Refusing to pay attention to his complaining joints he calmly unrolled a red and brown woolen mat, as ancient as him and,  looking at the setting sun far off into the distance, sat down and lit his pipe. 

“You’ve come a long way to die old one.”- the voice sounded like boulders crumbling. Grey Deer took a long puff from his pipe before slowly turning round to face a very stern looking buzzard.

“You have no sense of tact, do you Mosau’u?”

The Death Spirit ruffled his feathers. “I thought I’d dress up for the occasion.” The voice seemed to come from an underground cave beneath the great bird.

Grey deer held the creature’s gaze. “But first, I have a request.”

“I know what you want Masichuvio and the answer is no. Little Tiponi’s time is due. I shall visit her after you.”

“You call me by my Hopi name, you listen to me!” The old man raised his voice slightly. “…or I will refuse to die.”

“That is unacceptable, the other gods will never allow it!” the underground boulders churned.

“Chrome poisoning is not natural, you must tell them her time isn’t due!”

“Only a warrior who completes an impossible task can postpone someone’s death and that’s final.” The spirit of death punctuated with a loud sqwawk.

Grey Deer stood up with surprising agility and faced Mosau’u, nose to beak. “Then give me a task now.”

The buzzard leapt back with a flap of wings. “Now?” Mosau’u looked around at the bare sandy top of the rocky pinnacle. He slowly turned his beak back to the old warrior with a new gleam in his eye.

“Very well, Masichuvio. Walk off this peak without falling. If you succeed, little Tiponi lives, if you fail…well you know what happens next.” The buzzard’s talons scraped the soil in anticipation.

“Walk off this?” the old man said, carefully making his way to the edge of the drop.

“Yes,” the rumble managed to sound gleeful.

“All right…” Grey Deer took a few steps out and turned around, suspended in mid-air, grinning.

“NO! That is impossible! Only spirits can-“

“Look behind you Mosau’u,” the old man said. The buzzard spun around and there, on the ancient mat, John Grey Deer’s body was still sitting and peacefully smiling at the horizon, a thin twirl of smoke could be seen, coming from the pipe resting in his lifeless hand.

“I think you should be the one to tell the other gods,” said Grey Deer’s spirit, “I’ll make an appearance at Tiponi’s house tonight. Enjoy your meal “

With a victorious warrior’s whoop, the old man disappeared, leaving the buzzard alone. Mosau’u stood gazing balefully at the dead man, all hunger gone. “Ahul and the others will be furious at this news,” the death spirit groaned and flew away, leaving the old smiling man’s body intact.

***

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She totally loathed Hungarian.

“It’s just a few sentences,” her boss, whom she also despised,  had said. “You can learn them in one afternoon, and we can impress our clients when they arrive tomorrow.”

It was now three hours to tomorrow, and the afternoon hadn’t brought anything but regret.

For instance, Tessa deeply regretted the one adjective she’d added in her resumè: ‘quick-learning’, a year earlier, and which had led her to be hired by Assist Insurance Inc. and promptly set to work. Officially as secretary, and unofficially as the company’s multi-tool. If anything new turned up, all her boss had to do was deploy the quick learner, she’d get things done. So now the new thing was a hefty contract with a Hungarian bridge construction company whose name alone would make your gums bleed, and which, for some reason, had decided to send a few members of its board all the way to Chicago, for a tour of Assist Insurance headquarters, which was stupid, Tessa thought, since there were no plans to build a bridge inside the building.

‘Now repeat!”

The sentence looked like what a cat would write on a keyboard, if it were tied up and slammed repeatedly over the keys. Tessa clicked the “listen again” button to hear the expert Hungarian speaker say the sentence again. It sounded like what the cat would say.

Tessa tried to repeat the ugly sounds. ‘Wrong!’ the screen flashed back at her, but still in cheerful colors.

She repeated the sentence again in a slightly louder tone. It was supposed to mean “Welcome to Chicago, We hope you had a pleasant flight from Hungary.” Not even ‘Hungary’ sounded like ‘Hungary’ in Hungarian, it was ‘Magyarországra’. 

‘Wrong!’

She listened to the sample again, it didn’t even sound like something a human mouth could pronounce. She did her best to replicate it, in an even louder voice.

‘Wrong!’

Furious, she grabbed the laptop screen by the sides, drew it close to her face and screamed the sentence once more, then grabbed the power chord and yanked it from the wall socket. 

