Six Cycles Later
Grant looks out his window at the Imperial City. A horizon crowded with airlanes and towering buildings built upon buildings built upon more buildings. Great marble edifices and grand skybridges.
Somewhere in that building directly across from him, Sy...
2025-06-11 22:07:31 +0000 UTC View PostHroq practically sprints into the emergency emigrant station. He’s ready for a milling crowd, ready to throw elbows, but the path up to the line of clerks is clear.
“Flights out. We need one.” He finishes his run at the lip of a clerk’s desk. “I don’t know if the public ones are...
2025-06-11 20:46:24 +0000 UTC View PostSykora cries in his arms that morning.
“I won’t be afraid,” she whispers, when her eyes finally dry. “I’ll get up and I won’t be afraid. I won’t be, I won’t be. I won’t be weak.”
“You can be weak in here. It’s okay. Fall to pieces and I’ll pick them up.” He...
2025-06-10 05:01:09 +0000 UTC View Post“Arms pop turn step bend tail step turn—shit.” Sykora’s graceful dance skitters to a halt. She shakes her head like there’s a fly buzzing around it and resets, breathing heavily.
“You’re jerky, Majesty,” Vora says. “Drop the left quarter turn. It’s too helter-skelter.”...
2025-06-06 23:45:34 +0000 UTC View PostThe first thing Ynaqi notices when she wakes up in the clinical-white room is—okay, the second thing she notices, because you can’t really discount those harsh lights that poked through the skin of her eyelids to wake her. Pale as slit-goggle tundra and bright enough to give you a go...
2025-06-04 06:09:34 +0000 UTC View PostTymar is given a roomy office within the temple of the omnidivine. The deaconess happily surrenders it with a gentle bribe and some ungentle insinuations. Grant wonders aloud to Sykora about whether they ought to keep hiding their operations from the eyes of the clergy, but she declares the skuld...
2025-05-31 21:24:18 +0000 UTC View PostThe Black Pike’s gradual stretch across the horizon matches pace with the gradual widening of Ipqen-mek-Taqa’s eyes.
“How fucking big is this ship?” she breathes.
“Bit under two kilometers.” Ajax’s voice is flat, but Grant’s gotten good at telling when the mar...
2025-05-29 02:25:33 +0000 UTC View PostHello generous patrons!
We are nearing the end of Volume 3. Just a handful of chapters remain!
Volume 4 has a narrative that I'm pretty sure I know the direction of as far as the continuing development of Grant and Sykora. I'm interested in hearing what you guys would like to explore ...
2025-05-27 04:25:21 +0000 UTC View PostOorta’s team picks up on Grant’s jittery fervor; the Taiikari researchers work double-time to map the xhurr leaf into its chemical components. The results are back from the lab within the hour.
As Grant requested, they’ve cross-referenced it with Eqtoran blood samples, controlled aga...
2025-05-27 01:42:39 +0000 UTC View PostThe ventilated Eqtoran cruiser is too large and haphazard to bring into the hangar. They leash it to the outside of the post instead, where it hangs derelict in space, leaking its primitive fuel in slick rainbow ribbons that a hose sucks away into the depths of the station’s disposal tanks.
... 2025-05-25 21:18:58 +0000 UTC View Post“We’ll send word to the Pike immediately.” Oorta hurries in Grant’s steps as they enter the ready room, to a ripple of deep bows from white-clad researchers. “They can dispatch an interceptor on triple-burn and it’ll be here in minutes to blow them out of the sky.”
“No,” G...
2025-05-23 17:58:50 +0000 UTC View Post“It’s called a Gordie Howe hat trick,” Grant says. He’s getting the second canto under his fingers; talking while playing helps, he finds. “You get a goal, an assist, and a fight in the same game.”
Ipqen-mek-Taqa is holding up a sheaf of stapled pages translated from the Book of...
2025-05-20 04:02:13 +0000 UTC View Post
In this round we've got Majordomo Vorakaia and the Countess and Count of Korak.
First pic of a Kovikan!! Huzzah!
As always, I'm open to suggestions on the characters you'd like to see next, noble patrons.
2025-05-19 05:01:55 +0000 UTC View PostThe Book of Renewal is a slim volume in carnelian red. Its pages are dogeared and crinkled. Someone’s gone over it with a highlighter and pen, scrawling notes in the margins in a spidery hand. In the conference room, which has steadily reobtained the workday clutter that was cleared away for th...
2025-05-16 04:19:59 +0000 UTC View Post
It's been fun getting back into practice on this! I'll be back to my writing grind very soon. Just getting some reference images for the Black Pike's esteemed command group.
