At his best, Scrapper is bold and funny and sociable, and he tells great stories and dreams big dreams. But it s hard for Best Scrapper to come out, sometimes, because his earlier dreams are a now a long way from his latest reality, and you feel badly for him. You can t imagine what it must be like to have a piece of masonry crush your ankle; to have your leg rot with sickness; to endure the horrors of a surgeon slicing off a segment of you while you try to scream through the leather in your teeth. You would scarcely wish this upon the worst of the villains who hang from the gallows, let alone a friend.
Once or twice someone had asked, after a bout, why Leris did not take her bow in her real body. How could she respond? How could she explain that her human form was hers but not her, not in the way the spear form was? Since the earliest days of swordform there had been stories of people who were more weapon than person. Leris didn’t feel like she was a weapon, but she’d never been able to articulate a different explanation.
"Grandpa, you don t have to." Dovan s little hand rests inside his. Cyfris closes his fingers around it. "I know I said before that I wanted you to tell everything, but I changed my mind. You don t need to tell this part."
“We found something,” Matias began. He had rehearsed what he would say and was determined now to watch their expressions. To see if this was a revelation for them or if they already knew. “We’re expanding the palace kitchens, putting in a new hearth and tables. The builders knocked out a wall turns out it was a closet that had been sealed up. In the closet was a body.”
Our Fifteenth Anniversary Double-Issue, featuring a bonus novella by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko and new cover art: "Lake Village" by Roberto Nieto. The Tyrant’s Heir’s Tale by Carrie Vaughn. The Light of Setting Suns by Samuel Chapman. Between Blades by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko. BCS 320: The Light of Setting Suns by Samuel Chapman.