It ripped, there was a bright electric arc and all the room went dark. There was a sharp smell. Ozone, she thought, although she had imagined it to smell differently. This was more of a rotten egg smell.

‘Wrong!’ said the screen of the laptop with battery-powered smugness.

Tessa felt her way to the socket. She pulled out what was left of the plug from the wall, to make sure there was no short-circuit.

Then, begrudgingly assisted by the light coming from the screen, she made it to the the electrical cabinet down the corridor near the entrance to her apartment. She flipped the circuit breaker back up and saw the light return to her living room.

Another thing she saw, as soon as she had taken a few steps, was the large, steaming, horned creature on her sofa.

“You know, I heard you the first time, no need to shout like that,” it said.

Tessa was so surprised she simply forgot to scream. Her legs went from under her and she found herself sitting on the floor.

“Now, don’t act so shocked,” it said as it rose from its seat, “you summoned me by my name. What were you expecting?” The creature’s horns were an inch away from scratching her ceiling.

“Wha… how… name?” Tessa stuttered.

“Jaar-Athoth, Fifth level demon. What is wrong with you? Did the summon backfire and send your brains off somewhere?”

“Su-summon?” Tessa realized she was hyperventilating and held  her breath for a few seconds. The monster stared at her quizzically with its black eyes and red irises. It looked down, as if to inspect her carpet.

Tessa exhaled slowly and took another, slower breath. “Summon?” she repeated, “I most certainly did not summon you. A Demon?”

Jaar-Athoth raised a clawed finger, which then turned downwards as he pointed to the floor.

“Excuse me,” he complained, “where is my pentacle?”

Tessa blinked her eyes at the sudden change of tone. “Pentacle?”
“Yes! Pentacle! Would you stop repeating what I say and start providing some answers? Because I’m beginning to question our current arrangement.”

Tessa did not like that sort of treatment, not from her boss, not from Hungarian clients, and most certainly not from a seven-foot tall, red-skinned horned beast.

“What?” she said, “What? You show up all of a sudden, whatever you are, steam up my living room, not to mention the rotten eggs, scare me half to death and you have demands?”

“Demands?” the demon thundered, “I have existential doubts! For example how did you manage to get me across without a pentacle of protection?”

“Well listen here!” Tessa shouted back, “I’m wondering too what sort of beast you are, if you need to be protected!”

Jaar-Athoth blinked at her in disbelief. “The pentacle should be there to protect your world, to enclose the portal so your reality doesn’t pour down into hell like hot cheese and especially to protect you from me, you nitwit!” His voice had become hoarse with all the shouting.

“Well I didn’t summon you, so no pentacle. Ha!”

The demon plopped back down on the sofa, which almost folded onto itself under his weight. “You have no idea of what’s going on…” he muttered, “…no pentacle…I don’t know how you pulled that trick.” 

He looked back at her, as if he was considering grounding her with no TV. “I could devour your soul, and then consume your body, you know that?”

That was hardly the type of conversation one was expected to have around a coffee table. 

“Oh?” Tessa said. The idea of her sharing the same room with a red-skinned beast from hell, now that she’d gotten over the initial surprise and anger,  was starting to gnaw at her. She began to feel the urge to escape.

“…but I won’t,” said Jaar-Athoth.

“Oh! Oh well, thanks…”

“At least not yet. I’m free, you see, unconstrained. And I suppose quite famous back where I’m from. Nobody’s had a summoning in, oh, at least three thousand years. You can imagine how bored we all were when, all of a sudden, I hear my name being called,” Jaar-Athoth grinned with the memory and Tessa could see the gleam of his white fangs. “You should have heard the cheers, and also the insults!”

“Jealous?” Tessa said.

“Livid green jealous. Hah!” The demon slapped his knee and stood up. “Well, off I go. I might be back, or not. Don’t know.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

“Outside. No pentacle remember? I am free to wreak havoc and bring hell back on earth. Oh the songs they’ll sing in my name down below. All off tune, of course.” He unfurled a pair of ridiculously small wings. “Mind if I use your window?”

“Ah, no problem…do you really have to do all those things?” Tessa said, but he had already leapt outside.

