Welcome to Rependum!

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for subscribing to my newsletter. As a special thank you, I would like to extend an invitation to read a scene from Prince of Clovers. I have been working tirelessly for the past four years on this story and I hope you love it as much as I do. I would like to preface our first introduction with an oath, that is: if you ever open a book with my name on it, I promise you nothing less than everything I have to give.

Debating on which scene to present you with has been tougher than I imagined, but I finally narrowed it down.

The scene that you’re about to read features Fey Whisker, one of our six protagonists, navigating an invasion in Surba.

Note: This is not the final draft of this excerpt and it is subject to change.

The window exploded into pieces, shattering under the force of Fey’s elbow. Grunting, she squeezed her small figure through the opening and fell inside with a thud. Disoriented by the wails of terror and roars of battle outside the building, she slid underneath a table, sheltering herself.  She stole a glance at the window, and watched as a cloaked figure zipped past the building.

She could see it all from here. The chaos. The horror. Humanoids tormenting the usually peaceful town square of Surba. They swayed their limbs in relentless fashion, plucking their victims from a stampede of scurrying bodies, they slashed and tore and cut screams short. One of the monsters was taller than the rest. It pounced at a man, the latter too devastatingly slow in contrast to the wide stretches of the monster’s lengthy limbs. The creature stretched a skeletal arm, gripping the back of his victim’s sweater, and with one movement, hauled him over its shoulder. The man flew through the air and disappeared from Fey’s point of view.

That’s when a faint whimper echoed somewhere inside the room.

Fey stirred, gripping her staff below her weary eyes. “Who’s there?” her voice jittered.

She realized now that she was in a coffee shop. The place was spotless: chairs were neatly stacked atop the tables, and the checkerboard floors shined with polish. A drinking bar dominated the left side of the shop; the right half hosted a matrix of circular tables, reading couches and self-servicing stations.

The whimpering came again, sounding more human, more helpless. Fey pushed herself through the floor, utilizing the sudden ruptures of noise from the outside as a chance to take large strides towards the source of the sound. She found her—a young woman, holding a toddler in her arms, both kneeled and bowed in a defeated color that slashed Fey across her heart.

“Are you guys okay?” She asked, placing  a comforting hand on the woman’s shoulder.

A red light trailed through her uniform. It was her locator, which Fey realized now it must have been flashing in incessant fashion ever since the sirens wailed through the city. The quantity of terrorized people pressing their panic button was astronomical to her lonesome eyes. Feeling guilty, she ignored the locator and gifted the lady and her daughter her attention.

“It’s okay. I’m a barrier patrol. I’m here to help.”

“What are those things?” the woman began through her tears. “I was closing shop, I heard commotion outside. There was bodies on the floor. Are they dead?” She cried.

“They are sweetheart,” she said gently. “I’m sorry. More help is on the way. Do you need anything? Can I get you a glass of water?”

The woman shook her head and held her trembling daughter closer to her chest.

Fey glanced at her communicator. She had texted Ivory an hour ago. She looked to the window shop, hoping to conjure up her friend by thought. But she never appeared. Thinking that Ivory and the rest of the gang were currently traversing through a fog of macabre shapes churned her stomach.

Determined to go outside and face the world alone, Fey held the woman by her shoulders. “Whatever you do. Stay here. It is safer in here than it is out there. Do you understand me?”

In a midst of tears and whimpering, the lady was able to nod.

“How does it look out there?” She asked Fey.

Fey stood up and faced the shattered window, staff in hand. “Like the end of the world,” she declared simply. The woman’s wails gained volume as Fey’s sentence sank deeper in her conscience.

Fey withdrew the locator again. There was a signal coming from the next building over. Without a second to strategize, she took a deep breath, gripped her staff and ran out the shop.

She was bombarded instantly. A sagalis, perched atop a the shop’s sign like a thirsty gargoyle, had been waiting for her. It pounced down, unveiling itself from the shadows in a deafening screech. Fey spun her weapon around her shoulder and thrusted the sharp end through the creature’s face. The figure went limp above her staff, tripling its weight. With a force she could only attribute to her rage, she slammed the sagalis onto the pavement, silencing him forever. She roared with the hymn of battle and continued down the sidewalk.

There were only two seconds without commotion before she heard a scream, muted behind a door to her left. She veered and kicked, shattering the door from its hinges, exposing the entrance of an apartment building. On the first step of a steep stairway, a woman lay, crumbled below the weight of a sagalis. Fey locked eyes with her target and marched forward—a smoldering metal being pulled to a disgraceful magnet—and bashed the creature in the head. She felt the cracking of skull against her staff. Like a marionette folding under its vanishing strings, the sagalis flopped to the floor.

“You okay?” Fey signaled to the woman.

She gave a weak nod. The confirmation she needed to move on.

She walked back out onto the sidewalk and ambled toward a wide street. She caught her breath for only a moment, one snatched from her too soon by a deep growl of murderous promise. She turned around, and looked into the eyes of a skeletal humanoid. It was four times her height, and was sprinting towards her at full throttle, gripping the pavement to propel itself forward in giant leaps.

