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A favorite excerpt from The Last Lord of Eden

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The Last Lord of Eden, due to be re-released with a stunning new cover today, is primarily a science-fiction book with strong romantic elements and lots of adventure. And it also has a metaphysical fantasy element.

Hey, they do call the speculative-fiction genre “science fiction/ fantasy,” right? All my books, sci-fi and fantasy alike, occasionally dip a toe into the waters on the other side. Here’s how it works in The Last Lord of Eden.

While visiting his adoptive family on the planet Kestra, our nonviolent, pacifist hero Kell is manipulated into a situation where he must execute someone by beheading. He requests the help of a monastery belonging to a cult that worships Death. Here, he undergoes several weeks of training, where the ultimate goal is temporary possession by Death himself:

Fully awake, Kell felt like he was sleepwalking. He moved as if in a dream, no thought turning in his mind, his bare feet noiseless in the dark corridors of the temple. He passed open rooms, through the entryways spilled in silver moonlight, past the soft sound of sleep-drugged breathing, past bathing rooms, prayer rooms, practice rooms, the kitchen, the refectory.

He paused in a garden cloister. The green of the plants turned to shades of silver and black in the lucid moonlight. No wind stirred. Fever magnified his senses. The air was fresh with the scent of living plants and earth, the more distant smell of compost and of men. Every crack and chink in the stonework of the surrounding buildings scratched against his eyes, the ones in moonlight more sharply, those in the dark as softly as the down in a coverlet. He could have counted each leaf, but he didn’t; he knew their number and the number of their hours. He listened to the worms endlessly turning the soil, a sweet sound that sealed together death and life. He heard plants’ roots growing into the worms’ intimate passageways.

He touched a single perfect rose just opening from its bud, its red color barely discernible in the moonlight. Its petals felt like velvet. They fell beneath his fingertips.

He walked into the Sword chapel.

The Sword blazed through its sheath with an inner light that blackened the rest of the chapel. It shone through the monks who kept watch as if they were insubstantial wraiths.

Whispering to one another, the monks rose to bar his way. The words they chanted melted in the heat of his fever, leaving only harmonies hanging in the air, a minor third, a fourth, an unresolved seventh.

Kell pushed through them. One monk, then another, and then another put a hand out to stop him. They clung to his shoulders, his waist, his legs. Kell stumbled with their weight.

He needed the Sword more than he needed air to breathe.

He reached out.

With the tip of his forefinger, Kell touched the Sword. Fire ran through his body. Lightning possessed him. Thunder roared through the chapel.

The monks who held him dropped back and covered ears and eyes.

Into the silence that followed, the monastery clock tolled midnight.

He burned in a nimbus of fever and blue lightning. He took the sword from the altar and then from its scabbard. He cradled the naked blade against his body like a lover. He turned, his back against the altar, and he waited.

Awakened by the noise, monks ran into the chapel. The old abbot limped into the chapel last. He worked his way through the assembly until he faced the man with the Sword. He observed the cold magnanimity in the blue eyes, the alert posture, the possessiveness with which the man held the weapon. The abbot nodded and said, “Lord Death, welcome.” Slowly, one knee at a time, the abbot knelt at Death’s feet.

The person that was still Kell only in a distant part of his consciousness put a hand on the old man’s head and said, “My son.”

Death acknowledged the silently gathered monks with a nod as he raised the Sword. He slowly drew the sharp edge of the blade diagonally across each of his own cheeks. As the blood flowed, he put the Sword back into its scabbard, then allowed them to approach him. They washed him in rose-scented water, wiping his blood away until the cuts on his cheeks started to scab over. They gently rubbed orange oil on his body, lavender oil into his hair. They belted the sheathed Sword to his back.

The abbot sent word to the king that Death walked again among them. The execution was scheduled for the coming day.

Death kept the Sword at his back in its enameled scabbard. The monks knelt when he passed them in a corridor. The smell of them was delicious, mingling growth and life and decay. And desire. From time to time he touched a kneeling monk gently on shoulder or face or head or arm. The visible marks left by his touch did not disappear.

Death did not sleep. All night, he stalked the corridors of the monastery like a tiger pacing in its cage. In the morning, an elderly monk was found dead in his bed with his hands folded on his chest, his eyes open, and a smile on his mouth. Tiny red, purple, and blue marks near his mouth looked like a flight of butterflies escaping.

One cane of a rosebush, its flowers barely out of bud, stood withered and dried in the garden as if it had been dead for years.

