Yes!
It is nearly an entire month after I said it would be! But I have finally chosen the victors of The Skybound Sea ARC Giveaway Contest! Anyone who knows this blog knows that lateness is as much a tradition as the giveaways themselves, because traditions are based on consistency, and the fact that Sam Sykes is a terrible, lazy being is definitely consistent.
Truth be told, though, I wanted to give everyone possible a chance to contribute. And I definitely got my share. A lot of people put in a lot of effort for these ARCs and it’s truly flattering how many people signed up.
So much so, in fact, that I had to relegate the choices I put up for the creative writing portion of the contest to only a few. I hope no one will take offense if their entry didn’t get posted. I loved and appreciated every single one, but if I put them all up, we would likely drown in text!
So, without further ado, my top picks…
Martin Cahill
How Nelkath the Netherling Used Logic and Scare Tactics to Win The Day
Nelkath the Netherling had a boatload of problems and that was no joke. Here it was, invasion time, and she had been given the only problem she couldn’t punch in the brain.
The prisoner shuffled from foot to foot, his eyes flicking in every direction, seeking escape, of which there was none. The soldier sat on a nearby rock, sharpening her blade, itching to stick it into the prisoner. The sikkhun struggled at its tight, leather leash, gripped steadily inNelkath’s hand, eagerly seeking out fresh meat.
Sheraptus had ordered her to get all three of these onto the ship, which was bobbing in the water only three hundred feet away. Her shipmates were pacing the boards, waiting for her and her cargo to come aboard.
But she couldn’t just march ahead, all three in tow. The sikkhun would try and eat the prisoner, or the soldier, or herself, or anything else. The prisoner would end up running away, and end up falling off a cliff. And the soldier didn’t have enough brains in her head to rub together, that convinced Nelkath she wouldn’t just miss the boat all together.
What to do, she wondered. And she groaned and gnashed her teeth at the unfairness of it all. What glory was there in this? This peddling of flesh and blood . . . the herding of three stupid sheep onto a boat was beneath her! She was a warrior of the Nether, the sword of Sheraptus himself! Her sole drive was murder, her love was mayhem! All she was good for was punching things in the brain and dancing in their blood. It was what she loved, and what she was most excellent at.
A sudden grin came to her face, as wicked as a dagger and just as cruel and sharp. Well, she thought, they always told me to stick to what I’m good at.
With that, she elbowed the sikkhun right above the spine, driving it to its stomach, and into unconsciousness. With that, the soldier looked up, just in time to see Nether’s immense, purple fist wallop her upside the head, instantly banishing consciousness to a small and dark corner of her brain.
Turning she looked to the prisoner, who had wet himself in fear. ”Are you going to be a problem?” she growled.
Shaking his head, the prisoner quietly got on the ground and lay down, and helped up his rope. Taking it into her hand, Nether held that, the sikkhun leash, and threw the soldier over her shoulder. With a deep breath, she began to walk to the boat, dragging them all behind her.
Every few steps, she could hear the prisoner moan in pain.
She smiled. It was a grand time for an invasion.
Levi Stribling
Nelkath the Netherling has a problem! It’s invasion time and she has to get a warrior, a prisoner and her flesh-eating sikkhun to the nearby boats so Sheraptus has a sword, cannon fodder and a flesh-eating horror for the invasion. But she can only take one at a time. If she takes the prisoner, the sikkhun and warrior will fight. If she takes the warrior, the sikkhun will eat the prisoner.
How is Nelkath the Netherling going to solve this problem?
Nelkath does have an issue, but it isn’t one that we should quite label unsolvable yet. I’m not so easily deterred as to look at above scenario and promptly get on the phone with Robert Stack – not gonna happen. We’ll make sure Nelkath gets all the assistance needed to complete this task without canceling out any of the aforementioned resources.
The obvious answer here, which is laid out nicely for us in the write up of the issue is to take the sikkhun across first, leaving the warrior and the prisoner behind. All she would have to do is bind and gag the prisoner to a tree naked and knock him out. Nelkath would then instruct the warrior to beat the prisoner if he wakes up and gets out of line.This way the warrior doesn’t have to chase the prisoner down nor will the warrior get aroused as he will find the prisoner’s naked flesh revolting and want to kill him or broad-sword-whip his ass if he gets out of line.
