Starwitch is on Royal Road and Wattpad!

Chapter one of Starwitch has been published to Royal Road and Wattpad and new chapters will follow every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

On Royal Road, it's listed under the series name, The Book of Newts. On Wattpad, it's listed under the name of the first volume, Starwitch.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Read on Royal Road
Read on Wattpad Home, safety, and a place to belong – they seem so easy to find, at least for everyone but Amelia Blackwell and her sisters, who run from accusations of witchcraft at every turn.

It started so simply, with a book. No one might have predicted that a book apparently filled with pictures of newts might lead to so much trouble, but The Book of Newts is no ordinary volume on taxonomic detail of amphibians. The magic book reveals its true nature only to Amelia, at the age of ten, teaching her mathematics, science and engineering – subjects she would not otherwise have been exposed to.

Ironically, she and her sisters are accused of witchcraft for having built a horseless carriage, because to the ignorant villagers, there’s no difference between magic and science. They settle in a new land, only to find the same breed of persecution.

In an unusual ray of hope, they’re told of a distant kingdom that openly accepts witches, but shortly after they settle there, the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be an awful house fire surrounding their gilded cage: they’re drafted into the local military, because their new nation uses witches as living weapons.

The sisters accept the idea that peace will never be found on the ground. Looking to the stars, Amelia builds a space vessel powered by magic and steam, to carry them to a brighter future, hopefully without the strife that’s always followed them.

Unfortunately, the people of the stars have their own worries: an ancient, undead pirate queen, who consumes the souls of powerful witches to extend her own life. The Dead Queen takes Amelia’s sisters and leaves the magically-weak engineer to die, all as a sick form of sport.

Will Amelia survive long enough to overcome this greatest of all threats and rescue her sisters, or will they become fuel to feed the waning magic of a woman that should have been dead centuries before?

Tags: writing, work-in-progress, starwitch

Work In Progress #24: Starwitch #7

"You may have started this fight, but I'm [expletive deleted] well going to finish it! Perhaps accepting you is the path to one of us being eaten, but if it's eat or be eaten, then I know exactly what to do! After the entire ocean of grief I've swallowed, what’s a little more in the name of putting you down, once and for all?"

  – Marta Blackwell to the Dead Queen, an excerpt from Starwitch.

Starwitch is a novel about space-faring witches that I plan to release first as a web series, then for sale in online stores.

You can read short summaries of each day's writing on Mastodon.

Here's a list of previous blog entries on this work in progress novel, in order from oldest to newest:

• Starwitch #1
• Starwitch #2
• Starwitch #3
• Starwitch #4
• Starwitch #5
• Starwitch #6

Chapter 28: Roaring Rowley

Rowley calls out as the scene ends, "Now, someone bring me my axe!"

In the next scene, Amelia and her sisters hear strange music.

By Amelia's estimate, it features a guitar with steel strings and a body of glass, based on the sound. She mentally compares it to a screaming cat mixed with guitar.

Iris points out that the sound is based on a bone transduction spell. Marta asks why and Amelia suggests a better question is who would send music that way, but just as she's about to give an opinion, the music gets past the introduction, becoming incredibly fast-paced and much louder, reaching a painful volume!

The sisters clap their hands over their ears as they fall to the floor, but that does no good, because the sound is coming from their own skulls!

Amelia struggles to get into the pilot's seat, just as the hostile magic alarm goes off, far too late to be at all useful.

Switching back to Rowley's ship, the pirate woman is strumming her heart out with her eyes closed, on a guitar of glass with steel strings, though the interior has been stained blue. Standing beside her is her first officer, who's playing bass on a red guitar, to keep the beat, while Rowley plays about fifteen notes a second! Yes, she's playing something akin to heavy metal.

The first officer orders the weapons witch to fire the ordered warning shot and the next scene shows the glass ship from the outside, which is named Glass House, by the way.

The shape is very similar to a submarine, in that it's a long tube with a command tower for the bridge, but the very tip of it is dominated by a large, glass lens. There's also a large docking/landing bay at the front, which is full of smaller ships, including a squadron of small ships that may be short-range fighters.

Most of the ship is decorated with stained glass. Runic enchantments strengthen the materials and darken it, to keep the people inside safe.

16 mirrors pop up from the sides, which reflect light onto 16x16 arrays of glass filaments linked to the interior of the ship, which work as light-guides. The light is fed into an array of lenses that combine the light into a single, pencil-thin beam, with 4096 times the power of the sun, effectively a solar death ray.

The lower mast of Starwitch is expertly cut halfway through, severing all of the rigging cables, a warning shot meant to make it impossible to run.

Back aboard Starwitch, the song ends and Rowley delivers an ultimatum: "To the Blackwell sisters: stand to and prepare to be boarded! You and your ship now belong to the Pirate Captain 'Roaring' Rowley! Resist at your peril, because we can burn a hole clean through your ship in an instant, even from extreme range."

Assuming Rowley can hear them speak, due to the bone transduction spell, the sisters quietly gesture about the situation to each other as they prepare to fight, while the pirate ship opens its bay door, to scoop them up.

Chapter 29: "People in Glass Houses..."

Iris mentally projects herself into the bridge of Glass House, where Rowley is pleased the sisters appear to be giving up without a fight, though she's mildly suspicious.

She decides to hit the sisters with a rendition of a song she calls Hopeless in the Void.

Iris says, "I think not."

Rowley tries to argue, because she thinks she holds all the cards, just as Iris kicks her in the face.

The first officer, Mr. Zindo, is next, receiving a punch that knocks a few teeth out!

Then Iris starts mentally moving her remote-viewing spell around the room, so she can dish out punishment to the rest of the bridge crew, leaving them all down for the time being.

Back abroad Starwitch, Iris reports the success of her attack and Amelia fires up the main engines, blasting the interior of the open bay of Glass House, nearly roasting the ship's Docking Witch alive!

Marta adjusts the spell-core to pour extra magic into the engines and they accelerate faster than ever before!

Amelia glances at the rear-view crystal and notices Glass House moving to pursue them, shouting about it to Marta, who's been using the spell core and her own magic to scan for space rocks.

She locates an asteroid and charges it with an attraction spell, to slam it into the engines of Glass House.

Meanwhile, Rowley has ordered full acceleration, which is not as quick to do with such a large ship, but just as she gets going, Marta's asteroid wrecks the engines and cracks a water tank, resulting in an uncontrolled sideways spin.

Getting frustrated, Rowley again orders Zindo to start into Hopeless in the Void, with starts with the bass guitar.

Iris, who's still remote-viewing, responds by yanking Rowley's guitar out of her hands, only to use it like a club, swinging it from the neck! Rowley is hit in the head, then goes down, for a second head wound to the back of her skull. The glass guitar shatters and Zindo takes a shard of glass in the shoulder.

As Rowley passes out from her two concussions, Zindo screams for a healer.

Back aboard Starwitch, Amelia runs the engines long enough to reach escape velocity from Taneas.

Iris begins a conversation about the vow they made to their mother, to do no harm, raising the point that it seems to no longer be serving their needs. They consider for a while and decide to abandon their oath in favor of a more practical one: "I vow to do no harm, except in self-defense, for the greater good."

In truth, it's what they been doing, but they do feel better having talked about it, as a family.

Chapter 30: Gaze of the Queen

Captain Rowley wakes as a healer finishes healing her head wounds, though she still has bruises from her earlier tumble over her throne.

She immediately barks, "Status!"

Zindo lists issues:

• Docking bay and the fighters ruined
• Main engines destroyed
• They're spinning in space, due to cracked water tank
• It will be three hours before they can stop the spin
• Their prey will get beyond weapons range by then

Rowley adds a complaint of her own: with her "axe" destroyed, she can't roar.

This forces her hand and she acts on standing orders, contacting her boss, the Dead Queen, via bone transduction. She only does this because she fears being turned into a zombie by the Queen, the standard punishment for a lieutenant that fails to obey orders.

They have an interesting conversation, in which Rowley accidentally gives away her intentions and the Queen admits she has no fear of The Book of Newts falling into Rowley's hands, because the Queen was the young and foolish Newt Witch that The Book used to escape The Order of Newts.

She claims to have gleaned a great deal from it and has no fear at all of what Rowley might learn, because the Queen believes Rowley isn't half as intelligent.

She even goes so far as to say The Book holds very little information on magic, because it's all about science, which surprises Rowley. The Queen promises to deliver The Book to Rowley if she serves well.

Then, she says she'll be there momentarily.

Rowley is shocked, asking how.

The Queen answers, "A little magic and a little science."

In the next scene, Amelia is on a spacewalk, in contact with Iris via bone transduction, while Marta is near the spell-core, to cast whatever spell is required for repair work.

Amelia sees how badly damaged the mast is, finding the way it's been flailing around punched a hole in the hull during acceleration.

Amelia and Marta cut the damaged section of the hull free, replacing it. When they're done welding and spell casting, there's no trace of the original damage.

Next, Amelia gets Marta to cut the broken mast, in preparation for replacing the damaged section, but just as Amelia is about to tie off the mast, so they won't lose it, there's an incredible burst of magic, beyond anything Amelia has ever seen, which leaves the sisters terrified, because they can all feel it.

There's a flash of light so bright, Amelia can see the bones of her hands, despite her eyelids and suit being in the way! When it's over, there's an entire, rectangular mountain worth of granite floating in Taneas orbit, beside Glass House, which is so distant at this point, it looks like a little, sparkling dot.

The monolith scoops up Glass House, then turns to accelerate toward Starwitch! Amelia does some quick calculations and concludes they don't have time to save the mast. She climbs back in the ship, using her tether rope to move faster and doesn't even bother to pressurize the witchpit and the entry room.

She climbs in the pilots seat and rams the throttle forward, while Marta and Iris turn off all the background spells of the spell-core and use its full power to amplify the engines as much as possible, then follow up by adding their own magic to do the same. It isn't much, but Amelia also adds her own magic.

Chapter 31: Final Preparations

Flashing forward to the present again, Amelia uses a new spell to create an atmosphere-holding bubble around Starwitch, then releases the air inside the entry bay and witchpit by forcing the door open a few inches.

Once pressure is equalized, shew hauls the door aside and goes out, walking the underside of the ship with her magnetic boots.

She reaches the rear cargo hatch and carefully pops three corners loose, while the fourth stays latched, releasing atmosphere without blasting the hatch into space.

Her plan succeeds and the tires of the war wagon don't explode, because there's just enough atmosphere to prevent that.

Amelia climbs inside and uses manual mechanisms to flip the wagon over, since it has been mounted upside down, the entire time. She also adjusts the end of the track holding the tires to flatten it out (it's articulated), then locks it back down.

The end result is that the track lines right up with the edge of the hatch.

Next, she climbs back out and puts the hatch back in place, followed by installing a pair of hinges on the outside. She tests them, then seals the hatch and allows the air bubble to slowly release, by poking some balanced holes in it, to avoid undesired thrust.

She walks back along the hull, toward the door, as her mind wanders back to the past...

Chapter 32: All the Stops

The Blackwell sisters realize they're not going to escape with superior thrust, because Starwitch is maxed out and the monolith is still gaining!

Iris switches tactics and projects her mind into the other ship, searching for a vulnerable point. She tracks magic to reach the spell-core, revealing the Dead Queen uses one made from twenty stolen cores welded into a mythril plate, with a control circle on another big plate, above them.

The room is guarded by zombies, which can't see Iris.

She decides to unscrew the spell-core in the hopes that will shut down the gravity-based spell propelling the huge ship.

She reaches out to touch it and it attacks her with magic, effectively lighting her on fire in her mind, and she loses consciousness, due to the pain, though she's otherwise uninjured.

Seeing this, Marta decides it's time to get nasty and she begins charging one of the worst spells the Dugaria military taught her, the very same she used to burn soldiers out of forts with. Additionally, she links the power of the spell-core into it, allowing that vast energy to flow through her body.

The Dead Queen has a short scene in which she observes Marta's spell as it charges up on the masts of Starwitch, truly impressed by the power of it, eventually deciding Marta's magic is a threat.

It won't be important until the next chapter, but the Dead Queen's living appearance is given (curly, red hair, green eyes, fair skin), then for contrast, her present appearance is described (not much hair, a crazed look in her eyes, pallid skin that literally hangs loose, because her muscles are wasting away).

She briefly argues with one of the souls she's consumed, which is the strongest, before silencing her with a little spirit magic.

Concerned Marta has half a chance of killing her, the Dead Queen knocks her cold with a little blood magic, which spoil the spell Marta was charging.

Amelia tries making hairpin turns in the hopes she can lose the monolith that way, but she's disappointed to see the huge ship finally employ its engines to make up for the maneuverability difference.

Hopelessness sets in and she gives up, slowly reducing throttle, to make it clear to her pursuer, so she won't get squashed like a bug. She hopes to find a better moment to fight, some little opportunity to turn the tables.

She turns the ship around, for a better view, and gets a good look at the bridge of the monolith.

As the monolith moves in, with a docking bay open, Amelia works to retract the masts, but she's too late and the Docking Witch intentionally damages them by smacking Starwitch into the ceiling, until the masts are a bent mess, during which Amelia is tossed around the Witchpit. In the end, she extends the landing gear as both a sign of capitulation and an attempt to minimize further damage.

Starwitch is landed and the bay door is closed. When the pressure is up to normal, Amelia takes off her pressure suit and puts it away, then joins her sisters.

All three of them put their hands on the spell-core and get ready to fight as the Docking Witch enters, revealing she's a zombie, with mind intact.

They try to fight, but the zombie witch is faster, hitting them with a lightning-based stun spell that effectively works like a taser.

Armored zombie soldiers carry the sisters away.

The witch suggests they stop fighting and be entertaining, because that's their best bet. She also suggests they show no strength, because the Dead Queen loves to consume the souls of strong witches, though she admits it's probably too late for that.

Iris and Marta argue, but only get stunned for their trouble, while Amelia listens. As it turns out, the undead witch pities them and wants to help, because she wouldn't wish her fate on her worst enemy.

Amelia settles on a plan that involves crying, to make herself look pathetic, in the hope of saving herself, which makes her feel really awful, because she doesn't believe she can save her sisters.

She brings the death of her mother to mind, to make herself cry in the presence of the Dead Queen, adding a twist to the opening scene that the reader may not have expected. In effect, her tears were half despair and half grief intentionally brought to the surface.

Chapter 33: Mixed-Up Marta

Marta is in a cell, with her arms chained around a column, feeling particularly strange and possibly even sick, due to recent events.

She had a really bizarre experience with the Dead Queen, who spent an uncomfortably long time staring into Marta's eyes, using them as a literal window to the soul.

Marta's magic fails to work and she falls asleep, because she's exhausted.

She dreams that she's a child with curly, red hair and lives aboard a star ship with her mother, who's a Newt Witch.

He mother gives her a black puppy and gets her to vow to care for and clean up after the pup. Marta uses these words: "I, Elsbeth Natas, vow to care for and never neglect this dog! I will clean up the messes he makes!"

Cognitive dissonance sets in and Marta steps back from the memory that isn't her own, stepping toward a shadowed corner, which includes a doorway to another room, where someone hisses for her to get out of the light.

Marta joins a shadowed figure in the dark room and she's told the Dead Queen has forcefully stolen a piece of Marta's soul, only to have replaced it with a piece of her own.

Naturally, Marta is suspicious of this shadowed woman, who explains she's a fragment of a soul the Queen ate fifty years before and all she wants is to mess up the Queen's plans.

She talks Marta into accepting the new memories, because the internal fight against them is why she can't use her magic. This witch thinks Marta is strong enough to beat the Queen in a surprise duel, but she's got to get her magic working to do that.

Marta agrees and goes back to the little girl, stepping back into the memory, while the shadowed woman grins in a wicked way, though Marta doesn't see it.

Marta wakes with an aching neck, but manages to use a little weak magic to unlock the chains holding her, though that's enough to exhaust her.

Seeking to gain greater control of her magic, she settles in to meditate on her memories, to categorize who they belong to.

In the next scene, Elsbeth is sixteen years old (she was twelve in the previous memory), with her dog, Bones, loyally following her. He's a rottweiler, by the way, and he's enormous.

Elsbeth wears the red garb of a trained Newt Witch.

A scared and angry man moves to attack, but Bones steps in the way, growling. The man doesn't give up and stabs the dog three times, before Elsbeth steps in, using blood magic to stop the man's heart.

She tries to heal Bones, but she's attacked from behind by three men, while Bones falls over, because he's bleeding out.

Two of the men grab Elsbeth's arms, while the third puts a garrote around her neck and hauls back on it! Unable to speak, she can't cast spells, but magic does pour out of her body. The spirit of Bones absorbs some of it and uses it to tear the man with the garrote to pieces, while Elsbeth uses more blood magic to kill the other two.

She looks on the spirit of her dead, but still loyal dog and decides to bond his spirit to his bones, raising him as a zombie. Then she uses blood magic to repair the corpse, making him look alive again and she reasons that so long as she has the magic, she'll keep him in good shape.

Marta steps out of the memory and finds a dark corner, in an alley, where the shadowed figure waits. Marta admits she doesn't like what she's doing, because it feels strange and wrong.

They talk for a time and the figure reasons that what Marta's doing can be a two-edged sword. If she's not careful, she can harm herself, but she should be able to use it to hurt the Queen. Besides, she needs her full magical strength to fight the Queen, which she can't use with her mind in turmoil.

Marta goes back to the memory and the shadowed figure mutters to herself, "You poor, doomed fool."

She briefly steps out of the shadows, revealing she has curly, red hair and green eyes, because she's a part of Elsbeth Natas, the Dead Queen.

As she watches Marta run headlong into a trap, an invisible real fragment of another soul tells Elsbeth how much it hates her.

Elsbeth responds that she got the idea from the fragment, who tried to help one of her victims fight back, fifty years earlier.

Chapter 34: Interrogation of Iris

Iris is in a cell very much like the one Marta's in, but hers is not so empty and dark, because the Docking Witch of the ship is with her.

The witch applies one torture spell after another, which starts from the toes and slowly passes through the entire body, until it reaches the top of the head, after which Iris always says, "Iris Blackwell, Specialist, L-F-7-5-9-0-2."

The Docking Witch is impressed, because Iris has endured eleven such spells without crying out, but that's due to anti-interrogation training she received in Dugaria, since she was an intelligence operative with access to some rather sensitive information.

Speaking loudly, the Docking Witch questions Iris, but then softly encourages her to keep resisting, because the more pain she can endure, the longer she can put off having her soul eaten by the Queen, who badly wants to know what Iris tried to do to the spell-core.

Ironically, they both hope that Amelia will come back to rescue Iris.

Eventually, Iris finds herself looking on her own body from the outside, in a very detached manner, while her body continues to give nothing more than name, rank and serial number.