The room felt strangely empty now, but that’s how rooms probably feel after a horned giant moved out. Tessa had a strange feeling at the back of her head, something about unleashing a demon from hell, which may or may not be all her fault. She shrugged it off. There were more pressing matters at hand. She grabbed her laptop and shut off the stupid language learning program. It had turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. A quick search pointed her in the right direction. She grabbed her phone, navigated the app store to the correct download, paid the $4.99 and a few seconds later a new icon had appeared on her phone. ‘GlobalVoice’ it said. She tapped it, and a menu appeared. She selected input and output languages. Now the screen showed a microphone symbol. 

“Welcome to Chicago, We hope you had a pleasant flight from Hungary,” she said.

“Üdvözöljük Chicagóban, reméljük, kellemes járatot kapott Magyarországról“ the phone spoke back. 

“Nifty!” Tessa said, and went to sleep.

Twelve stories below, an increasingly bewildered Jaar-Athoth squealed as a high-speed car grazed him, the horn blaring haughtily. Fumes from the exhaust gases choked him, neon lights from the many street signs hurt his eyes. The demonic creature stood, wondering which other demon had preceded him, and had successfully turned earth into a living hell. 

***

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What to do with ourselves, when each day looks like the last, time seems to evaporate, marked only by the succession of meals, when we’ve binged on every possible bingeable show, (excluding “Disjointed”, which not even a one year Ebola outbreak would get me to watch), and prank-called every other person in town?

Unsurprisingly, people are rediscovering books. In an earlier article I had discussed how the current lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic was affecting book sales. The result was that sales were actually remaining quite stable for a good portion of the indie author market, while registering a sharp increase with more well-known authors. In other words, readers want to play it safe, even indoors, and go to the classics, or at least the well-heard ofs.

A survey among fantasy and sci-fi lovers produced an interesting collection of the top 10 books that are trending in sci-fi and fantasy lovers’ reading lists. Apart from being a very good collection of recommendations, it also shows how we all would rather bear those established writers we have, than fly to indies we know not of.

Which is a shame, really, since we (luckily) won’t have as many chances to explore new and interesting authors, all while saving the world while comfortably sitting on our asses. That’s why I am suggesting a second title by an indie author, next to every known one. They may be similar in style, or “you might also like” ideas, or just invitations to check this other book too.

H.P. Lovecraft – Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

The Indie Alternative:
E.A.Copen – Beasts of Babylon.

Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

The Indie Alternative
Jim Keen – The Paradise Factory (Cortex book 1)

Terry Pratchett – The Discworld series

An incredibly vast cast of the most unusual characters, from the possibly even human Nobbs to the anthropomorphic personification of Death itself, is the vector to a fantastic series of hilarious adventures in this alternative universe.

The Indie Alternative:
Ian Lahey – Hero of Stolen Time

An impossibly powerful potion, a sentient headache and getting diced by a necromancer are the least horrible part of a day in the life of the world’s most unwilling hero.

The Other Indie Alternative
Kevin McCallion – Moristoun

An island where all those who committed suicide live in eternal hopelessness. But desperate McSorely gets a sneak preview of Moristoun before making his drastic move… – desperately funny.

Douglas Adams – The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Meaning of life? Easy. Forty-two. What exactly is the question? That’s a tad tougher, but don’t worry, you and the planet are part of the computer designed to calculate it. That’s unless the Vogons don’t decide to demolish it first.

The Indie Alternative:
Michelle Proulx – Imminent Danger: And How to Fly Straight into It

High school junior Eris Miller thinks she’s having a bad day when her roommate’s boyfriend catches her stepping out of the shower wearing nothing but a towel. Then she gets abducted by scaly six-armed aliens with a strange fondness for the color blue, and her day suddenly gets a whole lot worse.

The Other Indie Alternative:
Ian Lahey – To Cipher and to Sing

The one thing which is worse than watching androids take over your job is having to teach them your job yourself.
Professor Gordon Fairlight has no intention of accepting such a task, but instead he finds himself dragged into a deadly sequence of events which include a murder mystery, a bad-mouthed super-AI, and a new friend who may – or may not – be instrumental to the end of human life on Earth.
Who to trust when you could be the next target? Get the prequel for free here.

Anne Rice – Interview with the Vampire

Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly erotic, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force—a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses.

The Indie Alternative:
Shane Carrow – Vampire on the Orient Express

Through fire and darkness, through blood and ice, the Orient Express is bearing an ancient evil across the continent – and not all its passengers will live to see Constantinople…

Neil Gaiman – Neverwhere

Neverwhere is home to Door, the mysterious girl Richard helped in the London Above. Here in Neverwhere, Door is a powerful noblewoman who has vowed to find the evil agent of her family’s slaughter and thwart the destruction of this strange underworld kingdom. If Richard is ever to return to his former life and home, he must join Lady Door’s quest to save her world—and may well die trying.

