Chapter Twelve: The FAR and Away Team
The planet hung in the viewports like a promise.
Blue and green and white, swirled with clouds and oceans and continents that looked almost familiar. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. It was, according to Hughie's preliminary scans, completely uninhabited.
*"Orbital insertion complete,"* Hughie announced. *"We are now in stable orbit. Beginning preliminary survey."*
Mickey leaned back in the pilot's chair—still too comfort
Very true. Out of them all, the only one who seems to keep his hands clean is Wylan. And even then, he isn't immune to the horrors around him. All he can do is keep trying to be kind, which is what got him into the mess of becoming a saint in the first place.
Radoslav is dangerous. He was broken and reforged. Haskal can manage him, mostly, and Darien is going to have to learn as he's acting as the Third in command of Radoslav's host. Darien is starting to learn what the cost of being Haskal's adjutant is all about.
Antioch was brutal. This event occoured, and it marked the start of the darker chapters of the Crusade.
The Patriarch is of particular note, that man endured a daily beating dangled in a cage over the walls of the city with a metal rod. He was taken down each night and treated, to repeat the "demonstration" every day of the siege, his only crime, being a Christian. He endured, survived, and was rescued.
John the Oxite (11th Century)
The King's pavilion smelled of wet wool, burning tallow, and desperation.
Darien had been standing over the campaign map for three hours, watching the markers that represented foraging parties and scout patrols and supply trains crawl across the worn leather, and he had come to a terrible realization: he was not a commander. He was a clerk with a sword.
"The Count of Toulouse requests permission to move his camp closer to the river," said a priest whose name Darien had already
Domesticating the Chaos
(Or, How to Acquire a Gremlin, a Son, and a Boyfriend in Six Days)
The Vega Vixen III had been in transit for approximately fourteen hours when Mickey heard the giggling.
Not the Gremlin's giggling—that was a constant background noise, like the hum of the reactor or the drip of a leaky pipe. This was different. This was higher, softer, punctuated by whispers and the rustle of fabric. This was the giggling of a nine-year-old boy who thought he was bein
So my Brother-in-law would disappear every morning and return with breakfast. Lovely spiced meat and rice that I would eat before going off to the University I was teaching at. (This was Cambodia)
This went on for months.
One day my sister was up,almost unheard of before noon, anyway she was sitting with her coffee watching me eating.
She asked her husband what I was eating... he explained he bought it from next door... The look of horror on her face, when she told us to stop eating it...
Confused, I asked why... Her reply was, "You know all those dog sounds from next door every night?"
my stomach started to do that plummet thing. "Oh no..."
"Those aren't pet dogs."
Yep, some "Mystery Meat" you don't ever want to know about.
Libbet, Julian's wife, lesbian, handy with a knife Lloyd gives her... and adamant that Julian's dad needs to be a few inches shorter and I don't mean in height, if you catch the meaning.
The rain had been falling for seventeen days.
Julian had counted. He had counted the days, the hours, the minutes between the moments when the sky lightened from black to gray and then back to black again. He had counted the rats that Bran dragged into the tent, the buckets of water that leaked through the sagging canvas, the men who coughed themselves hoarse in the night and did not wake in the morning. He had counted everything except the days until the siege would end, because no one kn