As the clock tolled six, Death watched the sun rise from his monastery’s clock tower, turning first the hills, then the palace towers, then the city from purple to orange to gold. A cool breeze carried the scent of wood ovens and fresh breads and pastries. It magnified the sounds of animals and people stirring.

Death smiled with a fierce joy. Everything he saw and heard and smelled and touched was his.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this excerpt as much as I enjoyed writing it. You might say that Death is a real character in this book, and not an unlikeable one — given that he is, well… Death.

(c) Copyright 2019 by G. S. Kenney. All rights reserved.

Mightier Than Magic: Alaric meets the Mouse

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Here’s a small excerpt from my latest book Mightier Than Magic. I hope you enjoy it.

The door opened tentatively, and only wide enough for a wisp of a girl to peer in from the threshold. She gripped the edge of the door so tightly that her knuckles were white. She’d probably bolt if he frowned at her. Hadn’t he seen her before? He tried to make his expression pleasant.

“Leave the door open,” the guard warned.

“Yes, sergeant,” the girl said almost inaudibly. She nudged the door open a bit wider and took a small step. Now he recognized her—the girl from the banquet hall last night. She’d called the queen Mother, but she didn’t act like the other princesses. She wasn’t much to look at either, all shrunk into herself, maybe fifteen years old. The cut of her clothing suggested nobility, but the costly fabric was dyed an unassuming shade of dull brown, a color that nearly matched her long, straight hair.

Her eyes were pretty, though, somewhere between green and brown, with long, arched brows. Her generous mouth promised a hint of more boldness than all the rest of her put together. This was a surprise, and an enticing one. Alaric smiled.

The girl relaxed. Slightly.

“Your Majesty.” Her voice barely carried across the small room. “My mother the queen has asked me to visit you. To thank you. In person . . . for last night. And to . . . to see if you need . . . anything.”

“What, you?” He’d meant that it seemed strange to send a princess on such an errand, when a servant might do. But the instant the words escaped his mouth, he realized it was the wrong thing to say.

The girl’s cheeks flushed pink. She shrank against the door jamb and wrapped her chest in her arms. The protective gesture accentuated her womanly shape.

Alaric couldn’t help but notice, and his own face flushed with embarrassment. He raised his estimate of her age. She must be seventeen or eighteen, almost as old as he was, and he’d implied . . . “I’m sorry.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d apologized to anyone. “I didn’t mean that the way it must have sounded. I only meant that if the queen is your mother, you would be an unlikely serving maid.”

He offered his best smile, well aware that sometimes people trembled when he smiled. And with reason. He hoped that now he would appear welcoming rather than frightening. “Please,” he said, rising and motioning to the chair, which he held for her as if she were a lady being seated for dinner.

“No, thank you,” she said. “There’s only the one chair, and I wouldn’t . . . I couldn’t make you stand while I . . .”

The room he’d been given was clean enough, and light streamed through its narrow window. But it was tiny and pressed in too closely. There was only the one chair, a narrow bed pushed against the wall, and a small table barely wide enough to hold two books side by side. “I can sit on the bed,” he said, then felt his face grow hot. The bed. Not a piece of furniture that should have been on display to this visitor, and he was sorry to have mentioned it. He cursed the room for its meagerness and himself for a fool.

But his guest appeared not to notice the implications. “Oh. Yes, of course.”

He held the chair as she sat, and then settled his tall frame onto the low bed. He avoided watching her too directly—her worried face, her hunched figure—as she fidgeted with her hands.

He waited.

“That was very kind, Your Majesty, what you did last night,” she said at last. She nibbled at a thumbnail, watching him from the corner of her eyes.

She was not as plain as she’d first appeared. Her skin was porcelain and clear, her face heart-shaped and perfectly proportioned. Though her nails were bitten to the quick, she had long, delicate fingers. But why so timid? And why had she not been invited to the dinner?

“Please, call me Alaric.” He spoke as gently as he could. “What’s your name?”

She hunched inward a little more and again wrapped her arms around herself. “Mouse.” Her voice was only a hair’s breadth above a whisper.

“Mouse? It’s . . . an unusual name.”

“That’s just what people call me.”

He could understand why. But he said, “Is that what you want me to call you?”

She didn’t answer.

“What’s your real name?” He attempted the friendliest expression he could muster. He was afraid this timid young woman might bolt like a deer scenting a wolf. He didn’t want her to bolt. He could use an ally, even one as unlikely as her, in Queen Claudia’s hostile court.

“Alicia Aurelia Katrina Emilia.” She raised her chin and straightened a little.