After a little while, she realizes she's remote-viewing, without having spoken the words of the spell. She walks behind the column she's chained to and experimentally touches the chain, confirming she can remote-touch.

She reasons her body is near death from dehydration, because she sweats some more with each torture spell and she's literally been sitting in a puddle of sweat.

She considers using the instinctual spell to escape, but decides the timing isn't right. She instead decides to wait until Amelia attacks and returns to hr body.

The Queen steps into the room and instructs the Docking Witch to reverse her tactics, then whispers in her ear. The Docking witch is disturbed by whatever the Queen suggested and it shows on her face.

When the Queen leaves, the witch alters her spell to cause pleasure instead of pain and Iris is overwhelmed into unconsciousness by the spell, after an hour.

When she wakes, she's craving more and the witch offers to give Iris exactly what she wants, if she cooperates. Iris had no issue with resisting torture, but nothing in her training had prepared her for such powerfully addictive magic.

She breaks within ten minutes and spills her secrets over the course of a day interspersed with less powerful hits from the spell. The only thing she held back was her budding escape plan.

When it's all over, Iris feels dirty and ashamed.

Chapter 35: Immortality by Degrees

The Dead Queen sits in her quarters, pleased by the way things are progressing.

Marta has fallen for her trap and is running toward synchronization of their souls, rather than away. Iris has broken and given up her secrets, as unhelpful as they turned out to be, because Iris has no idea how remote-touch works, because she does it on instinct. Even the task of repairing Rowley's ship is moving right along.

Her internal monologue provides an explanation of the effects of consuming a soul, which is compared to how runic enchantments work on granite, with many souls drawing magic in more rapidly, though they do interfere with each other during casting. However, the overall effect is more powerful and that has kept her alive for centuries, though she gives her dog, Bones, an extra helping of magic, to keep his body intact.

The Queen settles in for some quiet meditation in the dark, because she still needs to finish consuming Marta's soul and that requires getting in sync with it. To that end, she enters one of Marta's memories.

The Queen experiences the day Marta's husband, Zayne, died. She sits at home, waiting for him to come home, just a week after they were married, but he never does. Instead, her father shows up, to tell her Zayne was killed.

They cry together and Marta ends up pummeling her father's chest in frustration, though he never complains, just continuing to hold her.

Eventually, they discuss what happened. Her father says Zayne was found tied to a tree and wolves had gotten him. He was still alive, so her father rushed him to Marta's mother for medical aid. Despite everything Erika and Iris did, they hadn't been able to save him.

The Queen steps out of the memory, commenting, "How sad. Makes me glad I never married."

Next, the Queen experiences Marta's first deployment to the battlefield against living targets, in which she accidentally blasted a massive hole in the enemy lines, when she was only meant to be a distraction, because she lost control of her feelings and her magic.

On seeing the corpse-littered field, she says, "I'm sorry."

The Lieutenant and Sergeant both compliment her work and tell her not to apologize for doing a good job.

Marta clarifies in her own mind that she'd been talking to the men she killed.

Marta is promoted to Corporal for her excellent work and the sisterly way she looks after the men.

The Queen steps out of Marta and comments, "You have such destructive talent, yet you call yourself a pacifist? What fool raised you? They should have fostered your talent, rather than expecting you to hide it."

The third memory she experiences takes place just after the sisters reached orbit, after fleeing Dugaria.

Marta wakes and joins Iris in the witchpit. As they stare at the stars, they discuss their military careers, while Marta seeks a way forward, because she's overwhelmed by the thousands of lives she took.

Iris places the blame on the King of Dugaria and his generals, because they're the ones that tricked the sisters into settling in the land, without telling them they'd become weapons of war.

Iris tells Marta she loves her and asks Marta to give herself a little time. From that point on, they quietly talk about their military service on a regular basis, because they both know Amelia wouldn't understand.

The Queen steps out of Marta, feeling a strange sense of nostalgia for home and family, despite the fact she hasn't really had either for centuries.

She's impressed by the level of blind faith Marta and Iris place in Amelia. She starts to feel bad about all she's done to them.

Recognizing the influence of Marta, the Queen violently shakes her head, ridding herself of those thoughts.

Marta steps out of her own memory and faces the Queen, saying, "Didn't work, eh?"

The Queen demands to know how Marta can exert such influence and Marta admits she got the idea from the bit of the Queen that's been trying to trick her (it turns out she wasn't fooled, after all, and was just playing along).

Marta physically attacks the Queen in the mindscape they share because their souls are now linked, using the martial arts training she got in Dugaria. The Queen is knocked to the floor and Marta puts a boot on her neck, all while explaining they have a few things in common, in that they're both killers, though Marta sets herself apart, based on motives.

In the end, she says this: "You may have started this fight, but I'm-' she cursed, 'well going to finish it! Perhaps accepting you is the path to one of us being eaten, but if it's eat or be eaten, then I know exactly what to do! After the entire ocean of grief I've swallowed, what’s a little more in the name of putting you down, once and for all?"

Marta transforms her mental self into a giant snake and reaches to eat the Queen, who responds by rolling away and running through a wall!

Back in her quarters, she admits she underestimated Marta and settles in for a more involved soul vs. soul fight, setting her entire mind on the task.

Chapter 36: Ramming Speed

The Queen's meditation is interrupted, because she's needed on the bridge. Starwitch has been detected, on approach.

The Queen takes a look and determines that Amelia over-shot and will pass right in front of the monolith, without making contact. She considers this kind of sad, but goes back to meditating, this time from her throne on the bridge.

Starwitch passes within a matter of miles of the monolith, which is just close enough for Amelia to use the waste magic its propulsion spells produce. She requires an incredible amount of energy for her plans and Amelia pushes her body right to the limits of how much magic she can process, dang near killing herself.

In fact, a point arrives at which she's certain she's bitten off more than she could ever chew, despite how necessary all that energy is.

In the moment, there's a brief scene from the perspective of The Book of Newts, in which it is both frustrated and angry, wishing it had picked a different "puppet" to act through, because Amelia is not exploring the universe, like it wants to do.

In fact, she's been subconsciously resisting its influence and she doesn't have enough magic power for it to act more directly.

In the end, it realizes Amelia is about to accidentally kill herself, which would leave The Book in a ship that's adrift in deep space, because the current trajectory of Starwitch will slingshot it away from Junas with escape velocity, unless it helps, something it's loathe to do, since it's extremely selfish.

The Book reaches out to Amelia's mind and takes control of the flow of magic going through her body, giving her the power to handle it.

Amelia is surprised she doesn't die and channels the gathered energy into a gravity-manipulation spell, to give Starwitch enough thrust to change it's orbital inclination to match that of the monolith over a very short time. The G-forces nearly kill Amelia and she starts to gray out, until she adjusts her spell to reduce the forces inside the ship.

The crazy spell puts both ships in roughly the same orbit, though Starwitch is moving faster. Seeing this insanely-fast change in trajectory, the Queen orders full reverse thrust, but this isn't enough.

She tries to cast a spell to put even more power into her ship's propulsion spells, but Marta chooses that moment to mentally attack her, to prevent the Queen from casting spells!

Seeing Starwitch approach tail-first and concluding Amelia is aiming for the bridge, the Queen runs into a hallway, followed closely by her dog! The engines of Starwitch come to life for a second and a half, blasting the window to pieces, followed by a little decompression, which blows the remaining bridge crew into space!

Starwitch passes into the bridge tail-first and Amelia deploys the landing gear in time for a rough, backwards landing!

The ship rolls to a halt and Amelia activates the atmosphere bubble spell she tested out in an earlier chapter, sealing the hole in the monolith.

Chapter 37: Weapons of War

Iris is alone in her cell, where she's been since her interrogation ended. She has some water and bread, but she's so sick from withdrawal, she can hardly keep it down.

At one point, she tries magic, but a runic device in the ceiling hits her with a stun spell. It seems designed to detect magic words of any kind, at which point it will stun her.

With nothing better to do, she begins repeating her name, rank and serial number, in an attempt to put herself into a hypnotic state, to control the pain, finding some success.

Eventually, all of her symptoms fade and she realizes she's left her body behind again, having cast an instinctual remote-viewing spell that requires no words.

She begins wandering the ship, mapping it in her head as she bides her time until Amelia shows up to rescue her.

Hearing a commotion and experiencing some brief wind from a potential hull breach, Iris pops into the bridge, quite pleased to find Starwitch parked inside.

Knowing the time has come, Iris seeks the Queen, so she can give her the beating of her (un)life.

Amelia notes the pressure outside the ship is normal and opens the door, then puts away her pressure suit.

Passing through the workshop, she sees The Book glowing in a weird way and realizes it's maintaining her atmosphere bubble spell, to free her mind. She thanks it for helping.

Stepping into the spell-core room, she talks to the brownies: "Uh, rats, I'm leaving Starwitch in your care. I’m not sure if you can help or not, but I'm going to leave a little surprise for you, just outside the main hatch. If you can, use it to keep the zombies away."

She takes a small steam engine with her and exits the ship.

We switch to the perspective of the brownies, who come out of hiding as she leaves. There's a father, mother, a teenage girl and a boy of unspecified age that's covered in dust bunnies.

They have a discussion about whether or not helping is appropriate. The mother, daughter and son are all for helping, but the father is a slow decision maker and apparently the one that's in charge, because they all wait for his decision.

In the background, Amelia makes some noise by driving the war wagon out of the cargo bay, followed by preparing the "surprise" she's leaving the brownies.

Eventually, the father decides they should help defend the ship, because it's a very good home.

As Amelia drives off in the war wagon, they go outside and find a small tripod with a spring-gonne mounted on it, which Amelia has slightly modified for their use, including installing a seat for one of them to sit next to the trigger, for the sake of pulling it. The tripod includes little handles to turn, which rotate it and adjust elevation.

The tripod is linked to the little steam engine, which makes it self-reloading.

The son is super-excited and his family silently decides he isn't allowed to touch it, because he's too eager. The son is given control of the steam engine's on/off lever, while the father decides "A man must defend his family" and mans the trigger.

His mate is amused by this, because pulling the trigger is easy and he's left aiming to the women.

Zombies begin entering the room and the Brownies initially miss. Knowing they can't afford to waste ammo, the father does some magic to make their shots seek skulls and zombies fall with each shot.

The Queen is in the hall, struggling even to move, because Marta is momentarily winning their mental battle, while Bones looks on and whimpers at her, with concern.

The Queen starts to rise, just in time for Amelia to drive around the corner and go right over her! Seeing something that hurt his master, Bones chases the war wagon, presumably with lethal intent, barking as he runs.

Amelia doesn't even notice him and uses the waste magic in the air to cast a locator spell, in the hopes of finding Marta.

The Queen gains enough control of her mind to repair her body with magic and rises to her feet, just in time for Iris to jump her from behind, using remote-touch.

Iris fights dirty, first punching the Queen in the kidneys, followed by putting an arm around the dead witch's neck, hauling back. Next, she puts a knee into the Queen's spine, really putting some pressure on it.

The Queen tries to fight back, but Iris can't be touched.

The undead witch doesn't actually need air and begins considering possibilities, eventually coming to the conclusion Iris is responsible, though the Queen's unsure how, because Iris is in a cell that prevents the use of magic words.

The Queen finally realizes, however, that she once cast an instinctual spell to empower the spirit of Bones to affect the real world and realizes she may have inadvertently taught Iris how to remote-view without magic words, because when someone is being tortured, they would prefer to not be in their body and clearly, Iris used her talent to find a way to do that.

There's a brief and amusing mental conversation between the Queen and Marta:

My, aren't we just underestimating people left and right? Marta laughed, Keep up the excellent work!

Oh, shut up! The Queen mentally growled back.

Marta chuckled, Make me!

Iris adjusts her grip from a pointless choke-hold to grab the Queen's head, literally trying to twist it off!

All the Queen can do is complain.

Chapter 38: Death Dog

Amelia follows her locator spell, which puts a glittering trail on the floor for her to follow and she's soon lost, because the monolith's lower floors are an intentional maze.

In the blink of the eye, she misses an important turn and stops, to put the wagon in reverse.

Bones finally catches up and leaps onto the wagon, with a heavy thump! Amelia slams the accelerator pedal to the floor and Bones slides down the windshield, which only makes things worse. Their gaze meets and Amelia is terrified, because she's never seen a dog with glowing eyes!

She fires the driver's side spring-gonne, putting a lead ball through the dog's belly and hindquarters, which covers the windshield in blood, preventing Amelia from seeing, as she hears the sound of metal tearing! She tries the driver's gonne again, but nothing happens, because Bones ripped it right off!

Amelia switches out of reverse and begins accelerating as fast as she can, while she switches into higher gears, to gain speed as she prepares to intentionally crash the wagon, because she knows she isn't the best driver under exciting conditions and designed it to take a crash or two.

Bones cracks the outer layer of glass, then hits it again, while Amelia continues to accelerate. His third strike cracks the inner pane and Amelia becomes certain his fourth will get all the way through, so she turns the wagon sharply into a wall, just as the teeth of Bones penetrate the glass, which is as strong as steel, due to enchantments, by the way.

Bones goes flying and takes the window with him, but when he tosses it aside and gets up without one single scratch, Amelia switches the wagon back into reverse and hits the accelerator, while Bones howls and gives chase, continually getting faster, as if anger is his fuel!

Amelia turns the car around and starts shifting into higher gears again, as she takes the turn she missed at full speed! She comes out into a massive, open chamber, which resembles a city in every respect, because it is one!

The streets are thronged with zombies pulling hand carts, moving resources around, as required to serve their Queen.

Amelia accelerates as zombie laborers scatter. Looking back, she sees Bones is still getting faster, so she hits the booster rockets, finally losing him in the crowd, though she does crash through a cart loaded with large ceramic jars of water, which dump their contents all over Amelia.

Finally feeling a little safe, she puts more effort into driving and avoids further accidents, though not out of any care for the zombies, but because she doesn't need the delays.

The trail goes into a building and Amelia parks the wagon, draws her hand-gonne and kicks the door, hurting her foot, because it's two inch thick oak.

She turns the handle and pushes it open, then rushes in. For once in her life, she reacts fast enough and shoots two zombies in the head, doing all the math required for perfect shots.

The third swings his sword, but Amelia ducks, thanks to her basic training. She put her gonne in the zombie's face and shoots him in the head, just like the other two.

As Amelia puked, because none of the zombies were a pretty sight before she poked holes through their skulls, I took a moment to explain why shooting a zombie in the head works.

It has nothing to do with brains, because zombies don't need them, or they wouldn't turn into walking skeletons once their flesh rotted off. Instead, think of zombies as animated skeletons covered in partially alive flesh, which gives them doubled strength. What matters most is their skull, which serves to anchor their spirits to their bones.

So, the classic "shoot 'em in the head" trope works because you're breaking their skull, not their brain, at least in this setting.

Amelia is shocked back into full action-heroine mode by the sound of Bones howling, because he's catching up!

Amelia leaps the counter top of the jail/prison she's in, runs down the hall to the door indicated by her spell, then discovers the door is locked, just as bones enters!

She casts a quick lock opening spell as the dog leaps the counter and she pushes her way inside as the dog slides past, because the floor is a little too polished for him.

Amelia lights the dark cell with another spell, revealing Marta is deep in a trance, as Bones enters and growls with more menace than even a rottweiler ought to be capable of, he's had lots of practice and he knows Amelia is cornered.

Amelia shakes her sister and screams in her ear as Bones leaps!

Chapter 39: Rescue

Marta shouts at the dog, "Down!"

Bones lays down, but continues to growl at Amelia, until Marta says, "No! This is Amelia. She's your friend."

Bones licks Amelia's hand.

Amelia naturally has questions and Marta explains: Bones doesn't use the senses of his body, because they failed him long ago. Instead, he uses the senses of his spirit, which work in a much more metaphorical way. Right now, part of Marta is the Queen, so Bones thinks she's his master. This may indicate that their souls are mixing more fluidly than is safe for Marta.

Marta behaves in a more gruff fashion than usual, because her personality and that of the Queen are mixing, though she claims to be in control and her intent is to eat the Queen's soul, lest she lose her own. She insists she'll go back to normal once she wins the soul vs. soul fight.

Amelia is not reassured, but changes the subject, asking where Iris is. She turns out to be just down the hall.

They find her lying on the floor of her cell, repeating her name, rank and serial number, as a mantra to block the pain.

Marta explains that they better not disturb her too much, because she's currently giving the Queen the beating of her unlife.

Marta picks up Iris and they put her in the front seat of the wagon.

They're abut to head back to Starwitch, but Iris briefly stops her mantra to suggest they retrieve their spell-core.

Amelia drives and Marta tells her which way to go, while Bones rides on the hood, presumably enjoying the ride and the wind, as dogs tend to do.

The narrative returns to the Queen, who is beyond furious, because Iris is rather good at hand-to-hand, something the Queen never learned, because she had strong magic. She's also insanely strong in her invisible, untouchable remote-viewing state.

She settles on a crazy plan, based on what she knows of about raw mythril.

Without runes to restrain it, mythril slowly builds up magic over time, until it can no longer contain it, at which point the magic spills into the air, leaving it dangerously charged. When a mind with an active imagination comes along, the energy discharges, becoming a spell that matches the image in mind. This is known as a mythril surge.

She sets her mind on concentrating as much magic as she can in the local area, until it builds to an artificial surge, despite the fact she only has a 60% chance of controlling it, while Iris has a 30% chance of being the one to shape it, while there's a 25% chance the ship will absorb it. There is some overlap between those, in which multiple options happen.

The Queen gets lucky and produces a shockwave of spirit magic, which snaps Iris back to her body!

Just as the Queen is getting back to her feet, the sisters come down the hallway and run her down, again!

Seeing they didn't turn to go for their ship, she reasons they're off to get their spell-core back.

The Queen heals herself and gets back to her feet as she reasons about the chances of the sisters stealing her spell core, initially believing it's impossible, but as she considers the fact their spell-core's runes literally name them as its owner and the fact the Queen's core only makes reference to an "owner", she realizes it's just possible.

She curses and uses a gravity spell to fly down the hall, after them.

Marta torches the zombies in the spell-core chamber, who thank her before they turn to ash.

After a warning from Iris, Amelia puts on some thick gloves and examines the spell-core, intending to just remove theirs, but it turns out to be welded in, which is something Amelia has no clue how to accomplish, let alone do, because the melting point of mythril is incredibly high.

In the end, they decide to steal the whole thing and Iris gives it a go, via remote-touch, though she puts Amelia's gloves on her invisible hands, for some extra protection.

She unscrews the thing and the ship lurches, due to a sudden loss of thrust, though the artificial gravity turns out to be a spell permanently placed on the granite of the mountain, presumably to ensure that gravity is never lost.

Iris puts it in the rear gunner's seat of the wagon.