The Indie Alternative:
P.W.Catanese – Donny’s Inferno

Although she appears to be a teenager, Angela is actually an ancient dignitary from the underworld who needs the help of a mortal. And she’s chosen twelve-year-old Donny Taylor.

Deborah Harkness – All Souls trilogy

Twilight meets Outlander and Harry Potter, and they all go out to drink a potion or two. Harkness has created a universe to rival those of Anne Rice, Diana Gabaldon, and Elizabeth Kostova, and she adds a scholar’s depth to this riveting tale of magic and suspense.

The Indie Alternative:
Mona Marple – The Witches of Mystic Springs

Welcome to St Winifred’s, a magic school with an unpopular headmaster who won’t survive the night.
With a storm raging over the choppy waters, and the Magick Squad too worried about Health & Safety to come out and investigate, it’s down to the guest of honour to investigate the murder.

Joe Abercrombie – Shattered Sea trilogy

A series of fantasy books which even J.R.R. Martin had trouble putting down. This series is full of lightning-fast action and and packed with a wonderful collection of rogues, villains and two-faced bastards.

The Indie Alternative
S.L. Briden – Shadows of a Phoenix trilogy

A noble knight. A haughty sorceress. A dark prophecy that binds them together. High fantasy and Arthurian legend mix in this epic new series.

Earnest Cline – Ready Player One

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes this depressing reality by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia where you can be anything you want to be, where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets. And like most of humanity, Wade is obsessed by the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this alternate reality: OASIS founder James Halliday, who dies with no heir, has promised that control of the OASIS – and his massive fortune – will go to the person who can solve the riddles he has left scattered throughout his creation.

The Indie Alternative
Jeremy Fabiano – Tempest Chronicles trilogy

On his deathbed, he is made an offer he dare not refuse: fade away as the darkness takes him or have his consciousness transferred into a game—Tempest Online.
Leaving the broken husk he once called a body behind, Steve becomes Abalonious, a warrior possessed of strength, cunning, and the power to make a difference, but with that power comes a far greater responsibility.
The deal he accepted comes with a catch: if he fails, the game he’s grown to cherish is over and he’ll die—permanently.

BONUS ITEM: Apocalyptic genre, sponsored by COVID-19

John Wyndham – The Day of the Triffids

When a freak cosmic event renders most of the Earth’s population blind, Bill Masen is one of the lucky few to retain his sight. The London he walks is crammed with groups of men and women needing help, some ready to prey on those who can still see. But another menace stalks blind and sighted alike. With nobody to stop their spread the Triffids, mobile plants with lethal stingers and carnivorous appetites, seem set to take control.

The Indie Alternative
Laury Falter – Apocalypse Chronicles

On an ordinary day in early September, Kennedy Shaw leaves for school unaware that within a few minutes the world she knows will be gone – succumbed to an outbreak of epidemic proportions.

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A dark and fast paced hybrid between science fiction and fantasy which takes place in a pipe and vent underground world.

” Amidst the damned of planet Dark, Dun is beset by maddening dreams. These premonitions paint a hellish picture for The Folk. With nothing more than cryptic clues his missing father left behind, he’ll need to venture far beyond the colony’s protective walls and find the force intent on tearing everything apart. “

You can download your copy directly from here by choosing your preferred format:

• PDF
• EPUB
• MOBI

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Demelza lives in Perth, Australia, and has written an entire series in which she revisits famous fairy tales. This retelling of Beauty and the Beast is offered to you for free by the author.

An advisory note, this is a more mature version, and contains some sex scenes.

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The basic thing about Harry Potter’s world is that it’s nice, imaginative, colorful, and ends about three feet around the corner at the end of Diagon Alley. You just get that perception that it’s a painted façade, and that if Harry makes one wrong turn, he’ll find himself floating in an empty void while J.K.Rowling frantically dreams up a new setting for the scene.

By contrast, anything happening anywhere in Middle Earth looks like it’s not the first time that sort of thing happens there, it probably won’t be the last, and, to put it quite simply, wherever there is, it doesn’t really give a rat’s ass about what is happening, because it’s been around long enough to have an opinion. Reading about the setting feels, in other words, like a real, living world, and the events which come together to form the Lord of The Rings trilogy are just the last chapter of a beautifully complex interaction of history, society and even geology.

