Trampolining with Dragons

by S. W. Clarke

  That’s right, we’re only done with the first phase of the universe’s unfolding.

  We still have 2 more phases to go …

  Phase One was about establishing the heroes of our world and turning the pressure cooker on. Others and Humans are forced to live together under circumstances neither signed up for. There’s a lot of resentment. There’s also a lot of love.

  But as we enter Phase Two – 5 years after the gods left – the practicalities of this co-existence is taking its toll. Humans are wanting (and, in some cases, needing) to place restrictions on Others.

  Others are wanting to have a world of their own, where they can be free like they once were.

  In-fighting will be increasing with the stakes, and souls, of the world up for grabs.

  What’s more, we’ll start to learn more about where the gods went, why they left and what that ultimately will mean for the world.

  We hope to end Phase 2 in 2022. Please note – we HOPE to do it. The more sales we make of the already existing series, the more funds we’ll have to keep producing the books (and the more time, I’ll have to write. I’m typing as fast as I can).

  As for Phase 3 – well, I don’t even want to drop a hint as to what will happen then. Let’s just say that it’s going to be epic and leave it there!

  To that end, Shavonne, Matt, Kat and I would greatly appreciate your help! Help us get the world out there. Share the GoneGod World with your friends, family, colleagues at work. Call long lost friends that you haven’t spoken to for years just to mention the GoneGod World to them.

  Hell – tell the barista at Starbucks about us.

  Tell whomever will listen. We would truly appreciate it!

  Cheers and here’s to you, dear reader. We GoneGodDamn love you for reading!

  Ramy Vance, S.W. Clarke and the rest of the GoneGod World Team….

  PS - Here’s a breakdown of what’s been published so far: bit.ly/gonegodtimeline

  It’s all clickable links.

  GoneGod World - Catalogue

  Tara and Percy - Cooking Marshmallows with Dragons

  When I started this series, the world was different. No pandemic had occurred. The world hadn’t shut down. I hadn’t yet bought a fifty-pound bag of white rice. (It took me a full fourteen months to finish that bag of rice.)

  And now, as I finish the last book in her series, I’ve just properly left my home for the first time in those fourteen months. I went to a Japanese restaurant and about died with joy after my first sip of miso soup. You just can’t replicate that stuff at home.

  For me, 2020 was the year the gods left.

  It was the year everything I knew turned on its head. It was the year I understood that anxiety and stress can swim through your body—GoneGods, can they swim—without any real acknowledgment of them until you find yourself short of breath, and then all of a sudden you realize you’re having the first panic attack of your life.

  I’ve had a fortunate life. But anxiety is anxiety is anxiety.

  For the first four months of the pandemic, I was in a constant state of vibrating motionlessness. I couldn’t write, couldn’t read—hell, for the first week I couldn’t do anything but watch Tiger King.

  It isn’t that I didn’t want to write. I did, I did, I did. But guilt over such things doesn’t work that way, I’ve found—it only works to motivate you when you think the gods are still around, or after they’ve been gone a while.

  There are many reasons why Tara Drake is close to my heart. But because we’re on this topic, we’re most alike in our uncertainty that the world is a safe place.

  The gods could leave. Vampires could kill your family. Lust could steal your dragon. A pandemic could spread like wildfire.

  What do you do then?

  If 2020 has taught me one lesson, it’s that you must find safety—trust, refuge—in yourself. You are your own shelter. When you feel safe with yourself, the world feels far less overwhelming.

  That’s Tara’s journey. It’s why, when Ramy suggested a whip-wielding dragon rider whose family was killed by vampires, I said, “Hell yes.” Because the tumultuousness of her internal world spoke to me.

  And it’s why I like to imagine Patience Schweinsteiger, who has forgiven herself for her sister’s death, who has saved Percy and Ariadne, forging through the pandemic of 2020 as her own shelter. She is her own safety, and to hell with the gods. She doesn’t need their promises of fate or providence—they can stay gone.

  It’s why this series is so important to me. I believe there’s a universality to what we’ve experienced during 2020—that loss of control, that feeling of uncertainty—and why, like Tara, people who’ve had to come to terms with such feelings have come out of this experience stronger. Safer in themselves.