Marta points out that since they've stolen the core, it should consider them its owner and she recklessly touches it without dying.

Everyone gets in and Amelia backs them out of the spell-core room.

Coming back to the Queen again, she hears the wagon coming and lands in the hallway.

She's beyond pissed, but has gotten her magic under control, now that Marta and Iris are focused elsewhere.

The wagon comes around a corner on two wheels and the Queen smiles wickedly as she chants a spell.

Chapter 40: Showdown

Amelia spots the Dead Queen down the hallway and shifts into a higher gear, intending to hit her as hard as possible!

The Queen uses an inverted gravity crush spell to rip the wagon apart! Amelia is knocked cold and Iris takes a rather distressingly large chunk of metal to her gut!

Bones has the benefit of centuries of experience and he leaps over the head of the Queen, landing on his feet, without injury.

The Queen says, "Heel." and Bones obeys.

She points at Amelia and says, "Kill!"

Bones hesitates, because as far as he knows, Amelia is a friend.

The Queen repeats herself and Marta shouts, "Leave my dog out of this!"

The Queen laughs at Marta's confusion, but Marta points at the Queen and orders, "Kill!"

The Queen points at Marta and gives the same order.

Iris gets a brief scene, in which she begins dragging herself toward the spell-core, because it's her only hope of survival. She looks at Amelia, noting the fact she's also in need of healing.

There's a short scene from the perspective of Bones and we learn he considers the Queen to be his god. At the moment, he can't tell the difference between Marta and the Queen, reasoning they're both his god, which is weird, because his god isn't normally in two places at once.

He compares them by sight, hearing and smell, but can't tell them apart. Finally, he licks the hand of each, while they argue about him and give him orders. He dislikes the way the Queen tastes, but Marta tastes better, since she isn't a rotting corpse.

Therefore, Bones comes to the conclusion that Marta is a good god and the Queen is a bad god and he leaps to attack the Queen.

Despite how much the Queen loves her dog, she hits him with a stun spell that ends by gently lulling him off to sleep.

Marta and the Queen end up on exactly the same mental wavelength for a moment and they cast exactly the same spell, at the same level of power, just pointed in opposite directions. Their spells cancel each other out and the magic involved is released into the air, raw.

This is so much magic that a pair of surges happen. The spell-core rolls right to the hand of Iris and an illusion of the food bowl of Bones appears in front of him, laden with a wonderful-looking steak, because that's what he's dreaming about.

Iris uses the spell-core to heal herself (involves yanking the hunk of steel out of her gut, so ouch!) and her sisters.

Next, she tries to burn the Queen alive with its magic, while Marta hides the fact she's mumbling a spell.

The Queen feels the air heating and saves herself with a gravity spell that punches the core out of Iris' hands, but she's too distracted to stop Marta from casting a fire spell of her own!

The Queen tries to extinguish the incoming fire spell with a counter-spell, but Marta perfectly matches her again, canceling her spell out. The Queen is lit on fire and rolls around, while another surge happens, making the illusion of the steak smell like one.

Bones wakes to the smell of the best steak, ever, and bites into nothing, realizing it was an illusion. In his irrational doggy brain, he decides the bad god is responsible and he moves toward the Queen with menace and growls! Amelia draws her hand-gonne and points it at the undead pirate.

This conversation happens:

Practically crying, the Queen crawled back from Bones, protesting, "First you turn my dog against me, then you steal my ship's core? What's next, pulling my teeth?"

"We didn't ask for this!" Amelia shouted back, "You attacked us! Why don't you just let us go?"

"I might as well cover myself in tartar sauce and go swimming in shark infested waters!" The Queen spoke with great sarcasm, "My lieutenants would tear me to shreds, just the same!"

While the sisters consider their options, the Queen starts casting a spell.

Amelia decides to shoot the Queen in the head with her hand-gonne, but the Queen completes her spell and vanishes in a bright flash of light, using a spatial translocation spell, very similar to the way her ship first appeared.

Iris calls the Queen a coward and they head for their ship.

When they reach the bridge, they're surprised to see hundreds of formerly-zombie corpses, all killed by eerily-accurate shots to the forehead. There's some discussion of what happened and Amelia says "the rats" used the toy she left them.

They pack up the spring-gonne and the steam engine it ran on, then board their ship.

Amelia passes through the workshop on her way to install their new and improved spell-core, seeing The Book is still maintaining the atmosphere bubble spell.

She installs the new core, then requests The Book end the spell. Starwitch shoots out of the bridge of Foundation Stone like a cork from a shaken bottle of champagne and then Amelia fires up the new core, using it to propel them with a gravity spell, since they have no water on board.

Chapter 41: The Chase Begins

As it turns out, Rowley has been watching events aboard Foundation Stone the entire time, using scrying magic.

She is extremely entertained by the outcome, because it has left the Queen in a serious position of weakness, in which she'll an awful time just controlling her ship, because the Blackwell sisters left it without an atmosphere.

The Queen has tired writing things down, but all of the ink wells have boiled away. Some charcoal is briefly used, but that runs out quickly.

Rowley knows exactly what's coming, however, because the Queen has no choice: she'll chase the sisters down to kill them and retrieve her spell-core, lest all of the Queen's lieutenants smell blood in the water and come for her, while she's weak.

Rowley leaves before the Queen comes to the simple conclusion that the spell-core of Glass House could solve most of her troubles, and the Docking With, Mina, helps her do so.

Rowley intends to soon metaphorically be a long way off, with no knowledge of current events, lest she also become a target, since the Blackwell sisters defeated her first.

The next scene is from Marta's perspective, because Amelia passed out moments after writing down instructions for their course and Iris is far too sick to handle looking after the ship.

She considers how Iris is doing, extremely concerned for her mind and body, since it's quite possible the withdrawal symptoms could kill her. To that end, Marta is considering hitting her with occasional low doses of the spell that gave her the addiction, to ease her past the most lethal portion of withdrawal.

Her thoughts are interrupted by the Dead Queen making an ineffectual threat: Marta Blackwell, I’m coming for you! You won’t escape my wrath!

Marta tells her to shut up, then sets her mind to causing the Queen trouble, amazed the Queen found the time to make threats.

Parting Thoughts

Chapter 41 is the last chapter of Starwitch! I hope you enjoyed following along as I wrote. Starwitch will be published to royalroad.com and wattpad.com in the near future.

I can still hardly believe I wrote 13 and a half chapters this week, which was about 28,500 words, more than a quarter of this novel, but inspiration hit me very hard and for once, I felt able to catch nearly all of it, though that has left me very exhausted.

Now I can enjoy re-reading the novel from the beginning, for the sake of editing and consistency improvements, which should be lots of fun. Hypothetically, Starwitch should be published in the next two weeks, though I've still got some big hurdles to leap in the mean time, quite aside from editing.

This link will take you to a page you can watch for further updates on the release details.

Tags: writing, work-in-progress, starwitch

Work In Progress #23: Starwitch #6

"The distant woman groaned, 'We're not pirates, you idiot! We’re just new to space travel, so how could we possibly know how we're supposed to mark our ship, to make you think we're friendly?'

Haley growled, 'That's what a pirate would say!'

'It's also what a normal person would say. Now, if we were pirates, wouldn't we be trying to kill you, instead of talking?' "

  – An excerpt from Starwitch.

Starwitch is a novel about space-faring witches that I plan to release first as a web series, then for sale in online stores.

You can read short summaries of each day's writing on Mastodon.

Here's a list of previous blog entries on this work in progress novel, in order from oldest to newest:

• Starwitch #1
• Starwitch #2
• Starwitch #3
• Starwitch #4
• Starwitch #5

Chapter 23: Solar Wind

Amelia and her sisters stand in the witchpit, while she demonstrates a light sail spell she's cast without assistance from the spell-core.

I did a little research on light sails and discovered that a better approach than reflecting light is to split it with a prism-like sail. I also considered the sails of Starwitch, in particular, and decided that it's an illusion anchored to the masts, via an enchantment. I edited the first chapter accordingly, adding a rainbow effect.

The rigging is enchanted to produce musical notes to indicate the level of pressure on the cables inside the masts, ranging from A to G-sharp, but if if goes up an octave, then the rigging is in danger of breaking under the strain, since steel cables can only handle so much.

Reasoning that illusions can affect light, I decided that Starwitch literally uses weightless illusions for sail material.

Amelia's sail is weak, little more than a spider's web of prism-like material, which she has to refresh from one second to the next, because even raw sunlight can scatter her illusions. Her spell can get the rigging to a C-sharp on one side and a B on the other, based on their angle.

Marta requests and is given an explanation of the basics of the spell.

Iris asks what part the masts play and Amelia explains that they bear enchantments to allow illusions to interact with solid matter, which allows the light pressure from the solar wind to give them thrust.

Iris asks why Amelia didn't just permanently enchant the sail spell into the masts, leading to a discussion of how various materials handle runic enchantments.

The basic idea is that the more types of material go into a crystalline structure like stone or metal, the more runes it can hold, at the cost of reduced power, due to less efficient magic.

I'll quote Amelia's explanation for this:

"Take granite, for example. It's basically many types of rock compressed together, which does give it a much greater capacity to store magic, allowing a large collection of runes to work at the same time, but that strength is also its weakness.

"When runes produce an effect from the magic stored in granite, all of those different types of rock each produce their own copy of the spell, all at slightly different frequencies. When the magic comes together as a cohesive whole, the many competing frequencies interfere with each other and the end result is a weaker spell, plus lots of magic that goes to waste. In fact, eighty percent of the magic is wasted and simply released into the air.

"Pure metals, on the other hand, have a rather simple structure. They can hold only three runes, but when those runes have an effect, it tends to be rather powerful, with only five percent waste.

"Steel, on the other hand, occupies the middle ground, able to hold up to seven runes, with reasonably powerful effects and only thirty percent waste, though the details vary by the recipe of the alloy.

"The masts of Starwitch had to be steel, for the sake of strength, which forced me to choose between the sail or the safety spell, plus a spell anchor. Ultimately, I went with safety."

Mythril is a bizarre outlier, however, with no known upper limit on the number of runes, plus power beyond that a pure metal should be capable of, due to the extreme density of the metal combined with its magical nature.

There's a brief discussion of the process of diffracting light, which involves Amelia using a prism as a visual aid.

Marta tries her own variation of the spell, which produces solid illusion of glass sails that extend about ten miles in every direction! This produces enough force for them to feel it and Amelia is quite impressed.

Marta's spell breaks up fairly quickly under the strain of the solar wind and shatters, just like glass.

Iris goes next, experimenting with an illusion of a diamond sail, which produces less force than Marta's, though it lasts longer. Amelia takes note of this improvement and heads for the spell-core, to produce a sail none of them will have to concentrate to maintain.

Just after Amelia gets a sail setup that extends for a hundred mile radius, Marta notes how clean the air of the room smells and asks why. Amelia points out the fact that the spell-core's primary function is to clean and refresh the air, which is an important point for the next chapter.

They go back to the witchpit and Amelia settles in to get them on course, while her sisters stare out at the rainbow their ship is producing.

Chapter 24: The Trouble With Breathing

Back in the present, Amelia wakes from an unintended nap, with a headache and dizziness, due to too little oxygen and too much carbon-dioxide, because without the spell-core, the air of the ship is going bad.

She's somewhat surprised the mathematical portions of her brain are working at full capacity, which is weird, though she has a difficult time keeping them from wandering all over the place, including calculating how long she can survive without a change in the current situation, coming up short. Just as quickly, she calculates the number of stars in the universe, then the number of zombies on the Dead Queen's ship.

She once again concludes The Book is enhancing her head for numbers and focuses long enough to run the numbers related to her survival a second time, realizing she has two hours to live, but only if she's unconscious. Unfortunately, it will be six hours before her attack run on the monolith begins.

Amelia gets out of the pilot's seat of Starwitch and gets herself to crew quarters, where she puts on a pressure suit she built for herself, which is in a high-visibility orange color. However, because she was in an artistic mood when she made it, it has black tiger stripes and a white belly, to make it look more like the animal. The helmet resembles a fishbowl.

With the suit on, she turns on her oxygen tank at 70% of normal, which is enough to survive on. Between her tank and those of her sisters, she calculates she can last for six hours at 70%, then have enough left over for twenty minutes of full mental clarity, which she'll need for her attack on the monolith.

Next, she heads for her workshop, where she grabs an icepick and a rubberized sack. She opens a steam engine and uses a little magic to freeze the water. With the sack held to catch the chips, she breaks up the ice. This is taken to one wall, where there's a system for filling the rear water tank of Starwitch. She dumps the ice into it, then repeats the process with the next steam engine, because she needs reaction mass to slow down the ship.

As she works, her mind wanders back to the past...

Chapter 25: Ice Palace Two

Amelia is again in the pilot's seat, using one of the scrying crystals to zoom in on a distant object, which turns out to be a huge block of ice floating in space, in the shape of a cube.

She calls her sisters into the witchpit to have a look, only for an alarm bell to sound. Marta demands to know what that is and Amelia says it's an alarm indicating hostile magic.

Amelia starts up the main engines, for the sake of evasive maneuvers, while a huge ball of ice detaches from the ice block and flies their way, but maneuvering does no good, because the ball seems to have a homing spell on it!

After casting a scrying spell, Iris barks orders: "Amelia, face us straight into it! Marta, on my mark, you shoot a heat spell, the strongest you've got, straight ahead!"

Iris waits until they've nearly collided, then shouts, "Now!"

Marta's heat spell causes the ball to instantly vaporize and they pass though a cloud of hot steam. It gets rather warm in the ship, but they're fine.

Meanwhile, we switch to the perspective of Port Commander Haley Knotley, a half-dwarf witch that's in charge of the block of ice, which is actually a port (in-book word for a space station). As it turns out, nearly the entire port is made of ice, though it has a spell-core at the center, like Starwitch.

Haley also has a small, mythril wand, which she uses to cast ice magic, to defend the port.

She mistook Starwitch for a pirate vessel, due to a lack of markings and attacked, to defend the station.

She sees her attack fail, only to be suddenly lifted off the floor by an invisible hand gripping her neck! This is Iris using remote-touch. Iris also uses a bone-transduction spell on Haley, so they can talk.

They argue for a moment, because Haley is beyond stubborn and has a hard time changing her mind once she's decided something, which is the very reason she's in charge of such a remote outpost. Iris eventually gets Haley to calm down and talk.

After accepting the possibility Starwitch might not be a pirate vessel, Haley reluctantly gives them permission to dock.

Iris takes the helm and coordinates with Haley, while Amelia and Marta turn off their light sail spell and retract the masts into the hull. Iris flies them around the side of the port, to an open bay door.

Inside, some figures in pressure suits scurry about, allowing Amelia to calculate the size of the port, at about two miles wide! The landing/docking bay is rather big, but there's only a few small ships parked inside.

Iris flies them into it, and some external force takes over, for final landing. Amelia and Marta are startled, but Iris tells them to relax, because Haley told her it was coming.

They deploy the landing gear of Starwitch and gently touch down. By the way, Starwitch is designed to land very much like a plane, on a set of tires, while the side masts can be made to function like wings.

As that's happening, one of the figures uses a mythril wand to close the hatch of the landing bay, which is made of ice. When that's done, another figures rushed to help, spraying water around the gap of the door, while the one with the wand uses it to freeze the water into a seal.

After that, the room begins to pressurize. Eventually, all three of the docking bay workers remove their helmets.

The sisters exit Starwitch and Amelia gets a look at three other ships that are all smaller than her own.

The first is a red sphere with eight dual-purpose legs that appear able to extend to great length, to serve as masts for sails.

The next is shaped like a white snowflake, with a central body for living spaces and six extensions that possibly serve as masts, despite each of them having windows and living spaces in them.

The last is shaped like a green bug, with six legs and a set of cloth masts that are folded up on top of it, much like wings.

Amelia is immediately confronted by an angry witch, because normal procedure involves a strict schedule for opening and closing the docking bay and they were woken up to let Starwitch in, a waste of water and time.

The angry witch is joined by a polite and friendly witch, who says a few soothing things to get the woman to calm down.

The first apologizes, then introduces herself as Agnes Vixen. The second says her name is Alice Talbot. Amelia introduces herself and her sisters.

The figure that manned the hose finishes putting it away, then runs over, introducing himself as Nonar Bonebuster, though he does so rather loudly, because he has hearing issues.

Alice says, "Don’t mind Agnes. She’s a very serious woman."

Nonar mishears and agrees that Angnes is very spurious. Agnes smacks him on the back of the head and they begin arguing, while Alice leads the sisters to one side.

She explains that Nonar and Agnes are married and argue all the time. She suggests with a wink that Nonar starts the arguments in public, so they can make-up in private.

Alice informs them that Haley wishes to see them, that she might apologize, and the sisters follow her.

Chapter 26: A New Way of Life

The sisters meet Haley face to face and Amelia accidentally insults Haley, by referring to her as a "little woman".

That's a label the half-dwarf objects to, because "little people" can be born to any race, but the dwarven race is distinct from them, just as elves, fairies, orcs, goblins and gnomes are not human.

Amelia apologizes and she learns about the existence of the other races and it would seem her home moon is entirely inhabited by humans, because she's never before heard of the other races.

As an apology for attacking them, Haley waives docking fees, and even offers to top of the water tanks of Starwitch, for free, a declaration that gets Alice to gasp, because Haley is extremely money-oriented.

Haley and the sisters introduce themselves and Haley asks where they're from. They tell the truth and Haley asks why they left.

Again, they speak honestly: persecution and forced servitude as living weapons. Alice is sympathetic to them, as is Haley, and they're assured they're among friends. They're told most any Ice Palace will openly welcome them.

Amelia asks why the port is made of ice and Haley reveals her money-oriented nature again, by explaining that water is the currency used in space, because everyone needs it. Her eyes light up as she explains that the place is literally made of money!

Further, Haley explains that the Ice Palace has a spell-core that keeps it at the right temperature and provides gravity. The port is called Ice Palace Two, though it used to have another name: Breadbasket.

The history of Cakana, the moon below them, is explained by Alice. Three-thousand years back, the moon was settled by witches and farmers, because it was one of two worlds in Junas orbit that was suitable for massive food production. After three-hundred years, the farmers objected to the witches "never doing an honest day's work" and rose up in rebellion, using you guessed it: torches and pitchforks.

The witches peacefully backed down and the farmers took over. This resulted in the witches no longer hauling food into orbit for sale, and most of them left. Only a few stayed behind, which were the ancestors of the Blackwell sisters.

This change in government of the moon cut them off from the other moons of Junas and led to a shortage of food for everyone else, causing many deaths, over a pointless disagreement.

Haley asks the sisters to consider how they wish to live, because that will determine their allegiance and which markings their ship should bear, to avoid getting killed by non-pirates.

