“My luck has been absolute shit since getting dragged into this mess,” Bekksie thought, gnawing uselessly at the wooden bit between her teeth. The wood felt like it was hard as a rock! Her fingers ached from the way they’d been tied, as did her arms and legs, and she was basting in sweat inside the stout sack the bandits had stuffed her in. “What’s the big deal? One little cut and this guy has it...
“You need not keep your secret from me, my dear Astrid. I know what thoughts drive you, deep down. You are a woman, after all, beneath all of that warrior’s bravado. Why run from your true nature? Why continue to struggle against what you are?” Astrid shook her head, biting down on the thick ring that had been wedged between her teeth and secured there with a leather strap around her head. The...
“Wouldn’t it be better to travel at night, out of this accursed sun?” Astrid snarled as she settled the last of the wine casks into the wagon, having no trouble hefting them given her brutish nature. She stepped back and wiped sweat from her face, flung it off her hands onto the packed stones at her feet, just off the dock. Galvaera, beyond fed up with her situation as it was, had little patience...
The morning sun was still low over the width of the Su’Ra River, and dozens of vessels crowded the invisible and rarely obeyed lanes of travel as they moved in and out of Kifu’Nemhat, the steady winds blowing in from the Sobe’kaimun Sea making travel upriver a mostly painless affair. Usually. Already the shimmer of heat on the far horizon to the south formed, the day’s scorching heat already well...
“This can’t keep happening…I really need to renegotiate this contract…” Midori thought, and not for the first time since she’d taken on the modeling job for an upstart little website that needed a cute catgirl wearing skimpy clothes to try to draw in viewers. She was on her way to becoming the de facto mascot for the site, from what she’d been told, which was fine, but the photo shoots...