Then, she starts by taking the sikkhun over first, comes back for the warrior, and finally recovers the pansy-ass prisoner last.
But that’s too easy and, Sam, really, you’ve probably already read that scenario once or twice in some watered-down version already – so let’s be like Emeril Lagasse and kick things up a notch.
This becomes easy when you think of things like a genius.
First, Nelkath spends ten minutes writing something on a piece of paper. She folds the parchment up and instructs the warrior to carry it with him as if his life depended on it. He’s a warrior and he’s all kinds of loyaly-bound and shit like that so he’s down. He slips the folded parchment in a secret slot in his chest armor.
Next, she instructs the sikkhun to eat the prisoner. The flesh-eating monster is all like, “Fuck yeah!” and takes that cowardly sinning rat piece-by-scrumptious-piece down his gullet and in his monstrous tummy. The warrior has to look away. He’s a warrior and there’s a ‘right, just, and honorable’ way to go about killing something and what he just witnessed was not it.
Nelkath knows that for a very short window of time after the sikkhun eats a human, its anus flares to unspeakable proportions (some wacky evolutionary factoid there). Nelkath seizes the opportunity and bends the sikkhun over and instructs the warrior to get it. The warrior is a bit shocked, but is also one to follow the orders of its liege so it obeys. Once the warrior is snugly sitting in the large puffed anus of the sikkhun, the hole slowly closes, and the sikkhun is able to again stand erect.
Now that all three bodies are one, she (Nelkath is, of course, a girl) can safely escort the beast to the boats. She gets to the boats and takes a short ride across the river to meet Sheraptus.
With Sheraptus’s help, the two have the sikkhun bend over again and they pull open the beast’s anus. As the sikkhun had not recently eaten, the anus doesn’t flare on its own and needs a bit more muscle to pry it open. Finally, the anus unfolds and the warrior steps out. The warrior smells awful, like sikkhun shit, but it’s cool because Nelkath only needs him for one thing.
Nelkath asks the warrior to give the parchment she wrote to Sheraptus. Sheraptus receives it and opens it. Everything’s written in a language that he doesn’t understand. Nelkath tells him that everything will make sense if she could just borrow a wand from one of his witches.
Sheraptus, of course, sends for a witch who shows up a short time later with a wand. Nelkath grabs the wand and shoves it point first down the sikkhun’s throat, causing him to puke up every bite he had enjoyed of the prisoner’s flesh. It’s all bubbling there on the ground in a puddle of foul sikkhun puke. Nelkath gives the wand back to the witch and tells her to cast a spell on the puddle of puke and read the incantation on the parchment. The witch does as Nelkath instructs and points the wand at the puddle. A blaze of white engulfs the puddle and the prisoner is regenerated and revived. He’s covered in a nasty liquid when it’s all done, but he’s there.
And Sheraptus has his sword, his cannon fodder, and his flesh-eating horror. And he’s sure to conquer as he also has the genius mind ofNelkath.
Hilary
Nelkath pondered her problem, the solution was not long in its arrival. Nelkath told Sikkhun that he would go first, but he insisted that one of the others went first and refused to go. Totally pissed off Nelkath punched him square on the jaw, his balance lost it only took a nudge to start him of in the direction of the boats. Still rubbing his jaw and cursing under his breath Nelkath left him at the boats to return for the next one. On her return the prisoner suggested that the warrior go next as if he went Sikkhun would eat him. Hum! This is true said Nelkath but you are a prisoner and if I say you go next you will go next, now move! With a knife to his back the prisoner walked slowly toward where Sikkhun stood waiting. By the time they arrived he was already drooling at the thought of the feast he would have when Nelkath left them. Any thoughts of feasting were swept away to be replaced by confusion and disappointment when Nelkath made him return with her to where the warrior stood. Looking behind him at the flesh-eating horror and laughing all the way, the warrior walked with Nelkath back to where the very relieved prisoner stood. Tired with all the walking and arguing Nelkath sat down and took a long swig from her water skin and looked over to where Sikkhun stood and was convinced she could see steam coming from his ears. With a chuckle she got up and went to fetch him so their happy troop could once more be, if not united, reunited.
