QSFer James E. Honaker has a new queer fantasy adventure out: Beyond Good & Evil II: The Future Past.
The sun dims, shadows grow, and ruination draws near.
The Tomb of the Almighty, thought to be the home of a divine presence, was opened, and it has unleashed a ruinous presence back upon the world keen on resuming a conquest interrupted.
The shadows have spilled forth, destroying the sky city of Aracoras and wrapping their tendrils around the sky city of Lunaria and trying to subjugate the rest of the lands above the cloud sea.
Venser, son of the late High Priest of Aracoras, escaped the fate suffered by the rest of Aracoras, but he found himself in a deep sleep, passing out after seemingly dormant powers awakened to save him and his friends during their escape.
As Venser returns to the world of the living, he and his friends, the crew of the airship Naglfar, race to find the answers they need to stop a dark god from subjugating them all. His journey brings him back to faces old and new, and deeper into the arms of his weapons operator boyfriend, Basch. It’s a race to end an impending war before it has a chance to start anew.
The past has a way of haunting the future, and Venser’s about to learn the consequences of decisions made long before.
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Excerpt
In a moment, Venser’s eyes snapped open.
Venser reflexively squinted, his eyes needing to adjust to the sudden change in light. The memory of the voice he had just been hearing faded as the light took hold. He had remembered mentioning a splitting headache, which was no longer there.
His eyes adjusted and focused, and he was staring up at a ceiling in a room. Slowly, he took mental stock of his surroundings. His head was on a pillow, and he was under sheets, so it stood to reason that he was in a bed. It wasn’t a bed he recognized, but how he was laying suggested that he’d been brought there and laid there deliberately.
Slowly, he moved his arms to try and prop himself up into a seating position. They worked, but they both felt weak and unsteady. He was still able to get that far, and he had a look around the room he found himself in. It was sparse, with a couple of chairs and a bedside table, but little besides. It was comfortable, but definitely more functional than aesthetically minded.
Venser saw on the table to his left a pile of clothes, noticing that he also was not presently wearing anything. It didn’t take long for him to identify the clothes as ones familiar to him, ones he remembered wearing. So they’d been removed somehow, but he couldn’t remember doing it himself.
He groaned as he stretched, noticing the stiffness of his limbs as he moved them. He tried to cast his mind back as far as he could, to remember the events that had brought him here, but there was little besides an annoying, persistent fog between his memories and his consciousness here and now. He knew who he was, but that was just about it.
“What happened?” he asked. He jumped, his voice hoarse and not immediately familiar.
There were a lot of questions he had and a lot of answers he did not have. It was time, he thought, to figure out what he could. Slowly, he pushed himself up to a sitting position, not wanting to move too quickly in case something went wrong. He was still very unsteady and shaky, but his measured and deliberate approach to the enterprise of getting up kept any incidents from happening.
He reached over for the pile of clothes on the table, and he noticed a necklace on top of it, a stylized angelic figure with an inlaid red gem. He picked it up and ran a finger across it, and a strange feeling washed over him. It felt like melancholy, but not in the same way he had been familiar with. It was more a sense of loss, that where this had come from could never again be returned to.
Another fragment of his memory surfaced. A haunting laugh, a stone monolith disintegrating, a man exploding into bits of viscera…it went as quickly as it surfaced, but Venser felt the unease he could recall from when those memories were events that happened before his eyes.
He put the necklace on and proceeded to get dressed, slipping back into familiar clothes. They smelled like they’d been laundered, and it felt good to be back in them. He stood up carefully; his legs were not immediately steady, but after taking a breath and a moment to get his balance, he was fine.
A mirror hung on the wall near the bed, and Venser took a moment to look in it. The man who stared back had a heavy growth of stubble he wasn’t used to, along with unruly brown hair and piercing green eyes. The reflection startled Venser, to a point; he was still there, but he’d never had so much facial hair growth, and his eyes looked different, almost like they were glimmering.
It was still Venser staring back him, but he was taken aback by how he looked. The itchiness of his stubble was also now noticed, and he wasn’t sure he liked how that felt.
He took a deep breath and turned away, now looking out of the nearby window. It had been hard to get his bearings from bed, but the ground was white, with snow steadily falling from the gray sky.
“This has to be Balmung,” he muttered. His voice still felt hoarse, but it was getting better. Balmung was the first name that came to mind when he saw snow, and he remembered his time there before they’d departed for Aracoras.
The time they’d spent there…that triggered another wave of memories. Of Matthias, the captain. Arycelle and Sebastian, the plucky second-in-command and her engineer partner. And Basch, the weapons operator…and his boyfriend.
Where were they? If he was going to find out, and continue piecing together the fractured shards left of his memory, he figured he couldn’t stay in this room.
He carefully made his way to the door and, with a deep breath, turned the knob to open it. It was finally time to rejoin the world.
Author Bio
James is a peddler of bespoke cardstock and small independent game developer who lives in North Carolina with his three cats and a geriatric parakeet. He hopes to use book proceeds to fund the procurement of top-shelf kibble for his cats.
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