  Box of frogs, it’s been a ride.

  - S. W. Clarke, June 2021

  ***

  ***********

  ***

  An Infernal Heist!

  Meet GoneGod World’s Latest Hero

  His story will be out in July 2021 … here’s a teaser of what’s to come!

  Chapter 1

  It was hard to concentrate with all the screaming going on.

  But that was Hell for you. Nothing but the rumble of bubbling magma, the damned wailing about their damnedness, and on this particular level, the sound of battle. The clang of clashing metal, the tearing of flesh like raffle tickets, the screams of the defeated, the bellows of the victorious.

  It didn’t help that the cauldron of lava on the chair next to him was angrily spitting ashes at him either.

  Malfius fidgeted in his chair of thorns – worn smooth by the thousands of reprimanded demons before him – and flicked the coals off his scales so they wouldn’t burn him. He may’ve been a demon born of the Phlegethon River, but enough Hellfire would reduce him to molten slag.

  Which was exactly what had happened to Daxos.

  Which was exactly why they both were in the DIA director’s office, Malfius in one chair, the glob of lava that was now Daxos in a cauldron on the other.

  The director of Demonic Infernal Affairs, Prescott, supported his cheek with the knuckles of one hand while the fingers of his other drummed on his desk of blackened bone, clearly annoyed that his afternoon soak in the sulfur pits had been postponed. He wasn’t as tall as Malfius, but he was big and burly like a gorilla with skin redder than a forge. Six yellow horns sprouted from his head, arching upward like the spikes of a crown, and a double set of yellow eyes glared up at the demon sitting on the other side of the desk.

  Malfius may’ve been eight feet tall, his lizard-like body thick with muscle, but he felt like a plague fly under Prescott’s four-eyed glower. His barbed tail lashed nervously against the brimstone floor.

  “So, Malfius … back again, I see.” Prescott pulled a scroll of skin from his desk drawer and flicked it open with a talon. The supple scroll rolled across the desk, tumbled down to the brimstone floor, and shored up against Malfius’s feet. “I’d say I’m surprised, but that’d be a lie. And though as demons we’re encouraged to lie, the truth hurts more in this case. What does this make? Your thirty-fifth infraction?”

  Malfius swallowed, tucking his talons under his lizard-like chin and clicking them together nervously. “I’d like to take a moment to point out that reprimanding a demon is a rather counterproductive pursuit as we, by our very natures, are supposed to be deceitful, fickle miscreants—”

  “Spare me your loquaciousness! Was it the thirty-fifth or not?”

  “T-Thirty-sixth, sir.”

  “Ah, yes. That incident with Brad.” Prescott dipped a pen into a well of squid ink and carefully wrote the latest infraction on the bottom of the scroll. They’d have to sew in another skin to extend it very soon. “Daxos of Clutch Theta. Current rank on the leaderboard was what at TOI?”

  “He was two-hundred-seventy-two at time of incineration.”

  Prescott jumped onto his desk like an enraged gorilla, hurling whatever knickknacks he
could get his hands on at the cauldron of lava. A dragon skull followed a basilisk fang, shattering like pottery. “I don’t get out of the sulfur pits for anyone less than sixty, and you’re bitching about two-hundred-seventy-two? I’ll dump your slag back into the Phlegethon myself, you narcissistic louse!”

  “Malfius is a menace!” Daxos the lava glob shouted. “The last twelve battlers he’s been caddie to are still respawning. It’ll be weeks until I can battle again!”

  “Because you were doing so well before,” Prescott sneered, but he sat back down and took another look at the scroll. “He’s right, Malfius. I’ve got complaints from the last twenty battlers you’ve been assigned to.”

  Malfius winced, lowering his lizard-like head like a scolded dog.

  “Oh, sit up straight,” Prescott barked. “You’re a demon, not a pathetic human. Though you’re such a hapless idiot that it’d be a compliment to call you one.” The director of the DIA rapped his meaty knuckles on the table. “Listen up, Malfius. Your days are numbered here. You have no clutch, and no battler to protect you.”