2025-05-13 19:54:14 +0000 UTC View Post
I went and dusted off the ol' Apple Pencil to get some canon pics of the command group ready in order to get commissions of them. Most of them are gonna stay on Discord, I think (Join the discord!!!) but I was pleased with how this particular Sykora came out. Have a lil princess for your timeline...
2025-05-13 02:14:13 +0000 UTC View PostThe first day they have no luck. Even with Ipqen by their side, the translator needs only to say Tamuraq for whatever wary Eqtoran they’re communicating with to clam up and close off.
“Do you reckon there’s a different way we should go about this?” Grant conferences with Ty...
2025-05-11 18:53:04 +0000 UTC View PostBrigadier Hyax turns a heretofore unseen shade of purple when Sykora announces her intention to accompany Grant off the Pike.
“I’ll turn right around.” Sykora buttons the topmost fastener on her flight suit. “I just want to give him my goodbyes.”
“You can give him your goo...
2025-05-09 05:05:56 +0000 UTC View PostSykora steeples her fingers against the soft curve of her lower lip. “You’re asking me to do something against doctrine, aren’t you?”
“I’m not asking you to do anything. This is all me. I’m only asking you for permission. You’re the only one here who outranks me. Remember?...
2025-05-06 01:22:20 +0000 UTC View Post“People of the Eqtoran Republic.”
The voice from beyond the stars cuts through the Rivenland’s bridge vox. It’s grammatically perfect and smooth, and unmistakably alien. There’s no grit to its vowels, an uncanny softness to its trills. And there’s no music under it. No war drums...
2025-05-04 02:06:20 +0000 UTC View PostGrant sidles up to his wife as she watches Waian storm off the command deck. “Chief Engineer’s kind of intense about the membrane, huh?”
“Let’s not get tetchy with her over it.” Sykora sighs. “It’s her job, after all. And she knows what happens when a membrane’s integrity ...
2025-05-01 04:03:20 +0000 UTC View PostYnaqi floats to the Rivenland’s cramped bridge deck and grips a handhold by the nav computer. No navigator today. War crew only. That’s her and Tennek and Suqen, who’s already at her missile banks, checking and re-checking and re-checking again.
Everyone has their rituals, Yn...
2025-04-30 23:11:05 +0000 UTC View PostHey gang! Okay, here's a sequel to the last poll, where it was expressed that additional PoVs might be something you're interested in. Starting in Volume 4, we are going to have some intermittent Sykora PoVs. I'm going to save them for big moments and certain situations (such as scenes where Gran...
2025-04-27 03:14:57 +0000 UTC View Post“We begin,” Hyax says, “with a show of force.”
She hits the trigger on the command deck table. The Eqtora system unfurls from its projector. Eqtora itself is so small in the three-dimensional star map. Like a little bauble, and not the massive world before them.
Grant’s vie...
2025-04-27 02:57:06 +0000 UTC View Post“It’s some kind of misreading. It has to be.” Sqorvik stares at the readouts beside the stellar map. “Some sort of stellar interference showing electrostat where there shouldn’t be.”
“It’s accelerating, Sqor.” His partner is dialing a number on the observatory tower’s bu...
2025-04-25 21:09:47 +0000 UTC View PostOn the first day:
The comet streaks across the crushed-velvet sky above Reueq, the largest landmass on Eqtora. It craters into the Southern Ice Sheet. Its flames boil the frigid ocean beneath. Its passage is marked by a sparsely populated meteorological outpost, manned by a husband, wife, ...
2025-04-24 01:34:20 +0000 UTC View PostHey folks! So we're about halfway through volume 3. As I start to cogitate on volume 4, I wanted to take a quick poll of the crowd.
When I first conceived of Princess of the Void, it was (unlike all my other books) a single PoV story from Grant Hyde's perspective. But over the course of the...
2025-04-21 03:47:11 +0000 UTC View PostTheir fourth date is on the agro level. Tea among the hydroponic hedge mazes and riotous blooms. He asks her about her family back on Aodok, her funny sister who’d visit sometimes.
“Her wife is some kind of big-deal recording industry exec,” she says. “They dropped a bundle on zygom...
2025-04-20 06:39:14 +0000 UTC View PostThe Princess of the Black Pike is hanging upside down. Grant’s hands tuck under her shoulders to keep her stable. Grant’s face is buried in her crotch. Grant’s airways are being constricted by her legs as they wrap in desperation around his head, calves crossed at the nape of his neck. Tota...
2025-04-15 20:35:40 +0000 UTC View PostA rush-ordered fleet of drones in various states of construction splay their metallic guts across the hangar floor. Sparks fire and rivet guns slam. Ajax watches the hangar crew skitter between workstations, calling and whistling. It’s nearly the end of shift for half the workers on the floor, ...
2025-04-14 05:46:04 +0000 UTC View Post