Café de Nuit

Finally! Got over the competition hump.

Sometimes, muleheaded tenacity will carry the day.

Hurrah!!!

Another village scene with the boys.

I'm getting a much clearer idea of their personalities and their outlook. Lotal's overbearing swagger but quick with a joke. Cob himself is taciturn and gruff, though he can stick in a good word here and there. Prasti is complex and introverted.

It also struck me after I finished writing it that it echoes their earlier (misguided) discussion about where babies come from, which was unintentional but does provide a nice symmetry of plot.

I don't want to discuss too much since I already know where it's all going but just wanted to let you know I'm still reading with interest.

Excellent! Then I will keep writing with interest, especially as it's my summer vacation.

I'm typing more slowly than usual because I recently changed my keyboard layout to Dvorak instead of Qwerty. This is much easier on my hands and wrists but it means my posts are much more... considered.

I am lifting the embargo on discussing the plot of this fiction. I've decided that the spoilers are only worth preserving if there are people out there reading this. Discussion that links this to Ravenloft directly (even by "spoiling" the identity of the narrator Cob) is probably still desirable, if it at least raises the flagging readership of the fiction forum.

I just wanted to say the chapter before this latest one was pretty intense.

Also, I know that the Falcon motif comes up in a geographical sense, but I was wondering if the actual animals would ever come up, especially since they were specified as one of the few creatures he actually felt affection for. Will that come up in the story, or was that quirk born within the mists?

Which one? The one where Cob talks back at the nobles? I wanted to have a chance to elaborate on his philosophy there: "Victory goes to the one who will do what his enemies will not." It's similar to the legend of Kaiser Soze from The Usual Suspects, who realized much the same thing when his wife and children died.

The falcons will appear in a later episode. I'm thinking of having that happen when he gets to Hawkbluff (a canonical town in Thenol).

There were two posts today. Malarchus makes his return! And the dashing young son of the lord is apparently a very canny and dangerous political individual...

The battle scenes and the Himlak manse were ideas I got from reading about the Battle of Berlin in WWII. A desperate defending force, squeezed into a concentrated space, as the leadership contemplates the impending end, trapped like a rat in a bunker.

I've gone back and added a cast list in the first post in this thread.

Another post, with Cob breaking from a deteriorating situation in Forg and hitting the road with Anveran and Sootri. As he did several years before, Cob goes from Flex to Forg, but this time it's on foot and as a war refugee, not as part of a band of competing hopefuls.

This is Cob's first taste of life as a refugee of war, and it won't be the last...

A new post in this story. I suspect people are reading, even though only Isabella has posted recent comments. The "views" increment is increasing steadily and I'm fairly sure it's not just me doing that.

In this episode, Cob takes responsibility for Sootri again. Life gets a bit better, then a whole lot worse. War is hell.

Also, this bit of foreshadowing (from an episode way back when) is finally answered:

But Anveran was fated to gain the silence that her daughter had cast off - from that moment onwards, I would only hear her say six more words in the rest of her life.

I am writing this at great speed, more to finish it than anything else. I feel like I have a story to tell and at this point it's more important to get it done and move on.

I make, on average, maybe two or three edits each time after I post an episode. Sometimes it's stylistic and other times it's just grammar and punctuation.

At this rate I'm aware I'm probably not giving the story the descriptive flavor it needs. I have a plot that I'm working from, and I'm fairly careful about making it fit together with good continuity. The facts are more important for me now than the fluff, but then again I don't think I'm going to hear anybody complaining.

It's with no small amount of irony that I realize I'm devolving into the same rushed writing and oversimplistic characterizations that I criticized in King of the Dead by Gene DeWeese. Perhaps he had a similar resentment about his story too.

I feel ya, HuMan.

It's a very strange feeling reading something for the first time and yet still knowing how it's going to turn out. It adds a certain element of pathos to the narrative to make up for the lack of the reveal at the end, though hardly anything to compare. Still, it seems that Cob has a long way to go.

Heh, good to see you're still with the story!

Yes, Cob certainly does have a long way to go. I went back and counted the years and it seems that he is currently 16 years old - close to his prime physically, but still quite young to be taking care of a minor child as a primary caregiver.

I'm not sure how to write these episodes from here, in terms of mood. I think of Cob as being somebody who wasn't particularly sensitive even as a kid, so it would make sense that he'd adapt pretty well in a wartime situation. He is still quite young though, and there are flashes of conscience and extreme emotional distress in his experiences.

Some of the events, like the death of Anveran (and even the original removal of her baby) are intentionally described in a numb and dispassionate tone. Every so often Cob shows a softening in his character, but he cannot indulge it for long, as simple survival demands he be ruthless and shrewd.


Edit: Just noticed that the fiction is a year old now. Hopefully the rest of the story won't take so long to finish...

They finally get into the city, but it turns out that it's not exactly a solution to all Cob's problems...

Yet more Bladeforge.

Cob sneaks out of a brothel so he can go to the Temple.

Normally it's the other way round.

...

Or so I've heard.


Edit: I went back and added substantially more to the headsman scene. Now it really feels like it's the end.