Alice explains a few options:

• They could become port workers, but the pay is crap and they'd be stuck in place.
• They could join a merchant house to stay mobile, but the pay is still crap.
• They could become couriers, which pays good, but they'd lack the safety and backing of a merchant house.
• They could also become pirate hunters, who kill pirates for a living, a dangerous occupation.

Regardless, however, Haley can only help them become couriers, because they're out in the boonies, but once they reach a more important port, they'll have more options.

Alice brings up the subject of navigation tables. Every Ice Palace provides a free service of storing and sharing navigation tables, which are predetermined courses, including thrust and timing figures for courses guaranteed to be safe, if followed. At this point, it's revealed that most of the moons of Junas are in orbital resonance, which makes preset navigation possible.

Amelia is surprised no one travels more directly and her comments gets her hosts talking about the "Newt Witches", the mysterious witches that rule the star system, and who rarely interfere in the affairs of others, unless attacked.

The Newt Witches seem to have an innate ability to calculate direct courses in their heads, on top of having incredibly potent weapons and magic. The Newt Witches are also the group behind colonizing the system. They own the Ice Palaces (the ports) and dress in red, covering their whole bodies, except their eyes.

Haley shares a story of witnessing a Newt Witch use incredible magic to snuff a pirate ship out of existence, first crushing it, followed by making it grow smaller under the crushing power of her magic, until it vanished. Hypothetically, she described the formation of a small black hole. This witch used some form of magic item combined with her own powers to make that happen.

Despite this incredible show of power, the woman was kind to Haley and spend a lot of time chatting with her, because the witch liked children.

Amelia begins to suspect she's a descendant of a Newt Witch and after her sisters ask some pointed question, this is confirmed, because the witches that stayed on Cakana were Newt Witches.

More subtle questions shift the subject to the origin of the Newt Witches and Alice offhandedly mentions a myth about a magic book that taught them to fly through space, which they lost and have been searching for, though this is only one story among many.

Getting uncomfortable and wishing to change the subject, Amelia decides they should become couriers, at least for the time being, and Haley shows them the symbol they need to paint on their ship, which looks like a stylized sailing ship that will basically be the space equivalent to flying a particular flag.

Chapter 27: Rush Delivery

Six months later, Iris is busy minding the ship as they launch from Ice Palace Three, which is in orbit of a lush, garden world that lacks seasons, because it's perpetually like spring there.

As she gets Starwitch away from the station, she chats with the Port Commander via a bone transduction spell. The commander happens to be a fairy that fancies herself as a match-maker. She's been trying to setup Iris with her brother. As the subject comes up, Iris shades with embarrassment, but in the end, she decides aloud, "Next time."

She says goodbye to her friend and works the winches to deploy the masts.

After that, she passes into the entry room, which has become a cargo bay for the things they carry from port to port. Currently, it's full of oranges, which are a gift from the port commander of the local Ice Palace to the commander of another. This is a display of supreme confidence in the ability of Amelia to plot direct courses, because oranges spoil quickly.

Passing into crew quarters, she finds Amelia asleep, because she was up all night adding new cargo racks, since this shipment is the largest they've ever taken on, with the entry bay crammed from floor to ceiling, with only a narrow passage down the middle.

In the workshop, Iris finds Marta working at a potter's wheel to turn a bowl. Marta has been making and selling pots with runic enchantments, which are a big money maker, almost as good as their rush delivery service as couriers. It's revealed that almost no one in the system knows how runes work, aside from the Newt Witches, who don't sell enchantments.

Iris reaches the spell-core and briefly examines the current wheel of cheese the brownies have been eating, noting the fact they slowed down a lot, after the first few weeks.

She activates a sail spell, makes some minor adjustments to the gravity spell to help compensate for a coming engine burn, then heads back to the witchpit, where she pushes the engines to one-fifth power for twenty minutes, because their course requires both the sails and an engine burn, for a particularly speedy arrival.

In the next scene, Marta is minding the ship, in preparation for their last burn of the journey, after a few days travel. In the rear-view scrying crystal, a red moon looms ever larger.

Amelia pops her head in as Marta begins the burn, asking if she'd like to get some rest. Marta decides she wants to handle docking maneuvers.

Marta gets the ship inside Ice Palace Sixty-Eight and notices how full the docking bay is. Most of the ships belong to The Silver Circle, which is the most prominent merchant house, though there's also a great many from The Twilight Flame, another big house. There's some couriers mixed in, which makes Marta feel right at home.

The sisters have a two hour wait before the bay will pressurize and Marta joins her sisters for breakfast. Amelia jokes about the dwarf port commander, who's obsessed with oranges, constantly raving about the first time he ate one. She even does an impression of him: " 'Me was in heaven, it was so juicy and sweet! Me hardly noticed the skin was still on, because me didn't know better!' "

In the next scene, they present the dwarf with the best crate of oranges, for his personal consumption, while his men work to unload the rest.

The dwarf actually tears up and thanks them for the crate, then Marta informs them they brought ninety crates. The port commander's face becomes a mess of happy tears and he bites into one of the oranges, sucking the juice from it. His tears freeze before they even hit the floor.

When he's done draining the orange, he comments, "Sweet, juicy heaven!"

The sisters laugh and turn to leave, but he stops them long enough to hand over a sealed letter, claiming it's a job offer. The seal in the wax is a pair of crossed cutlasses, a symbol Amelia doesn't recognize.

Amelia opens and reads it, learning the Queen of a kingdom on the surface of Taneas wishes to hire them. Taneas is the most distant moon of Junas, named after the goddess of commerce. The moon is in an eccentric orbit that's only in direct contact with other worlds every 300 years, because it isn't in proper resonance with the other moons.

This Queen, named Edwina Rowley, wishes to initially employ the sisters as messengers, but if things go well, then she would like them to calculate courses for entire merchant convoys, promising 5% of all sales.

The sisters are moved with compassion for the people of Taneas and decide to take the job. Amelia takes them straight to the navigation table of the port, which is a slab of granite mounted in the wall of the main hall.

She examines the figures describing the orbit of Taneas and decides it is possible for them to get there, though it will take three weeks of sailing.

With nothing better to do until the port's bay door opens, they go shopping.

The next scene focuses on a woman in a parka that's been following and observing the sisters, without being noticed, despite the way she's shivering cold.

She uses a bone transduction spell to report: "Captain, the fish have taken the bait, hook, line and sinker. Looks like our intel was right, because they're real eager to help out ‘Queen Rowley’, may she reign forever. The youngest sister says they'll arrive in three weeks."

The woman she's contacted laughs at her joke, then says, "Good. Fishing is always better from a well-stocked pond. Continue to observe from a safe distance."

The witch in the parka ends her spell, then complains, "Just so long as I don’t freeze to death. I hate Ice Palaces!"

Chapter 28: Roaring Rowley

The Blackwell sisters have arrived in orbit of Taneas and they're above the night side of the moon, noting a bizarre sight: yellow-white dots and lines illuminate the land.

They're confused for a time, before Amelia explains that they're looking at what could only be a huge, sprawling city. It won't be revealed for some time, but Taneas has rejected magic and embraced technology. They're currently at about the level of Earth, but they do not look to the stars like we do.

In fact, they know space is full of magic, and anyone that touches their atmosphere will be shot at by multiple nations at once, with surface-to-air missiles. In effect, this is very much a "look, but don't touch" world.

The sisters aren't sure how to contact Queen Rowley and Amelia suggests they try to locate a suitable landing site, once they roll around to the daytime side. Failing that, they'll have to wait for the Queen to contact them, because she must employ someone with remote-viewing ability.

In the next scene, Captain Edwina "Roaring" Rowley comments, "You may rest assured in that, Amelia Blackwell."

She's been using remote-viewing magic to observe the sisters for days.

Her ship is made of glass and crystal, which normally gives a view of space, but at the moment, they're hidden by a spell to bend light around the ship, making them invisible. This makes it impossible to see, however, which is among the reasons Rowley is using scrying magic.

Her observations have turned up an interesting fact: Amelia is the owner of The Book of Newts, which Rowley is quite aware of, because she was a Newt Witch before she turned pirate.

The Book has been lost to the Newt Witches for 2,000 years, not because they misplaced it, but because it ran away. This isn't explained, but they were using it as a reference, rather than using it to explore the universe, which is why it arranged to be stolen, presumably by manipulating the mind of one of the witches.

The Order of Newts is mentioned as the name of the ruling body of witches and it's confirmed that Amelia's mathematical gift is basically what makes someone a Newt Witch, though not a member of the order. It's also explained that the mathematical gift gives one the ability to see through The Book's illusions, though the real truth is that Amelia's gift is weaker than average and The Book made sure she saw through the illusions, because it liked her mind.

Rowley intends to take The Book for herself, though she plans to act with great precaution, because she expects just about anything to happen. After all, Amelia has the book.

Rowley gives orders in preparation for an attack, which will happen as soon as they're out of the shadow of Teneas.

Tags: writing, work-in-progress, starwitch

Work In Progress #22: Starwitch #5

Amelia sobbed, closed her eyes and accepted her impending death, until a glimmer of hope pierced the darkness, a single point of light so intense she saw it through her eyelids! She opened them and looked, but her vision was blurred from too many tears.

  – An excerpt from Starwitch.

Starwitch is a novel about space-faring witches that I plan to release first as a web series, then for sale in online stores.

You can read short summaries of each day's writing on Mastodon.

Here's a list of previous blog entries on this work in progress novel, in order from oldest to newest:

• Starwitch #1
• Starwitch #2
• Starwitch #3
• Starwitch #4

Chapter 19: Sticks, Stones and Words

Using scrying magic to watch for trouble, Iris informs her sisters, "We've got company: two witches on sticks!"

Marta switches to the rear-facing seat and tells her sisters it's Denholm and Krauss. Iris reminds Marta to focus on Denholm.

Iris tries to kill Krauss by crushing her heart with remote-touch, but Krauss is able to barely protect herself with blood magic. She does, however, fall off her stick and injures herself enough to be out of the fight.

Meanwhile, Marta uses the rear spring-gonne to shoot at Denholm, very nearly killing her with a spell to make the lead balls target-seeking!

Denholm loses her temper and her eyes glow, followed by her entire body, surrounding her in an angry, red aura, which makes her hair float on end.

Denholm begins a complex incantation that would have ended with the magic word for 'kill', but Iris uses remote-touch to force her mouth shut before she finishes!

Amelia suggests: "If she wants to play with sticks, how about you give her some stones?"

Marta agrees and focuses on a complex incantation, which is a multi-stage spell, including linking syllables held on the tongue to create brief delays before modifying the spell's effect.

Initially, Denholm uses gravity-based telekinesis (Denholm is a gravity witch, as it turns out) to fend off hundreds of boulders Marta ripped out of the ground! Denholm shatters and deflects boulders, while smaller fragments bounce off her glowing aura!

Denholm thinks she's done with Marta's spell and charges to attack, while Amelia switches on the war wagon's steam-based rocket boosters to get out of the powerful witch's reach. Yes, Amelia effectively built a rocket-tank.

Marta triggers the next stage of her spell, which causes all the fragments of rock to heat up and continue seeking Denholm. It all turns into lava and the bristles of Denholm's broom catch fire!

She glances back, sees the incoming attack and focuses entirely on defense as the lava envelopes her!

Marta triggers the third and final stage of her spell, instantly cooling the lava into a big ball of obsidian, three feet thick! Whether she's alive or dead, Denholm rolls off on her own.

The sisters reach their front gate, which Iris blasts with magic and they crash through the gardens of the yard, including a topiary creation that looks like the sisters and a floral clock.

Amelia drives them toward the tower holding Starwitch.

Meanwhile, Krauss finishes healing herself and forms a magical link to Denholm, to feed her magic. Denholm shatters the obsidian sphere holding her and gives Krauss new orders: "We terminate the traitors with extreme prejudice! I don't care who or what gets in the way!"

In short, they won't be trying to avoid damaging the war wagon after this and will be going all-out. That may have been the only reason they failed at all.

Chapter 20: Launch

The Blackwell sisters load the war wagon into the cargo bay of Starwitch, the open area at the bottom. They seal it inside, then climb the tower to board the ship.

The boarding plank is kicked out and the door is sealed. Marta is strapped in, while Iris climbs to the Witchpit, where she straps into the pilot's seat.

Meanwhile, Amelia climbs all the way down, to reach the spell-core, which she uses to ignite thermite that's been hidden inside the supports of the tower. The thermite melts through the steel holding the two halves of the tower together and one whole side falls away, producing a minor quake.

Next, Amelia uses the spell-core to briefly manipulate gravity to point away from Starwitch and most of the rest of the tower breaks free, leaving only a support gantry designed to keep Starwitch from falling over, which is reinforced with steel. Amelia climbs back up, strapping in beside Marta.

Iris starts the launch engines, which are little more than long pipes running half the length of the vessel, which are absolutely filled with little, metal plates enchanted with runes to make them vaporize water on contact, though they also heat steam. These pipes are linked to the four rocket nozzles at the tail of the ship.

Steam pours from the vessel and it lurches into the air. Sacrificial bolts attaching the support gantry to Starwitch snap, which were in turn attached to high-tension cables that were part of what kept the bottom of the gantry stable, while the steam forces the gantry to fall away from the rocket.

Starwitch rises through the air at a leisurely pace at first, because Amelia is concerned that full throttle would kill their servants, an unnecessary loss of life. The intent is for them to rise to three-thousand feet before going full throttle.

Meanwhile, Denholm and Krauss fly on one broomstick, together, landing on top of the mansion as they see the rocket rise. Denholm tries to destroy the rocket with magic, but she can't directly affect it, because Amelia put some protective enchantments on it. Likewise, Krauss tries to kill the sisters with blood magic, but also fails.

In the end, Denholm demands, "How much do you weigh?"

Krauss answers honestly, "One-sixty! Why?"

Denholm begins casting a spell to hurl Krauss into the air, which she begins objecting to, but Denholm pays her words no heed, telekinetically throwing Krauss into the sky!

Krauss screams, of course, but that makes no difference.

Iris sees Krauss on the rise and tells Amelia, who gets out of her seat and requests a reduction in throttle, so she can climb back down to the spell-core.

When she's there, she lays down and puts a hand on the magic device, concentrating first on a scrying spell, so she can see what's going on outside, then an air-manipulation spell, to attack Krauss with blasts of pressurized air.

Amelia nearly beats Krauss senseless, because her attacks have the advantage of being invisible, since they're made of air. Krauss takes some heavy injuries before enacting a spell that causes her to bleed enough that she can surround herself in a protective shell of blood, which intercepts Amelia's attacks and incidentally helps with air friction.

Amelia is forced on the defensive as Krauss begins firing her own blood like pellets from a huge shotgun! Amelia blocks most of them with a barrier of air, but a few of Krauss' blood bullets hit the ship.

As Krauss presses the advantage, firing still more blood bullets, Amelia demands to know their altitude and Iris says, "Twenty-five-hundred!"

Amelia shouts back, "Close enough! Go full-throttle!"

Iris obeys and Starwitch goes from one-third to full throttle! The sudden increase in volume bursts the eardrums of Krauss and Amelia goes back on offense, managing to knock the witch cold!

Denholm, who's been watching the whole time, to direct the flight of Krauss, gives up and brings her subordinate back to the ground, though she's disappointed.

This marks the escape of the sisters from their home moon.

Denholm gets on her broom and tracks down the carriage driven by Dawkin. She captures him, but soon discovers he has some papers stuffed into his jacket pocket.

Getting curious, Denholm takes the papers and unfolds them, revealing the plans for Starwitch. In this moment, she basically vows to track the sisters down, that she might have revenge and justice for her King. It may take years, but Denholm is not one to give up. This is an intentional hanging plot thread, which I'll come back to in another book, because Denholm is far too much fun for me to toss her on the garbage heap.

She's so distracted by her find, Dawkin manages to escape. At the next town, he paints the carriage, ties a canvas tarp over it, to make it look like a junk wagon, then hitches a horse to the front, instead of using the engine, all to make himself look like a junk merchant. This allows him to escape the country.

Chapter 21: The Next Horizon

Iris cuts the engines, presumably since they've left the atmosphere, and Amelia briefly struggles with zero-G. After fumbling around for a bit, as the wheel of cheese floats about, Amelia figures out how to move around and gets hold of the ladder, "climbing" to the witchpit.

She joins Iris there, who's getting sick. Amelia takes the pilot's seat and Iris loses her breakfast in the background, using a paper sack to catch it.

Amelia assesses their course, calculating their altitude and velocity in her head, then proceeds to using calculus, which she learned from The Book of Newts, to calculate the details of the engine burn that will get them into a stable orbit.

She begins to worry about her ability to do such complex math in her head. Her ability to make numbers dance and sing had always been unusual, but from the moment she obtained The Book of Newts, she found if much easier to work even complex calculations in her head. She isn't certain and it isn't spelled out, but this is a perk of owning The Book.

However, just as she's starting to ask serious questions about what The Book is trying to do, Iris draws her attention to the view through the windows.

Both of them have their breath taken away by the sight and Amelia tears up, with the droplets gathering around her eyes, due to the lack of gravity.

She wipes them away and the sisters stare with awe as the liquid floats free, naturally becoming a series of spheres. Iris thanks the Gods for their safe escape from the moon they once called home and Amelia also says a quick prayer of thanks.

Shortly after, Amelia gets back to work, because if she doesn't correct their course, they'll fall back into the atmosphere and burn up.

Amelia uses water-based maneuvering thrusters to turn them parallel to the ground, then Iris straps herself in, beside Marta, who's still unconscious. Amelia watches the second hand of the witchpit's clock as she runs the engines for a precise amount of time, to circularize their course into a proper orbit.

After that, Amelia uses the spell-core to create an artificial gravity field inside the ship, then lays out a mattress on the floor of the crew quarters, shrugs out of her military uniform and gets to sleep, while Iris watches for trouble.

Amelia dreams of flying Starwitch toward the sun, leaving Junas behind. She argues with her sisters rather often, but can't recall the words or the subject matter.

The sun looms ever larger and a time comes in which Amelia becomes certain they're going to burn up. However, as she's looking out at it, she sees lines forming on its surface, between six points along the edge.

First, a hexagon forms, then every other point is linked, forming a six-pointed star from two overlapping triangles. Then the hexagon formed as the center of the star starts the process again, with a new star forming inside it. The process continues until the details are so small and fine, Amelia can't see them, forming a geometric fractal.

All of this is a magic circle. At the center, a point of blackness is seen, which quickly expands and Starwitch is drawn into it, causing Amelia to scream in her sleep!

The darkness is far deeper and more terrifying than anything Amelia has ever experienced before, and as it snuffs out the lights of the ship, she succumbs to a mind-numbing depression, curling herself into the fetal position as she gives up all hope.

