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The dark fantasy and Cursed Island is waiting for you every Friday. I love this book, and I'm happy to share pieces of it each week. Thank you for reading my work. The end is coming.

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https://patrickwmarshauthor.wordpress.com/2026/06/26/beware-the-ills-part-49/

Beware the Ills: Part 49

I can’t leap, dodge, or bend. We’re completely vulnerable here, since the building behind me has crumbled, and there are too many arrows in the sky. There are screams behind the machine. Four Ills have crawled onto it from behind as the machine roars. One falls in front of the jutting chest and is melted to pieces by the growing energy. The other three pull back on the walking machine. It falls on them. One gets crushed, but the other two stab the men to death with curved knives. I smile at the sight.

The scorching bubble fires at us in a hobbled and sideways streak.

Something strong has its arms around my waist. The ground sizzles with rocks and fire underneath our gliding legs. We’re in the air, and on top of the roof in a few bounds. It’s one of the bodyguards from earlier with Haukter. He used his monster strength to leap up the narrow walls, grabbing the two of us.

The Ills have saved my life. 

The invaders start pouring into the city like wild brown mice. The Ills have won, the men are retreating. They have no more machines to protect them. The last machine was the one those four Ills mutilated. I leave the prince against the crumbled building and watch the men retreat. Only fifty of them left, at the very most.

I’m impressed. I’m happy. I smile wide, and the Ill prince laughs nervously.   

The invaders are carrying the berserker woman on their shoulders, as they scramble away between the buildings. I’m impressed with their stamina after such an amazing battle. I follow them with my eyes as they pick a random alley to run through the city.

I’ll pursue them. I will.

The dead cover everything, and their splashes of blood stain the snow in elaborate designs. The Ills are weeping human sobs and are crying into their hands. It was a terrible battle. Thousands were killed. The Ill leader behind me coughs and stands up from the shattered roof we’re standing on. He’s uninjured, tall, and man-like. He looks so young, so much time for everything. He’s staring at me, as Ills and blood covered townsfolk stagger about. Two men carrying my sword fall on their knees in front of the building and start sobbing. It’s very embarrassing. I follow them with my eyes. I cannot show any emotion, none. Ills are walking over in droves. They’re covered in blood and peeled green skin. Men, women, and children spill out of the city to help them walk, and stagger. Normally, they’d scream and run at their approach.

I must chase to the invaders, no time for socialization. I wish there was but there was too much damage. I turn to the Ill prince. He’s looking out through the afternoon snow. I stare at him directly in his narrow colorless eyes. He trembles under my blood-soaked gaze.

I smile large and show my teeth. I wink, and I fall off the roof. I grab my sword from the two men, and I run.

The streets seem shorter than they were before, especially absent any explosions or arrows. I want to catch the surviving men, and the berserker. I want to catch them, kill them, but save her. I won’t kill her. The streets seem so endless, like it’s all so unfamiliar to me, even though I just dashed through it a short time ago. One house makes me feel warm as I pass it, like I’ve been there before. It’s a strange sensation. I’m getting closer to the edge of the city, and the beginning of the Shingles. My legs feel light and enthusiastic. After I kill Haukter, there will be no more fighting.

I can’t even imagine what that will be like.

I’ll be releasing my novel Beware the Ills in segments every Friday. You can find out more about the book right here, or check out Amazon’s info. I love this book. Happy to simply share it. 

Love Fantasy with fizz – Amazon

Love fantasy with fizz? Check out my books on Amazon Love fantasy with fizz? Check out my books on Amazon (UK) (US)#Fantasy #DarkFantasy #Horror #Shortstories #Indieauthor

https://libraryoferana.wordpress.com/2026/06/26/love-fantasy-with-fizz-amazon-8/

Jon expected fear after blacking out.

Instead—

he found kindness.

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BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Ten The Story That Made Us Careful

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Ten

The Story That Made Us Careful

This is Chapter 10 of BRECK: Stone’s Rest, Book Three of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye. New chapters post daily.

The Story So Far

Three days in Garrow’s records found the actual problem — not the trench, but page forty-seven of the original charter, where “affected parties” was defined using a template that never knew the mountains existed. The trench is fixable. The definition is a different problem. Breck needs Mira to start building Frostpeak’s testimony into something a Lumenvale proceeding can receive. He needs the Council to hold long enough to let him try.

