QSFer Aaron Sofaer has a new Queer LitRPG Fantasy book out (Ace, Agender, Aro, Bi, Demi, Gay, Gender Fluid, Lesbian, Non-Binary, Poly, Trans MTF): Quill & Still.
Sophie Nadash once yearned to understand life and chemistry. Now a disillusioned scientist approaching middle age, she yearns to set aside pipettes and polymerase forever.
A chance encounter with the Goddess Artemis sets her on the path to becoming the Alchemist for the rural Shemmai village of Kibosh, where the rat race gives way to peace and the quiet life. Freed from the hustle of Earth, she can relax, make friends, and rediscover her love for chemistry through its mystical precursor… and come to grips with the Jewish faith she left behind as a child.
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Excerpt
Wandering off the path in the Greek woods might not, in hindsight, have been the most sensible of choices. Compass and map notwithstanding, the trackless wilderness had things that a biochemist was not qualified to deal with. So, following the glimmers of mist along the tiny creek as I hiked upstream towards the tinkling music of a waterfall? Probably not the path of wisdom.
There was no way I wasn’t going that way, though. I’m an absolute sucker for the way that morning mist dances as it burns off, and I’ve never seen a waterfall that I didn’t want to stop and admire. And it wasn’t like I had somewhere in particular to be or a particular path to take.
It was just me, the woods, a week of vacation, enough food for five days, and enough iodine to purify a month’s worth of water. It was my break from the humdrum of what passes for science in academia, from pipettes and flow cytometers and centrifuges; it was my break from exhausted, desperate postdocs trapped in the cycle of abuse and their publish-or-perish PIs.
So of course I walked up-river. Exploring to find the small places of sublime beauty was the whole point of backpacking through the woods.
The quiet snuck up on me. My feet crunching against the leaves and the snap of twigs sounded almost overwhelming as the birdsong, frogs, and other critters faded into silence, and it wasn’t long before the only things I could hear were myself and the water. Even so, by the time I noticed the song, I was coming around the bend and could see her through a break in the trees.
She was astonishingly beautiful. I don’t know how to convey the extent of it, how to put it into words. Slender, with this incredible Olympic heptathlon physique and stunningly perfect skin, she lounged in the crystal- clear water of the pond with her head and shoulders pillowed on a mossy rock and her arms scratching the lowered heads of two enormous dogs that were lying on the bank in perfect stillness. And that—or the weaponry—should have been a warning sign, but my mental inertia kept my feet going into the clearing, and when I almost tripped over a branch and had to step hard onto the friable ground to keep my balance, her eyes snapped over to me as she reached for one of the javelins at her side.
Hi, I wanted, or maybe should have wanted, to say. Sorry for disturbing you; I can go. But do you mind if I stay? It’s beautiful here, and if I wouldn’t be intruding, I’d love to sit by this pond and watch the waterfall. My name’s Sophie, and I appreciate your forbearance.
“Holy shit,” I said instead. “ Are those your javelins? Because oh my goddess do you ever have the arms for them.” I blinked a few times, seeing her eyes narrow, and took a very small, careful step backwards, flushed with embarrassment and a sudden nervous fear as her dogs’ heads came up. “Sorry, sorry, my mouth gets away from me, you’re beautiful and your gods look—I mean your dogs look great and I’ll just go now.”
A moment later, I turned back towards her, away from the impossibly thick brush and the needle-looking spines that barred what was previously a clear path. They ran all the way to the water, and a little more besides; there absolutely was no way I was getting through them, and no way I got through them in the first place.
“Or… not, I guess.” I tested one of the spines with the tip of my hiking boot, wincing as it went through the leather with ease. “Was there… I know there’s no way this was like this when I walked through.”
“Approach, child.”
I’d taken four fast steps towards her by the time my brain caught up. There was an unbelievable degree of command in her voice, and I’ve always been an absolute sucker for a pretty girl telling me to come nearer to her, so it wasn’t the fact that I obeyed that threw me for a loop. It was the fact that I was on unsteady, uneven ground, taking long steps at practically a running speed, and I didn’t fall on my face or my ass; and that broke whatever effect it was and I almost slipped, catching an easy smirk on her face.
“Okay, that was weird. This is weird.” I looked more closely at her, and at what was strewn around her. Notably missing were things like pants or shoes, footprints, a bag of any sort, or signs of anyone else, along with anycollar or mark of ownership on the dogs; present were the dogs, three long javelins with what looked like wickedly pointed tips, an unstrung bow, a shirt, and a horn of a vaguely familiar style.
That, and those two words had been Greek, and okay, I was fluent in Greek, but when I stopped to remember what words she used I could hardly recognize them, what with the linguistic drift. So how did I understand her?
I had enough time to perform the shift from looking inquisitive to gaping, along with the obligatory internal oh, probably in prelude to an oh shit, when she crooked her finger at me. I obediently kept walking forwards, because what else was I going to do? The way out was blocked, and the javelins were within reach of her hand. That’s a tunic, not a shirt, I thought to myself, uselessly. “I know this is totally rude, but somehow I always thought you’d look older? More, I dunno, late-twenties, at least. Though I guess the myths specifically did describe you as young.”
From the look on her face, that was absolutely the wrong thing to say. “Young?”
Author Bio
Aaron lives in California, working as a software developer while muttering enviously about the superiority of walkable communities and countries with vastly better support for raising children.Having had the Path of the Writer unlocked by the mid-life acquisition of an awesome rainbow hat, Aaron is now trying to inflict thirty years of arguing about civics and public policy at the Shabbat table onto readers seeking fantasy novels. Rumors that the devastating smirk masks a series of deep, dark secrets are entirely unsubstantiated—all such secrets are all-too-shallow and prone to being shared at the drop of a pin.
| Author Website | https://www.aaron.sofaer.net/ |
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