The Story

Set in the post-apocalyptic future of the Nightscape timeline, this novelette marks the debut of Broga and Ranvir, swordbrothers on a quest to find Broga's enslaved half-sister. Together with a few former pit fighters, the pair stumble across a mass killing in a remote desert mining town. The source of the destruction is revealed to be an overpowering menace that threatens all thinking life. 

Written with accomplished pulp fictioneer James Palmer and illustrated by outlaw artist Gene Espy, this self-contained prequel to The Iron Shadow is a sword-and-sorcery tale like no other! 

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Novelette Excerpt

 “The devastation of Rahalid goaded me like a prevision of Ojánkoa’s judgment. It seemed a perfect smoke-suffused limbo, ‘es ulizate agoera uxibertsela ’ [a universal state of un-being]. Though heartsick at the gratuitous slaughter, I was, at length, glad of the experience, for it purified my breast of any doubt: this world is a test of will and faith without end.”

—The Life and Achievements of the Renown’d Sacrist Monk Garzach Bengochea

They found the first corpse no more than a dozen paces outside the town’s smashed gate. It was curled up on itself, a blackened hole in its back.

The stink of putrefaction blistered Broga’s eyes as he knelt beside the body. The face was a bloated ruin swarmed by flies. The eyes ran like egg whites from their sockets, the pupils unfixed. An eastern merchant, Broga surmised from the floral embroidery on the robe.

Other, similarly scorched bodies littered the scrub plains and in ever-greater heaps beyond the stove-in gate. Whatever happened to Rahalid had apparently been total.