishop who can't do jack about a Papal Legate/papal bull endorsed union of the two.

Steffy helping his Ash to return to the world out of his trauma. This book, or the three, has definately belonged to those two. They grew up on the pages and need each other. Their roles are switching now, Ashot looking at Steff to guide him through the wonder of 12th Century France. And Steff knows that the Abbey no longer holds what he wants, it never really did. He is, argueably, one of the best trained doctors setting foot on French soil at the time he has so much more to do.

Sebastian and Ishan(Erik) Sebastian is a Crusader deserter who refused to participate in the massacre of Jerusalem

They who killed without mercy received no mercy. They who burned the innocent were burned. They who ate the land were eaten by worm and water and rot. Within a generation, every hand that raised a sword against the unarmed in Jerusalem was stilled.

The year is 1099AD when our Story Ends. But fate has a way of creeping in and dealing with Evil. So what happened to the Crusader Lords that remained, our collective villains: Raymond of Toulouse met his fitting end not by fever, but by the very element he had so often wielded against others: fire. In September 1104, Muslim defenders of Tripoli sortied against his newly built castle, Mons Peregrinus, and set a wing ablaze. The old count, scrambling to escape across the rooftops, felt the timbers groan beneath him—then give way. He crashed through into the burning room below, his flesh searing in the flames that had once been his signature punishment for "infidels." He lingered in agony for five months, his burned body slowly failing, until death finally took him on February 28, 1105. The fanatic who had preached holy fire died by it—undramatically, painfully, and alone in a half-built fortress. A more perfect irony is hard to imagine Godfrey of Bouillon—the "Defender of the Holy Sepulchre" who refused a golden crown where his Savior had worn thorns—earned a death befitting a man whose legend outran his deeds. In June 1100, while besieging the coastal city of Caesarea, he was struck by what Christian sources politely called an "illness" and what the Arab chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi reported with far less ambiguity: an arrow . The emir of Caesarea may have poisoned him; typhoid may have done the work; one version even whispers of a poisoned apple . Whatever the precise mechanism, the result was the same. The man who had scaled Jerusalem's walls and waded through its blood prayed for five weeks in agony, his strong limbs—the ones that had supposedly cleaved a camel in two with a single sword stroke—wasted to nothing . He died on July 18, 1100, just one year after his triumph. The "pure knight" of Christian legend, the paragon whom Dante placed among the warriors of faith in Heaven, expired in a damp bed in Jerusalem, his body failing him not gloriously in battle but slowly, messily, and far too soon to enjoy his stolen kingdom Baldwin of Boulogne—the first Count of Edessa, later King of Jerusalem—was a man who built his power on betrayal. He wrested Tarsus from his fellow crusader Tancred, accepted an invitation to protect the Armenian ruler Thoros of Edessa, and then conveniently stood aside as Thoros was assassinated, seizing the city for himself in March 1098. The man who carved out the first crusader state through treachery and cold calculation met an end that suits a glutton: he ate himself to death. In 1118, Baldwin launched yet another campaign into Egypt, plundering the town of Farama with his usual ruthless efficiency. Then, according to the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres who rode beside him, the king went walking along the Nile with his knights and amused himself by watching them spear fish from the river with their lances. They carried their catch back to camp and ate. The 17th-century historian Thomas Fuller later distilled the story to its essence: Baldwin "caught many fish, and his death in eating them". An old wound reopened, his body weakened, and the king who had outmaneuvered popes, patriarchs, and princes was carried back toward Jerusalem on a litter, dying at the wretched village of Al-Arish on April 2, 1118. The schemer who fed on the misfortunes of others was finally undone by a fish dinner. Kilij Arslan—whose name meant "Sword Lion"—was the sultan who fed the People's Crusade to his horse archers outside Nicaea in 1096, slaughtering some 17,000 unarmed peasants and selling the rest into slavery . He was the first Muslim commander to face the Crusaders, and for a time, he made them bleed. But the same arrogance that led him to dismiss the main crusader army as no serious threat—he was off fighting the Danishmends when they besieged his capital—would catch up to him eventually . He lost Nicaea. He lost his wife and most of his children to captivity. And though he redeemed himself by crushing the Crusade of 1101, proving that Frankish knights were not invincible, his end was inglorious . In 1107, he conquered Mosul, overreached one time too many, and found himself defeated at the Battle of the Khabur River by a Seljuk coalition loyal to the Great Seljuk sultan Muhammad I Tapar . The "Sword Lion" fled. He plunged his horse into the river, loosing arrows behind him at his pursuers as he tried to escape—until the current dragged horse and rider both beneath the surface . The man who had drowned thousands in their own blood now drowned himself, water filling his lungs as his armor dragged him down, into the depths. Each one of these bastards met a just end. EVERY ONE OF THEM, as if the souls of Jerusalem, the ash, and the murdered found a way to strike back. The Lords of the Crusade were cursed, and that curse finally devoured them.

Tomorrow : LOST TO THE SAND Two enemies wake in the ashes of Jerusalem—one a deserter drowning in guilt, the other an amnesiac who remembers only how to kill. Hunted across the desert by a vengeful lord, they must disguise themselves as a Crusader knight and his squire to survive. But in the war-torn port of Jaffa, masks slip. Secrets surface. And a feral German street rat with a talent for trouble forces them to confront an impossible question: in a holy war that devours everything, can two broken boys build a family from the ruins?

I hope, today, you have a small smile. Hopefully the staff have a bounce. and GOOD MORNING

The Mediterranean Sea was a vast, glittering expanse of endless, indifferent blue, stretching from the bleeding shores of the Levant all the way back to the damp, green heart of Frankia. For the men of the Vanguard, the Genoese merchant fleet that carried them home was not merely a collection of deep-drafted cogs and sleek war galleys; it was a floating purgatory, a wooden purgatory suspended between the horrors they had survived and the deeply uncertain future that awaited them. Weeks h