Another short story has now been completed and added to the Pure Escapism collection. By my count the total amount of words between them comes in at around 96,000 now, which came as a surprise to me when I compiled the numbers.
This story continues on the tale of the giant white minotaur Nhaqosa, following on from The Pit and The Merchant’s Legacy. This one is called Echoes of Dark Reflections.
The world that Nhaqosa has found himself in has always been the most gritty and brutal of the various setting, but this one is darker still, at least for my writing. The story never intended to turn out the way it did. The concept behind it had always been there, to give Nhaqosa something of a different challenge, one that would test even him. However the story took a different path than I expected and I had to ramp back the ending a bit. Even so, the events are going to leave scars on Nhaqosa, and how than pans out in future stories we will have to see when I get around to them.
Given the nature of the story, it seemed logical to introduce a new race, one that I had been trying to work out how to bring into the setting. This is the Talsharan, as mentioned previously in Long Lost Relics. They have something of a dark, unpleasant history to them as well, one that will require further exapnding on at a future date.
The story is also in a way a bit of a homage to Dark Sun setting. It isn’t set on Athas, but it does in parts have a feel for the same brutal setting of Dark Sun I’d like to think.
And so with another story down, it is time to move onto the next one.
Mist and Shadows 