Just as she's totally given up, intense light interrupts the darkness, and she wakes.

Her sisters look on her with worry, because she was both screaming and crying in her sleep. Amelia can't remember the dream, but she knows The Book of Newts was trying to show her something, because she recognizes its subtle magic swirling around.

On hearing about this, Amelia's sisters become quite concerned, but Amelia is forced to tell them she doesn't remember the dream. This is a little foreshadowing for later books, though it should soon spark Amelia to try talking with the book again, probably while she holds a hand on the spell-core.

Amelia dresses in clothes she designed for wearing on the ship, which is basically a custom set of coveralls made just for her, though it has a series of loops and pockets for tools around the waist. Her sisters have already changed into their own shipboard uniforms and Marta uses her tool loops to hold some jerked meat, so she'll always have a snack on hand.

Amelia fills a canteen with water from a spigot in the wall that's linked to the water tanks and drinks a little, then gets herself some jerky, while they discuss what comes next.

Amelia says there's somewhere nearby that they can sail to, at least according to The Book of Newts, which has detailed maps.

Chapter 1: Lonely

I revisited chapter one today, because I thought of an opening scene that would set the main conflict rolling from the first paragraph.

Amelia and her sisters have been captured by the Dead Queen and the zombie soldiers have forced them into a line, according to both height and age.

Marta and Iris both try to fight, but their words are cut short by torture magic that leaves them screaming.

In stark contrast, Amelia begins to cry, because she feels utterly helpless, and the evil, undead witch laughs.

The monstrous woman instructs her soldiers to take Marta away, so the Queen can consume her soul. Marta begs and pleads, to no avail.

The Queen next decides that Iris is another suitable candidate to consume, but Iris has more fire in her and fights back, only for the Queen to hit her with another torture spell.

Coming to Amelia, the witch thinks aloud, "What to do, what to do? I've never seen such a weak witch before. I could consume her soul, but I would probably waste more magic in the act than I would gain…"

The pirate witch paces for a time, before saying, "The other two will enrich my magic for centuries to come, but this fish? Throw her back, because she’s too weak! Oh, and drain the water tanks of her little vessel before you release it, but leave her enough to force her to choose between maneuvering and drinking water!"

Amelia is dragged away.

Chapter 22: Weaponsmith

Amelia is alone in the workshop of Starwitch, back in the present, the flashback paused for the moment.

She's busy assembling a prototype spring-gonne, which consists of some pipes and clockwork mechanisms, very similar to a pinball launcher, only with much stronger springs, approximately the same power as a crossbow.

Each barrel is six inches long, with a six-inch chamber for the spring mounted behind it. Each spring chamber has a rod for drawing the spring back sticking out to one side, which hooks into clockwork mechanisms of the pistol, allowing a cocking handle to be drawn back, very similar to some toys that shoot foam darts.

The mechanisms in the handle allow cocking each barrel in turn, then fired individually. The barrels don't rotate. Amelia refers to the device as a "hand-gonne".

Amelia considers how deadly it will be once she's done, and her mind is drawn to the past, when she was eight years old.

Her mother caught her experimenting with a grasshopper, by cutting off its back legs, followed by sewing them back on. Amelia had been effectively trying to do a biology experiment, out of curiosity.

Her mother takes a dim view of this and squashes the poor creature, to put it out of its misery.

They have a discussion about what constitutes animal cruelty and what doesn't, even considering the matter of killing animals to eat them.

Amelia apologizes for hurting the insect and her mother extracts a vow from her that's very similar to the one she got from Marta.

In essence, Amelia promises to never harm a person and only harm animals when necessary.

Back in the present, she considers the harm she did to "Killer" Krauss. Technically, she violated her vow, but it had been a matter of weighing three lives against one and in truth, Amelia didn't kill Krauss. She only knocked her cold, an injury Krauss could easily heal with magic, once she woke up. In short, very little harm was done and all of it was necessary.

Amelia considers how her vow applies to undead and concludes killing them would be a mercy, like unto putting down a rabid dog. She especially applies that last thought to the Dead Queen, because killing her would end her abominable, undead existence and ultimately save lives.

In short, Amelia has nothing to hold her back in the upcoming fight, though she still feels nothing but regret for dragging her sisters into danger.

Future Plans

Now that I've got the sisters in space, my main concern is to set the stage for the end conflict. On the other hand, however, I'm only halfway through episode 6 and I need to finish the flashbacks by the end of episode 8, so the climax can begin in episode 9.

Episodes 9+10: The Climax

My episodes have all been four chapters, so far, and making the climax two parts would involve about eight chapters. However, I can safely assume the last chapter of the book will be given over to tying up loose ends, but I may add a short epilogue at the end, after episode 10, probably just to tease what's coming in book two.

The epilogue will probably consist of the Dead Queen screaming with rage and getting her monolith on the move, to chase the escaping sisters down. This will serve almost as a preview of the next season.

In short, that means I need the climax to be 7 chapters, which is reasonable enough. That leaves me with two chapters for each of my three protagonists, plus one mostly dedicated to the Dead Queen, so we can really learn what motivates her.

I have many details in mind for the climax, which will be more action-packed than anything else in the book. I could describe it now, but I don't want to spoil the details until I get there.

The Near Future

I'm left with a conundrum: what goes into the end of episodes 6 through 8?

I've done the things I planned early on, including establishing the prejudice and strife that propelled the sisters into space and the war Dugaria started was an excellent way to leave the sisters with emotional scars that may never heal, a fact that makes them more interesting to read about. It also made them strong enough to fight a war, even though they object to violence.

I believe I've covered the necessary growth and scarring of my characters, and I could shorten the season to make it a total of eight episodes, which would probably get the length to around 85,000 words.

This isn't an option I like, however, and I hope you'll bear with me as I consider options, below, as a sort of brainstorming session.

Episode 6

The end of episode six (one more chapter) should demonstrate how light sails work, giving me a chance to detail the almost musical chimes the masts produce under load, probably due to the cables inside the masts vibrating under the effects of slight waste magic. I'll probably include a montage-like scene of Amelia teaching her sisters everything about Starwitch and the magic it uses, to cover the week it takes them to reach their first space station at a leisurely pace.

I also need to make a point of showing Amelia wistfully looking down and thinking about Dawkin, as her sisters try to comfort her. This is something I'll have to do regularly, through this and the next season, since Amelia's feelings for Dawkin will be a central point of the third.

The sisters will find surprising acceptance at stations, because magic has always been the tool of choice for traveling the stars, whether through runic enchantments, witchcraft or wizardry.

In the novel, I'm likely to refer to space stations as "ports", since that's how chapter one referred to them. Just about every moon of Junas has at least one, including their own, though they'll soon find it has no connection to the surface, because the people down there are so very backward.

This will also give me a chance to give the names of some moons, in the form of potential places the sisters can visit or should avoid, which are named after the gods of the setting.

For example, Cakana is the name of the moon they orbit, which is the name of the goddess of agriculture and harvests. Cakana's chief export used to be food, before the locals decided they hated witches for being smarter than them, a story the people of this first port can tell them. I imagine the story boiling down to the following paragraph:

Farmers were brought to the world by witches, because the land was so good, but after a hundred years, the farmers came to resent being ruled by "smug, know-it-all witches that don't work a day of their lives", a direct quote from the farmers of the time. They rose up with torches and pitchforks, leading the witches to back down, due to their vows of non-violence. Aftet that, the farmers ruled themselves, cut themselves off from contact with space (that always required the witches) and over thousands of years, forgot the past.

There will be a variety of little micro-fiction stories about various moons, to explain the more prominent ones, ranging from a single sentence for something amusing, but unimportant, to several paragraphs for those that matter. I should be able to somewhat explain the setting's pantheon of gods in the process.

Episode 7

I think episode 7 will serve to establish how things work in space, probably after a six to twelve month time skip. I'll get a chance to show how the sisters earn their keep, probably by hauling cargo and building things.

I think one chapter should be dedicated to making an ordinary delivery of metal ingots, followed by a chapter about a visit to their favorite port, which probably orbits a moon inhabited by dwarves. I might go so far as to make that port an orbital tether, because dwarves always build big.

In these two chapters, I plan to sprinkle in mentions of pirates in the area, with people saying they're grateful the Dead Queen hasn't been seen in Junas orbit for a few years, though her lieutenants still harass everyone for "protection money", with each of them assigned to patrol a particular moon.

My thinking is that the Queen has been on the outskirts of the star system on some long-haul trip to capture a rebellious subordinate, so she can eat the woman's soul.

With the scene in space set, I think the chapter after that will cover the sisters accepting another delivery job, which will take them to a moon they've heard very little about, which is incidentally in neutralterritory, in orbit of a moon that has no contact with space and no port in orbit.

The job turns out to be a ruse to get the sisters out of the network of stations that are current on their "protection" fees, leading to them being attacked by one of the Dead Queen's lieutenants, a powerful witch. Unlike her boss, this one is alive.

The episode will end on some action and a cliffhanger, in which the sisters look like they might just die, to add some suspense.

Episode 8

The episode will begin with a battle between Starwitch and a pirate vessel that's probably made of rune-enchanted stained glass. The sisters will barely win, but the bottom mast will be badly damaged, which forces them to slow down.

In the next chapter, the witch they defeated will contact her boss, telling the Dead Queen all about the Blackwell sisters and I'll perhaps write something from the villain's perspective. Meanwhile, Amelia goes on a spacewalk, to make repairs.

Just as she begins addressing the damaged mast as her last repair task, the Dead Queen's monolith will show up and Amelia will lose her concentration just long enough for the broken mast to slip from her hands and drift away, which will lead into a break between chapters.

The third chapter of the episode will come back to Amelia in the present, pausing the flashback for a time. In this chapter, she'll go on another spacewalk, to adjust the way the war wagon sits inside the cargo bay, because it has technically been upside down, all along.

She'll also work to make the cargo bay hatch into a ramp for the vehicle to drive out of, when Starwitch is landed. This task will briefly involve Amelia over-taxing herself with magic, to create a bubble of partial atmosphere around the ship, since the cargo bay is pressurized.

Once her work is done, she'll briefly stare out into space and her mind will once more drift to the past.

The last chapter of the episode will show the sisters pulling out all the stops, in an attempt to out-run the Dead Queen's monolith, using all of their magic combined with the spell-core and the launch engines of Starwitch, to produce maximum thrust, but it won't be enough.

Despite the fact the monolith is practically a mountain made of granite, it will be fast enough to gain on them. In a last-ditch effort, the sisters will try to out-maneuver it, but that will also fail, because the monolith uses a set of powerful, central engines, along with a system to vector superheated steam to any exterior thruster, on any side. Effectively, the monolith's engines will bear some resemblance to those of a Harrier Jet, only far larger.

I think the sisters will start graying out from acceleration, while the monolith's crew is unaffected, because they're undead.

The episode will end with their capture, which leads directly to the opening scene of the novel, getting the reader fully up to date.

Tags: writing, work-in-progress, starwitch

Work In Progress #21: Starwitch #4

"Keep in mind that if this test fails, I'm not going to let you live." Her eyes glowed, bathing Amelia's face in red light, before she went on, "I'll get an earful form His Majesty over it, but ultimately, I can argue I acted in his best interest, because you're definitely not."

  – Lieutenant Colonel Denholm (An excerpt from Starwitch).

Starwitch is a novel about space-faring witches that I plan to release first as a web series, then for sale in online stores.

You can read short summaries of each day's writing on Mastodon.

Here's a list of previous blog entries on this work in progress novel, in order from oldest to newest:

• Starwitch #1
• Starwitch #2
• Starwitch #3

Chapter 13: Marta's Mission

Five years have passed and Marta is on a mission in the jungles between Dugaria and Skobia, along with a small squad of men that include a Lieutenant and Sergeant. Marta has been promoted to Corporal.

She's in her accustomed place in line, between the Lieutenant and Sergeant, who put her life above their own, since witches are so few, compared to regular soldiers.

Marta suspects Dugaria's claim that Skobia attacked first is total garbage, because the constitution only allows using witches for defensive purposes. Hypothetically, the claim that Skobia attacked first and refuses to give up, even though it's one-third the size, is propaganda, to allow using witches for an invasion.

Marta grows depressed and her thoughts follow this pattern:

Five years as a dog of the military. Five years as an Artillery Witch. Five years of violating the vow she'd taken as a child, leaving her feeling so dirty, no amount of soap ever made her feel clean. Five years of looking for a way out, only for no solution to present itself. She was trapped in the worst kind of nightmare, in which she took the starring role, as the monster that burned men alive.

She secretly hopes to become numb to that pain, but knows when that day comes, it will be the worst so far, because she'll know she's become nothing more than a mass-murderer.

Her thoughts are interrupted by their quiet and secret arrival at the edge of a clearing that holds an enemy fort. It's Marta's time to do her job and she begins charging a wide-area fire spell carefully tuned to burn only soldiers.

While she waits for the magic to gather in her spell, she looks on the fort, seeing some men come back from patrols looking tired, with their guard down. They're all rather young, about sixteen years old, roughly the same age as the private standing beside Marta.

She decides she can't kill them and starts draining the magic from her spell.

She flashes back to when she was thirteen years old and standing in the corner, because her mother had caught her casting a spell to give a boy pimples and boils, an offense that got Marta slapped, even though her mother had never struck her before.

They've been arguing and Marta demands to know why her Mother quietly serves the villagers, when she could use magic to make herself their ruler.

Her Mother's explanation:

"I love them. They're my friends and neighbors. I went to school with them and I deliver their babies. I agree that they're stupid and ignorant, but that will never change the fact that I love them all, aside from the Mayor, but I make an exception for him, because he's so frustrating, but he's just doing what he feels is right, even if it should be wrong."

She also points out that if she used magic to take over, then she'd never know another moment's peace and calls politics a thresher for the thumb; better to stay out of it.

Marta is forced to admit her mother has a point.

Her mother asks if Marta remembers the first thing she was taught about doctoring.

"The right way to bandage a wound?" Marta asks.

Her mother answers, "No, before that."

Marta is confused, because bandaging was first.

Still, her mother insists that something came first and Marta thinks it over, finally saying, " 'Do no harm.' "

Mother explains that Marta not only used magic to do harm, but also involved her medical training in the offense, which was the reason she got slapped.

Marta apologizes and her Mother extracts a vow that Marta will never harm anyone with magic again.

Back in the present, the Sergeant sees Marta bleeding off the power in her spell and asks, "Corporal, what's the holdup?"

Marta reasons that if she fights back and refuses to follow orders, then Amelia's plans for escape might be ruined, because Marta will be forced to serve in chains, rather than a uniform. Marta has no idea what those plans are, because Amelia has kept them to herself and asked Marta to play along with the army.

Marta reluctantly releases her spell on the people in the fort, who die screaming, burned alive. She feels no remorse and doesn't cry, despite witnessing it with hr own eyes.

Her small squad occupies the large fort, in preparation for reinforcements, who will arrive in five minutes.

Meanwhile, Marta is exhausted and dumps the ashes off a chair, so she can sit down. She realizes for the first time, ever, she didn't cry for those she's killed. At this point, she cries for the loss of her own remorse. She begins considering immolating both herself and her squad the next time she's called on to harm anyone, reasoning that will save lives.

Her skull begins vibrating to produce sound only she can hear and the voice of a witch from the WIA (Witch Intelligence Agency) back in Rimestar reaches her ears. Marta reports the success of the mission (the witch's spell is two-way).

The witch relays word that Marta's next assignment will be back home, due to some demonstration. Marta reasons that will involve one of Amelia's prototypes. Marta is glad to hear it, because she wants to have a word with Amelia; if Amelia doesn't get them out of Dugaria soon, then she'll lose her oldest sister.

The WIA witch ends the communication spell and Marta feels the eerie calm of one that's decided to end their life.

Chapter 14: Iris and Intrigue

The body of Iris floats in a sensory deprivation tank in one of the remote-viewing rooms of Fort Stand. At the same time, her mind is far away, at the front lines, where a battle recently concluded.

The area is full of bodies, most of them Skobian soldiers, who wear yellow sashes over their armor. Iris is overwhelmed by the sight, sounds and smell of the battlefield, bothered by the stench of blood and burnt human flesh.

She hears a soft cry for help and investigates, finding a Skobian soldier, who was blinded by the same explosion that took his legs off and he's blubbering about the war, asking why Dugaria refuses to let Skobia surrender.

Iris is disturbed by the implications, because she has her doubts about the propaganda the government spews out as an excuse for a witch-assisted invasion of a resource-rich neighboring country.

Just as she's considering the soldier's words, another witch steps through Iris' mental projection, briefly making her vision go out of focus, though she had a quick look through the other woman's sinus cavities, showing her mostly red, with lines for bones and blood vessels.

The witch screams, "Shut your lying mouth!" as she claps a hand on his forehead and uses magic to make his head explode!

Iris looks away, but is still disturbed to see blood rain down.

The evil witch rattles off the number 1299, then asks Iris if she'd found any more survivors, because shew wants her kill count to be a nice, round number. By way of explanation, the two of them are linked with a Bone Transduction spell, similar to the one Marta experienced with a WIA witch.

Iris has seen other survivors, but chooses to lie to Captain "Killer" Krauss, because Krauss is totally gone in the head, far too obsessed with counting her personal kills. Additionally, standing orders are to always take a few prisoners for interrogation and Iris has no desire to see more death.

Krauss runs off to find another victim and Iris returns to getting an accurate casualty count on both sides, which has been her primary responsibility, so far.

She ends her spells and emerges from the tank, reporting the numbers to her superior officer, who tells her to dry off and head for Room Nine, an infamous room surrounded by ominous rumors.

Iris obeys and knocks on the door. After identifying herself, she's ushered into a dark room lit by a single, dim candle that doesn't reveal the witches hidden around the edges of the room.

They question her for a time and Iris confirms she can not only remote-view, but also remote-hear and remote-smell while she's at it.

They test her by tricking her into remote-viewing the men's washroom, which makes her go bright red, but she confirms her ability to smell the other room by revealing the men are using lavender soap.

Next, Captain Denholm and a witch general in a black uniform step into the light, beginning a discussion that Iris doesn't quite follow, as they talk about the King of Skobia and his court vizier, a wizard of no small reputation.

The old General orders Iris to remote-view the washroom again and orders her to try picking up a bar of soap. She does so and much to her surprise, it works. She lifts it high into the air and the men run screaming from the room, a commotion that can be heard in the halls.

Iris is initially pleased to learn she has the power to remote-touch, which has never been seen before.

She's ordered to rest for the night, because she'll be working rather hard for some new training in the morning.

She asks if she can be told the purpose and Captain Denholm reveals the plan is for Iris to kill King Bayard of Skobia, without going anywhere near him. She's hopeful Iris will be able to reach into his chest, to crush his heart.

