Rowley's Roar #4

For today's blog post, one of the fictional characters from my novels will be sharing a few messages. No, I'm not going crazy. I'm just having a little fun with writing from the perspective of one of my characters, to explain her music.

Without further adieu, please once again welcome Captain Edwina "Roaring" Rowley, who shall be taking a moment to explain another song from an album we're compiling.

Glass House

Hey little itches, today I'm going to tell you all about my star ship, Glass House.

After I impressed the Dead Queen and she made the offer I couldn't refuse (the alternative was having my soul sucked out, to fuel her undead existence), she gave me a rather hefty budget with which to build a battleship.

You see, every one of her lieutenants is supposed to have a unique ship, because no off-the-shelf hardware would do. After all, we constantly faced the biggest existential threat any pirate could: the Pirate Hunters.

Those cracked freaks are led by former Newt Witches, giving them the mathematical talent to plot direct courses through space, without which they could never catch us. Even worse, every one of the whiny itches thinks they have a big bone to pick with us, just for daring to be different and free.

I spent a small amount of time examining the other pirate ships and came to the awful conclusion that they all suffered from the same flaw: short range or non-existent weapons, because they all relied on magic for combat. Even the pirate queen's ship relies on her for combat spells.

So, I decided the best way to survive would be to sneak about and hit targets from extreme range. Since my roar works at interplanetary distance, I see no reason to get close. To that end, I used my budget to experiment with optics, a rarely-explored subject.

I'll put it this way: have you ever used a magnifying glass to fry an ant? Yeah, well, imagine scaling that up, though I'm not talking about a bigger lens. Instead, imagine a big array of mirrors, all angled to reflect the light on the same target. It's real nasty, even in the atmosphere of a planet.

The trouble is, scaling that up isn't easy, but that's what I set out to do with my ship. I drew up a number of different designs, but ultimately decided to settle on a mixture of rune-enhanced glass and crystal for construction, since I had to put some very fine glass for optics all over in the body.

In the end, I settled on a ship with 16 pop-out mirrors that would reflect the sun onto arrays of 16 by 16 panels of light guides, which sent the rays of the sun inward, to the center of the ship, where a series of lenses combined all 4096 rays into one pencil-thin beam.

In the void of outer space, with no atmosphere to reduce the power of the sun, that was always extremely deadly.

However, my glass ship had an alternate configuration, which sacrificed crew quarters for even greater firepower, which I intended to serve as my final revenge on the Dead Queen.

In that setup, it carried 256 mirrors, each with a 32 by 32 array of light guides, for a final light amplification of 262,144. In the final battle between the entire Solus system and the Queen's granite monolith, Foundation Stone, I used that setup to bore through the side of the ship, helping the pirate hunters to do some serious damage.

That was one he...ahem heck of a fight, because even the Gods took part, to make sure the Dead Queen finally went down. I'll tell you, it can really shake a person up, looking into the face of a Goddess they never believed existed. I still don't know how I feel, in a religious sense, but I'm no longer an atheist.

Getting back to the point, Glass House filled a unique role in the pirate fleet, because it was the only long-range artillery we had. On top of that, her death ray was entirely non-magical, allowing my crew and I to focus our magical efforts elsewhere.

Between the death ray and my mythril guitar's roar, I was untouchable and undefeated for many years, until I dared tangle with the Blackwell sisters, Marta, Iris and Amelia, but that's a story for another song...

Here's today's song, named in honor of my ship, Glass House:

Here's a link to the MP3 file, if you'd like to download it.

Glass House is copyright 2026, Owen Tyme, all rights reserved, but free for your personal enjoyment. Lyrics by Owen Tyme, music generated by ACE-Step 1.5. E-mail me if you want to use it for something else.

Tags: audio, music, roaring-rowley