Aaspa’s Imps, the sequel to the highly original fantasy, Aaspa’s Eyes  by Jane Jago is about to escape into the world. Take a sneak peek before it does…

We sat there, halfway up a rocky escarpment, watching four hefty thuggish humans and their helpless captive with our mouths open. What was the captive?  It was something all our teachers had told us was no more than a myth. I looked at Aazba and he shrugged although there was anger in the back of his handsome eyes. He hates cruelty. And what we were looking at was certainly cruel. Tethered to the ground by chains around its limbs and barbed hooks through the membranes of its wings was what I realised had to be a dragon. It was about the size of a full-grown hell hound with a dull looking yellowish skin and leathery wings. It looked sick to me and I found myself thinking we couldn’t leave the poor creature to suffer.    
    Pity cranked up to killing rage as I got a glimpse inside its mind and heard it calling for its mother. Aazba obviously heard it too as his head came up and his nostrils flared. We were looking at each other in fury when the final straw ignited us into action. One of the thugs took a length of lead piping from amongst his clothing.
    “Time to break the bones in its wings,” he said gleefully. “It don’t need to be able to fly to lay eggs. Plus. If we keep it hungry and teach it to be afraid, it’ll always do just what we tell it.” 
    He stepped towards the terrified creature and Aazba and I exploded from our hiding place. I took out three of the thugs with darts tipped with spider milk, and they fell in  boneless heap. The one with the lead pipe didn’t get off so easy. Aazba was in one of his rare rages. While he beat the human senseless with its own lead pipe I carefully approached the cringing dragon. I cut the straps on the hooks and carefully eased them out of its wings. Impelled by some female emotion I’d normally be ashamed of cradled its lizard-like head in my arms.
    “See mother soon,” I murmured, not expecting it to understand, just hoping the soothing tone of my voice may help it to feel less fearful. To my surprise I heard  small voice inside my mind.
    “You promises?”
    “I do. We’ll return you to your mother as soon as may be possible.”
    The creature relaxed against me and, remembering my own Mother’s way of calming infant fears, I hummed gently to it. Aazba finished with the thug and walked towards us. The dragon shrank from him. 
    “Hush little one, Aazba won’t hurt you. He is not like them humans.” I turned my attention to my Partner. “This imp is hungry and sick. Will you see if you can find the keys to her shackles, then maybe sprint back through the portal and call for help.”
    Aazba dangled a bunch of keys before my eyes then lit out as if all the demons of Hades were after him.
    “He goes for help.” I explained as I unlocked the heavy chains. The infant sagged against me.
    “Free. Thankings.”
    “Can you stand?”
    “Yes. Can.”
    She made a brave effort and I went over to the hut where the thugs had been living. I found a bucket of meat pieces. They were not the best quality, but the dragon was very hungry. I brought the bucket to where she swayed on her feet. 
    “Slow,” I warned. “You don’t want to be sick.”
    I let her eat about half the bucket, then moved it.
    “More soon.”
    She sighed. “Thirsty.”
    I found another bucket, which her tormentors had been using for their drinking water, it was almost full. The dragon imp drank, but then she seemed too exhausted to do any more. 

You can preorder your copy of Aaspa’s Imps right now.

The collected ‘wisdom’ of seven decades on this planet condensed into limerick form. Certainly not philosophy to live your life by…

The limerick’s a thing of great beauty 
Although it’s both vulgar and fruity
For rhythm and rhyme 
It’s ahead of its time
And the entendres do double duty

©️jj

…. or ‘How To Speak Typo’ by Jane Jago

afert (noun) – Egyptian goddess of typos

anywya (noun) – a strangely compelling haircut that looks like a haystack. Other haircuts are available to politicians but this one seems to work best

beign (adjective) – of underwear that peculiarly greyish beige that comes from many washes with the black sock that always sneaks into the machine

efort (noun) – safe storage for your computer

ehr (interjection) – the noise made by certain politicians when they can’t answer a simple question

exewrcise (group noun) – a bitchfest of yummy mummies with iPhones strapped to their skinny arms competing fiercely for who has the cutest running shorts

itisi (adverb) – of walking giving the appearance of having the cheeks of one’s bum tied together

londong (noun) estuarine penis

peopel (group noun) – a crowd of middle-aged women busily being outraged by modern life

slive (noun) – the piece left at the end of the cake from which the dog has licked the icing

stange (noun) – the smell of hair singeing

umbiquitous (adjective) – unsure whether or not one is omnipresent

viloence (noun) – the sound made by a female cat when she is looking for a mate

Disclaimer: all these words are genuine typos defined by Jane Jago. The source of each is withheld to protect the guilty.