Iris heads home, as ordered, but about halfway there, she begins to cry, totally unable to stop, because they're finally going to force her to kill, against her vows.

Chapter 15: Amelia Assembles

Amelia sneaks out of her bedroom using a knotted rope, meeting her chief assistant, Dawkin, on the ground. Amelia is totally oblivious of the fact, but Dawkin is in love with her.

He tells her Hobard is busy on the other side of the house, dealing with a group of drunks that were anonymously given free beer, a key to the front gate and an invitation to party there.

As it turns out, Amelia has been trying to give Hobard and the house servants the slip for more than a week, because they've gotten really problematic, continually following her around.

When her basic training was complete, Amelia was sent home to work as a military contractor against her will, with the task of producing a horseless, armored war wagon.

Lately, however, Amelia has come to think of the house staff as her enemies, because she doesn't pay them and even if she fires them, they're immediately replaced, all on top of the fact they're effectively spying on nearly every move she makes.

The two of them sneak off to a corner of the property where Amelia had a granite tower of exceptional height built (probably about 70 meters tall and 11 wide), to serve as her private sanctuary, where she supposedly experiments with magic and therefore everyone is supposed to keep out.

Amelia opens the custom combination lock she built and they step inside. The interior is obviously mortared almost everywhere, except along two tooth-like lines on either side, where the tower is instead joined with steel plates.

Stairs run upward along the interior, but the center of the large, open space is filled with a slightly smaller tower of gleaming, brushed metal, which is Starwitch. One side toward the bottom and facing the door has a panel off, revealing an empty cavity, which a wooden ramp gives access to. Inside the cavity, tracks might allow rolling something inside and a hook on a chain dangles, presumably for lifting.

Amelia and Dawkin spend most of the night working, because Starwitch isn't quite ready to launch. Amelia decides to bring the other apprentices in to finish the project, because there's very little time left before the next demonstration of a prototype war wagon.

Dawkin is sent off with the plans for Starwitch in hand, so the others can study them, before laying hands on the vehicle.

Amelia heads back to her room in the predawn light and hides the rope under the floorboards. She turns in, hoping to get a couple hours of sleep, but she's woken an hour later.

Apparently, there was a big ruckus in the night (drunks with lots of free beer), but the sheriff is convinced the sisters were being targeted.

Amelia dresses for the day and sends the man off with no extra information, while suppressing laughter.

Iris can read her far better than the servants and questions her in the hall as they head to the dining room. Amelia reassures her sister that it was just a distraction.

Iris asks to have a private word with Amelia and informs her that Marta wants the same, additionally telling Amelia their sister will be back that afternoon.

Amelia agrees to speak with them both and that's the end of the conversation, though she can tell Iris is extremely upset.

Chapter 16: Starwitch

The sisters head to Amelia's tower for their family meeting. Hobard tries to follow them, but Amelia orders him to leave them alone, going so far as to say he hovers too much.

Their butler looks mildly offended, but obeys, because if he defies their orders, it will give away the fact he's been spying on them, all along.

The sisters enter the tower, then bar the door.

Iris gets things going by asking what Starwitch is.

Amelia names the rocket and explains it's both their method of escape from Dugaria and possibly, their new home.

Marta asks when it will be ready and explains that she plans to immolate herself rather than burning another target for the army.

Her sisters are stunned by her words for a time and Iris goes next, saying she's being trained to kill remote targets with magic, because she has a unique talent for remote-touch, which is an extension of remote-viewing magic. Her intent is to kill Captain Denholm, then the old general witch if they ever order her to harm someone with magic. Needless to say, that's not likely to end well and Iris is unlikely to win the fight.

Amelia apologizes for how long her plan has taken and the things her sisters have been forced to endure. She tells them Starwitch will be ready after one more all-nighter, at least with all her apprentices helping.

However, she'll need a distraction. Marta decides she'll get drunk and trash the house, a mess no butler or maid could resist dealing with. This also has the advantage of being somewhat expected, because Marta has been obviously depressed for a long time.

They discuss Hobard and Amelia is told by Iris that he's military, a fact she figured out ages ago, as are the other house servants. In essence, they've been in a gilded cage all along.

This leads to a discussion of how dense Amelia can be, considering how intelligent she is, and her sisters tease her a bit about Dawkin being in love with her, though she doesn't quite grasp their meaning, because they don't spell it out; they want to see what happens without too much interference.

However, Marta does suggest Amelia look at Dawkin with the eyes of a woman, rather than those of an engineer or witch.

They begin discussing the escape plan and Amelia begins with a tour of Starwitch.

After a scene break, they're in the last of the living spaces, near the bottom of the rocket, where Marta asks why what's obviously supposed to be the floor is currently serving as a wall.

Amelia gives a poor explanation and says they'll have to make their own gravity, in flight. The short version is that the rocket is pointing straight up, just for launch.

Iris interrupts by demanding, "What is this thing? I can sense incredible magic pouring from it!"

Iris points at a device set into the middle of the wall that currently serves as the floor. It's made of gleaming metal, with six long rods linking thirty metal plates together. Each of the plates is crammed full of runes and yes, the whole thing radiates incredible magic.

Amelia begins explaining the "spell-core", as she calls it, trying to leap into a technobabble-filled explanation, though her sisters get her to explain more simply. It's a runic enchantment designed to cast arbitrary spells based on the imagination of a human that touches the top plate, which has a magic circle etched into it.

The whole thing is made of five pounds of a rare, magic metal called mythril, which continually draws magic into itself from its surroundings. storing it away for future use. Effectively, the spell-core is a magic battery that will allow even Amelia to cast powerful spells, if needed.

Her sisters are concerned by the very idea and Amelia further explains that she made it to only work for the Blackwell sisters, which reassures them.

With that out of the way, Marta points out a wheel of cheese and some milk sitting in the corner, which appears to have been nibbled by rats. Amelia quickly kneels beside it and removes the note her sisters hadn't noticed yet, which had been on top of the cheese.

The note reads as:

"This milk and cheese is an offering to any Brownies that would like a home. Feel free to eat and drink as much as you like. I'll get more cheese when it runs out, but won't be able to get you more milk."

Amelia puts her finger to her lips, calling for silence. She finds a tiny hand print in the cheese, where a Brownie braced themselves against it, to tear a chunk off. Amelia does some math based on the size and concludes Brownies are no more than three inches tall.

She silently shows her sisters the hand print and they smile, because they were all aware their home in Daleshade had at least one Brownie, which their mother always fed dairy products to, though no one ever saw it/them. As a result, their shoes were always in good repair, every morning, regardless of the state they were in at bedtime.

Iris and Marta openly mock Amelia for her strange habit of feeding "rats". From this point on, when the sisters talk about rats, they'll be talking about the Brownie(s) in code, to avoid offending them, because Brownies won't stay if they're openly talked about.

The sisters begin the long climb back up and out.

Chapter 17: Final Touches

Marta spends the night drinking all the wine she can get her hands on, while kept sober by an enchanted necklace Amelia made for her, which features amethysts.

The necklace magically keeps her sober, but also makes her increasingly clumsy, the more she drinks, allowing her to play the part well, without forgetting her job.

She's been smashing furniture, due to her natural strength and the clumsiness, while Hobard has stood ready to refill her glass, though he keeps trying to sneak out of the room.

In the end, Marta demands that he dance with her and he reluctantly joins her atop a table. Marta whirls him around at high speed, intentionally making herself sick.

As she starts to cough, Marta holds him very tight and vomits down his backside, ruining his uniform and filling his shoes! She lets him go, stumbles, then falls backwards, which breaks the legs off the table!

Hobard falls into the vomit puddle, then rises, ineffectually wiping himself off.

Marta rises, claiming she feels better, then shouts for more wine!

Before he storms off, Hobard shouts, "I don't care what the military does to me, no one should have to endure this kind of abuse! I quit!"

Marta is extremely amused that the man broke his cover as she grabs the bottle of wine and heads for a new room, because the one she's in has become a little too dangerous for bare feet.

Meanwhile, Amelia and her apprentices are hard at work putting final touches on Starwitch, while they fill the rocket's various water tanks.

As Amelia works in the witchpit to mount the scrying crystals used for viewing outside the rocket, Dawkin reports to her that the tanks will be full in a matter of minutes.

Amelia steps beside him and takes a moment to follow Marta's advice, looking at the man as a woman.

She has a strong desire she doesn't understand, to get closer to him, and as she leans toward him, he closes his eyes and slightly puckers his lips. Amelia follows suit and leans even closer, curious to learn what her unexplored feelings mean...

The moment is ruined by one of Amelia's female apprentices climbing the ladder, to tell her the water tanks are full.

With the moment ruined, they get back to work.

After a scene break, Amelia gets back to her bedroom and prepares for bed, in the hopes of getting an hour of sleep, despite the fact dawn is happening outside. Unfortunately, her hopes are dashed by a knock on the door.

The Head of Housekeeping informs her that Hobard quit in the night, along with most of the night staff, due to Hurricane Marta's behavior. Amelia is occupied dealing with the consequences, until Iris takes over for her, because Amelia has a busy day of work ahead.

Amelia goes to her workshop, where her apprentices work to unpack the crate of tires that just arrived and the war wagon is described.

It's effectively a four-seat car with armored plating that's angled to maximize thickness against projectiles from the front and rear. Currently, it lacks side armor, because the tires still need mounting and the plates are intended to protect the wheel wells.

It has four "spring-gonnes", which are basically guns that used springs to launch round stone or metal bullets. Three fire bullets weighing just ounces, while the big one mounted on the roof uses one pound projectiles. All are cocked by the vehicle's steam engine and they're semi-automatic.

Each seat has a weapon, with the driver's being fixed to face forward, while two face forward and back, able to turn up to 45 degrees to either side. The big one, however, uses a periscope with a trigger for aiming and firing. It faces forward, but is able to turn ninety degrees to either side.

Amelia dons some gloves and gets to work.

Chapter 18: The Demonstration

Incidentally, in writing this chapter, I decided that Captain Denholm needed to be a Lieutenant Colonel, so she could out-rank Captain Krauss, which required me to edit several previous chapters.

Amelia is unable to sleep, due to nervousness/excitement about the coming day and rises early. She wastes a little time around the house, checking into preparations for the lunch party the sisters are supposed to host, even though Amelia has no intention of sticking around that long.

Eventually, she heads out to the workshop, where most of her apprentices are finally taking a break, after spending all night putting final touches on the war wagon, because this one isn't destined to explode and it needs to work right on the first try.

Dawkin, on the other hand, is buffing the wagon's armor, to make it shine.

Amelia has another quiet moment with Dawkin and very nearly kisses him, but the same young, female apprentice as last time interrupts.

Amelia thanks them all for her work and asks if they've made the preparations she asked of them.

Dawkin reports that all the plans for Amelia's inventions are secure in the carriage she gave him, which is the same wagon that Amelia's father turned into a mobile house, though Amelia has since made it horseless.

The female apprentice reports that Amelia's old portable workshop has a few of their families crammed into it, along with all the steam engines from the workshop. They're ready to go.

Another reports they're ready to drive the tractor away, which has been hitched to a large wagon, full of the rest of their families. He says his sister has the backup copies of Amelia's plans.

Amelia orders them to get on the road. The intent is for them to get themselves to Skobia, where they'll meet up and offer to build Amelia's war wagon for the other side, because nothing about the war has been just (Dugaria attacked Skobia for resources, then lied about it, to justify using conscripted witches offensively).

Once more, Amelia and Dawkin have a quiet little moment, in which they nearly kiss, but this time, Marta is the one to interrupt, because Colonel Denholm is getting impatient, having sent a messenger.

In the next scene, Dawkin is on a horse, which is hitched to the war wagon. It can move under its own power, but it's supposed to be publicly tested in front of the top brass.

Meanwhile, the Blackwell sisters are inside, talking.

They first discuss the fact that Captain Krauss will be at the demonstration and Iris reacts with naked terror, claiming the woman is a blood witch.

As it turns out, witches with a talent for manipulating blood are the reason witches are feared and reviled, because a blood witch's powers react to their emotions, usually in a violent, explosive manner. This normally leads a young girl just coming into her magic powers to accidentally kill people, followed by the realization they're to blame.

Most turn their powers inward at that point, due to the emotion of such a thought and tend to self-destruct, but a very few survive. The rarest of them become healers, but the rest tend to become serial killers.

Krauss just happened to be in a country that's willing to make use of a deranged whack-job whose only talent is murder, or she would have been hunted down and burned at the stake, most likely by other witches. Aside from that awfulness, Krauss is also fond of fire and probably a pyromaniac.

The fact that should terrify everyone, however, is that Denholm keeps the woman on a short leash, which indicates she's even more powerful, likely capable of killing Krauss with ease.

In the end, Iris decides she'll try to hold off Krauss, while the plan has always been for Marta to hold off Denholm. Amelia takes the wheel (Iris was originally supposed to drive).

Iris requests, "Remind me why we didn't just launch in the night? This is starting to sound like a bad plan."

Amelia reminds them that the apprentices have to get to Skobia and the longer the delay, the further away they'll get, quite possibly ahead of rumor. She also says their Mother would never approve of the way they've probably made things worse, so they have to at least try to help Skobia.

They arrive at the field set aside for the test, which is next to Fort Stand. Folding chairs are occupied by some rather senior military personnel, including Captain Krauss, Lieutenant Colonel Denholm and the old General that's been training Iris to kill with remote-touch.

While Dawkin removes the hitching mechanism linking the front axle to the horse, Amelia exits the vehicle and salutes her superior officers. Denholm rises and this scene happens:

The Lieutenant Colonel returned the salute and gave Amelia an icy glare as she spoke loud enough for the crowd to hear, "This is your last chance, Private Blackwell. You've been given rather more latitude than I'm comfortable with, due to the potential of the weapon you've promised His Highness, but the King's patience is growing thin." She looked over Amelia's shoulder, to the wagon, "Are you quite certain you need your sisters for this demonstration? I'm almost certain they're not actually required."

"You weren't here for the previous two tests!" Amelia protested, "Iris is always calm under pressure and quick enough to pull me out if I freeze, and Marta is powerful enough to control the blast if the engine becomes unstable! I need them both, or I could die!"

"Very well," Denholm nodded, apparently accepting the lies, "but one more catastrophic failure and your new home will feature chains and bars, at the very deepest portion of the King's most vile dungeon."

"I've done my best to please the King," Amelia bowed her head, "but compact steam engines can be quite volatile and difficult to stabilize. After recent research, however, I think I know what's been going wrong and this one will do…better…" Amelia trailed off in the face of the intense glare the taller woman gave her.

"So you say," Denholm leaned until she towered over Amelia, forcing the small woman to look straight up as Denholm hissed so quietly no one but them might hear the rest of her words, "but I don't believe you. You think you're always the smartest woman in the room, you smug, little-" Denholm sharply cursed in Amelia's face, spittle landing on her cheeks, "but I'm on to you and the King agrees you've rope enough to hang yourself with, so if you'd like to make any final adjustments, to assure this prototype works, now's the time. Keep in mind that if this test fails, I'm not going to let you live." Her eyes glowed, bathing Amelia's face in red light, before she went on, "I'll get an earful from His Majesty over it, but ultimately, I can argue I acted in his best interest, because you're definitely not."

Amelia gulped and quietly nodded as she slowly backed away, though their eyes remained locked. Before Amelia finally dared to look away, Denholm gave her a sick smile that was full of menace and anticipation very like that of a hunter, just before a good kill.

Dawkin drags her attention away from the scary Colonel by asking if she needs anything else.

Feeling close to the edge, emotionally speaking, Amelia grabs Dawkin and kisses him, because it's her last chance, leading to a pair of paragraphs that speak for themselves:

It was a moment that was both short and sweet, but which also seemed to stretch into a subjective eternity, because it was charged with magic beyond that of anything Amelia had ever experienced, making actual magic feel like a cheap stage magician's trick by comparison, while the kiss she shared with Dawkin felt like the genuine article.

When the kiss ended, Dawkin gave Amelia a huge smile and planted a kiss of his own on her lips, which went on far longer than the first, leaving Amelia feeling absolutely giddy with delight, as if her blood had lost all its weight and become lighter than air, threatening to lift her into the sky. In short, it was even more magical than the first.

In the wagon, her sisters are happy Amelia finally figured it out, but sad they can't take Dawkin with them.

Denholm and Krauss, on the other hand, are not amused and also somewhat annoyed, but the witch General seated beside them tells them to lighten up, because if things go wrong with the demonstration, then Amelia will never see the man again and they should give her a little slack, since the King wants her jailed in that case.

Dawkin and Amelia both say, "I love you" and Dawkin rides the horse away. As soon as he's around the wall, he urges it into a gallop, because he needs to put as much distance between himself and Rimestar as he can.

Amelia gets into the wagon, in tears over the loss of what she only just realized she had. The sisters discuss the possibility of taking Dawkin with them, but Amelia defeats their arguments with logic she hates: the other apprentices aren't as skilled and they need him to rebuild the war wagon on a reasonable time scale, the only way Skobia might hold their own in the war.

Amelia wipes away her tears and starts the engine. The wagon runs flawlessly and they demonstrate the smaller weapons on some defenseless wood cutouts of Skobian soldiers. The big spring-gonne is tested on a small brick wall, which it obliterates. They make a victory lap around the field at a slow pace, then go round the corner of the fort instead of stopping, then accelerate away!

Seeing them flee, Denholm and Krauss use broomsticks to fly after them and the two decide to kill the Blackwell sisters as traitors, because they're stealing the King's property (the war wagon). They dive for an attack run!

Tags: writing, work-in-progress, starwitch

Available for Pre-Order: The Inverted Glass

The Ebook of the fifth and final volume of The Wizard's Scion is now available for pre-order and will be released on December 13. Sadly, it took far longer than I originally planned for, but better late than never, I suppose.

In the bad news column, I'm now lacking the services of a professional artist, though I'm waiting on a reply from another I contacted. In the neutral column, I made this cover myself, by heavily leaning into metaphors for the plot. I used public domain vector art and a nice nebula image from the James Webb Space Telescope, if I remember correctly. Someday, the art may be replaced with something better. In the good news column, the advantage of this new approach is that you'll be seeing my novels published far faster than in the past.

The wraparound cover for the print edition of The Inverted Glass is my next side project, which I'll probably be able to finish tomorrow.

The omnibus edition of The Wizard's Scion should also be coming soon, but I have to assemble a set of metaphors that work with the art available to me with my admittedly not-great art creations skills. I'm primarily a cut and paste artist, but I've got a good eye for both visual metaphors and art in general, so it's just a matter of time before I find something that works.

I hope to get through the majority of my backlog of novels in the next couple of months. In particular, I'll be starting final editing of the prequel series, Sky Children, later this week, since I already have the artwork done for the first two books. The second book will follow shortly after. The third book will have to wait until later, because it's still badly in need of a total rewrite.

