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Apex: Chapter 01

Adult | Sci-Fantasy | Trans MMC | Mechs

First draft is being posted as written. Errors and continuity issues will exist.

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Auren’s scream sliced through the silence in the Avatar’s cockpit, if the tiny, confined space could even be called that. His fingers punched at the controls, his eyes flicking through the sudden darkness in search of instrument readouts. This hulking metal exoskeleton, molded around his body like a protective second skin only a moment ago, was now a smothering prison.

The controls didn’t respond, and the cracked monitor remained dark. Auren screamed again, spewing a litany of foul wishes upon the control tower, and thrashed wildly against enveloping limbs that now refused to move.

Even the life support was off, which meant power was shut down completely. That could only be done from back in the safety of the control room, and would only ever happen under the direct order of King Tiberius.

The kingdom of Tanas-Ashe had surrendered to Vespria. The Avatars, mobile combat suits piloted by the Army’s best-trained soldiers, were immobilized to allow the Vesprian units to safely disengage.

No matter. If Auren couldn’t crush his opponent in the shitty tin can he hid in, he’d rip the Vesprian soldier to shreds with his bare hands.

And he fully intended to try, if he could only get loose. He whipped his body back and forth in the tight quarters, barely noticing the sharp sting of metal slicing his skin or the acrid taste of blood in his mouth. The eventual creak of the emergency extraction panel opening, and the flood of light accompanying it, did little to calm his fit.

The zapper did slow him down a little, fifteen hundred volts slamming into his nerves long enough to let the collection crew pull him out into the fresh air. But that only lasted until Auren’s eyes settled on the enemy Avatar interlocked with his, and the collectors pulling out its pilot.

The Vesprian was taller by a handful of inches. The long, black hair was swept back from his brown face in a braid that Auren’s fingers itched to grab and rip out of his head. He surprised his keepers with a lively lunge at the other pilot, but three burly soldiers quickly slammed Auren down in the machine-trampled mud hard enough to knock the wind out of him.

More swears spilled from Auren’s lips, screamed and frantic. Then the other pilot looked down at him and smirked, and rage took over completely.

It took a few more hits with the zapper, but eventually Auren’s body stopped responding to him. His vision swam and his legs gave out, and he was hauled back across the battlefield with no strength left to fight.

The rage, however, remained.

* * * * *

“Quiet down, line up!”

Auren twitched, slowly dragged to consciousness by the sound of milling feet. The noise was muffled, distorted, but the voice sounded familiar.

“You get five minutes in this room, then I boot your asses out to the next stop, so shut your mouths and listen!”

Castir, the Head Physician for both the Avatar pilots and the Tanas-Ashe royal family. He was speaking in the no-nonsense tone of a professor, and Auren slowly pried one eye open to find himself locked behind the glass of a recovery pod. Castir stood several feet away, in front of about ten young men and women who immediately fell quiet.

New recruits.

“Some of you come from places with questionable education, so I’m going to give you the elementary school tour speech,” Castir was somber and stern. “Sapherion is one of two planets orbiting the star Kadmon. Their orbits are at the Covington Limit, which means close enough that the energy of Sapherion—aether—can be disrupted by the energy of Abaddon: nether. Abaddon orbits faster, so Sapherion is always in Abaddon’s nether trail. This steady influence of nether is what creates the Aberrations that force humanity to live in walled cities, which is why the Avatar program was created in the first place. Someone with half a brain cell, please explain Zenith and Nadir.”

There was a pause. Auren managed to blearily open his other eye as the cadets shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. Castir pointed at one of them.

“You.”

“Abaddon overtakes Sapherion approximately every three-hundred and fifty years,” the girl obediently answered. “At its farthest point, Nadir, its effect is minimal and Aberration activity is low. Twenty-five years before overtaking begins a period of growing nether activity, which culminates in Zenith as Abaddon passes us. The next twenty-five years have gradually less of an effect, and Aberration activity slows. But Abaddon’s effect is so powerful, Sapherion is only able to establish communication connections with Earth during the fifty or so years on either side of Nadir.”

“Correct.” Castir treated the answer as the bare minimum, and gave no favor for the cadet’s extra response regarding Earth. “Right now, we’re three years away from Zenith. Aberration activity is rising, and the only thing standing between monsters and civilians are the Avatars. Only those sensitive enough to aether can pilot one, and even then, a lot can and does go wrong.”

Auren knew this speech, he could recite it in his sleep. Every few months a new crop of cadets was marched through the academy and made painfully aware of how stupid and risky it was to be an Avatar pilot.

“Excessive aether exposure causes health issues in anyone not fully compatible,” Castir said. “Cancers. Brain degeneration. Not everyone suffers infertility, but it’s not uncommon. And the only way to figure out if you’re fully compatible is to shove you into an Avatar and wait to see if you rot. Avatars are a dangerous weapon for their users. Unless you want to end up in this room with aether poisoning, pay very close attention to your superiors.”

