While Sand and Bone is building up the story, Flight of the Scions is in the beginning of the epic fight where there is magic flying everywhere. These are greatly different from each other but they both show my love for anime and the influences it has on my writing.

(There are some excerpt in this one with a bit of spoilers. They are also unedited.)

Sand and Bone 5: Halfway There

One of the major themes in Sand and Bone is the question of how a pacifist survives in the desert. This chapter is a good example since Rutejìmo uses a deadly weapon but won't ever strike the final blow. He can defend himself and will do so but won't attack.

It has been five years since he became a kojinōmi but that doesn't mean he hasn't been learning how to defend himself. There are pepole still trying to kill him and he can defend himself. This chapter show that, along with building the personalities that will be presented in the scenes that happen at the end of the first act.

Read Sand and Bone 5: Halfway There at https://fedran.com/sand-and-bone/chapter-05/.

Flight of the Scions 39: The Fall of Lurkuklan

Flight of the Scions was my first novel. I had such grand hopes that it could be published and sent it out to quite a few places. As the years went on, the story continued to evolve as I kept rewriting it. First it was Welf and then Kanéko. Each time, I got better but I was also going over the same book over and over again, trying to figure out what I missed.

Eventually, it came down to Harper Voyager. The last place I submitted rejected me and… well, I gave up. I decided to do the self-publish route and started to look into that. I knew it had to be edited, but my first quotes were in the tens of thousands.

To make it more reasonable, I split the novel. However, I couldn't just break it in half because I hate books that end like that. Instead, I decided to go down the middle and split out Garèo's part from Kanéko's. In effect, two novels going on at the same time.

This chapter is where those two plots come back together again.

Garèo sighed. “You're right.” He reached back to the empty sheath in his hand. “Father, I need you.”

Sunlight exploded in his fingertips, spears of it stretching out. Kanéko was glad for her darkened goggles as she saw the dagger materialize in his hand. He unsheathed it and held it tight to his chest.

Garèo is a very competent fighter. Actually, this is the first part of the final climax. Everyone is settled into their powers and they are all somewhat powerful, even the horse, Ojinkomàsu.

He moved faster than Kanéko thought possible, his feet not even visible on the ground. The sunlight formed a wave around him, spreading out across the fields and kicking up a wall of dust, dirt, and crops. It rose with every rod Ojinkomàsu covered in a blink of the eye. It obscured Kanéko's view of the tower as the stones started to hit the ground, shaking the earth, and her heart lurched when her mother's bow fired one last time and went dark.

She tried to scream, but her voice locked in her throat.

Before her, Ojinkomàsu and Garèo ignited in golden flames. They surged forward, piercing the dust cloud rushing at them. Ojinkomàsu's impact cracked the air and sent out a shock-wave that kicked up boulders the size of houses out across the field behind the tower. The horse burst through the rubble and out the other side, carrying rock and dust after him in a giant vortex.

A lot of the hints of these were in cut sections. We see her father's power in the first two chapters but this is the first time she, therefore the reader, gets to see Maris, Ruben, Tagon, and Mioráshi using the full measure of their abilities.

Mioráshi deserves some commentary. One of my favorite RPGs was White Wolf's Exalted. I loved playing it (though I hated the overkill part of it). I did so for twelve-hour sessions every Saturday for years. Now, she isn't Exalted but the idea of using sunlight for weapons fit nicely into the cosmology I crafted with Sand and Blood and the day clans.

Mioráshi could be seen from a mile away as she perched on the side of the tower and leaned over the edge. Her entire body was bathed in a spear of sunlight that reached up into the sky where it pierced the clouds. The spear flashed every time she fired her bow, a brilliant arrow of solidified sunlight streaking out from her weapon and slamming into Damagar's face and eyes. The air rumbled with the sounds of her bow shots, a beat of pressure followed by a crack of noise. It looked just like the dream Damagar threatened her with.

“Mama?” whispered Kanéko. She had never seen her mother shoot so fast or with anything besides normal arrows, but she could see how her mother spun sunlight into an arrow and fired in less than a few seconds.

“The Kosobyo hóri, your clan's bow magic.”

What you don't see is that Mioráshi is also cursing at Damagar at the same time. Just insulting him as a way of powering her magic. She uses both.

Through all of this, we have Kanéko, a girl without magic. This mirrors Sand and Blood's story about the protagonist being weaker than everyone else but there are some big differences. The main one is that while Rutejìmo remains weak and accepts it, Kanéko rises up to face it. All the previous chapters of her learning how to communicate with telepaths, shielding her thoughts, learning how to work with others, and her ability to visualize and abstract is actually her training for this fight. This ends up being a fight between her and an eighty-foot telepathic toad with psionics.

Read Flight of the Scions 39: The Fall of Lurkuklan https://fedran.com/flight-of-the-scions/chapter-39/ (subscribers)

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