In short, keep your eyes peeled and hang onto your seat, because things are about to significantly speed up.

Without further adieu, I present to you:

The Inverted Glass

Buy This Book The Steel Wizard, Captain Levi Jacobs, is woken in the night by his pregnant wife, with happy news their child is coming, but joy becomes tragedy as she dies in childbirth. Reeling from this loss, he vows to raise their daughter to be a strong hero, just like her mother, but even that fleeting comfort is stolen from the bittersweet moment as the poor infant struggles to breathe and dies in his arms!

Reeling at the loss, he staggers from one defeat to the next, slowly losing everything else he cares about.

Finally, after a particularly traumatic defeat at the hands of a new enemy, followed by a prolonged kidnapping involving the forced administration of narcotics to make him complaint, he lies in the infirmary of his ship, grief-stricken and struggling with addiction withdrawal. Just when he’s at an all-time low, he’s offered a ray of unusual hope, reminded that he once witnessed his future self travel through time.

Armed with this memory, he focuses to unlock the secrets of temporal magic, intent on undoing months of terrible events, only to find it’s not so easy, because he has to fight to gain the approval of the Moirai, better known as the Three Fates and speaking with them is no easy task.

Can Levi change history or will all that he loves remain forever lost in the past?

The cover of the novel has multiple meanings:

First, a certain troll swordswoman is back, in the form of both a summoned ghost and an inadvertently summoned demon, one good, the other evil. That's what the figures in the hourglass are about.

Meanwhile, the good one is deeply concerned about the final destination of her soul, because the necromancer, Cha'da, summoned her away from the afterlife during her personal judgment day, just as her heart was being weighed against a feather.

Second, the protagonist, Levi, has a harrowing time trying to get back everything he's lost, using time travel. The hourglass also serves as a reference to that. This last of Levi's adventures reveals how he's judged by the Three Fates, all because he tried to change history without first asking permission. In the end, he somehow has to balance the scales and justify his actions in order to change history.

Both character go through some very rough times along the way, but I find the ending of this one to be the most emotionally satisfying of the series.

I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I have.

Tags: writing, publishing, the-wizards-scion

Work In Progress #20: Starwitch #3

"Do not test me, ladies. I am the very best war witch this country has ever produced. I would find it particularly easy to blow this entire house to splinters, followed by telekinetically dragging the three of you away."

  – Captain Scarth Denholm, an excerpt from Starwitch.

Starwitch is a novel about space-faring witches that I plan to release first as a web series, then for sale in online stores.

You can read short summaries of each day's writing on Mastodon.

Here's a list of previous blog entries on this work in progress novel, in order from oldest to newest:

• Starwitch #1
• Starwitch #2

Chapter 8: Parting Ways

Amelia lies in her bed, aching all over. She's resting to heal, but her mind is quite busy. She still has no option for cushioning wheels, but an alternative has occurred to her: an airship.

The only trouble with that is her best bet for lifting an airship into the air is 'metal phlogiston', which is better known in the modern world as hydrogen, but she's concerned about the explosive qualities of the gas.

After a knock at the door, Mrs. Maccle enters. She expresses her concern for Amelia's health, but when Amelia tells her it's just bruises, her expression doesn't change.

Mrs. Maccle explains that Amelia has been accused of witchcraft. The older woman also reveals that she's a witch, though even weaker than Amelia. This admission earns the older woman even greater trust from Amelia. As it turns out, the mayor's wife has been subtly guiding the locals toward greater tolerant, but this backfired with Amelia, because it was too much, too soon.

Mrs. Maccle says she'll delay things as much as she can and her husband will investigate the accusation, but ultimately find Amelia and her sisters innocent, though they both know that won't be enough. However, it will be plenty of time for the Blackwell family to pack up and leave, before a mob can take action.

Mrs. Maccle tells Amelia of a far off country to the west, beyond the ominously named mountain range known as 'The Burning Slopes', which is presumably volcanically active.

Dugaria, as the nation is named, is (in)famous for publicly accepting witches, though she knows nothing more about it. The journey will take months if they cross the volcanic range or as much as a year, if they go around.

Mrs. Maccle wishes there was more she could do for them and Amelia smiles, because she's gotten an idea, suggesting the mayor's wife can help them some more by buying a bit more time.

In the next scene, Marta is on the roof of Amelia's warehouse/workshop, surreptitiously watching a mob that's gathered by the front door to protest the presence of an accused witch.

Marta heads back inside after reading their signs and hearing them shout about burning witches. She joins Amelia, Iris, their Father and Mrs. Maccle in working on a crude airship that's little more than a big, flat platform with a railing and a building in the middle, though there's enough room for the family's vehicles at either end.

The whole thing is on wheels and has a steam engine that can drive it on the ground or run a pair of propellors.

They finish structurally reinforcing it and Amelia asks Mrs. Maccle to open the back doors.

The ship is rolled outside and Iris ties it off to prepared stakes, while Amelia gets the process of filling the gas bag started. Marta and their father prepare to catch the bag as it unfolds, to avoid punctures, since they've only got one shot at this.

Mrs. Maccle heads off to join her husband, the sheriff and eight of his largest men on the other side of the building.

To serve as a distraction, the sheriff approaches the mob and demands to see their permit for the public gathering. The conversation with the leader of the mob (a lawyer, by the way) implies they don't have one and as they go back and forth about the current situation, people from the mob begin sneaking away.

They argue the merits of whether Amelia is a witch or not, because "Oh my, she flew!" The mayor tosses a paper airplane (they would probably call it a paper bird) through the air and makes a rather logical argument that what Amelia did was a scaled up version of the same. He even insists there was no magic, just science.

There's more arguing as, in the background, the gas bag inflates and Amelia does some work on the control fins attached to it, though the mob is fortunately to distracted to notice.

Again, the matter of the permit is raised by the sheriff, including a threat to arrest everyone. More of the crowd peels off, while the sheriff's men start circling the crowd.

The leader of the mob accuses the mayor and the sheriff of a conspiracy to help a witch (amusingly, this is quite true), but he makes the mistake of jabbing the sheriff with a finger.

She sheriff turns that finger into a serious point of pain and arrests the man for a variety of charges: assaulting an officer of the watch, disturbing the peace, incitement to riot and conspiracy to murder an innocent woman, a circumvention of justice.

The sheriff's men arrest what little remains of the mob.

Meanwhile, the airship takes to the air, flying west. The mayor asks his wife if she knows where they're headed. She tells him they're going to Dugaria, where they hope they'll be accepted, and he groans.

Mrs. Maccle loses some confidence as she asks, "Witches are accepted in Dugaria, aren't they?"

Her husband's response is chilling: "Only because the government uses them as weapons!"

Sadly, Mrs. Maccle hadn't heard that part of the rumors.

Unfortunately, it's far too late to warn the Blackwell family.

Chapter 9: Burning Slopes

Amelia's airship, Airwitch, has been in the air for about two and a half days and with Amelia at the helm at dawn, she finally spots The Burning Slopes, which live up to their name.

The mountain range is a line of volcanoes, which are currently not violently erupting, though lava pours down the sides of some. I think of this similar to the volcanoes of Hawaii, which have been mildly active for generations.

Amelia is concerned about the danger of going over them in an airship that's lifted by explosive hydrogen gas, though the alternative of going around will take at least a month, if not longer, because they'll have to fight against the west-blowing prevailing wind they've been riding so far, if they turn.

They have a family meeting in which Amelia explains her concerns and calls for a vote. She votes to go around the mountains.

Their father abstains from voting, to avoid a potential tie. As a male born to a family of witches, Tim is quite used to letting the women in his life take charge.

Marta votes to go over, because their map shows no civilization anywhere nearby (too many volcanoes, which can be far more active on the moon of a gas giant, compared to Earth) and they only have a month's rations.

Iris agrees, because while they could theoretically forage for food, their mother trained them in a totally different kind of terrain than they've been flying over.

Amelia doesn't like the decision, but accepts it and pushes the engine to maximum power, because she wants to get over the volcanoes as fast as possible, even at the cost of wasting water. She aims them between a pair of volcanoes that seem less active than the others, to maximize safety.

As Airwitch passes between a pair of volcanoes, one of them begins to erupt, but it's too late for Amelia to turn aside, lest she crash the airship into one of them!

Lava pours down the side and pools in the valley beneath Airwitch, producing a powerful updraft that carries them to a dangerous altitude that threatens to make the gas bag brittle enough to burst, because it's only cotton fabric coated and sealed with rubber.

Iris takes the helm, while Marta starts climbing a knotted rope to reach the top of the gas bag, where an emergency valve can be used to release some of the hydrogen, which would reduce their buoyancy. Amelia heads inside, in preparation to refill the gas bag, once they're out of danger.

As it turns out, their father, Tim, hasn't been taking a turn at the helm, because he's scared of all the controls, too nervous to ever touch them. Amelia has been taking his turns, despite the fact she has so much work to do on the ship.

Due to this fact, the system designed to re-compress the hydrogen for later reuse isn't done, forcing this crazy emergency procedure. Thus, he feels responsible.

Tim punches Marta, leaving her lying on the deck with a dislocated jaw (Tim doesn't know his own strength and that was definitely unintended). He climbs in her place and releases some of the hydrogen, while Iris shouts to direct him, though she thinks she's talking to Marta. They lose most of their altitude, until they're just hundreds of feet above the treetops of a jungle.

During his climb back down, Iris and Amelia begin refilling the gas bag and the sudden change in acceleration causes Tim loses his grip on the rope! As he falls to his death, he says a final prayer to the Gods for the safety of his daughters, feeling content his final act in life was saving their lives.

Amelia emerges from the interior, finding Marta lying on the deck, unable to speak. Amelia takes the place of Iris at the helm and Iris treats Marta's injury with a mixture of doctoring and a healing potion. Naturally, putting Marta's jaw back in place produces a scream of agony.

Marta explains what happened and Amelia despairs, because she knows the fall wasn't survivable.

Iris runs to the back of the ship and looks the way they came, hoping to see her father, desperate for a chance to rescue him, but the volcano's eruption has gotten worse and the jungle is aflame. It would not be safe to go back, forcing them to leave their father behind.

Iris collapses and sobs. Marta scoops Iris up in her arms (remember, she's a big woman, built like a lumberjack) and carries her to the front of Airwitch, where the sisters mourn together.

Chapter 10: The Welcome Village

After a day's travel and almost 700 miles crossed, the sisters come to a small village and tether Airwitch to some trees, via a grappling hook.

The villagers stare up as Amelia looks down and one of them asks, "Are you a witch?"

She initially says "No, I'm an engineer!", but the man's wife says they like witches and when Amelia's sisters join her at the railing, they vote to be honest and Amelia admits they're witches.

The villagers were initially nervous about the airship, but the moment Amelia admits she's a witch, they go back to their business, as if women flying around in airships was normal.

They're invited to a lunch of fish and something akin to spinach in the tiny hovel that serves as the couple's home. The man is named Davit and he's the village administrator. He turns out to be very friendly and eager to convince the sisters to settle in the village, because they've been looking for a witch for years.

He shows them the house the villagers have built for their future witch and it turns out to be a rather wonderful home, a small mansion, in fact. His people have been living as paupers, so they can afford to make some lucky witch exceptionally comfortable.

He claims the "humble home" is the best they can do, but it's larger than the one the sisters grew up in!

Amelia questions him about this and he claims the sisters are likely to find far better living arrangements in a larger city.

They ask why Davit's people would put themselves out for a witch like this and he explains:

"When a witch is needed, but there isn't one available, people suffer. Witches heal and brew potions. They help others, because that’s what witches do." Davit bowed his head, "With a witch in the village, we would prosper and know great peace. Witches are a blessing from the Gods."

After a few days to relax and mourn the loss of their father, Amelia and her sisters move on, intent on traveling Dugaria to find a good place to settle down (the village is nice, but too poor for their liking).

Davit gives them a map of the nation to help them on their way.

Chapter 11: A New Home

Six months later, Amelia wakes and walks the halls of the mansion she bought in Rimestar, the capitol of Dugaria. Servants greet her in the halls and she has breakfast with her sisters, while waited on by their butler.

Amelia had no need for such a large house, but bought it for the 40 aches of fenced yard and the location, outside the city, though still within easy reach.

She also had no need for servants, but their salaries (aside from the gardeners) are paid for by the city, as an added incentive for witches to settle in the city.

Her sisters have been working in a local hospital, as doctors/healers. There was a big accident and tending to the injured kept them up all night, so once they're done eating, they head off to bed, for some long-overdue sleep.

Amelia heads out to her workshop, which is on the land she bought. She checks over the construction work taking place at one end. The place is ready to be used, but not finished, since Amelia wants enough room to work on rockets intended to get her to orbit.

She briefly checks on her apprentices, who work on small devices intended for sale in the local market, then heads for the corner dedicated to her current project: Blackbird II. The aircraft is nearly finished and the custom tires arrived the night before.

Vulcanized rubber is the big innovation of Dugaria, something Amelia has been studying, though she's not quite up to the level of the local craftsman that made the tires for her plane.

She cracks open the crate holding the tires and checks them over, quite pleased. She begins working mount them.

Amelia is happy and content to be accepted and beloved by the locals. She's also happy to have so many amazing resources available to her. She reflects on the fact her sisters are also doing well, both of whom have been getting attention from men.

Amelia has also been catching the eye of hopeful young men, but she's always too lost in thought to notice.

However, despite how much Amelia loves Dugaria, she's been cautious about her greatest secrets, including runic enchantments, though that's is mostly a matter of her life-long habit of hiding her magic.

Amelia's work is interrupted by Hobard, the chief butler, who informs her that she and her sisters have guests that insisted on seeing all three of them.

Chapter 12: Assignments

Amelia goes with Hobard and is led to the sitting room.

One of the couches is occupied by a woman in a dark green army uniform and a matching pointed hat, marking her as both a soldier and a witch. Her collar bears a captain's insignia, with the addition of a little, pointed hat, because a witch always has greater authority than any non-witch of the same rank.

Seated opposite the woman are Iris and Marta, who were woken for the meeting. Amelia sits between them.

The military witch introduces herself as Captain Scarth Denholm. She goes on to tell them Dugaria is now at war. By law and declaration of the King, all citizen witches have been conscripted into the army.

Iris objects, saying they've taken a vow of non-violence.

Amelia claims they never agreed to that and the Captain hands her a copy of the constitution of Dugaria. Amelaia reads and learns that they automatically became citizens when they became home/land owners. This is the reason Dugaria gives free homes and land to witches. Amelia reads further, learning the King does have the right to conscript witches, whenever needed for the protection of Dugaria.

Marta demands to know what happens if they refuse, leading to a scene that speaks for itself:

The military woman leaned forward and her hat produced a looming shadow over her face as her eyes glowed like those of a demon, a deep, red shade, like glowing blood, "Do not test me, ladies." Her icy tone was heavy with the promise of dangerous icebergs that could sink a ship, "I am the very best war witch this country has ever produced. I would find it particularly easy to blow this entire house to splinters, followed by telekinetically dragging the three of you away." Her eyes stopped glowing and she leaned back in the couch, "However, that would be tedious," she glanced around herself, eyeing the fine furniture and the many paintings on the walls, "and an insult to the many witches that lived in this house before the three of you.

"Oh, and even if you think you might be able to overpower me with your combined magic, keep this little tidbit in mind: outside, the other six witches of my coven stand ready to support me and each of them is at least two-thirds as powerful as I am, all of them military trained for battle. No little hedge witch could possibly win such a fight, and three would fare no better."

Amelia's eyes narrowed with anger, "So we're to be dogs of the military, whether we like it or not?"

The captain sighed, "Ladies, this isn't much different from the men of this country, many of whom are having a similar conversation, right now, though that's determined by random chance. To make up for the fact that all witches are being conscripted, the King is offering commensurate rewards. The pay is excellent and you'll have whatever materials you desire for personal magical research. Just about anything can be within reach for a military witch. We have but to ask, especially since we're going to war."

"But we have to be the King's magical assassins, right?" Iris glared, her voice filling with contempt.

"If that's where your talents lie." Captain Denholm stood and went on, "So, ladies, what will it be? Do you come quietly, or do we brawl?" Again, her eyes glowed and she smiled, revealing a wild expression that hinted the woman was secretly hoping for a fight.

Waves of murderous intent carried by magic charged the air and the men behind her took a couple steps back.

Marta stood and hung her head, "It would seem we have no choice."

"What about our vow of non-violence?" Iris also stood, but remained slightly defiant.

Denholm shrugged, "Another casualty of war, I suppose, but you'll serve, either way. Go quietly and you won’t have to wear chains."

In the end, the sisters go quietly, because it's obvious they're no match for Captain Denholm. She leads them to Fort Stand, a military post just outside the city, where their magical talents will be tested and they'll receive their assignments.

While the sisters are busy being tested, Captain Denholm returns to their property and Hobard is revealed to be a secret military spy, as are the rest of the house servants.

Hobard leads her to Amelia's airship, inside the workshop, and it's taken away, for study and to ensure the main characters don't fly away. Little does Denholm know, the steam engines have all been removed to power the machines of the workshop (Denholm doesn't even know what a steam engine is) and the canisters of hydrogen have been emptied for the sake of safety, making it totally useless.

The sisters finish testing totally soaked in sweat, because they were pushed to their absolute limits. They're lined up along with six other witches, to hear the results and receive assignments.

Marta's greatest magical talents lie in Fire and Earth magic. Her assignment is to become a front-line Artillery Witch.

Iris has talents for long-range Sensory and Communication magic. Her assignment can't be spoken publicly, implying she'll be doing something secretive, perhaps intelligence work. The other witches glare at Iris with envy, because whatever her assignment will be, they think it's going to be a cushy one.

Amelia is declared to basically have no particular talent for magic and lacks power, a fact she already knew.

Denholm doesn't quite know what to do with her and asks, "What talents besides magic do you possess?"

Amelia answers honestly, by saying she's an engineer, a builder of machines, particularly vehicles, like her airship.

Denholm is shocked by this and briefly loses her composure.

They discuss her airship and Amelia points out the fact she used science to make it fly, rather than magic.

The Captain is quiet for a time, before she assigns Amelia to the basic physical training every War Witch receives, saying she'll have to discuss Amelia's final assignment with her superiors.

Amelia quietly makes up her mind to escape Dugaria, but since they're in the center of the country and will surely be watched, that will not be easy. She hopes to distract people with technobabble and accomplish her true goals behind the backs of those watching her.

Current Progress

Starwitch is about one-quarter finished, with the first three episodes of material in a rough draft state. So far, I'm averaging about one episode a week. I've written about 33,000 words, so far.