← Chapter Nine: The Ending No One Wrote | Chapter Eleven →

Chapter Ten: The Story That Made Us Careful

This chapter asks what changed how a person sees the world — and answers with a story that isn’t a book, but carries more weight than most books ever will.

Mira agreed to the translation work without much discussion, which told Breck she’d already been thinking about it before he asked, possibly since the chamber session, possibly longer. She laid out, with the same flat diagnostic clarity she brought to everything, what it would require and what it might cost.

“Frostpeak’s account can be rendered in a form that’s legible outside Nomados,” she said. “What I carry out of communion with her is specific enough — dates as she experiences them, locations, the progression of what she’s felt in the deep stone over the six years of the concession. I can render that into chronicle form. What I can’t guarantee is that a Lumenvale court will credit the source once they understand what it is.”

“That’s a problem for Caine’s office to solve,” Breck said. “Your job is to make the testimony. His office’s job is to argue it has standing.”

“You trust him to do that.”

“I trust him to try it. That’s all I can ask of anyone in this.”

He left her to begin and was crossing back toward the lift with Jenna when the runner found him — a girl of about twelve, Forge Clan markings on her collar, with the look of someone who’d been told to deliver a message quickly and had taken the instruction seriously. Elder Tomson’s compliments. He had something to say and would appreciate Breck coming to say it where only the two of them would hear it.

The quarters Tomson kept on Grandfather Ironheart’s lower terrace during the convergence extension were smaller than Breck expected for an elder of his standing — plain-furnished, working-warm, the walls hung with tools rather than decorations. Tomson himself stood at the window when Breck arrived, not looking out of it so much as using it to avoid the room, the way people use windows when they’ve decided to say something they haven’t fully decided they want said yet.

“I’m not your enemy,” Tomson said, without turning around.

“I know that.”

“I want to be clear about it, because I’ve been told I read as one.” He turned then, and looked at Breck the way men who’ve spent a long time in difficult work look at the people they have to trust whether they want to or not. “Daveron granted you standing. I didn’t argue against it once the vote was clear and I’m not arguing against it now. But I want you to understand something before this goes much further, and I want to say it where nobody’s deciding whether to look encouraged or worried by it.”

“I’m listening.”

Tomson moved to the table, sat heavily. “Three generations ago, when my grandfather’s grandfather held this elder seat, there were ground-dwellers who came here with a survey contract and letters from their own government expressing genuine concern about the Peak-rider clans and what they needed. The survey was honest. The letters were sincere. The men who carried them weren’t lying about their intentions.” He looked at the surface of the table as he said it, the look of a man reciting something he learned before he learned to doubt it. “They went back home. The letters made it into their own government’s records as evidence of goodwill and diplomatic engagement. The survey became the basis for a land-use agreement that granted ground-dweller caravans rights to the Shifting Plains corridor and gave the clans nothing in return, because the clans had already demonstrated, by allowing the survey, that the corridor was accessible, which meant it didn’t need to be purchased. The men who came weren’t malicious. They were simply working within a framework that always found a way to give them what they came for.” He looked up. “We tell that story in the Forge Clan the way other clans tell weather wisdom. Not as a warning against outsiders. As a caution against mistaking goodwill for outcome.”

Breck let it sit a moment. “That’s the right story to tell,” he said.

Tomson’s eyes sharpened slightly. He’d expected argument, clearly. “You don’t disagree.”

“Good intentions carried through a framework that doesn’t account for everyone in the room aren’t worth more than the paper they’re written on. I’ve spent three years watching people get hurt by things that were never designed to hurt them. The design is almost worse than malice would be, because at least malice understands what it’s doing.” He folded his hands, let Tomson take his time with the response. “I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m asking you to let me try to change the page the story keeps ending on. If it doesn’t work, you’ll have lost nothing you hadn’t already lost.”

“And if it works,” Tomson said slowly, “we’ll have let another ground-dweller come and go with something we gave him that we can’t take back.”

“Yes,” Breck said. “A ruling. That your peaks have standing. That harm done to them is harm the law is obligated to answer for.” He held Tomson’s eyes. “That’s the thing I’d be taking. If that costs you something, I want you telling me now how it costs you, because I’d rather know.”

