Lost Light

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More Chapters this weekend for both "The Darkness in the Lion's Forest" and "The Lot."


The Darkness in the Lion's Forest - This week, Crow and Nick go to the Emerald City, where their friend, the lion, has sequestered himself away, not talking to anyone. Nick and Crow are asked to come speak with him to see if he will open up to them as his closest allies.

The Lot - New Chapter coming this weekend! Rowan is passed off to his new buyers and is taken to upstate New York, where he learns about the war, the shape of the world now, and how it is all predicated on human existence. There's a strange man who, unlike all the other wolves, when challenged back by their alpha, does not retreat, and that gives him pause.

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Getting another of my in-progress stories ready for INKITT!

Rowan Reid survived six years alone after the virus reshaped the world, avoiding vampires and lycans through careful isolation. Captured after one lapse, he's held two sleepless nights in a bare cell, screamed hoarse and unanswered. Daniel Kaine, a vampire adjudicator, arrives and delivers the truth plainly: Rowan is unclaimed property, subject to bids from vampire and lycan households, and will likely be turned by whoever wins him. Daniel arranges his glasses and proper clothes, then walks him, barefoot and unbound, to the auction hall being readied for bidders. He explains the process coldly: Rowan will sit unable to see or hear anything, and be returned after. While bidding goes on beyond a viewing room. Paralyzed by fear and logic rather than hope, Rowan claims no questions, though hundreds go unspoken, and he dreads knowing who is the winning bidder.

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The Darkness in the Lion's Forest is now being posted, starting with Chapter One: The Clearing at the edge of the Gillikin Wood.

https://www.inkitt.com/stories/1821063

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I am writing a new story that will be out chapter by chapter soon. I do not categorize this as FAN FICTION, as the Wizard of Oz is within the public domain, and this does not have the same restrictions as other properties that are not. I hope to have the first chapter up this evening!

Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodsman, has learned to take his peace where he finds it, an afternoon in a sunlit clearing, a lizard on his chest, Crow's straw-and-pollen shoulder against his arm. That peace ends the moment Glinda's bubble descends through the Gillikin canopy: the Cowardly Lion has shut himself in a room in the Emerald City for three days, eating nothing, speaking to no one, and only Nick and Crow have any hope of reaching him.


What follows is not a battle, yet it's a long night of sitting with someone who has run out of road, learning to tell shame from fear, and remembering that courage was never borrowed from a place, a wizard, or a curtain. It was always carried. Sometimes it just needs someone to stay long enough to remind you where you put it. The yellow brick road is not the road it once was, but old roads have a way of asking old questions again.


A story about staying, through fear, through fire-shy nights, through the slow work of being witnessed rather than argued with. Before the deep wood, there is a morning of preparing: a sharpened axe, a face given rather than assumed necessary, and a choice made freely, at last, in the open.



There's a line in the original Baum books where the Tin Woodsman is asked whether he'll ever remarry, and he answers that he has the Scarecrow, and so has no wish for a wife. It's a throwaway moment in the text, but "a friend of Dorothy" was, for a long stretch of the 20th century, coded language for exactly this kind of relationship, and I've never been able to un-see the echo once I noticed it. This story leans into that thread rather than around it.


More than plot, this is a character study. Nick and Crow have been together long enough that their care for each other has worn into shorthand: the choreography around a lit flame, the way Nick reads Crow's stillness like a second language, the small permissions they've learned to give one another. I wanted to spend time in that established, unhurried intimacy before asking them to do anything heroic with it. The Lion's arc runs in parallel, a study in the difference between fear and shame, and what it actually takes to reach someone who's shut the door on both.


If you're here for magic and peril, that's coming. If you're here for two people who've had a long time to get good at loving each other, that's the heart of it.