This time his smile was genuine—amusement at the string of names that stretched longer than his room was wide. “And how would you like me to call you, Alicia Aurelia Katrina Emilia? If I needed a glass of water and I had to ask you for it, I might die of thirst before I’d quite gotten all that out.”

She smiled shyly back at him. Fear still hovered around her eyes, but her face lit up. “Katie,” she said. “Call me Katie.”

Alaric’s heart catapulted. In the instant of her smile, she was radiant. She’d been wearing an expression of fear and worry so deep-seated that it masked her beauty. “And remember, you may call me Alaric. Please.”

Here was a person who was extremely competent at projecting her insignificance. He wondered if magic was involved.

Writing Alien Son

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Like my other books, Alien Son is science fiction, with more than a hint of romance.

It’s set in the same world as Saving Aran, and those of you who have read that book will recognize some of the characters. You may remember that there was a mystery in Saving Aran that was not resolved in that book: How can it be that there are humans on both Earth and Aran? These are people so genetically similar that they can interbreed. The odds they would evolve independently on two planets light-years apart are miniscule, like the odds that simple Brownian motion would suddenly lift your entire desk up into the air. Yet, though scientists have searched both planets for any archaeological or other evidence of any kind of alien contact in the past, there is nothing that can explain the existence of these two entirely separate human populations.

There’s also an unresolved personal mystery in Saving Aran. Cort’s father is no longer around. His mother tells him his father “went to Earth.” Does she mean that literally, that he somehow managed to get aboard one of the Earthers’ starships and literally fly to planet Earth? In the slang of the city where Cort grew up, the phrase “went to Earth” is a euphemism for dying. It seems more likely his father died than somehow managed to get to Earth. In the khenaran–the ancient forest–those who die are reborn, but the wise whynywir, who know everything about the planet, have no information about Cort’s father. Is it possible he really did fly to Earth?

Alien Son answers both of these questions. And way more, besides. Best of all, there’s no need to read Saving Aran first. Instead, you can read Alien Son first as a completely stand-alone book, and then later, if you wish, enjoy Cort’s back story.

In Alien Son, we meet Mikel, half Earther and half Arantu, the much-younger son of Cort’s father. The son born on Earth with an Earther mother. The son who is driven to pursue some great accomplishment in his life that will be worthy of his martyr father’s heroic efforts to save Aran from Earther exploitation.

We also meet Aiana, a historian from the far-distant future, who is using time travel based on technology-enhanced lucid dreaming to seek out a historically significant personage from Earth’s past (as she sees it). She finds Mikel on Aran. He’s the one she is looking for, but he has no intention of returning to Earth. Yet he must, for history has already been written. How can she get him to fulfill his destiny, even if it means his death? Worse, her dreaming self is getting harder to control. She’s falling in love with the man.

Time travel, it turns out, is incredibly hard to write. My future could be your past, and both of these might be different from an objectively drawn timeline. There is a very large time loop in Alien Son, spanning millennia of objective time. At any point in the story, the two protagonists know very different things because they’ve been in different objective times at different subjective times.

Finally, I had to draw a flowchart to keep it all straight, and to make sure the time-twisted story is actually self-consistent. I’ve shown this flowchart to a few people, but never publicly, not until now. You are seeing it first, here.

Spoiler alert! If you prefer to enjoy your surprises in the twists and turns of the book, scroll down no further! You can buy the book (or read for free on Kindle Unlimited) here.

Alien Son time loop

The Halfling’s Court

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My friend Danielle Ackley-McPhail, whom I have never met, is launching a new book. Strike that “never met” part: We may have said a few words at Balticon a year and a half ago. Or maybe not; in any case, it never got as far as, well, names or anything. We’ve gotten to be friendly through belonging to the same writers’ group and through Danielle’s writer-oriented Yahoo group. I’ve also gotten to be friendly with some of her other friends in these groups, and it feels kind of strange and nifty to have a circle of friends whom I like but have never met.

The new book is called The Halfling’s Court, and it sounds like a good read. I’ve read some of Danielle’s other books, Yesterday’s Dreams and Tomorrow’s Memories, and I enjoyed them very much. Danielle is good with characterization and descriptions and doesn’t draw back (as I do) from blood and gore, either. The Halfling’s Court, like the other two, blends hard modern times and the Land of Fae. Danielle mixes them well and pours a pleasant tale.

The Halfling’s Court will be launched officially at Arisia in Boston in January, but it’s already hit the ground running (er, hit the air flying?), with a listing in amazon.com and reviews starting to come in.

What an exciting time for a writer! I wish her so much success!