ValentineDavis21

"Are you okay?" They were back in the truck but Vanus was the one driving. Bazzel didn't answer - why have I started thinking of him as Bazzel all the sudden? he wondered. He kept his head facing the window, the lost hopeless look on his face reflected in the rain-speckled glass. Vanus felt his own nerves tighten, the words "Hello? Can you at least say something?" heavy and acidic on his tongue. You need to stay calm, he reminded himself. You're behind the wheel for the Good

Bazzel was awake when he should not be; Bazzelthorpe was alive when he should not be. And yet once more his body was not his own; once more his will, his life was not his own. White light seared his eyes, making him cry out. No he didn’t cry out, because he couldn’t. He couldn’t get his mouth to work properly. They’d pumped him full of drugs to keep him from moving just as they’d done to Siel. Soon they would cut into him with sharp instruments made of steel, slicing him open like a fish to

All the self-righteous fury and macho false bravado Bazzelthorpe had displayed in front of Kahlah whooshed out of him in a single gust of cold air. He heard the high-pitched mewling sound of fear again, but this time it was not Martice or Lexis making the sound - it was him. And he couldn’t make himself stop. During his first years on the surface, he recalled seeing a showing of the old black-and-white Frankenstein movie. While moviegoers laughed and howled and threw popcorn at the silly, o

It didn’t take long for Vanus to regret his entirely impulsive, not-at-all-thought-out plan to descend into the pits of hell; a hell. There were so many of them who could possibly keep them all straight? Unfortunately pride, the true downfall of man, would not allow him to make the long, winding journey back up to the surface. The problem was the steps: They were steep and uneven. Rather than climb down facing forward he had to take one excruciating step at a time with his back up against

“I’m here,” Vanus said in a voice thick with sleep and dreams and ghosts and who knew what else. “Right before it happened.” Bazzelthorpe sat with his back against the wall. Except for Vanus everything was completely silent. It was as if the building had lost complete interest in them for the time being. It’s probably just waiting, trying to draw us out, the Astorathian thought. “What do you see?” he asked just to distract himself from the slow passage of time. He could feel each second dra

I am currently on Chapter 25. So, I will throw out a few bones. I think these are relatively spoiler-free and they are just some ideas I am toying with. The point of the deities (particularly the ones mentioned in the videos) is that they feed off trauma and while they definitely use magic to influence the world, they use real-life events, real-life traumas to do that. Take someone like Brad, who at the start of the story was a normal guy, is now a killer. Secondly, recall when Vanus and Bazzelthorpe stopped at the ice cream shop after the morgue scene, Vanus explained briefly about the hierarchy of Inferno (the Void) which is truly vast. There is a reason why the Corebook is so huge. There's a whole freakin' cosmoverse for me to explore if I so choose, and right now I'm just exploring the Inferno section (one dimension, one pantheon or whatever). Thirdly, the next three or four chapters take a detour from the case and focus solely on Vanus and Bazzelthorpe. It will explore their trauma more. It is not pretty and quite horrific. For those who want to know what in the Void Bazzelthorpe saw in the camera, that is answered at the very end of Chapter 24. In the grand scheme of the story, it's not overly important, but it is a character development thing. I will try to keep posting regularly, but I also have another story I've been working on that I'm about 20 chapters into. Debating on when I should start posting that. I have 7-8 chapters in the backlog for this and am trying to keep it up, but am trying not to burn myself out on this one. That's why I have so many stories that I never finish, is because I don't pace myself. I have enjoyed writing this one so I want to make sure for the Good Mother's love that I finish it.

Pale moonlight cast pools of silver on the Wishwood ruins, giving everything a ghostly cast. During the day there had been humans everywhere, scuttling around like rats in search for scraps, but now that darkness had fallen no one was around. The silence reminded Bazzelthorpe of those long, endless days when Gael and he had snuck around the streets of Inferno (not unlike rats), afraid to draw the attention of something that wanted to eat them or torture and maim them in a terrible way. He tried

Vanus stood amidst the rubble and ruin that had once been the Wishwood Suites, breathing in the smell of ash. Is this what lung cancer smells like? he wondered. It was a dark thought from a man who found himself in an equally dark mood. The entire parking lot had been barricaded off to keep curious onlookers at bay. Cops waved at them in a lazy attempt to get them to move on. Tendrils of black smoke hung around the ruins like a wreath. The sky was grim, an overcast gray that only added to t

When Brad came home, Heidi was on the phone. She spoke in the low, hushed voice of someone who doesn’t want to be heard. She sat at the kitchen table, her back slightly hunched and turned away from him. Her head was bowed with defeat. She didn’t see him standing there with his back pressed up against the wall like a stalker. “I don’t know what to do,” she said into the phone, her voice on the verge of breaking. “We went to the hospital. The MRI checked out. I know he’s talked to a therapis

Dan, I don't know why but the Brad chapters are always so fun to write. I don't mean that as a compliment to myself, but I am having a lot of fun writing his descension. It's also hard to do it in a way that feels realistic and unrushed. A lot of this stuff is supposed to take span within a week or so. I'll have to figure all that out when I go back and edit. I have an ending mind but we are a long ways off. I'd say plotwise I just got finished with the setup phase as of Chapter 22.

