Happy Yeti posted:

I don't know, there are worse things to fill up the cracks in your being than a god of light.

chthonic bell posted:

By the way, I bit the bullet and re-started my serial. The first update, circa 4k words, is up. Next chapter's gonna be up Friday.

I know I'm no Wildbow, but I hope it's worth a look. It's up on Celestial Abyss.

Under A Fell Star posted:

Anzu Menelik is nineteen, queer as a five-speed-walking stick and apprenticed to the necromancer, alchemist and cultist Raimut Hellewege, his mysterious and often cruel benefactor, mentor and lover. Raimut seeks immortality and Anzu seeks knowledge and a place in a world that’s often cruel to a swishy young man, especially when he’s transgender and bears within him far more Spirit than most people have Flesh – Anzu is painfully attuned to the magic of the sun from birth, able to produce fire and light as easily as thinking about it. Many find this terrifying. Raimut finds it useful. Anzu finds it a nuisance and is far more interested in the ancient art of golemsmithing, that his people, the qarnot, practised for millennia before it was lost.

Neither he nor Raimut are up to the task of uncovering the old rituals, until Anzu’s long-lost twin sister, Siris, turns up, claiming to have been apprenticed to a now-deceased golemsmith. She bears the knowledge they need to make a homunculus walk and talk and maybe even acquire Spirit. But Raimut Hellewege is a dangerous man with many secrets, Anzu is a magnet for supernatural mischief and it seems that the world at large is facing a coming cataclysm. Anzu and Siris will need to use all their wits and resourcefulness and magic talent to survive what is coming their way.

Namarrgon posted:

If wildbow's style has taught us anything it should be that a god of light is not necessarily a god of good.

chthonic bell posted:

Happy Yeti posted:

That's true, though if not good, he's more likely to be an opportunistic rear end in a top hat than truly evil, so it's still better than a demon darkness and oblivion.

Namarrgon posted:

I wonder if that 'deal' with the Light God is going to bite Blake in the rear end. Either the god answered a small bit of worship/prayer in helping Blake curbstomp Ur or it was an act so minor the god was running on autopilot. In the first case it might not have been a freebie.

Grundulum posted:

On the other hand, pretty much every other prediction I have made about this work has been wrong. So there's that.

chthonic bell posted:

I've started reading Pact. I'm very confused so far but quite intrigued. I hope Blake's landlord doesn't die, I liked him and his ridiculous pajama pants.

Tollymain posted:

And Blake is behind the mirrors.

Is his experience with the mirror world different from Rose's? I thought for her that world simply didn't exist save for what mirrors could reflect. I'm pretty sure there are not a whole lot of mirrors near Ur- or the factory it's in

I wonder why he's gone to Rose first, and not Mags?

Blasphemeral posted:

He probably used the mirrors to get there quicker, and maybe to protect himself from an immediate attack upon appearing out of the blue. He can clearly exist outside of mirrors, as he was doing for the whole chapter so far. But being able to slip into them for the fast travel, like Rose used to be able to do, is really kick-rear end.

Pavlov posted:

Yeah, something feels off about that last bit to me too. Was Blake in mirror-land the whole time he was fighting Ur? We don't see any description of anything like how Rose said mirror-land was. He also has his own reflection, and isn't limited to certain places like Rose was. Also if he was in mirror-land couldn't he just have used that to jump out of Ur's factory?

I feel like he might have been in real-world for the start of the chapter, and somehow accessed the mirror because he didn't have another way to get back to Jacob's Bell.

Smiling Knight posted:

I hope Jeremy makes it out in one piece. I find him very sympathetic.

Tollymain posted:

You don't make a serious bid for Lordship without being formidable somehow

PupsOfWar posted:

speaking of Path of the Fury/In Fury Born, I came across a web-original story the other day that is more or less a better version of the same narrative. On the Spacebattles.com forums, of all godforsaken places.

Premise: multistellar human civilization is attacked by a large, technologically-superior confederation of alien races, who are a very transparent knockoff of the Covenant from Halo (I suspect this whole thing might have started out as a halo fanfic at some point). Late in the war, the humans' state-of-the-art flagship manages to outduel and destroy one of the aliens' supposedly-invincible capital ships (though it is crippled and suffers total crew loss in the doing), which prompts the aliens to Get Serious about the war. The ship's AI takes command, but, by the time it makes it back to Sol space, Earth has been glassed and humanity is practically wiped out. The AI snaps and heads off into the void, where it spends thousands of years preying on the alien confederacy until it becomes a sort of interstellar boogeyman. Story picks up when some far-future human sepoys stumble into the rogue ship's path.

It still has its issues (being internet fiction by some nerd), but I think it's a cut or three above most Baen output and worth the read-through if anyone found the "rogue warship AI on a vengeful rampage" premise of In Fury Born super intriguing but would like to avoid Weberisms. Author is pretty good at making sympathetic enemy characters (their government lies to them about all the hardassed oppressive poo poo they do) and the heroes, while not ~amazingly deep~ or anything, outstrip your average MilSF protagonist.

There were also some episodes of Andromeda that tacked a similar premise, iirc.

Pavlov posted:

I was thinking, back in the last chapter, how did Sandra know about Blake, and that he'd come back?