Over the last few days, in addition to working on the rough draft of Tears of the Mountain, I have also been making progress on the next short story in the Nhaqosa collection, called Echoes of Dark Reflections.
The rough draft is getting close to the end, but do date it has turned out a bit darker than other stories. The Nhaqosa setting was always the most brutal of them, but other events in Echoes of Dark Reflections seem to be making it grittier. Whether that will survive to the final draft remains to be seen.
The story hasn’t quite been finished yet, and I’m trying to make up my mind about something before doing so. Nhaqosa is accompanied by a merry band of mercenaries, around two dozen in total. Most however remain unnamed and only around three have received any real attention in the stories to date.
I’m trying to decide what to do with them. I could kill most of them off so only a handful remain, but this is likely to have a big impact on Nhaqosa given he sees them as family. The other is in each story focus on one or two of them and then cycle them into the background again. The nature of the stories is that there would always be deaths, it’d just be more pronounced in the former option, and it would be the way I’d go if I was truly evil.
Mist and Shadows 