Tomson stared at him for a long while, in the particular silence of a man stress-testing a structure he’d been expecting to find hollow. “If you fail,” he said, finally, “we’ve allowed ourselves to be documented as the party that participated in a Lumenvale process that considered the question and declined to grant us standing. That documentation can be used in future proceedings as settled precedent against us.” He said it carefully, the way a man who’s spent a lifetime reading the fine print says things. “That’s what failed petitions have given us before. I am not willing to go into another failed process blind.”

“You’re right to name that,” Breck said. “Caine’s referral isn’t a petition. It’s a case with a specific charter violation in evidence. A failed petition asks for something. A failed case, argued on the basis of documented harm, is harder to use as precedent against the party that was harmed. The question wouldn’t be whether you have standing — it would be whether this specific harm constituted harm under the existing framework. Those are different failure modes.” He paused. “But you should have a lawyer review that distinction before you tell Daveron to let me proceed. I’m a courier, not a lawyer. I believe what I just told you, and I might be wrong about the fine print.”

Something in Tomson’s expression shifted — not warmly, but honestly, the shift of a man adjusting a calibration. “You just told me you might be wrong.”

“I might be wrong about the fine print. I’m not wrong about the trench, or page forty-seven, or what Mira felt in that chamber, or what Bren read on Grandfather Ironheart’s crown.” He stood. “I’ll leave you to decide what weight to give the first of those against the rest.”

He was halfway down the switchback path from Ironheart’s lower terrace, Jenna a quiet three steps behind him, when he saw the man.

Ground-dweller, camp-worker’s clothes, standing at the junction where the switchback met the main path in the casual, unconvincing way of a man pretending to rest who hadn’t been walking hard enough to need rest. Broad through the chest, a foreman’s leather kit on his belt rather than a laborer’s. He wasn’t looking at Breck. He was very carefully not looking at Breck, which was its own kind of looking.

Breck kept his pace even, didn’t slow, didn’t glance back, and noted the exact location and the quality of the not-looking the way he noted everything that arrived sideways — without urgency, without reaction, simply filed.

“Who’s Garrow’s site manager,” he said to Jenna, quietly, once they were past.

“Hask,” Jenna said, equally quietly. “I don’t know him by sight.”

“I think I might,” Breck said, and said nothing else about it for the rest of the walk down.

He thought, going over the day’s material as he walked, about what Tomson’s story had done to the Forge Clan’s worldview, and about the question the day had put in front of it — what changed how a person sees the world. Not a book. Not a song. A thing told around fires in the Forge Clan’s particular keeping, a real event rendered into repeatable form because the real event had been too instructive to let rest in private memory. That was what certain stories did, the ones that mattered most — not entertain, not illuminate in the comfortable way of fiction that left you set down the same person who’d picked it up. The ones that mattered rewired the seeing itself. The Forge Clan looked at surveyors and letters of goodwill and saw, underneath them, the shape of the framework those things always served, because three generations ago the story had been lived first and told after, and the telling had made the pattern visible to people who’d never lived the original.

Breck thought about what story the mountains’ clans would tell three generations from now about this season, about these weeks of convergence and records and a courier from Lumenvale who’d turned up with a referral and a pencil. He thought about the two versions of that story — the one where the framework changed, even partially, even imperfectly — and the one where it didn’t.

He very much wanted the telling to land on the first.

He’d have to earn that, though, and the man at the junction who’d been so carefully not watching him suggested, with a clarity Breck trusted more than most things he could have been told directly, that whatever time he had left to earn it had just gotten shorter.

← Chapter Nine: The Ending No One Wrote | Chapter Eleven →

BRECK: Stone’s Rest is a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye — Book Three of the BRECK series, crossing from Lumenvale into Nomados. Chapter 10 of 20. New chapters post daily.

✦ Enjoyed this chapter? “The Story That Made Us Careful” continues Book Three of the BRECK series — a skeptic’s honest warning, a foreman who’s started watching, and the question of which version of a story the clans will be telling three generations from now. Browse the full series, follow for daily chapters, or share this with a reader who knows that the stories we tell to survive are the ones that change us most.

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26. PlotHoles - Wie oft stolperst du hinein?

