In her peripheral vision, Eva watched as Shalise tilted her head to look at Eva. “I suppose,” she said. “Prax has stopped making a fuss for the most part. I told him that I would go back to the prison and figure out a way to get him back in his cell. He might have been lying to me when he said it in the prison, but seeing the world through my eyes for a few decades can’t be worse than staring at a hellhound every day.”
Eva gave a short, almost forced laugh. “I can see that being a pain. But it might be for the best if we tried anyway.”
“Still no plan?”
“Not a clue. Arachne doesn’t think that summoning Prax will work because
Stretching her arm into the air above them, Shalise started to fill it out with muscles. Her arm rapidly went back to normal before the tips of her fingers started being affected.
“That’s kind of disturbing,” Eva said.
“You have Arachne’s hands and legs.”
“Point,” Eva said as she lifted her own arm up into the air alongside Shalise’s arm. Despite moving it around in the dirt, not a speck of dust stuck to it.
They both let their arms fall at the same time. Shalise released a small sigh as hers hit the ground.
“It’s probably for the best. At least down here I don’t have to see the look on Sister Cross’ face when she finds out.”
Eva snorted. “At least you only have to worry about a look. She’ll try to kill me when she finds out about Prax, and again when she realizes you went to Hell, and yet again when she finds out you’re still here.”
That got a short laugh out of Shalise, though it died off with another sigh.
“We’ll get you out of here,” Eva said. “Or maybe it won’t even matter much in the future.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just something Zagan said.”
Shalise let out a short huff.
“When he dropped the two of you into Hell, I don’t think you went straight to that prison. From what you told me, there was about a week’s worth of time that just went missing. I don’t know what he did with you two or your souls–and I am very glad you have them back–but he used them to figure out something disturbing.”
“More disturbing than losing our souls in the first place?”
“Maybe. Though, as disturbing as it is, it might mean a way home for you.
“Zagan said that someone or something is trying to bring Void–the Power that essentially runs Hell–and all of this,” Eva swept her hand across the sky, “into the mortal plane.”
Hello, thanks for reading.
Book five will continue as scheduled. No intermissions. Tune in next time for 005.001.
Despite that, there will be a slight change to the pattern in book five. Book five will be five chapters long and focus on Wayne roughly fifteen years prior to the start of the series. I originally decided on that course of action earlier this year when I started falling behind in my writing because of other responsibilities. So, in lieu of spending time thinking up and writing extra chapters, I decided on this interlude. As an added benefit, it has given me a good chance to collect my thoughts before going forward with the main story.
After the short interlude that is book five, book six will be back in the ‘real world.’
Anyway, what to say about book four?
First, despite its bumps, I hope you enjoyed the majority of it. Initially, I was far more concerned with the early half–the part within the prison–and feared it would be more of a slog to get through than the latter half. According to the comments, that was not the case.
In retrospect, it is fairly easy to see why. Too much combat and not enough forward progression in the Willie’s domain arc. I’m not quite sure what set it off, but I had a sudden desire to write a bunch of combat scenes and Willie’s domain provided a good excuse. If you look back at the earlier books and even the first half of book four, you’ll find that there are very few combat scenes and the combat scenes that exist typically are inter-spaced with plenty of non-combat things going on.
The reason for that stems mostly from me tending to skip and skim combat scenes in other peoples’ work. I find them less interesting than other aspects of writing and generally skim for major injuries or revelations. Yet for some reason, I decided to do the same thing I skip through.
Something I’ll strive to avoid going forward. Not combat scenes, but the lack of plot advancement during such scenes.
On a whole though, I did enjoy writing book four and I do hope you enjoyed reading.