“It’s a bloody disgrace. Goodbye.”

Trish bit back a rude retort.

“Thank you, caller, have a nice day.”

She was speaking to a disconnected line.

It was raining as she walked home from the call centre. Trish had half her attention on avoiding being splashed by passing cars and stepping in puddles, but mostly she wondered about what dangers she’d face that evening.

Home.

Nuke a quick meal then go online.

“Chiarania, where’ve you been? Get here quick, we’ve got a new mission!”

Call centre life forgotten, Emergency Medic Chiariana of LSS Explorer, grabbed her kit and hurried into action.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Caer sat on his pony looking at the dead body on the ground and wondering if he should send more scouts back towards the road, almost a day’s trek behind the caravan. This man had been alone, half-mad and no threat to the caravan, but others might even now be following the same path that they had taken from the road and for the same reason they had taken it: others who were scouts for brigands, bandits or bigger caravans than his own.
He spat in the dirt and narrowed his eyes as he looked past the file of wagons, ponies and people. It was late afternoon and his breath misted slightly in the air. The long cold winter was over, but in the barren Wastelands, spring was always slow to come. The air still carried a biting chill, even in the heat of the day and the distant peaks kept their mantle of snow and ice, tinged with crimson by the light of the huge red sun. Spring was having to claw its way free of winter’s greedy clutches so that Temsevar could bask in an all too brief season of warmth and growth.
The Wastelands were vast and magnificent. Here and there, standing proud and alone in the plain, like the lost sentinels of a forgotten age, were towering flat-topped mountains of rock, some so massive they were too big to cross in a day on foot. It was as though at some point in the distant past the ground had simply dropped away, leaving the high plateaux stranded above, like giant stepping stones, creating a two-tier terrain. If in the winter, these high grounds were the coldest and most exposed, in the spring they seemed always flushed with new vegetation before any managed to creep out of the more parched stones below.
Caer made his decision. With the work to be done, the four men he already had out scouting their back trail were all he could spare for the moment. He called to one of the mounted men who was riding with the caravan.
“Shevek, we are camping here.”
The man he spoke to wheeled his pony away and rode at a brisk pace towards the front of the train of wagons and animals, issuing sharp orders to make the night’s camp around the rocky debris beneath the steep cliff face of one of the high monoliths. Caer felt a familiar sense of satisfaction as those orders turned the straggling ranks of moving people, ponies and wagons into a brief flurry of chaos, before brightly coloured awnings, tents and pavilions sprung up from the chaos, like strange blossoms. Caer and his men rode through the quickly forming encampment, shouting instructions, solving problems, helping secure ropes and encouraging any who were slow to respond with the whips they carried curled in their belts.
In a remarkably short time, the caravan resembled a miniature town with streets and open spaces, stables, and pens. Fires were being kindled, children tending the animals as women kneaded dough and cut the vegetables for the evening meal. Toddlers screamed and got underfoot or rolled like puppies amongst the big, sharp-toothed dogs, which ignored them and begged for scraps with soulful eyes and then turned on each other snapping and snarling when an unsavoury morsel was cast their way.
Once the familiar routine was well established, Caer’s men guided their mounts towards the middle of the camp. The ponies’ short stubby ears, thick coats, wall-eyed glares and powerful necks, made them far from beautiful to look upon, but their split hooves could splay to grip surefooted even on snow and ice or could run fast on firmer ground. It was their broad backs which carried the burden of human traffic in both trade and war with a sturdy strength and agility which, for Caer, had a beauty all of its own.
The men who rode were as tough as their ponies. The older ones amongst them wore their hair long, stained red and tied back into a heavy braid, the greater length of the braid telling of ever greater age and experience. The youngest men had their hair shaved so close to the scalp as to seem bald. They were not even allowed to begin to grow a braid until they had served a year of apprenticeship with the caravans. All the men wore coats made from a brightly coloured heavy-felt cloth, over shirts with billowing sleeves, patterned skirted jerkins made from fleeced hides and plain felt britches which gathered loosely into calf-high boots. All were armed: every man wore a bandolier of wooden cartridge boxes over one shoulder and carried a crude pistol; one or two had a long-barrelled musket or rifled carbine, on their backs and each wore a long-bladed knife with an ornately carved hilt and whips hung looped at their belts.
These men were of the Zoukai, a brotherhood of warrior guardians, hiring themselves to protect the caravans which carried the trade of Temsevar. Named after the swift and ruthless, red-plumed predatory birds which hunted from the skies in these very wastes, they were bound by a strict code of honour which placed loyalty to their captain and their caravan above all else.

