Forgotten Keep Zine Preview
This is a preview of the first zine I'm hopping to finish this summer. I've got about a month per zine if I want to finish both in time to chill before classes start; I think I can do it. :-P
"Forgotten Keep" will feature some of the weirdo fantasy fiction I write I dream up in between work and essays. The first story I want to include is called:
The King of Rot
Finn stood outside the castle walls, its stone silhouette looming over her. The vagabond knight held her shield close to her body, a torch blazing in the other hand. Curly brown hair bubbled in small rows from underneath her helmet. The stars swam in the black sky above the massive keep, and a shadow loomed over the structure; the same shadow that loomed over Finn. Zimbarah, disgraced elf king, nekromancer. The stories of Zimbarah's rule, century-old, whispered by the villagers around the keep. Human lives demanded as tax in his undead armies. Sacred ancestral grounds blanketed by poisonous fog. This keep bore his name, and his foul odor crept through its brick.
โ Mossy stone stairs rose in front of the keep, their steps leading into the small bailey around the tower. Finn knew better than to enter through the front door, yet had lost her climbing tools to the bandit, "Neglect." After this I might have enough to buy a thousand more grappling hooks, and a crossbow just for fun.
โ She snubbed her torch into the ground and pulled her short sword from its sheath. She climbed the stairs to the entrance and stood for a moment before the gate. She held her blade upright before her face, concentrating. Three runes at the blade's base began to appear in the steel. From these marks warm light spread over the sword, from dull orange to crackling yellow-white. She was no mage, but the sword carried its own magick, enchanted long ago. Illuminated in the sword's glow, the knight breathed deep through her nose and steeled herself for what lay behind the iron gate.
โ The spiked tips of the gate's iron lattice hovered inches over the cold dirt and dragged across her pack as she crawled under. Inside, the small bailey was blanketed with dead straw and grass. The rising mephitic moisture stuck to her skin. Floating on top of this miasma was the lingering smell of something sharper, rotten, but less dull. Rotting flesh. Finn's stomach turned.
โ As she began to march forward, Finn raised her sword overhead, casting its magickal light as far as possible into the venomous dark. Her eyes scanned the ruins of the once-opulent keep. The bailey was pocked with broken carriages and half-slumped hutsโthe skeletal remains of a kingdom that had once been full of promise and life...\
That's all for now, I hope you enjoyed! It's been so much fun to write fiction after doing so much analysis during the school year haha. <3