A young man raised his hand, and Castir nodded for him to speak. The cadet pointed at Auren’s pod.

“Your pilot is awake, sir,” he said. “Is he here for aether poisoning?”

Castir glanced back and noted Auren’s open eyes, and clapped his hands in finality.

“Your five minutes are up,” he announced. “Out the door and to your right, your babysitter will take you to your next stop.”

He watched them file out of the room, hands folded behind his back, until the last cadet was gone and the doors closed behind them. Once he no longer had to perform, Castir’s rigid stance melted into a lazy slouch as he made his way over to the pod and pushed the button on the intercom.

“Good morning, Sunshine,” he greeted. Auren winced at the light shining off his platinum blonde hair. “How are we feeling today? Still screamy and bitey?”

“Tired.” Auren’s mouth was dry as cotton and tasted like metal. His voice had the croaking quality of a man haunted by thirst. “Was I screamy and bitey?”

Castir grinned and punched in his security code. The case of the recovery pod slid open, but Auren couldn’t leave it. He was strapped in, tightly, from a binding across his forehead to restraints at his ankles.

“You had one of the most impressive cases of spark mania I’ve ever seen,” he replied. “It took two collectors and three soldiers to bring you in, and that was after they ran a zapper over you half a dozen times. What were you thinking, climbing into that thing? You’re not a pilot.”

“I’m their designer.”

“You’re a diplomat.” Castir spit the word with the same edge of mockery Auren himself often said it with, and examined the readings on the pod’s display panel. “Come on, one more purge and you should be good to go. You can practice your story in the meantime, the king wants answers and he’s pissed.”

Auren winced at the sharp pinprick of mild sedative Castir gave him, per procedure. As the cozy, dreamy feeling settled over him, the doctor released his restraints and helped him step out of the pod. Castir was a foot taller than him, providing balance as they walked arm-in-arm down the hall to the purging center.

A few minutes later, Auren was stripped naked and sinking into the welcoming heat of the blue gel filling a Shock vat. Once he was neck deep, the tingle of Shock ran through his body like a mild, pleasant massage. Gentle energy pulses ran through him, conducted by the gel, to drive out any lingering concentrations of aether.

Castir sat on the side of the vat, monitoring the process on his tablet.

“So do you want to explain to me why you were pulled out of an Avatar at the far end of the Stretch instead of safe in the control sector?”

Safe. Auren would have scoffed if the mix of sedative and warmth didn’t feel so good. There was nowhere safe during an invasion.

“I didn’t start out on the Stretch,” he replied. “Intelligence told us Vestria broke through the front, but they got right to our doorstop way faster than anyone anticipated. The monster squad is trained to deploy faster than the war pilots, so they were the first wave. By the time the war pilots deployed, the battle was in full swing to the west. About an hour into the fighting, the eastern sensors went off.”

“Weirds?” Castir asked. It was almost funny hearing him use the common slang with his fancy accent. “Where? The bay?”

“We thought so,” Auren answered. “But all the Aberration-trained pilots were deployed in the first wave of defense. General Tuski started disengagement procedures to reroute the monster squad around to the bay, but the sheer number of Vesprian Avatars made it impossible. What was I supposed to do, sit back and watch a massacre behind the walls?”

“Was letting yourself be blasted by an energy source you’re damn near allergic to supposed to save anybody?” Castir countered. “You went fucking feral, Auren. It’s a miracle the unit you picked launched close to the Stretch. If you hadn’t been engaged by a Vesprian unit before you made it into the civilian zones, who knows how many people you could’ve killed.”

“I was fine,” Auren insisted. “I didn’t start to feel effects until about ten minutes in, if it wasn’t for that asshole I’d have plenty of time to secure the bay and disembark before things got bad.”

Castir only sucked his teeth. The reasoning wasn’t good enough, and it probably wouldn’t be good enough for the king, either.

“What happened?” Auren asked, sinking a little deeper into the gel. “We surrendered, didn’t we? That coward.”

“We surrendered,” Castir confirmed. “The order came down to stay calm and keep doing our jobs, that Vesprian forces would be entering the capital but we should ignore them. The power went for a few seconds and cutting the Avatars from the grid completely always causes that, so we all knew the defenses were voluntarily shut down. What we didn’t know was that there were Aberrations spotted to the east, so that explains the thirty or so Vesprian Avatars heading that way shortly after the announcement.”

Castir didn’t have to spell the conclusion out. Avrelas, the capital city of Tanas-Ashe, was stuck between a war and an unidentified number of mutated creatures closing in on trapped food. The city was only able to defend against one threat at a time, King Tiberius had surrendered in exchange for the Vestrian force’s protection from the other.