The opening of The Fated Sky the first part of Transgressor Trilogy, and the first book in Fortunes Fools by E.M. Swift-Hook.

The collected ‘wisdom’ of seven decades on this planet condensed into limerick form. Certainly not philosophy to live your life by…

I can’t understand people that
Don’t see that the world must be flat
If the planet was round
It would bounce round and round
It’s a big spinning bowl – on a rat

©️jj

‘The Simulation’ by Ricardo Victoria is one of nineteen Game Lit stories by as many authors in Rise and Rescue Volume 2: Protect and Recover.  All profits from the Rise and Rescue anthologies will go to support wildlife devastated by the Australian wildfires. 

“How the hell did this happen?”
“I don’t know,” Jay replied with a shrug. He was short and chubby and felt like he hadn’t slept in weeks.
“What do you mean you don’t know? This thing didn’t create itself. It is… too complex,” the tall, thin guy said with exasperation. Lou was his name, and he was pointing to a hologram projection. It was a planet, brimming with life, cities, people, animals of different kinds, some vaguely familiar, some brand new to the pair.
“That’s the thing, I don’t remember doing it. Not like that.”
“You were missing for weeks. It’s clear you were busy coding this. What do you mean you don’t remember doing it? Were you consuming again?” The tall guy gave him a disapproving look. He knew addictions were a sore spot in their friendship.
“Err… yes?”
“Is that an affirmation or a question?”
“Both? Look, man. I just know I started coding this so we could have our roleplaying sessions with a holographic projection and save us the hassle of consulting the rulebooks. I just wanted more fluidity in our gaming sessions.”
“And to stifle power gaming,” the tall guy added, smirking slightly.
“Well, yeah. Things have become… unruly to say the least. Starting with you,” Jay replied seriously. While he liked to tinker with the gaming system, he was getting tired of the players’ power gaming – so much so that their story had become an unwieldy mess recently. Especially thanks to Lou’s mean streak.
“And I already apologized for that. Still, I can’t believe you don’t recall coding a perfect simulacrum of our roleplaying setting, down to physics and magic rules, history and the whole set of rulebooks. Heck, you even included a time progression of the family trees of each of our player characters. It has their genetic codes, and are those quantum interactions? Again, how the hell did this happen?” Amazement brimmed in Lou’s voice.
“Look, I’m asking the same question. I just remember I started coding, using as a base an old AI template code I found lying around from our school projects. But it looked different,” Jay offered, although he knew that, even for him, the absent-minded genius was a lame excuse.
“Different how?” Lou asked, intrigued.
“Slightly more complex, like nested matrices recombining themselves all the time as if it were a kaleidoscope. I started pouring the data into the matrices and they replied with more complex data and it started to grow up from there. I just kept working non-stop and the thing kept growing. It was odd.”
“In which sense?”
“I didn’t get hungry, barely thirsty. I was in the zone, man! Then one day I finally fell asleep and, when I woke up, this whole new universe was there, taking up all the memory, processing power, and system energy.”
“Did you try to turn it off?”
“It wasn’t necessary. Before you arrived, the whole block had a blackout.”
“And?”
“The hologram simulation kept running. I think it is self-sustaining now. If that makes sense.”
“Not really. It shouldn’t be possible. And yet here it is, a whole world, nested in who knows which parallel dimension. All of it based on our roleplaying campaign,” Lou stroked his chin, caressing his badly-trimmed beard.

To keep reading snag your copy of Rise and Rescue Volume 2: Protect and Recover now and help support Australian wildlife.

A Bite of – Ricardo Victoria

(1) If you had to live in a video game, which one would it be and why?

That’s a tough question. But I probably would say that, providing I can get the appropriate combat training,  Final Fantasy. Most likely 6,7,8 or 10. That’s because the things I usually dream feel like that videogame series. I like the aesthetics, the merge of magic and technology, the weird clothes, the freedom to explore and have adventure.

(2) Where do you find is the most inspiring place to write and what time of day?

Time? Probably afternoon or night, when’s less hectic. As for place, if I could write in the shower I would. That’s where I get my better ideas.

(3) What is your favourite pick-me-up drink of the day, coffee, tea or something else and how do you like it served?

Since I stopped drinking hot chocolate (for dietary reasons), I’m enjoying cappuccinos with almond or Irish cream syrup. I like it warm and in a tumbler so I don’t spill it.

