The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

Rick and Krista are getting the full explanation of the Monteverdes' lifestyle, now that they've been roped into partaking in it. How will this change Rick's perspective on his past with Lily?

Keiko may have just reached the bottom depths of shame as she looks in the mirror and starts to realize how toxic her relationship with Barry has become. Can she find the resolve to finally end it?

And someone else is dropping in too, who also is looking to overcome her shame for the past and her resolve to change things.

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/35

Headless Over Heels.

Seth looked askance as Lisa climbed into the wagon after her luggage. The wagon bed creaked under her powerful frame. “Were you always this strong,” he asked, “or was it a Winter War-slash-Verdugo development?”

“I didn’t exactly train in earnest until they gave me a sword to swing. But I was always rather robust.” She made a show of dusting her hands off. “You know what they say about Orwinese girls.”

“What’s that?”

Auntie Liz

“Oooh. You don’t know.” Lisa grinned. “Then I won’t spoil any surprises.” She climbed the wagon’s divider and perched on the box seat. “Hop up, Mr. i’Lynnok.”

“I’Lynnok?”

“Seth i’Lynnok.” She held out her hand. “That’s your pseudonym while we’re traveling incognito.”

Seth took it. Her bicep stood out and slid gracefully under her skin as she helped him into the wagon. “That’s an Orwinese word, right?” he asked, to give himself something to think about besides the Verdugo’s arms.

“Mmhmm. It means fox. Fitting, no?” She scooted over to give him more room, though her generous hips still left him a bit cramped. “Unless you’d like to change Seth too.”

“Seth’s fine. One of the few things about myself I’ve never thought about ditching. Although I have gone by Boris a few times.”

“Boris? You?” She quirked her head. “You wouldn’t be a Boris. Too slim.”

“I was a fat baby,” he said. “What about you?”

“I was fatter.”

“Your pseudonym, I mean.”

“Moi?” She laid a hand on her chest. “I am Elizabeth i’Lynnok.”

“Are we pretending to be married?”

The white marshfires in her eyes glowed as they widened with her surprised laugh. “I’d planned on being your aunt, Seth.”

“Oh.” His cheeks tingled. “Of course.”

“But married could be fun.” She flicked the reins and Demetrius grumbled into motion. “The dashing younger husband and the vamp who stole him away. That could be very fun.”

Annalise’s warning about her sorceress head lurked in the back of Seth’s mind. “Aunt works. Let’s do aunt.”

An amused hum from between her wine-dark lips. “Let’s.”

He cast a skeptical look at his employer’s paperwhite skin. “Though I’m not sure how anyone could see us as related.”

“You let Auntie Liz handle that part,” she said. “Wink.”

“All your heads do that wink thing, huh?”

Lisa stuck her onyx tongue out. “Annalise got that from Lisa, thank you very much.”

Down the cobbled Laramme thoroughfare, a few people cast curious looks at the Verdugo’s oddly lengthened hair, though her sunglasses and her hat covered much of the transformation. Seth looked to the scaffold as they passed. A geezer in overalls was on his knees atop it, industriously scrubbing the arterial blood from its boards.

The woman who’d spilled it hummed melodiously to herself at Seth’s shoulder.

They rolled out of Laramme’s village cluster into the golden waves of its fields. It was a perfect afternoon, the sort you’d want to capture in amber and preserve for the coming dark and cold. A fresh crispness in the air intermingling with the baking emerald warmth of the sun. Seth wondered sometimes whether the Deathspell had influenced the weather at all. Did the kindred of old feel the warmth of their strange yellow sun for longer? Were their winters gentler?

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...auntie-liz

Princess of the Void.

Should Headless Over Heels land in the top 5 of Rising Stars, I will provide two bonus chapters of Princess of the Void, the following Monday and Wednesday.

I will also commission an artist to draw a brief and explicit illustrated account of Sykora getting her wish Granted, If Ya Know What I Mean. This I will not post on Royal Road, because there are rules to uphold, but those of you with a taste for --content omitted-- will be able to seek it out.

I hope these offerings entice you to check the story out, and I hope that when you do you'll fall as in love with those characters as you have with Grant and Sykora, whose adventures now continue!