Fey roared back and ran at the figure. It was black like a sagalis; had limbs like the branches of a willow tree; a face like the giant skull of a goat; sharp, dripping fangs like a cobra’s, and two sets of horns like a pair of palindromic bat wings.

They bridged the space between them, nearly colliding. The humanoid reached an arm forward. Fey knelt and angled her staff diagonally, slashing the air in front of the perpetuator’s path. The figure tripped and crashed to the floor, expelling dust and gravel into the air. Fey produced a dagger from her boot and launched it forward. It found the creature’s forehead, half of its blade protruding from the base of his skull. Fey watched as the creature thrashed like a fish out of water, roaring with polytonic sirens from hell. Using the base of her weapon like a hammer, Fey smashed the hilt of the dagger once, twice, and thrice until the entire blade disappeared in the depths of the invader’s brain. The body went limp.

Like the turn of a switch, the town square was left vacant in silence. The clouds of dust raining debris upon the limp bodies on the street served as evidence of the carnage that took place the night the crystal towers wept in tears the color of fire.

Until Fey’s locator flashed again.

She glanced down—a red dot blinked on the map. The coffee shop.

Fuck. She sprinted back the way she came, jumping over bodies, fighting against the eastern wind, ignoring the trembling in her legs. She approached the window she had shattered moments ago. She was nearly there.

And the beeping stopped.

She halted.

“Hello? Are you still there?”

Silence.

She breathed, and hurled over the opening, entering the coffee shop: a battlefield. The chairs stacked above the tables were now unrecognizable splinters scattered about; the mugs stored away safely were now ceramic confetti on the floor: a checkerboard pattern that was no longer spotless, but now served as host to an expanding lake of blood. There, in the heart of the room, was the woman she had seen earlier, impaled above the broken splinters of a chair.

Fey felt acid in her stomach, it traveled up her esophagus and escaped through her tear ducts. She cried an angry cry and gripped her staff fiercely, leaning on it for support. She wanted to give up and collapse; to cut her losses and run home to her parents; to become seduced by slumber until the world fixed itself.

“Where are you?! Motherfucker! Show your face!” she cried.

What responded was no monster, but a familiar whimper. A child’s whimper. She looked to the kitchen door, where the woman’s toddler was silhouetted against a skull-colored light that stabbed through the door’s air gaps.

Fey’s expression turned soft at the sight of the confused daughter of a dead woman. She wiped her face, regaining whatever shadow of composure she could muster for the orphan.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Fey’s voice rose an octave. She sniffled. “I’m not going to hurt you.” She surveyed her surroundings, searching for the monster that did the damage. It was long gone now. She hurried toward the girl and dropped to her knees. There, she took the toddler in her arms, hoping to provide at least a quarter of the comfort only her mother could have warmed her with.

“I’m so sorry.”

What words could she even use? The image of her mother’s body would be one she would never be able to conceal. Fey’s thoughts had become so ravished that she almost didn’t register a slimy texture on her neck. Puzzled, she separated herself from the girl, and stared upon her face.

“What’s wrong?” She inquired.

The little girl flashed her a smile—the last expression that Fey would see from the orphan’s innocent face before her tiny body began to contort. Her whining transformed into a snarl; her arms and legs twisted and bent with the crack of bones, and her regular stature grew three times in size.

Fey stepped back as the shapeshifter unraveled itself before her: it was a green man, one she had seen earlier. It was scaled like a reptilian, with eyes colored like moss and face brown like a tree trunk. Its body was armored in logs that seemed to be growing out of its body in sporadic places. The green man grimaced at Fey and charged toward her.

In a frenzy, Fey hurled sharp pieces of wood at the creature, but these simply bounced off his body and fell to the floor. The humanoid smiled, its mouth dripping with incessant hunger. She unsheathed a dagger and propelled it forward; it ricocheted off his person and fell.

On a fretful whim, she hurled her body at the man and wrapped her arms around his neck. She shrieked and bellowed and scratched at his face, falling prey to an animalistic instinct that had turned her entire being into its slave. She dragged him by his throat and towards the counter—the creature croaking in protest in the fleshy chains of her arms—and bashed his head against the counter.

The creature squawked in protest.

She bashed again.

It croaked, weaker this time.

Fey continued to bash, over and over again until the only noise the creature could produce was the sound of his skull and flesh smearing on the wooden counter. She used all of the energy that was left within her, and didn’t stop until it was apparent that the man’s life had departed his body multiple bashes ago.

She abandoned the cadaver, bloody and defeated, wailing a scornful wail at the evening the Celi’s had prepared for her. She dragged herself underneath the other side of the counter, its wall forming a barrier between her and the dead humanoid. She hugged her knees, buried her face in her forearms and cried for a long time.

Ding! Her communicator sent a jolt through her body.

It was a message from Ivory: Marion’s Park, Marool. We’re waiting for you.