Born in the frozen landscape of Toluca, Mexico, Ricardo Victoria dreamed of being a writer. But needing a job that could pay the rent while writing, he studied Industrial Design and later obtained a PhD in Sustainable Design, while living in the United Kingdom and working in a comic book store to pay for his board game & toy addiction. He is back now in Toluca, living with his wife and his two dogs where he works as an academic at the local university.

He is the author of Tempest Blades: The Withered King and has short stories featured in anthologies by Inklings Press and Rivenstone Press. He was nominated for a Sidewise Award 2016 for the short story Twilight of the Mesozoic Moon, co-written with his arch-nemesis, Brent A. Harris. He also won a local contest for a fantasy short story during college. But hey! That one doesn’t count, does it?

You can find his rants and other work—both fiction and opinion pieces—on his own website/blog and follow him on Twitter.  

Today, with her marriage, the truce would become full peace. There was no time to make the preparations, but standing with her commanders to meet the delegation, she realised that no preparations would have helped her anyway. 

Their leader was young – younger than herself, but then this war had taken many older nobles.

“I come to fulfil the honour of my Clan, to bind the peace by marriage.”

She stepped forward trying to hide her true feelings. 

“Then I welcome you – as my third husband.”

It was a slow way to expand her Empire, but it was proving remarkably effective.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Maybe by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook . Sometimes we walk the edges of realty…

Annis stood, still holding the gun, her young face puzzled, shaking her head.

“No. No, You must stop it. Jessica. You must.”

The Old Ones moved to a single command, an ancient voice from primordial times. The voice that had once summoned humanity to leave the ways of the gatherer and hunt for flesh. Dark and potent, it summoned now the myriad aspects of itself, the feasters on fear and the eaters of blood, drawing them back to the place where it would Be once more.

“No!” Annis cried aloud, her body being pulled out of shape as if by an unseen pressure.Her face changing, as if under the distorting brush of an artist.

“No,” Jessica heard her own voice, but it was not her own. It was more than a cry of desperation, it was a cold assertion of denial and as she spoke the single syllable, the world seemed to slow. Someone stepped out of her and then turned to face her, kirtle, belted at the waist and long hair braided. A mirror image. She picked up the ugly knife that lay on the stone and in her hand it gleamed silver, catching and reflecting the light above the throne and casting it into the shadows. Then she held it out on an open palm.

“I can’t do this, Jessica, it has to be you.”

The eyes, so familiar, held nothing but expectation.

Jessica reached out and took the blade.

In a single movement the other, had stepped back and lifted the sprawling body of Roald into her arms, her touch transforming him again from monster to man. His eyes flickered open and widened.

“Hild?”

The woman shushed him as she might an infant, then looked back to Jessica.

“This is not my time, it is yours. Do what you must.”

Then both were gone and time reprised. It was like a dream within a dream was over and Jessica was plunged back into the nightmare, but this time alone. Annis screaming, the Old Ones creeping back to become once more the single malevolent, life-destroying, malice that they had been, which grew in strength and power with each moment as it flexed its presence and reached out, turning its focus upon the figure that stood at the confluence of every point of its progression.

JESSICA!

The name shivered through the underworld like a curse.

Alone and vulnerable, defenceless. Feeling again the hard blows, the brutal, pounding body, the shrill and silent scream of panic, as bound and gagged, she was hurled from the car to roll on the rocks.

That is who you are. That broken, beaten and weak creature, Stand aside and I will spare what remains of you. Resist and you will relive that for eternity. I can trap you as I have trapped the others, locked in your own private nightmare, playing it through, forever.

The knife in her hand gleamed, it’s obsidian blade as sharp as any metal, carved from the congealed blood of the earth itself. Jessica stared at it, images of blood and fear and agony, twisting her thoughts. She could refuse and know that in neverending darkness, or shed her own blood and bind herself to oppose it. 

And then she knew.

“No,” she said quietly, her voice simply determined.

She gripped the stone knife and raised her hand, then with a single blow she struck the blood-drenched stone and it shattered as if hit by a pile-driver.

Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook

Part 16 of Maybe will be here next week…

Gimme coffee, coffee, coffee
Gimme coffee, coffee, coffee
Gimme coffee, coffee, coffee
Just give a cup to me!

I need coffee, lovely coffee
I need coffee, tasty coffee
I need coffee, sweet, sweet coffee
Don’t palm me off with tea!

Want more coffee much, more coffee
Want more coffee, please, more coffee
Want more coffee NOW, more coffee
I need it can’t you see?

What d’you mean you’re out of coffee?
You just can’t be out of coffee!
I so need a bloody coffee
Oh screw it, I’ll have tea.

E.M. Swift-Hook