Fantasy

The Dragon Plays With Fire Again

Hi Readers,

It’s been a crazy week. We hope yours was better than ours! What happened?

First, and probably the worst, the external drive our scribe uses to render cool images of us died, and we discovered the backup didn’t run, (I blame the dragon for that too), so we lost some cool images of us. Until our scribe gets a new external drive big enough to hold us and run the program to render us, we can’t get any 3d images. 😦

Did we scout the interweb for a replacement?

You better believe it. We had all characters on deck for that one.

But our adventure didn’t end there, unfortunately.

The Newsletter-Dragon, who delivers our emails, fried the fans in Melinda’s pc. She shouldn’t have been spitting fireballs in the house or aiming them at yours truly. (I am Ran, the best supporting character in the Curse Breaker series.)

She missed because I’m fast on my little feet, and Papa casts shields quickly when I’m in danger, but Melinda’s pc wasn’t so lucky. A fireball hit the cooling system. It wasn’t meant to handle that, so it died a fiery death. I can’t prove it, but a fireball must have brushed the external drive that renders images of us and overheated it.

Melinda phoned up a repair place, and a nice fella came to look at the slagged fans. But the manufacturer used a special fan that’s not commercially available, and the case is dead bolted closed, so that was a bust.

We, characters, convened an emergency meeting and hit the interweb again to find a replacement. A pc powerful enough to render us in 3d is expensive, and there are quite a few to choose from. All the options are expensive though, so I don’t know what we’re going to do.

The stove also broke two weeks ago, but that dragon swears she didn’t break it. I’m inclined to believe her because it’s a gas stove, and it didn’t ignite even when the dragon stood there and breathed fire on it. The repair man (not the same guy) came last week and fixed it.

The Newsletter-Dragon swooped in before he left and tried to intimidate him into a giving our scribe a discount, but he just stared at her like she was nuts, then handed her the bill. I give her points for trying to the save our scribe some money, but she could have saved a lot of time and money by not destroying important computer equipment.

After the repairman left, that dragon dropped onto the chaise lounge our scribe keeps by the window to sulk. Can you guess what happened next?

No fireballs were involved. Well, not until after the damage was done.

If you guessed the chaise lounge collapsed under her and the legs broke off on one side, you’re correct!

She might have exhaled a fireball when it happened, but it disappeared so suddenly, I might have imagined that.

And yes, we, characters, convened another emergency meeting—our third in one week!

Papa used his magic to take the broken chaise lounge out when no one could figure out how to fix it. (Fictional characters don’t fix things. We’re better at breaking them.)

I truly hope your week was less eventful than ours. We’re not sure how our scribe got anything done last week, but she never missed a meeting despite the chaos and quarreling characters surrounding her, and she worked on His Angelic Keeper: Fallen too. It’s now 111,000 words long!

Some of that is still outlines, but there’s only 15 chapters left for her to write! The end is nigh! Soon, she’ll be working on whatever is next in the queue, either Rogue Ranger, or Curse Breaker Trapped, or Rogue Spells.

Our PC situation might decide which book will be written next. Rogue Ranger has a cover already, but Curse Breaker Trapped and Rogue Spells do not. But we’ll see what next week brings. Fingers crossed the pc fairy drops one off for us!

(There is a computer fairy, right? That dragon muttered something about that, and that got me wondering.)

And now, it is my great pleasure to present the first part of one our favorite chapters in Spell of Shadow & Light before the precious PC overheats.

Spell of Shadow & Light

A Curse Breaker Prequel

Chapter 2

Help, screamed Furball, startling Amal out of an afternoon nap. She mantled her wings. Beside her, her mate, Thing, almost fell off the shelf he’d perched on as that shrill call for help repeated in their minds.

Calm down, honey, and tell me what’s the matter, Amal sent to her terrified grandchild. Furball wasn’t hearing anything. He was too busy broadcasting a distress call so loudly; it drowned her out. But he was just a baby who hadn’t gotten the knack of listening while sending. Amal made a mental note to work on that after they saved him from whatever had startled the little kit.

“Did you get anything?” Thing flapped his wings hummingbird fast to turn his fall into a door-ward swoop without waiting for an answer. He knew she’d follow him, though. They were a team.

“No, Furball’s too worked up to hear anything. Did you get anything?” Amal launched herself off the shelf where she’d been napping.

Nulthir is in trouble, Thing said mind-to-mind.

“You know that for certain?” Amal asked aloud in their language of whistles, chirps, and occasional peeps.

Language was the music of the mind. Every language had its own tonal center and distinct harmonies that made up its unique key. Only Nulthir couldn’t wrap his mind around the atonality of theirs. That wasn’t his fault, though. He didn’t possess the mind gift, and thus didn’t have the right equipment to tap into different mental frequencies. He was locked into only one headspace, the one for human speech.

Amal wasn’t troubled when she stretched out her thoughts to confirm Thing’s prognosis and didn’t bump into his mind. She often couldn’t make contact even when she and Nulthir occupied the same room. Amal doubted Thing had made contact either given the wild look in his owl eyes. He and Nulthir had a close bond, and the silence drove her poor mate crazy with worry. 

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Amal chirped when she couldn’t get through to her mate’s frantically reaching mind. Thing wouldn’t stop trying to reach Nulthir until he either made contact, or they bumped into him in the flesh.

“We don’t know that.” Thing punched the symbol chalked on the wall adjacent to the door with his clawed hand.

When it lit up a shimmering green, the door swung open, admitting them to the corridor beyond. They both shot up to the ceiling forty feet above, putting their aerodynamic bodies well out of sight of Nulthir’s human neighbors. They didn’t know he lived with a menagerie of magical bipeds with wings, and they must stay ignorant of that little detail until the laws changed. Behind her and Thing, Mixie and Yarn, Furball’s rather confused parents, shot out of the door followed by Crispin and Thistle.

“Fair flying,” Dale said as he touched the rune to close the door before any more grandchildren ventured out.

One grandchild in peril was enough for one night. Thankfully, the rest of the family had chosen to stay where it was safe. Crispin’s brother, Dale, would protect them, nor was he the only one to stay behind. The six of them should be enough to pull Nulthir out of whatever jam he’d gotten himself into, unless it was magical, and it might be.

Nulthir was clever enough to handle anything the mundane world could throw at him. Amal shelved her worries until she saw how matters stood. There was no use borrowing trouble when the world was so good at dishing it out.

Since she couldn’t get a fix on Nulthir, Amal sent her thoughts winging out ahead of her in search of the still frantically mind-calling Furball. Where are you, my child?

But Furball just screamed mentally for help again as loudly as he could. Amal already knew he was in trouble, just not the location of said trouble. Mount Eredren was a huge place with many levels rising to its peak and just as many delved under it. Furball could be anywhere in that vertical sprawl, but not Nulthir. He had a job.

***

To be continued next week as we continue our special presentation. Get your copy of Spell of Shadow & Light now.


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