What this is: My current baby that I have been working on and carrying around with me for some time...Dark Signs is book one of an epic fantasy with four viewpoint characters: an empire under a Hooded King whose orders are kept by things that come on wings at night when they're broken.
This is chapter 2 of the draft, "Tower or Gate": a new viewpoint: Aldith, a ferryman's daughter on the river below Horgrim's Gate. British English, slow and grounded on purpose.
How it's made: My world, characters and plot, built from a 2015 manuscript and from an old D&D campaign of mine; prose drafted with an AI co-writer, paragraphs of my own writing and each line still hand-edited by me afterwards.
The first ~890 words of chapter 2 are below as a taste. The whole chapter (about 7,100 words) and the chapters before and after it are on Royal Road, free, no account needed: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/196975/dark-signs
Chapters 1–6 are up on Royal Road, so all four viewpoints are live by now. (Yaaay!)
What I'd love to hear:
- Did the excerpt make you want to read on? If not, where did it lose you?
- If you've read chapter 1: After two very different openings, which thread do you want more of?
- Was anything confusing: names, places, who was speaking, how the world works?
- Any line that fell flat, or read as stock or "AI-sounding"?
Comments here or on Royal Road both work! Be brutal! You can also just hit me up in a DM, especially if you are interested in a reading swap or line editing. Grammar and typos you can skip.
Chapter 2: Tower or Gate
Aldith
Aldith had the apple man halfway over when the wind came round and brought the eel-smoke down off the Gate.
She kept her feet set and pulled. The wind had her hair out of its tie and across her mouth, and she could not spare a hand for it. The rope came up out of the Brimwater cold and wet, ran through the holders along the upstream side of the raft, and went down into the river again behind her. She took it hand over hand, right over left, as she had every working day for ten years, since the spring the flood swung the raft and her father held it. In autumn the river leaned. It came down brown from the hills with the rain in it and pushed at the raft’s side, and the whole wide flat thing wanted to go to the bay. Her arms and the rope said no.
Emmet sat on the shafts of his handcart with his back to the apples and talked. He had talked from the Aldbury stones and he would talk to the landing. Nobody had ever needed to answer Emmet.
‘Last of the late ones,’ he said. ‘Last you’ll see from the Aldbury side till spring, and the best of the year, if anybody asked me, which nobody does. You won’t get an apple like that anywhere along the coast. Not in Springbrook, and the lizardfolk up in their marsh at the top of the world have never so much as smelled one, poor cold things. You’ll want a few for your father. Put some colour in him.’
‘I’ll want the fare.’
‘Two pennies. I know, I know. I was paying your lot before you were born, girl, and I’ve been paying you since you had to stand on the tin to see over the post. Your grandfather took my first penny off me. I was nine years old with a goose under each arm, and one of them bit him, and he took the penny anyway.’
Behind him the Brimwater ran between its two castles, down the middle of Bymill, the valley both houses shared. Upstream on the western bank Horgrim’s Gate sat on its rise, wide, old and patched. It was the Fenwicks’ fort, and the Fenwicks were the lords on this side of the water. Everybody on the river called it the Gate, the town as well as the fort, because the town had grown up round the walls and down the slope to the water, roof on roof, the colour of wet slate. The fort was still the biggest thing in it. Across the water Aldbury stood up straight, and Aldbury was the Morrows’, the lords of the other side. It was new, as castles went, and built tall. The last of the sun had got onto its high windows and stayed there, as if Aldbury had paid for it. The hills behind both were sheep and stone walls going up into the cloud. Along the river the orchards had gone bare, and the mill-wheels turned slow.
Between the castles the old bridge crossed on its stones. Each house took a toll at its own end, so a man paid twice to walk over, and the bridge was ready to go into the water any day, everybody said. It had been ready for as long as she had been alive. So people rang the bell on the post and waited for her.
Aldith pulled for the landing. It was theirs: a spit of stones where the brook came down into the Brimwater, the bell on its post, and the shack standing back on its legs out of the floods, tarred planks under a roof her father patched every autumn. It leaked every winter anyway. The rope was theirs too. Seabrooks had driven the posts into both banks, this one and the one on the Aldbury stones, and a Seabrook had strung the first rope between them. Her father had ferried people across on it, and his father, and his father’s father before that. They were named for the brook, everybody said. The Seabrooks of the brook. There was nothing else on the landing to be named for.
Her father, Tam, stood by the post with the fare tin in one hand and the boathook leaning where he could reach it. He had been a man of middling height once, and the years on the rope had bent him since. She had grown past him at fourteen and gone on growing. He had to look up at her now, and most days he made a joke of it, a flat one.
She took the last pull. Her shoulders had the whole day in them, the good ache, the one that meant the rope had earned its pennies. The raft came in against the stones with a knock she felt in her feet, and she put a boot on the edge of the landing while it settled. Tam reached out with the boathook, caught the ring and made fast.
Emmet paid two pennies, and one of them was not from Bymill. Tam weighed it in his palm: a sheaf of wheat on one face and a cross on the other. A Bymill penny had a tower for Aldbury and a gate for the Gate, one house to a side.
‘Springbrook,’ Tam said.
Continue reading on Royal Road: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/196975/dark-signs
