Hello all! Chapter 52 check-in. Currently sitting at over 200k words. Conservatively looking at June for completion of draft 1. Sooner, if I can hack it. Glad to say, as the draft has continued, so has the descent into darkness. From the offset, things are pretty grim. The general premise in a (wildly boiled down) standalone sentence? "Siro, an outlaw dataminer, hunts down a way to raise his wife from the dead by following in the footsteps of a madman." It's basically downhill from there. I'm tossing in a little bit of the ride with today's update. The following, from chapter 52, is a taste of how dark things get:
The north wall was a black slash of Darkfield through concrete. It jutted into the long room like the bow of a crashed ship. Security cages of beaten wire mesh stood behind rows of surgical tables on the southern wall. Of those, one was occupied. The thing that hunched within was a small, shadowy lump poised with vacant eyes on the black bow. Siro stopped floating near when he realized who it was. He couldn’t bare to get any closer; couldn’t draw his attention away. What have you done, Boltz? Dear God, what have you done? There was hardly anything of Rhea left. Her arms and legs were gone. Most of her hips. She sat on the lopsided remains of her upper torso, supported by thin, bony projections that grew searchingly from her wounds. A black tuft was all that she still had for hair, the rest of it gone with what Boltz took from her face and head. Had he, failing to stop the infection, resorted to amputation? Siro had seen the Darkfield's spores up close; the way those golden slivers darted about, hungrily seeking hosts... what they did to tissue couldn't be undone. But Boltz had tried. And tried and tried. The medical part of his brain-- that stable doctor that formed a safe niche in his psyche-- had taken over. At the expense of the humane, the sane. Thanks for reading! Until next time!
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AuthorHailing from Seattle, Magnus Blackwood is a metalhead, amateur strongman, cape/cloak advocate and microbiologist who's been writing sci-fi since 2013. His stories focus on weaving horror and occult elements into futuristic hellscapes with a magical twist. Archives
February 2024
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