This piece will probably end up at 120,000 words or less. Early chapters were heavy with descriptive detail and I was forced to write longer chapters (3,000+ words), due to how intricate everything Amelia builds is, but now that things are starting to move along with more action and slightly less science/engineering, the chapters are slimming down to my more typical average (2,000-2,500 words).

Future Plans

Episode four will begin with a five year skip forward, during which the sisters have been working for the army. My intent with the episode is to produce a lot of character growth for the main characters.

Marta and Iris will get their own chapters dedicated to them, to show how much they've changed and how difficult their circumstances are.

Marta will be shown in the field, using her magic to destroy entire fortifications, while her conscience stings her for harming others with magic.

Iris will be seen using scrying magic (think CIA remote-viewing programs, only far more effective) to get instant results from distant battlefields, so her superiors can make better decisions. I will probably end that chapter with Iris' superiors using her unit of black-ops witches to assassinate high-ranking officers of the enemy army, with extreme-range magic.

Meanwhile, in her own chapter, Amelia will be seen squirreling away resources for a secret project, while Hobard tries very hard to find out what she's up to. During the skip forward, she'll have been working as a government contractor, tasked with designing a horseless, armored "war wagon", a project Amelia has been delaying for years, intentionally detonating prototype after prototype, with the explanation that "steam engines are very hard to stabilize, a design flaw I hope to fix, soon."

The last chapter of the episode will bring them back together, because Amelia insists she needs her sisters on hand, claiming Iris is the best driver and Marta's magic is strong enough to control the blast if the prototype explodes.

They'll drive the new war wagon and go on the run across Amelia's land, toward a tower she's built, while Captain Denholm gives chase, via broomstick. When they arrive, Marta will hold off the other War Witch, while Amelia and Iris blow one whole side off the tower, revealing the hidden shape of Starwitch, while the other half of the tower serves as the rocket's support gantry.

Marta will lose her fight with Denholm, but will have bought just enough time for her sisters to load the war wagon inside the base of the rocket and the three of them will blast off. Denholm will probably try to follow, but she'll be unable to chase them out of the atmosphere.

After that, all future episodes will take place in space.

Tags: writing, work-in-progress, starwitch

Work In Progress #19: Starwitch #2

"I declare to all: if any of you ever harms so much as one hair on the heads of my daughters, I will return as a vengeful spirit, with bloody intention to wipe out this entire village, guilty and innocent alike, because evil triumphs when good men do nothing!"

  – Erika Blackwell, the mother of Amelia, an Excerpt from Starwitch.

Starwitch is a novel about space-faring witches that I plan to release first as a web series, then for sale in online stores.

You can read short summaries of each day's writing on Mastodon.

Here's a list of previous blog entries on this work in progress novel, in order from oldest to newest:

• Starwitch #1

Chapter 3: Steam Without Flame

Most of this chapter was descriptive details on Amelia's projects, to slowly demonstrate what she can do, despite her primitive surroundings.

Amelia is 14 in this chapter and now has a small shack to work in. She pays for things by making and selling high-quality steel ingots to the village smith.

She's working on parts for a steam engine that lacks a firebox, a series of metal plates she's chiseling runes into, including the runes for 'metal', 'boil' and 'water'.

She finishes her work, assembles the plates with some rods to form something reminiscent of a heat sink, though with larger gaps between the plate. She pours some water on it, which boils off as if the metal was hot, though it's cool to the touch.

I imagine the runes to be the written form of the language of magic, which just about anyone can use, though they need the right knowledge to make use of it: only runes marking metal and stone will work, because metal and stone act as mediums in which magic condenses.

Any previously living material, like wood or paper, will fail, because dead things strive to live again and use up the magic in that attempt. Effectively, this means dead wood is very slightly zombie (maybe about 0.001%).

Marta (Amelia's oldest sister) joins her, curious to see what she's working on and they have a brief discussion of runes covering the above information. It's stated that Marta's husband died around the time Amelia was four years old. She's 12 years older than Amelia. Marta is a rather large woman and built like a lumberjack, but she's not unattractive.

After they're done talking, Amelia puts the enchanted device inside the little engine's steam chamber and seals it. She fills it with water and the belt wheel on the side spins, demonstrating that it works. Thus, Amelia is capable of making extremely compact steam engines with a level of power that rivals that of a modern gasoline engine.

Marta asks what's next and Amelia says she needs a carriage. Marta is confused, because they don't even own a horse, but Amelia insists she needs only the carriage.

In the next scene, months have passed and Amelia has heavily modified a carriage into a horseless carriage and her sisters help her mount a heavy, magic-powered steam engine to the frame.

Amelia's Sister, Iris, is described. She's a little taller than their mother, who's average height. She's also exceptionally beautiful. Her personal history is briefly illuminated as part of her description.

She'd been engaged to the mayor's son, but just days after they announced this to the whole village, he was murdered. It isn't entirely clear how he died, though he was tied to a tree and wolves got him. It isn't stated whether the wolves killed him or just ate him.

Iris has been very sad for the past three years, due to losing her betrothed.

With the work done, their mother gives them a picnic basket of food and the three of them head off for a test drive, with Iris in the driver's seat. She turns out to be a crazy speed-demon and smiles for the first time in years.

Unknown to our main characters, the local smith and his son, both named Rolf Mossflaw (senior and junior, to be clear), were sneaking onto their land while they drove off. The two of them witness the horseless carriage and Rolf senior concludes that it's witchcraft, despite multiple attempts to justify it as non-magical.

Eventually, the lack of smoke from the steam engine's firebox (it doesn't even have one, but he doesn't know that) forces him to accept the idea it's magic.

The smith and his son head back to the village, to "do the right thing" and tell the mayor, even though they don't want to.

Chapter 4: A Terrible Choice

Erika, Amelia's mother, is at home, working to prepare ingredients for potions, since healing potions are how the family made their money before Amelia started making steel.

Her husband, Tim, is a woodcutter, but it's a weekend and he's taken a day off to spend time with his wife, though he's fallen asleep in a rocking chair.

There's a heavy knock on the door, far too loud to be a social visit and Erika concludes the mayor is back to accuse her of being a witch, for the sixteenth time, even though it has been more than a decade since he last accused her.

The mayor once witnessed her using magic while he was drunk and has never let the subject go.

Tim wakes and offers to beat the man, but Erika decides another round of intellectual jousting will be enough to take care of the problem, so he sits down again. In other words, she decides to handle it herself, since the mayor is an idiot and she normally runs mental circles around him.

She opens the door and Mayor Godfrey Rumblecleaver points the accusatory finger, saying, "She's a witch! I've seen it with my own eyes! This woman, Erika Blackwell, has had congress with the devil! I saw her dance in the forest, naked, alongside a demon!"

He has an entire lynch mob with him, including his deputy. The mayor is, by ignorant and stupid tradition (according to Erika's internal monologue) also sheriff and judge, though he's bound by law to follow certain procedures.

This involves giving the accused witch a chance to refute his claims.

As an avid reader, Amelia has both read and understood the village's entire law book, having committed it to memory, consequently making the mayor look like a fool once already. She also taught her mother something: the law book says accusations require two or three witnesses.

Erika points this out, so the mayor provides another witness: the village moonshiner and local drunkard, who claims he saw Erika dance naked with a goat-horned demon!

Erika remembers the only occasion she saw him that week, in which he was drunk off his butt and likely hallucinating, so she isn't surprised he imagined her naked and a passing goat as a demon.

She asks the crowd to raise their hands if they believe the man to be a reliable witness when he's drunk, which is basically whenever he's awake. No one raises a hand.

Likewise, she refutes the mayor's claim, because everyone knows how drunk he was the night in question, which was when Erika was 15. She's now 42.

The incident took place during a harvest festival and moonshine had been freely available. The young man that later became the mayor had been drinking heavily, despite the fact he'd never had any alcohol before.

The smith, Rolf, steps up next, reluctantly telling the tale of seeing Erika's daughters drive a bewitched carriage. They argue for a time and he presents his irrefutable, expert opinion that it could only have been magically-powered.

Erika demands a second witness and Rolf junior confirms the story.

Seeing he's caught Erika in a situation she can't talk her way out of, the mayor offers a pair of awful alternatives: either Erika's daughters burn as witches, or she does in their place, because the law says a parent can pay for the crimes of a child.

He even goes on to call it a good bargain. Meanwhile, his face is full of sick glee, because he's finally caught the witch he's chased most of his life. If Erika agrees, then all she has to do is say out loud that she's a witch.

She says, "I'm a witch" so softly, no one but Tim hears and he rushes to attack the mayor, only to get shot in the shoulder with a crossbow bolt from the deputy.

Erika patches him up and he passes out.

Absolutely reveling in her torment, the mayor says he didn't hear her and she needs to speak up.

Erika speaks louder, but he still isn't satisfied, demanding that she speak loud enough for everyone to hear.

Finally, she shouts her true feelings to the world, including how proud she is to be a witch, making a verbal list of all the good things she's done for the villagers, much of it with secret magic.

She finishes by saying magic isn't evil, but the mayor is, having persecuted her over nothing, for decades.

As her hands are bound by the deputy, she considers torching her accusers with magic, but remembers her grandmother's words on the matter, which were basically, "Do no harm with magic."

She follows the vow of pacifism she made to her grandmother, going quietly to the pile of wood and the stake, to be tied to it, while moonshine is dumped all over the wood to make it burn better.

Before she's lit aflame, the mayor whispers to her, "I had to kill my own son, because one of your whore-of-the-devil daughters bewitched him, just like I did with that poor fool that married Marta! I'm glad I finally get to see you burn for what you took from me!"

Finally seeing the depth of the man's depravity, Erika speaks her final words:

She spoke at a volume comparable to a megaphone, her voice magically enhanced to ensure all ears present would take notice, "Know this day, Mayor Godfrey Rumblecleaver, that your sins will follow you to your very last day, while the gates of the infernal realm gape open and ready to take your soul!

"I declare to all: if any of you ever harms so much as one hair on the heads of my daughters, I will return as a vengeful spirit, with bloody intention to wipe out this entire village, guilty and innocent alike, because evil triumphs when good men do nothing!" Erika gave Rolf and his son a particularly scathing glare, before she looked once more at the now cowering mayor, to speak so softly only he should have heard her final words, though the magic still took them far and wide, "With my last, dying breath, I curse you to never know peace!"

All of that was just words to mess with everyone's heads, but who knows, maybe the last words of a witch have power beyond mere magic?

Erika uses magic to light the pyre herself, to take control out of his hands of the mob and steal from the mayor the option to believe he killed her.

Shortly after, her daughters arrive, just as a wagon full of men departs. Marta is driving, barely managing to stop the carriage before succumbing to a numb and helpless silence, while Amelia sputters.

Iris, on the other hand, rushes to the aid of their mother, using magic to part the flame and loosen the ropes, so she can haul Erika free of the blaze, but it's all for naught, because she's already dead.

Chapter 5: Salt in the Wound

While Amelia's family are reeling at the loss of their wife/mother, a few days pass and the town crier shows up with a proclamation from the mayor: all property of the confessed witch is to be forfeit to the village and auctioned to pay for the firewood used.

The auction is scheduled for the next day at dawn, though they will have four full days to actually willingly give up the land or make arguments that they should be allowed to keep it.

Amelia's father produces a stack of old wills from her ancestors and she reads them all, discovering that every one of the Blackwell women for the past few centuries has used the same wording in their last will and testament.

The essence of it is that the home and land were given to a specific individual, but everything else became the collective property of their female progeny.

In essence, they foresaw the issue of being discovered as witches and had a strong legal defense in mind to dodge the seizure of property. They would have done the same with the land and house, but local law forbids joint ownership of real estate, to prevent family arguments from spilling into court.

Amelia attends the auction and makes an attempt to buy their land back, but the mayor out-bids her, paying double the actual value of the land. Amelia make herself publicly weep by thinking about her mother, but smiles on her way out of the courthouse, because the auction went just the way she planned.

Over the next few days, wagon loads of salt, alchemical waste and lye arrive at the Blackwell family home and their father directs the work of poisoning the land, to make it worthless to the mayor. At night, the sisters use magic to summon rains storms, so the contamination will sink into the soil.

Their last day on the land, they pack up their belongings and Iris uses fire magic to burn the house's thatch, followed by Marta employing earth magic to make the mortar and stones of the walls crumble. Last of all, Amelia jams the pressure relief valves of a small steam engine and activates it inside her workshop, before they all run away to avoid the explosion.

Effectively, there's nothing of value left behind. They stay in a tent that night, but no one can sleep and their father goes out.

He visits the village smith and brow-beats the man into joining him. They gather others that hate the mayor.

Together, the group throws a blanket over the mayor's head and haul him out of his house for the beating of his life, but before they get going, they tell him why, including among the accusation both everything they know and suspect. He's warned that if he ever twists the law again, they'll come back to seek vengeance for the three people he's killed (Erika, his own son Conrad, and Marta's husband, Zayne).

In the morning, the mayor fails to show up for the deed to the Blackwell family's land and the subject of where their father went in the night is raised. He admits nothing, but promises the man is still alive, followed by this little gem: "On those cold, winter nights, I imagine his knee will really ache and I hope he'll be reminded of all the bad things he’s done."

The sisters decide they can live with that and, in fact, it makes them feel slightly better.

They leave the deed to the land under a rock and depart for what they hope will be a land without persecution and prejudice.

Chapter 6: The Stuff of Dreams

After two years of off-and-on travel, Amelia and her family are near the city of Macclesfield, a prosperous farming community, where they've been camping long-term, to rest from their travels.

Amelia has built herself a horseless portable workshop in a wagon/shack similar to the one Mr. Pinewater lived in. Inside, she's built herself a lathe that she's been using to make table legs, because no one in the city has ever seen the results of a lathe before.

Her table legs are all the rage in town with wealthy ladies, even though Amelia thinks the existing legs are better, but she's not going to argue with wealthy people giving her their money to do a job.

Amelia is depressed, because she wants a more permanent home and a much larger workshop, but most towns won't let them buy real estate, because they're outsiders. Even worse, in the few towns that did, rumor reached all the way from the prejudice-filled village they left behind, causing them to flee for their lives, lest the Blackwell sisters be burned at the stake.

As she works on an order, Amelia reflects that she has wealth, but what she may actually need is influence, to change a few minds, that she might buy land, since she believes she's now beyond the reach of the rumors; it's been eight months since she last heard rumors about her family.

She finishes work and heads for town.

While she's there, she waives her fees in exchange for the the wives of the three members of the city council speaking to their husbands on her behalf, to make an exception to city law, so she can buy land.

It works and she even becomes friends with the mayor's wife, Mrs. Maccle, who has very forward-thinking views of women and thinks Amelia will be just the thing she needs to shake things up, in a good way. It's never quite stated that way, but Mrs. Maccle is a feminist.

In the next scene, Amelia is shown a huge, disused warehouse, one option among many properties she might buy and she's soon seeing all the possibilities the place holds for her. It even has an office area that could easily be converted into a comfortable home for her family, solving both issues.

She's soon lost in imaginary visions of what could be, eventually seeing in her mind not just the flying machines she been wanting to experiment with, but airships and eventually, a steel tower rising through the air on a column of super-heated steam!

The tower pierces the heavens and then turns at the apogee of it's flight, producing another burst of steam that carries if forward, until it's falling all the way around the world, always dropping, but never hitting ground, an orbit.

The word 'orbit' sticks in her mind, because she's never heard it before and she realizes the imaginary vision she just had wasn't her own.

She haggles over the price and buys the warehouse, before heading back to her little workshop, where she looks at The Book of Newts and asks, "What are you?"

The book flips of its own accord to the last page, which is blank. Next, it flips to a page showing a diagram of the solar system. Finally, it shows her star charts, and she finally realizes the sun the gas giant her little moon orbits is one star among many thousands of named stars, which are mapped in meticulous detail in the book.

She doesn't understand what it's telling her, but she feels exhausted, because the book has been manipulating the magic her body produces to flip it's pages, a feat that has left her with a headache, because her magic is rather weak. It isn't able to finish what it was telling her, because she doesn't have the magic required for it to finish.

She recognizes the book has some kind of dream or desire, which mostly lines up with her own dreams, though it clearly thinks on a larger scale than she does. She questions whether she should trust the book, since that was so very strange. It has never harmed her, so she decides to continue on her current path.

She also reasons that perhaps she owes it something for the knowledge shared, deciding to try and fulfill the book's dream of flying to the stars.

At this point, I finally named the gas giant Amelia's moon orbits: Junas. Amelia believes it's the home of her world's gods, a much bigger world for giant, divine people. By the way, it looks a lot like Jupiter, but let me make it clear: it isn't. Junas is orbited by many worlds the size of Earth, plus lots of little ice moons.

Chapter 7: Wings

Amelia and her sisters work to haul her first full-size flying machine out of Macclesfield, while townsfolk look on, in wonder.

Blackbird, as Amelia named it, is a fixed-wing aircraft with a single propellor, using another of her enchanted steam engines. Amelia jokingly refers to the cockpit as a 'the witchpit', which is where the term was originally coined. The aircraft is black and Amelia compares it to a raven.

It's winter and the ground is covered in snow, because Amelia hasn't yet learned about vulcanized rubber and didn't want to deal with metal or wood wheels at such high velocity, thinking the ride would be dangerously bumpy.

Marta drives the plane out into a farm field using another of Amelia's recent inventions, a steam-powered vehicle designed for heavy hauling, a tractor.

When they're ready, Amelia and Iris act as pilot and co-pilot, taking Blackbird into the air! It's an exhilarating moment as they lift off the ground and Amelia cautiously gets them some altitude in a slow circle around the city, before turning control over to Iris, who does some crazy dives and sharp turns, until Amelia is sick.

Amelia takes them down for a landing, which is the part she's most nervous about, because she expects to crash the first time.

The landing goes smoothly, right up to the point they hit a boulder hidden by the snow! Since everything is white, Amelia never saw it.

The prop smashes on it, then the engine hits it, producing a spray of hot water and steam, followed by the belly of Blackbird getting torn to shreds on it, while one of the skis is torn right off. They're briefly forced back into the air, because the boulder somewhat acts like a ramp.

When they come back down, the left wing dips into the snow, due to the missing ski, lurching them to the side, until the wing rips off. Next, the right wing does much the same, a whiplash-inducing sudden shift from twisting one direction to the other!

The wing also tears off, then the other ski breaks, leaving snow, ice and dirt spraying all over them through the torn bottom of the witchpit.

Amelia pukes, while Iris laughs hysterically and sobs at the same time.

Marta drives up to check on them, but fortunately, the only injuries they've got are lots of bruises and Amelia is motion sick.

There's some discussion of what went wrong and Amelia decides wheels are a must, after all, so she'll be seeking a way to cushion them.

Tags: writing, work-in-progress, starwitch