In other words, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, a troll inexplicably shows up inside Hogwarts. How did it get loose? There is some half-assed explanation about the bad guy trying to do random Bad Guy acts, but basically it’s because J.K.Rowling thought it would be a good moment for a troll to appear, more specifically to appear in the girls’ bathroom. Why? I DON’T KNOW WHY!

In The Fellowship of the Ring, the company encounters a Balrog. Why? Because they’re in Moria, underground, and Balrogs are underground. How did it get loose? The dwarves dug too deep. Where are the dwarves? KILLED BY THE FREAKING BALROG, NOW RUN! It just all fits together better.

But the true magic is even deeper, in the synapses and veins of the narration itself. It’s in the names of things and places which, I’m sure you noticed the first time you read LOTR, come very close to discouraging you from reading such a complicated text. But you read on, and as you read, you start to realize that the strange names are not just patched up word games like, say, “diagon alley” and “hogsmeade”. You have Ered Luin, and then Ered Mithrin, and realize that ered means “mountains”, and mithrin means “grey”. And then you remember that one of Gandalf’s nicknames is Mithrandir, which means ‘Grey Wanderer’ and you go ‘oooooooh!’

You never go ‘oooooh!’ in Harry potter, but there is, admittedly, more booger humor.

The secret to this incredible realism of Tolkien’s world is in his special linguistic alchemy: he started from the languages and built the elves around them. Then his elves had some serious argument over some drag costume jewelry or something like that, and they split up into two groups. So the languages divided into Quenya and Sindarin (and other dialects too, but you don’t hear elves use them unless they’re swearing). Then came the other races, including men. For men, specifically the horseriding Rohirrim, Tolkien played the ace up his linguistic sleeve: Anglo-Saxon (or Old English). Eoh is Old English for ‘horse’ which became Roh in Sindarin, and although “Rohan” is a Sindarin name, you may have noticed that many of the actual names of the horse-people in Rohan begins with “Eo”, such as Eomer, and Eowyn. Eowyn herself speaks Rohirric when at the end of “The King of the Golden Hall” she says “Westu, Theoden hal,” which is 100% Old English for “bless you Theoden”. It is possible to etymologically trace many Anglo-Saxon words to their modern form.

But the J to the double R T. didn’t stop there, because he wanted his other languages to sound realistic as well, and so he made sure they too could boast some of that cool etymology, only the other way around. For example he reverse engineered ancient Quenya so our modern languages appear to contain words which originate from it. I shall leave you with a few examples:

• Direct connection: the word I cited above, ered, comes from ancient Quenya oron, which means mountain. So does Greek oros.
• Association: the ancient Quenya word for ‘strong’ is taura. Taurus means ‘bull’ in Latin.
• The Geology: ok, follow me here, the verb root for ‘to fall’ in Quenya is tal_. For example: taltuva, ‘he fell’, and atal_, ‘has fallen’. The fabled island of Nùmenor, the peoples of which Aragorn is himself a descendant, is said to have been punished by the gods after its inhabitants rebelled against them. The punishment? It was made to sink down into the sea at the end of the Second Age. After the cataclysm, the sunken island was known as ‘The Downfallen’. In Quenya: Atalantë 

oooooooh!

Ian Lahey writes fantasy and sci-fi. He really doesn’t want to be funny, he just fails at being serious. You can read more of Ian’s failures below, and even find links to his books.

Thanks to Marc Zender for correcting a linguistic blunder I’d made, which compromised my otherwise very serious article.

Don’t forget you can get a free short story just by signing up to my newsletter. You will also be invited to virtual book fairs and get the opportunity to win a $25 Amazon gift card.

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This short fantasy story is for those who love classic dragon battles and just a touch of humor.

Reader warning for the presence of sensual and violent content.

Get your free copy here (e-mail required)

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As the Azgaril Northern Liberation Army invades the tiny nation of Tamaria, Centurion Dathan Herulus faces the difficulty of harmonizing his orders with his conscience. As the Azgaril move north, Garrick Ravenwood, a young Tamarian soldier, meets Brenna Velez, a refugee who has fled the destruction of her homeland. Their courage helps Tamaria resist the might of the invading force.

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