Even two doors down and with two doors shut between them, Brad could hear the anger and authority Jaffe Curry's voice. He carried the authority with him everywhere he went, wielding it like a flaming sword. He's probably threatening to sue someone, Brad thought. Or maybe he was arguing with his wife, Tiffany. Excuse me, soon to be ex-wife. You couldn’t pick up a goddam newspaper without seeing something about Jaffe and his multimillion-dollar divorce. What was the point in looking at a story whe

“I can’t imagine what you must be thinking,” Vanus said when Bazzelthorpe and he were in the truck. The Astorathian didn’t answer for a long time and Vanus didn’t think he ever would. Vanus wished he could say he was surprised. Few had ever truly withstood the truth of what it meant to be a death magician and all that it entailed. The romanticized depictions on TV and the reality could not be more different. Bazzelthorpe waited until they’d stopped behind a red light to answer. “You lo

Vanus didn’t know why he was being such a chicken all the sudden. He’d been to the morgue a thousand times, the hospital even more than that. He couldn’t think of two places he loathed to go more, but it went with the job. Everyone had to do things they didn’t want to do, didn’t they? Perhaps it was the comment the Astorathian had made about his caseload…or rather the lack of one. He reminded himself that Bazzelthorpe hadn’t meant it as an insult (had he?). It had merely been a remark. A re

"Yes," Vanus said into the phone, letting the person on the other line hear the first stab of impatience in his voice. "I realize the staff at the morgue is overwhelmed…I certainly don't want to add to your list of problems. But I did fax over a priority flag from the Theocracy yesterday morning, signed by my boss along with details of the victim. Now how hard can it be to find a corpse…excuse me, the remains of a corpse…that's been fried to a crisp?" He paused long enough to let the s

Tonight when Leonidas called for him, Brad found the acolyte and his nepharites waiting for him in the upstairs study; this time he’d brought two with him instead of one. Their towering presence made Leonidas seem small and shriveled, a child cursed to a neverending nightmare. Assuming that child didn’t already naturally come from the burning pit of some hell dimension as it was, Brad thought darkly. Leonidas stooped forward to get a closer look at Brad's mural; the way each segment ca

Vanus emerged from the bathroom in a thick fog of steam, dressed in fresh clothes, his hair brushed back from his brow. He scowled in disappointment. The Astorathian hadn’t left. The death magician had sat against the door of the shower stall until the heat seeped out of the water in hopes that Bazzelthorpe would pick up the hint and leave. With the way his luck had been going lately, Vanus told himself he better get used to things not going the way he wanted. The Astorathian’s face was…re

“Arriving at Grant Avenue and Fifth Street,” said the chirpy automated voice on the tram. “In the name of the Mother, have a nice day.” Sometimes it surprised Vanus that he didn't hear it in his sleep. The train slowed to a graceful stop. The door slid open with a mechanical whooshing sound. Van’s long fingers tapped anxiously against the side of his briefcase. He felt his brain send the impulse down his spine to his legs: Get moving. This is your stop. His body apparently had its own plan

“Disappointment?” Judging from the way his eyes widened, this was not the answer the death magician had been expecting. His brow furrowed in confusion, the pale skin dimpling into a crack. Even in the wake of his outburst, the promise of devastation it would cause, Bazzelthorpe was fascinated by how the death magician’s face worked. It constantly shifted, each movement exaggerated and unrestrained. Bazzelthorpe was beginning to become aware of a sadistic pleasure that took joy in playing wi

Thank you. I'll do my best to keep it up.

The architecture of the Theocracy was supposed to showcase the awe-inspiring feats of the twenty-first century. Prism-shaped and three dimensional, a monolith made of mined steel from the ruins of Elysia. This is the result of what we can achieve when you wield magic and technology together. Order in the midst of chaos. To Vanus it just meant he had to climb a lot of steps. Steps and steps and more steps. Most days he didn’t mind. It helped him stay fit. In this business a healthy diet was

Brad snapped awake, smelling smoke. Smelling fire. His first thought was that he had to get Heidi up and they had to get Little Annie and get out of the house. But when he lifted his head and looked around, the house was completely dark. He didn’t smell smoke. The fire alarm in the hallway wasn’t going off. Everything was silent. His family was safe. Before he could slip back into sleep, a thought tugged at the back of his mind: Something was supposed to happen last night. Something importa

Four days ago... When he was a boy, Brad loved to draw. It was the first thing he could remember loving to do. He remembered the moment he realized you could make anything so long as you had the color in your hand. With yellow you could make the sun, with blue the ocean. He’d been four or five then, crouching on the floor in the bedroom while his parents screamed hateful things at each other in the living room. This same thought came back to haunt him as an adult with a slight u

The man who was responsible for the capture of the Astorathian Butcher was nothing like the man who had appeared on the front pages of The Roc City Gazette. He thought of those long, sleepless nights when every Astorathian mother in the Slums had clutched onto their children with fear. Not just fear for their lives but for the fear that there was no justice to be had for their suffering. We're not a priority. The Theocracy doesn’t care. They don’t consider us human. All except one agen

The man who’d captured the Butcher of Innocence and appeared on the Roc City Tonight Show scarcely resembled his real life counterpart. Baraq recalled those long nights when every mother in the slums of the city had clutched their children to their breasts in fear for their lives; between this and the threat of the plague it seemed that no one was safe from the wrath of death. Only one voice served as a guide during those long dreadful nights when Baraq was on the brink of madness, wishing his e