Auren understood it. But he didn’t have to like it.

“They’ve been here for three days,” Castir added. “That’s how long it took to fully purge you. His Majesty is chomping at the bit to tear you a new one, let’s get you discharged so you can face your firing squad.”

#original fiction #fantasy writing #transgender fiction

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deadtime-stories · 26 days ago

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I forget social media is where you actually post stuff, but this is a blog so I'm trying to do that occasionally. Both here and over on @littleredpencil, where I'm putting my fanfiction back up.

This weekend has been the first in 2024 where I've genuinely had time to sit down and look at my writing projects. Due to a hurricane of life events, I didn't have the time or energy left to do anything I was hoping to do in 2024.

I aimed for March to query Scion of Bones to agents, but beta reads and edits came back far slower than expected. The feedback from these services was phenomenal and worth the money...but also revealed continuing weaknesses that now have me currently working on my EIGHTH REWRITE. (Well, partial rewrite.)

This involves several things:

(under a cut for anyone who does not care about Scion of Bones)

Cutting down the involvement of characters like Nox's brother Sequoia, who is genuinely just not necessary in those scenes. There have simply been many characters over the rewrites whose roles are better switched over to Drew, especially in a debut novel where large and inconsequential casts can be confusing. Drew is the closest thing Nox has to a significant other, and it makes sense for all these smaller support roles to be added to his.

Rolling small side character interactions into Drew's, and keeping Drew 100% human only. This gives him a more solid and prominent role in the story, and gives him the much more defined and important role of being Olivier's counterweight. Liv is Nox's thread to the demi world, and Drew is his thread to the human one. These two important people keep Nox firmly on the border between worlds and allow the story to move forward and the plot to oscillate between them.

Getting over my really weird issue with symmetry. This has been a NIGHTMARE of a problem, and I don't know where it came from. Absolutely nobody would ever notice this, but when Scion of Bones became dual POV, the viewpoints were spaced in a pattern. Whatever order the POV switches were in during the first half, it was mirrored in the second half:

I cannot for the life of me tell you why I was so freakishly obsessed with this. This particular mirroring serves no narrative or literary purpose. What it did was make the flow of the story strange and broken in some places, where I wrote the chapter based on which POV was involved instead of the scene. Now that I've had a few months busy with other things and finally gotten back to working on it, I've found I'm able to let this symmetry go and put the POVs where they need to be. Which brings me to:

Breaking up chapters or adding shorter, in-between chapters to switch the POV where suitable. Because of the reveal at the end, Scion of Bones is meant to be seen through both Nox's and Liv's point of view, but understood predominately through Nox's. He's the reader's introduction to the series, and they aren't allowed to know everything Liv knows until after that reveal. But Liv is not only an important source of (admittedly vague) backstory and information, he's a MAIN CHARACTER of the series. This story isn't about Nox with Liv as support, it's also OLIVIER'S story. His story needs and deserves its own exposition and plot outside of holding Nox's hand, and that means breaking out of the weird POV pattern I was holding onto and mixing things up to give him his time on the stage.

Refining and growing Garrett's involvement. Love him or hate him (you're supposed to hate him), Garrett starts out as Nox's primary adversary while the Blood Court is Liv's. Garrett's role has also evolved since the start--a lot--and his ultimate goals and intentions have become more nuanced. So has his relationship to Nox and the outsized control his money lets him have over him. Not only is Garrett not stupid, but there's a reason he has his position...he's smarter and craftier than most give him credit for. There are also specific reasons a man like Garrett would let Nox operate so independently for so long, despite having the resources to rein him in if he wanted to.

As the first book in a series, Scion of Bones has a lot of heavy lifting to do. It needs to introduce the world, while having a solid and easy-to-follow cast and plot. It needs to draw a reader in with the immediate danger of assassins, and present as a contained, standalone novel while still quietly laying the groundwork and backstory that will allow the final paragraphs to launch it into something far bigger and much more complicated.

Annoying as it is for bookshelf aesthetics that most first books in series are smaller than their sequels, there are just different rules for a successful first book. Unless you have a huge fandom or social media following, authors just can't afford to have too much going on in their debuts.

That's why this book has undergone eight rewrites and taken more than four years now to get to this point. It started as a self-indulgent AU fanfic of a fanfic about two barely-noticed VLD characters, and was over 120,000 words of them kind of getting together. The bad guys were created more than half of the way through when I belatedly realized I needed one, and the ending was cobbled together at the last minute.

The current version is the result of years of studying story structure, excessive reading to get get familiar with my genre, editors, beta reads, and rewrites. Scion of Bones is taking so long because it's my first real education in professional story writing, I've had to learn so much to get it to this point.

So, I really hope 2025 is the year I complete that education and finally get the finished version out into the world. Whether traditionally published, or independently.

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