Just a little proof-of-life update!

After some difficult times, I got back into writing. I’m giving Gerard a bit of rest now while I work on someone else’s adventures over in Shem - and good many years after the events of Gerard’s stories.

I’ve posted the first chapters over in the Discord. Drop by!

I will never be allowed in the secret libraries of the Shemite kings. Yet, I know what’s written there of this land. That, a hundred centuries ago, it was as green and rich. As fertile as that great Crescent where (one) civilization started. The one these people’s Sumerian ancestors left. First, voyaging as brave colonists. Then, fleeing as refugees.

Shem, as Iraq, was now a land of deserts. The cool rivers from its waters passed by lifeless, hot sands. Dig, and you’ll find the stone canals that killed this land. For millenia they brought salt from the mountains. A trace of a trace at a time. Such disasters couldn’t be noted in mere lifetimes. Young boys were toothless grandfathers once they suspected trouble. It was the accountants who realized. Their trade, after all, had invented writing. Yet, just as their forever-lost cousins in Sumeria, they couldn’t prevent this doom. They could only measure it; the death of Shem.

There are still marshes and jungles on this continent. Sun-browned slave girls pluck pomegranates, melons, and barley for their farmer masters. Along the coasts, old colonies have become the new capitals. Yet, this is still a land of settling sand. All will be covered in time as the palaces of their ancestors were - upon both worlds.

The noon sun burned down, bright. Horizon-to-horizon, bone-white dunes were its mirror. I shielded my eyes with my scarf. From the south a cooling, killing wind blew. I stopped to take some ghee from a brown leather pouch. I rubbed it over my cracking lips. The ghee smelled like stale butter, but would keep my skin from mummifying.

I carried on down the black road. It stretched ahead of me, to the horizon. It was made from dark, granite stone shot with grey veins. Each block would have needed a cart lizard to haul it. There were millions of blocks. Each a different size - yet laid to fit 32-feet across, precisely. These ‘Black Roads’ ran for miles, straighter than any arrow’s flight. Many disappeared into the sand. Others into dark monoliths or jagged hills than none returned from. Along the rest, the peoples of Shem lived their lives.

Am I a Shemite? No. Just like you, I’m an outsider. Indeed, I’m a most unremarkable man. I was an admin goon in a doctor’s office in Boston, Massachusetts. Some days, I’d be asked to “have the talk” with someone about their lacklustre insurance. Nowadays, I just kill people because I mean to. I’m much happier for it. I go by Darius of Harak now. Dary-oos is how Shemites from the western coastal cities pronounce it. Out here in the deserts, they say it right.

“Darius. I’ve come to kill you.”

There, just like that.