At Speculative Chic, we feature a lot of authors who share everything from their favorite things to the inspiration for their work. But why not also share their fiction? Welcome to Fiction Friday, where you’ll be able to sample the fiction of a variety of authors, including those who write at Speculative Chic! Today, we’re featuring our very own J.L. Gribble. J.L. is also the author of the Steel Empires series, which combines urban fantasy and alternate history for some surprising results. Her latest, Steel Shadows, provides the perfect pause in this series before the relaunch of book 1, which includes special bonus features, is released later this summer. Keep reading for more!
About the Book
Steel Shadows (2019)
Written by: J.L. Gribble
Genre: Urban Fantasy/Alternate History
Pages: 188
Series: Steel Empires #5
Publisher: Dog Star Books
The shadows are talking and they won’t take no for an answer. Victory has returned safely to present-day Limani, sure that nothing so strange as time travel can ever happen to her again. Until the shadows begin speaking to her. And it turns out she’s not the only one.
Along with her sire Asaron and daywalker Mikelos, Victory will travel to a realm outside anything she could ever imagine. A previously unknown, ancient enemy threatens to tear apart the fabric of the world, and everything Victory thought she knew about magic will be completely rewritten.
In this unfamiliar world, accompanied by long-lost companions, Victory must find her way home once more. But if the shadows have manipulated her life all along, will she have a home to return to? Or will the darkness consume Limani as well?
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Catch Up on the Series
Steel Shadows Excerpt
Victory wasn’t sure, at first, whether she’d opened her eyes.
When she blinked, the view didn’t waver. A solid gray sky, like the thickest fog reflecting street lamps on a winter night. She blinked again, but the scene didn’t change. Definitely not the depths of Limani’s mage school. A hard surface supported her, and she raised herself on her elbows. Grit from the ground beneath her coated her bare arms. She dug her fingers into the surface, but they met bedrock under a fine layer of gray sand. Everything was flat, like the surface of a smooth lake. No breeze disturbed the scene, and the only difference between ground and sky was a thin line in the distance.
Her body ached when she pushed herself to her feet, as if she’d run for miles. She turned a slow circle while brushing sand from her hands but found no variation on the horizon in any direction. She filled her lungs through her nose, but the air’s scent was as flat and empty as the ground. The generic harshness of rock under particles of dust. No hints to where she might be.
Not Limani. Back in Nacostina, in the past after the hydrogen bomb destroyed the city? But even that could not have caused this complete desolation.
A sharp pop displaced the air behind her. Victory whirled and dropped into a defensive stance. Asaron had appeared in the same spot where she arrived.
Victory nudged him with the toe of her boot. “You absolute moron.” But she grabbed the hand he extended to haul him to his feet.
He brushed dust from his jeans. “You disappeared.”
“So, you decided to follow me? Even knowing what happened last time?”
Jutting his chin, Asaron said, “You’re the one who ran toward the shadows, when you are also aware of what happened last time.”
Victory threw up her hands as a second pop sounded. “Damn it.”
“Ouch.” Mikelos rubbed a hand to the side of his face. “That was not pleasant.”
“We have a new contender for the title of moron,” Asaron said.
The vampires helped Mikelos stand, and Victory considered and rejected half a dozen exclamations before settling on, “What the hell were you thinking?”
Mikelos examined their unexpected surroundings. “You and Asaron disappeared. Wasn’t about to let you get into trouble without me.”
“Now all three of us are trapped here.” Victory ran her fingers over her scalp, displacing more gray dust.
His survey completed, Mikelos stood at the third point in their triangle. “And where is here?”
“No idea.” Victory twined her hair into a thick braid, and Asaron answered with his own silent lift of one shoulder. “But we’re not mages. We’re stuck here, with no supplies, inappropriate clothing, no weapons — ”
Asaron snorted. “Speak for yourself.”
“Right, no weapons other than the two knives my maniac sire keeps on himself at all times.” Victory spread her arms wide. “Any suggestions?”
Mikelos pointed in the distance. “There.”
Victory squinted, but that particular point on the horizon seemed as empty as the rest. “There’s nothing there.”
“Either we sit here and wait for the kids to track us down while I die of dehydration and then you two starve to death.” Mikelos brushed past Victory in the direction he’d pointed. “Or walk and hope we find something different.”
“Man has a point.” Asaron followed Mikelos.
Victory peered into the blank sky. Not sunlight. But not night, either. Wherever they were, it wasn’t any place she recognized.
In any time period.
***
They walked for hours.
Asaron kept dropping into a march pace, but Victory resisted the urge to lengthen her stride and fall into step with him. They both wore sturdy boots, but Mikelos had on colorful summer-weight sneakers, with flimsy rubber soles and no ankle support.
Her daywalker would keep up with them without complaint, but his ego wasn’t worth ruining his shoes, or worse. She kept the speed to a more casual stroll.
Not like they were going anywhere.
The light above never shifted, the sky maintaining its soft, gray light. In a gradual change over the course of a few miles, the landscape grew rougher. The flat plain of gray dust transformed to gravel. Later, pebbles and larger rocks cropped out of the ground. Their straight line transformed to a meandering path. The rocks grew from handball sized, to the height of Victory’s knees, then her waist. By the time Mikelos demanded his first break, they had convenient places to sit and rest.
“You’re only going to get thirstier.” Asaron flipped one of his knives end over end, staring into the distance. “The break won’t help.”
“I’m sorry, did you have someplace to be?” Mikelos glared until Victory placed a hand on his knee. He acknowledged Victory’s silent request for restraint with a half-shrug.