  “Thaddeus will have your ass now, Malfius,” the lava glob gurgled sinisterly. “You should’ve thought about that before you handed me a morning star instead of a double-bladed battle axe!”

  Prescott rammed his fist against his desk, demanding silence. “Though given your size, it’s a wonder no one’s trained you as a battler yet.”

  “Trust him with a weapon?” the lava glob exclaimed.

  The director of the DIA snatched the last object on his desk – the head of the former Level 4 director swimming in a jar of sulfuric acid – and threw it at the cauldron to shut him up. Glass shattered, the head bounced across the brimstone floor a couple of times before turning into ash, and the acid sealed the cauldron with a black crust. For a blissful moment, the only thing they could hear was the perpetual sounds of battle happening in the distance upon the Black Plains.

  Prescott leaned back in his chair with a happy sigh, then remembered Malfius was still in his office. “You failed as a familiar from Level 4, so spectacularly that the fiery underlord himself gave you a mark that prevented any sorcerer from ever summoning you again, and you were demoted to caddie on Level 5.”

  Malfius lowered his head again. Prescott had glazed over the fact that he’d become a caddie only after a failed stint as a janitor with the Sages on Level 7 and a horrible week as Charon’s valet on Level 1. The Boatman had had to ferry souls in nothing but his underwear – tighty graysies – and top hat after Malfius had washed his robes in holy instead of unholy water.

  “What’s holy water doing in Hell anyway?” Malfius muttered to himself.

  In fact, he’d never been that good at anything really. Malfius had been a mediocre familiar at best – being summoned to be the slave of only the most incompetent sorcerers – until the last one. It’d had to have been a fluke. He’d never been bonded to someone so prestigious before. Not that it had lasted very long. The very man he’d been summoned to protect had been betrayed and stabbed to death by a bunch of senators, and an empire had collapsed as a result. A very lucrative empire of corruption, debauchery, war, and enslavement which had been funneling souls into Hell at an unprecedented rate. After Malfius’s cock-up, that currency had slowed.

  Dramatically.

  “… all you had to do was carry a battler’s weapons and hand them out as needed,” Prescott was saying. “But since you’ve been a caddie, all of your battlers have been defeated. They’ve all been cut down by inferior demons, wiping out their rank on the leaderboard and losing whatever advantages they had at becoming the next Destroyer, and now have to wait six-hundred-sixty-six hours as nothing more than slag in the Phlegethon until they can respawn. You’re making a lot of enemies, Malfius.”

  “And I’m one of them, you bumbling bozo!” Daxos broke through the black crust, sloshing around in his cauldron and showering the floor with sizzling sparks. “When I respawn, I’m going to turn your skin into chicharrones and feed them to Cerberus!”

  Malfius gulped.

  “Fortunately for you, there’s one more thing you can try before I banish you to Level 1 as an entry-level soul sorter,” Prescott said.

  “Anything!” The idea of cataloging all those slimy degenerates was enough to make him gag. They were like jellyfish, bobbing bloated in the River Styx, and could get really handsy. He was a demon of fire, not aether, and wading around in a soul river would quench the fury in his belly. He would become weak in time, flaking away to ash, never to respawn. And though respawning hurt – really hurt – you always came back.

  This, well, this was a real-death death sentence.

  Prescott slid a box of chalk across his desk. Malfius caught it as it shot off the edge, the chalk rattling in its container like oracle bones.

  “You’ll replace Trent as scorekeeper. Apparently the Infernal Rooster has eaten one too many of his limbs, and he has to respawn. All you have to do is maintain the leaderboard.”

  “S-Scorekeeper?” It was the job dumped only on the ineptest of demons. “But I am Malfius, he who runs faster than thought, who rides the fury of hurricanes, the herald of hopelessness! Prescott, I am the connoisseur of calamity—”

  The gorilla-like demon banged his fist against his desk. “This is your last chance, Malfius! Now take Daxos and get the hell out of my office.”

  Malfius decided to change tactics. Maybe if he was overly grateful, Prescott would give him another chance as someone’s caddie. “Oh, thank you, sir! Your begrudging mercy will not be forgotten. It’ll go down in the fiery annals as the quintessential example of demonic brotherhood—”

  “Now!” Prescott shouted.