Puh, ich hoffe eigentlich sie zu stopfen. Vermutlich habe ich aber so einige, die dann erst im Lektorat auffalllen. 😇

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“Only Harmony is the true path. You deny it, deviant!”

Golden End available now
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BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Nine The Ending No One Wrote

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Nine

The Ending No One Wrote

This is Chapter 9 of BRECK: Stone’s Rest, Book Three of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye. New chapters post daily.

The Story So Far

Garrow was warm, precise, and honest about the trench in a way that made him harder to deal with, not easier. He handed over the survey records without much resistance. Breck took them back to Thunderstep’s terrace and started reading. He’s been reading for three days.

← Chapter Eight: The Man Who Built Something | Chapter Ten →

Chapter Nine: The Ending No One Wrote

This chapter asks what ending you’d rewrite — and finds the answer not in any story, but in a legal document whose last page was already decided before anyone thought to check who was missing from the draft.

The records were good. That was the first thing Breck established, working through them across three days and two nights on the long table in his borrowed quarters on Thunderstep’s second terrace, the mountain’s faint bioluminescence providing just enough light that he’d only needed to burn through half his candles. Garrow’s people kept meticulous documentation — survey logs, extraction tallies, inspection reports, the full chain of correspondence with the Magisterium going back six years to the original charter application. Good records, professionally maintained, in the hand of at least three different clerks who had all been trained to the same standard.

That was also, by the end of the second day, recognizably the shape of the second problem. The first problem was the trench. The trench had a location, a measurement, a distance from the survey line that was not ambiguous and would not become ambiguous when read by anyone competent in Lumenvale charter law. That problem had a form it could be put in and an office it could be sent to and an outcome, Breck was reasonably confident, that would result in at minimum a cease-extraction order for the eastern boundary. That problem was solvable.

The second problem was what remained after the trench was filled.

He found it on the forty-seventh page of the original charter application, in language so standard it had clearly been copied from a template rather than written for this specific case, which was precisely why it had survived six years of renegotiations and three Magisterium inspections without anyone noticing what it quietly assumed. The charter defined affected parties as Lumenvale citizens, registered guild members, and landholders of record within the survey perimeter. Period. The definition had been written for disputes between miners and farmers, between charter-holders and neighboring estates, between competing extraction operations. It had been written in a city where the nearest walking mountain was a three-week journey and therefore a theoretical problem at best, and it had never been updated, because nobody in that city had ever needed to update it, because nobody in that city had ever successfully argued that something which wasn’t a citizen could be harmed in a way the law was obligated to answer for.

The mountains weren’t in the draft. They had never been in the draft. Not because anyone had decided to exclude them — that would have required someone to consider including them first — but because the document had been written to the edges of the world its authors knew, and the walking mountains of Nomados sat cleanly outside those edges, and so the ending had been decided before the story knew they were in it.

He was still sitting with that when Jenna appeared at the doorway around the second hour past midnight, carrying two cups of something that steamed, which told him she’d either been awake already or had been watching for his light.

“You found it,” she said, looking not at the records but at his face.

“Forty-seventh page. Three paragraphs defining affected parties. They didn’t leave the mountains out deliberately. They just wrote to the edge of their own knowledge and stopped.”

She set one cup in front of him — something warm and faintly mineral, a Nomados blend he’d been slowly developing a tolerance for — and took the chair across the table with the manner of someone who’d been expecting this conversation and had decided to have it at whatever hour it arrived. “That’s a harder problem than the trench.”

“Yes. Because I can report the trench and Garrow gets a cease-extraction order and the eastern boundary gets respected, and none of that changes what happens to Frostpeak next season, or the season after, or what happens to the children who can’t complete their bonding because the heartstone veins run thin. The charter doesn’t recognize that as harm. No charter does. The Magisterium has no mechanism for hearing a complaint from someone who doesn’t exist in its definition of someone.”

“What would it take to change that.”

“Precedent,” Breck said. “One successful case. A court — or Caine’s office acting in the court’s stead — formally recognizing a mountain as an affected party, allowing her testimony into the record, ruling on the basis of harm done to something the law currently pretends isn’t there. Everything after that first ruling has ground to stand on. Nothing before it does.”

