Fantasy horror author
Fifteen days into 2021, my biggest achievement for the year has been to finish all three strands of story missions in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla in around 80 hours. Despite that, I do have a few things in the pipeline for the coming year that I'm eager to get into.
“Here’s Maggie Thatcher.” John opened one hand to reveal a stick figure drawn on the palm. He mimed throwing it in the air. “Throw her up and catch her. Roll her up and splat her.” He rubbed his hands together as though scrunching up a piece of paper, then opened his other hand, with a wild squiggle of ink on the palm. “There’s Maggie Thatcher.”
Piralael wasn’t on Novalis. The assembly had confirmed this using sky-watch, a live satellite image showing the entirety of the island from above which they had then switched over to infra-red. There was one concentrated heat source within the village hall, with everybody gathered, and innumerable spots too small to be human beings that frittered about the island’s forest, but nothing else. There was no other human being on the island beyond those in that room.
Kessimh’s neck was stiff and her toes were cold. She opened her eyes and blinked up at the trees which loomed over her, the small oval of open sky letting through just enough pre-dawn light to cast the world around her in a sickly grey colour. It was an effort to force herself up into a sitting position, and her reward was a nauseating pulse in her temples.
Getting to the hilltop wasn’t easy. It required a trek down a thin path being worried at on both sides by overgrown brambles, which followed a winding route downhill to a pebble-dashed beach. There was a broad cave several kilometres along, more like a tunnel since there was a way out the back to where a sheer cliff rose out of the water.