GLORY TO THE PIKE

I Know You

I am immune.

The pronouncement ripples through his audience like a physical force. The bridge crew do not speak when their superior is addressing them, but the urge is clear in them. Eyes darting and meeting, expressions of galled disbelief.

“Every Maekyonite is,” Grant says. “That was always my strong suspicion, but it has been confirmed aboard the Prelate system research vessel. The men, the women. All of us.” He reaches behind his head and clicks the strap of his anticomps open. “I wore these to disguise myself. But I want to meet your eyes when I tell you this.”

His sweeping attention snags on a woman in the crowd, a researcher whose name escapes him but who always smiles sweetly at him every time she bows. She’s staring at him like he’s confessing to a murder in front of her.

“When Sykora took me from my world and brought me into yours, we resolved to keep this secret until the sector was ready to hear it. it wasn’t compulsion that made me choose her. It wasn’t compulsion that made me choose you.”

He forces his eyes up, away from his stricken audience and into the camera that is broadcasting his words to the legion of crew aboard every level of the Pike.

“You have all come to know me and accept me as one of your own. It’s a natural feeling to second-guess yourself now, and to question who and what I am, and wonder whether there are other deceptions. But I swear this to you, as your Prince.”

He wills his hands out from behind his back and points to the holoprojection of his homeworld.

“Maekyon will be ours,” he says.

Postures shift again. Uncertain hope returns to the warriors of the Black Pike. They don’t understand their Prince anymore, maybe, but they understand their duty.

“My loyalty has always lain with the Black Pike sector and its Princess, and still does. I will stand with her, and with all of you, as this ZKZ annexes my home world. I will—” An unwelcome quiver starts in his throat. He shuts it off before it hits his voice. “I will see Maekyon join the Taiikari Empire. I’ll prove your fears unfounded; I’ll repay the loyalty you have shown me in kind, and I’ll show the sector that my people need no compulsion to be made proud citizens of the Imperial firmament.”

He looks across them all, sees the fear and confusion at war with love and fealty.

“Glory to the Pike,” he says.

His people may be stunned and conflicted and standing in the wreckage of what they thought was an ironclad truth of the firmament. But they are warriors of the Taiikari, and his call breaks through the daze. “Glory to the Pike!”

He keeps his chin up, even as he feigns what he does not feel. “Glory to the Empress.”

“Glory to the Empress!”

And he’s done it. He’s survived. Whatever they say about him now, to his face or his back, he’s made it through. He has that.

“End transmission,” he says, and the camera’s light blinks out. He turns from the humming dark and stoops at the waist down to Sykora and Vora. “Would one of you take over again?” he whispers. “I kinda need to lie down and stare at the ceiling for the rest of the day.”

“You did wonderfully, Grant.” Vora embraces him around the shoulders. “As wonderfully as you could. They’ll acclimate.”

“They totally will,” Waian says. “There’s Void Princesses who take wives, after all. It’s not, like, so odd for a—”

“But I’m a man, chief.” Cortisol spikes in Grant’s mind, tunnels his agitated vision. “I’m male.”

“I—” The color drains from Waian’s face. “I mean, yes, absolutely. Of course you are. All I mean is that, uh… there’s context already for the people who can’t… I’m gonna stop talking, actually, before my foot goes the rest of the way down my esophagus.”

Grant remembers what Brother Tymar told him once, when they were eating fish together on a remote research station. This might be where the implant is complicating things for you. The Taiikari word for someone who can be compelled is male.

He sighs himself out of his cornered-animal tailspin. This isn’t an antagonist; this is Waian. “It’s okay, Chief Engineer,” he says. “I know you.”

“So do they,” Waian says. “It’ll be a weird couple days while they try and get with the system, and then everything will be okay. Y’know?”

“Yeah,” he says, and feigns again: “I’m not worried.”

“Nor should you be,” Sykora says. “Because if any of them place a toe out of line in their fealty to you, I will launch them into a moon hard enough to ding the axial tilt a degree.”

Grant ought to reprove Sykora’s threat of violence, but this one time it makes him feel better. “Will you come with me?”

She kisses his hand. “Anywhere in the firmament you’ll take me.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...apter-news
UPDATE: https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2402682/