Jenna wrapped both hands around her cup and was quiet for a moment in a way that meant she was deciding how much of something to say. “The clans have attempted, three times in my lifetime, to petition the Magisterium for some form of recognition. Not full personhood, not standing as citizens — just the acknowledgment that harm could be done to a mountain in ways that legal frameworks should be able to address. All three times the petition was returned as outside the Magisterium’s scope.” She looked at the stack of records on the table, then back at him. “We weren’t given a different answer each time. We were given the same answer each time, which is the Magisterium’s way of saying it considers the question settled.”

“It considers the question settled because it’s never had a case in front of it that forced it to unsettled it,” Breck said. “A petition is a request. Caine’s referral is a case.”

She studied him a long moment. “You think it can actually be done.”

“I think someone has to try it before we know whether it can be done, and that I am apparently the person positioned to try it.” He picked up the cup, drank, set it down. “I’ve been thinking about a question someone put to me recently. Whether there’s a book or a story you’d change the ending of, if you could. The kind of question that sounds like it’s about fiction.” He looked at the forty-seventh page, still open on the table in front of him. “This is a book. Six years of it. Four hundred and twelve names in the labor rolls, three renegotiations, eleven inspection reports, one exposed heartstone vein that nobody quite knew what to do with once they found it. The ending’s already been written into it, forty-seven pages in, in a template nobody questioned. The affected parties are citizens and guild members and landholders of record. The mountains are somewhere past the edge of the map, where the law simply stops having opinions.” He closed the charter. “I’d change that page. That specific page. Because once that page is different, everything that follows it is different too.”

“You can’t rewrite his charter,” Jenna said carefully.

“No. But I don’t need to rewrite his. I need one ruling that says his charter’s definition is incomplete — and that an incomplete definition of who can be harmed, applied to a case that involves parties the definition didn’t account for, doesn’t constitute a finding that those parties weren’t harmed. Just a finding that the question was never properly asked.” He looked at her. “Has Caine ever made a ruling that extended outside Lumenvale’s established jurisdiction?”

“I don’t know Caine.”

“I do.” Breck pulled the second-to-last page of the records toward him and made a note in the margin, the same pencil he’d used at the trench two days ago. “He opened a door for me, twice now. I think he understands that some questions don’t get asked until someone puts them in writing in front of the right office, and that the right office, most of the time, is whoever has the standing and the nerve to take the question seriously.” He looked up. “Mira said Frostpeak’s testimony was translatable. That she could render it in a form a Lumenvale proceeding could work with.”

“In theory. It’s never been attempted.”

“Most things that work were never attempted until the first time.” He closed the last of the records and stacked them neatly, the habit of a man who’d been trained to leave a workspace the way he’d found it, regardless of how long he’d been in it. “I need Mira to start working on what that translation would look like. Whatever form Frostpeak’s account can take — chronicle, affidavit, witnessed testimony — I need it in a shape Caine’s office can receive and argue from. Not because it’s guaranteed to work. Because the ending that’s currently written for this story is the one nobody questioned forty-seven pages in, and I am not willing to let it stand on the grounds that changing it is difficult.”

Jenna looked at him across the table for a long moment, and he was aware, not for the first time since arriving in Nomados, of the gap between what her face showed and what was happening behind it — the same quality he’d noticed in Daveron, in Mira, in everyone here who’d been carrying this a long time. They had learned not to invest in the look of hope before they’d confirmed the substance of it.

But she didn’t say no.

“I’ll take you to Mira in the morning,” she said. “Sleep first. You look like you’ve been fighting the records.”

“The records were winning,” Breck said, which was, he supposed, the closest he ever came to humor at two in the morning, and stood up to find his bedroll, leaving the stack of Garrow’s excellent documentation sitting on the table like a story that had just been told a different ending was possible.

← Chapter Eight: The Man Who Built Something | Chapter Ten →

BRECK: Stone’s Rest is a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye — Book Three of the BRECK series, crossing from Lumenvale into Nomados. Chapter 9 of 20. New chapters post daily.

✦ Enjoyed this chapter? “The Ending No One Wrote” is the pivot chapter of Book Three — the moment the investigation stops being about a trench and starts being about whether a mountain can have standing in a court that was never built to ask the question. Browse the full series, follow for daily chapters, or share this with a reader who knows that the hardest problems aren’t the ones with villains. They’re the ones with incomplete definitions.

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