“We’re not on a schedule.” Victory fingered the rock’s rough texture. But she was no sort of geologist. “Ever seen this type of rock before?”
“Do either of us look like Kane?”
Victory didn’t dignify Asaron’s snide retort with a response. Her foster son, the earth-aligned mage, would be handy right about now. Any of the kids, with their magical ability, would be handy, and she prayed they were searching for a way to find their parents and Grandpa as soon as possible.
Mikelos hopped off his rock and stretched his calf muscles. “I’m blanking on any myths or legends that might explain where we could be.”
“What would legends be able to tell you? They’re legends for a reason.” Asaron set forth once again. Mikelos and Victory trailed behind.
“It’s been hours, but the light hasn’t changed,” Mikelos said. “We’re not still in our world. The likeliest explanation is some sort of alternate space, perhaps the realm of the shadows that you’ve both been seeing.”
Asaron glanced over his shoulder, brows furrowed. “You think we’re in some sort of magical dimension?”
“What do we know about magic, really?” Mikelos had his lecture voice on, which he often used during his music lessons. His students learned about the history of their instrument and the language of music along with how to play. He didn’t wait for an answer to his rhetorical question. “We know about elemental magic. Kane’s element of earth, Archer’s of water. There’s also fire and air. Then there’s primordial magic, which is embodied by storm, Toria’s alignment. But when you get down to it, that’s all we know.”
“You don’t think the mages know more?” Victory asked. “It’s their job.”
“I would hope they know more. But knowing more about their specific abilities and more about how magic exists in the world are two different things, right?”
Asaron’s voice rumbled. “I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”
Mikelos spread his arms, encompassing their bleak surroundings. “Everything we know about magic does nothing to explain this.” He pulled his hand in before it smacked a boulder.
The rocks continued to grow as they progressed, now almost to Victory’s shoulders. The path Asaron picked around the rocks deviated more and more from their original straight line. The flat horizon became a jumbled mess of boulders and crags they had to veer their way through. Her nerves tightened as her field of view narrowed to a smaller space around them.
“It’s too bad we don’t know anything about magic,” Asaron said.
Victory needed to nip Asaron’s attitude in the bud, before the sarcasm war worsened. “Enough, gentlemen. Let’s conserve energy.” She assumed their silence signaled assent and continued to trudge along at Mikelos’ heels.
Measuring distance in this field of rocks grew difficult because of their irregular path, but Victory estimated that she achieved at least a few miles worth of quiet. Not peace, because the unnatural silence broken by their sliding footsteps on loose gravel disconcerted her almost as much as the unchanging sky.
“I don’t want to start any arguments — ” Mikelos continued over Asaron’s exasperated groan. “ — But I have another theory.”
“Okay,” Victory said. “What’s this one?”
“I’m trying to remember it all.” He hummed a few bars. “There was a series of hymns dedicated to the original Roman gods. I found them in a library in Veneti when we wintered there one year between tours.”
Her daywalker made no sense. “What are you talking about? There are no Roman gods.”
Asaron halted, steadying Mikelos when the other man almost ran into him. “There were, though. A long time ago.”
Taking advantage of the break, Victory rested against the nearest boulder towering above her, easing her weight off each foot in turn. “Are you talking about the first Senate members?”
“No, not those vampire assholes who thought they could deify themselves with enough statues. Real gods. With worshipers. Human and vampire alike.” Asaron clipped his words. He knew more than he let on but waved Mikelos to speak instead.
Mikelos sagged against the boulder next to Victory. “Right. The hymns referenced places of reward and punishment. Heaven and hell, but not the nebulous places advertised by the spiritualists of the modern age. These had specific details. But damned if I can remember now.”
Asaron didn’t rest, standing braced on both feet with his arms crossed over his chest. “What are you getting at?”
Mikelos waved one hand in dismissal. “We might not know where we are. But at some point, someone might have.”
A female voice sounded beyond the boulder they rested against. “Huh. You’re closer than you think.”
Victory lunged away. She caught a flash of the edge of a body behind Asaron, but her sire’s taller bulk blocked her view. He lurched in surprise as well, spinning in place and lashing out with one arm. Flesh connected with flesh with a sickening crunch, and the figure staggered away from Asaron.
A feminine silhouette had both hands clapped to her face. “Son of a bitch.” Between her fingers, blood dripped onto a white tank top, a vivid scarlet stain against their dull surroundings. The rest of her—pale skin, white-blond hair, and gray denim jeans tucked into dust-stained boots—was as washed-out as everything else.
Then the woman pulled her hands away, shaking them out. Her nose reset itself with another shudder-inducing crunch, but the woman herself already distracted Victory.
The woman she knew.
The woman she knew to be dead. “Syri?”
Syrisinia, Toria’s elven best friend who’d died in the Parisii Catacombs half a decade ago, tucked a loose strand of hair behind one pointed ear with a hand now clean of blood, though the stain on her shirt remained. “Hey, guys.”
About the Author
By day, J. L. Gribble is a professional medical editor. By night, she does freelance fiction editing in all genres, along with reading, playing video games, and occasionally even writing. She is currently working on the Steel Empires series for Dog Star Books, the science-fiction/adventure imprint of Raw Dog Screaming Press. Previously, she was an editor for the Far Worlds anthology.
Gribble studied English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She received her Master’s degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, where her debut novel Steel Victory was her thesis for the program.
She lives in Ellicott City, Maryland, with her husband and three vocal Siamese cats. Find her online (www.jlgribble.com), on Facebook, and on Twitter and Instagram (@hannaedits).
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