  Then again, maybe not.

  Malfius launched out of his seat to salute the director, his barbed tail tangling in the legs of Daxos’s chair. The cauldron overturned, and the glob of lava oozed through the cracks in the brimstone floor like the yolk of a broken egg.

  “Ahhh!” Daxos screamed, seeping into the cracks. “Help me, you idiot!”

  Malfius dropped the box of chalk, which incinerated on contact with the lava, and hastily scooped molten rock back into the cauldron. Except his six-inch talons made for poor scooping implements, and the lava slipped through them no matter how hastily he scraped them across the floor.

  “It’s gonna take weeks to drip back into the Phlegethon, you bastard! It takes six-hundred-sixty-six hours of uninterrupted marinating in the river to respawn, you brainless – ack!”

  Daxos disappeared into the cracks, garbling obscenities until the office was quiet again. Except for the white-noise screaming that could be heard nonstop throughout Level 5 at any hour of the day. That was still going on.

  Malfius peeked over the edge of the desk, lips peeling away from his needle-like teeth into a sheepish smile. Prescott was back in his seat, cheek supported by his knuckles, drumming his fingers against his desk as he had been at the start of their meeting, looking unimpressed.

  Malfius tucked his talons under his chin, clicking them together nervously. “G-Got anymore chalk?”

  Chapter 2

  Malfius hunched by the leaderboard, trying to look inconspicuous. Which was pretty difficult to do when he was an eight-foot tall be-horned demon with a row of spikes rippling down his spine all the way to the end of his barbed tail.

  At least the leaderboard was on top of a jagged pinnacle a hundred feet into the air. Malfius was the only one up there, besides the Infernal Rooster who crowed the time. Ichabod was a horrid bird, stooped like a vulture but the size of a Shetland pony, constantly molting its maroon and sulfur-yellow feathers. Around its neck was a heavy chain, lashing it to the pinnacle.

  Malfius gave it a wide berth – Trent had said it would bite him if he ever turned his back on it – and instead kept a lookout for the one demon who wanted to maim him.

  Some demons just couldn’t let bygones be bygones.

  The Black Plains were in full panoramic view, from the jagged foothills that ma
rked the boundary to Level 6 to the twisting river of red magma that was the Phlegethon River. If anyone wanted to get to him – Thaddeus included – they’d have to climb the pinnacle, and Malfius would see them coming.

  But the battlers and their caddies were too preoccupied with the upcoming fight. Thousands of demons congregated below, sharpening their weapons, grappling with their clutch mates, and insulting each other.

  Every twelfth day held a Main Event, the eleven days in between each Main Event dedicated to the Qualifiers where demons could battle for ExP, or experience points. ExP would boost your overall BAMF rating, and if you got to BAMF-25, and you could enter the Main Event. Most were gladiatorial style, where the seasoned demons racked up major scores on the leaderboard, but today was a Prizefight. Today was the first of three fights to determine the next Destroyer.

  To be a Destroyer was every battler’s dream. Win two out of three fights, and you were guaranteed to be the next natural disaster unleashed upon Earth. Win three out of three fights, and you were destined to bring about an apocalyptic event.

  Malfius jumped as the Infernal Rooster crowed three times, signaling the match. He hurriedly opened his pouch, extracted a single piece of chalk, and carefully wrote the names of the contestants on the leaderboard.

  Bocephus vs Thaddeus.

  Instantly their stats rippled across the leaderboard, everything from BAMF level – Battler At Maximum Force – to Time Since Respawn to preferred weapon of choice.

  Bocephus: Clutch Zeta, BAMF-76, Leaderboard Rank: 2, TSR: 72 days, Twin Poleax and Prehensile Tail.

  Thaddeus: Clutch Kappa, BAMF-82, Leaderboard Rank: 1, TSR: 364 days, Double-Ended Scythe.

  The demons jostled each other as the ground rumbled, a wide section lowering itself into a pit-like arena. Bocephus jumped down, rolling lightly to his feet, while Thaddeus just dropped like a stone cast into a river.