But I think my favorite might be the one I ultimately selected as winner, as offered by Steve…
“Don’t rightly know if she’s still among the living” Rach muttered. He still felt the years of pressure to never look directly at his slave mistress. Pressure and scars across his back. Rach absentmindedly scratched a louse from his beard, pondered it between calloused thumb and finger and screwed up enough courage to look up once again.
Nelkath was a pale-skinned, dark haired terror of a beauty. Tall and athletic. She was wound in black leather straps with shiny silver accents all twisted, jagged and pointy. It was a proper uniform for a Nether slave mistress – a symbolic garb designed to incite lust among the simple Freed and fear with those enslaved. Nelkath wore it and the whip on her hip oh so well.
Rach reckoned that Nelkath was a beauty all right. But years of abuse at her hands had stripped any of those thoughts from his mind. That and she wasn’t so beautiful with the purple raging face and her bulging eyes. The twitch might have taken her down a notch, too. That stream of drool he could live with, Rach thought absently, but those fecking eyes. Just weren’t right. Enraged to the point of bursting, they were.
Something had snapped in Nelkath and, aside from the twitch, she had been frozen standing there for the past 20 minutes. Hands on hips and statuesque. Well, if statues had blood vessels burst in their brains, then she’d be called ‘statuesque’.
“Witch was good with that whip o’ hers, but was never good at math” he mumbled.
The argument continued just as it had for the past hour. His fellow slaves, Sayum and Chalk yelling and waiving their arms at each other over a pile of Spikey Things for Murderous Purposes crates.
“Look. ‘Ere we need to get these six crates of STFMPs down to the ole S-pus afore noon. There’s three of us, excluding the mistress, and each of us can only carry one half of one crate. It’s clear that we should send two of us down while the mistress stays behind to whip the third. We then return to fetch another crate – leaving one behind yet again for the whipping. 15 minutes down and 15 back for a total of three hours. It’s the most efficient answer!” Chalk chopped his hand through the air as if the past hour of arguing meant nothing
Sayum towered above Chalk and launched into what was likely the 20th response. “If’en we each drag one down to the mighty Sheraptus while the mistress whips all three of us, we should be down-n-back in an hour and a half. That gives us another 1.5 hours to each drag the second STFMP crate down for a total of three hours AND we all get a taste of the whip along the way. Much, MUCH more efficient than your convoluted calculations!”
“Gnnaaaaa!” countered Chalk. “The calculation simply doesn’t work out! If I were to believe you, then the STFMP dragging process would involve sliding the crates over an even surface. Cobblestones and the occasional cat would surely delay us 11% between here and the wharves. I even factored in the frictionless benefit of 3 chamber pots emptied per block along the way – it simply DOES NOT WORK!”
Sayum raised a giant fist as to pummel the smaller Chalk. Instead he snatched a nail from a ceiling beam and began to scratch out complex trigonometry on the warehouse wall. “My estimations show a 23% decline in productivity per slave left behind to the 30 minutes of whipping. Understanding that the mistress would surely be tired of the blubbering, bloody first slave, she would want to switch one of us out.” Sayum carried the four. “Then the remaining two would lose their efficiency advantage, causing Sheraptus to surely run the healthiest one through with his mighty broadsword. The surviving slave would then limp back in shame – leaving her with two limping slaves to finish the work.” He punctuated the final word by driving the nail through his final calculation by brute force.
Rach had heard it all before and he was immune to their mathematical jousting. Numbers were like a day without whips for Rach – unimaginable. Nelkath, on the other hand, fancied herself a thinkin’ kind of boss. She had raised her seven-headed whip she called a “Cat o’ Nine Tails” in anger when Chalk and Sayum began their efficiency argument. That should have been the first warning for her that math was not part of her world.
Then the wicked, beautiful fool tried to comprehend. Anger mixed with confusion. Confusion with rage. Rage with calculus and something snapped. For the last 20 minutes she simply stood there – all bug eyed, twitching and red. As if something burst in her head as Sayum and Chalk worked through their convoluted calculations.
Feck it, Rach thought as he undid Nelkath’s coin purse and stepped out to hail a cart team in the street. He counted out coins and directed the Freemen load the crates for delivery to Sheraptus at the wharf. “These fecking Spikey Things for Murderous Purposes aren’t going to move themselves.”
Super cool! Thank you all for showing up and offering your stories! As I said, there were so many, it took a long time to sift through them all and decide! But I’m so glad so many people put so much effort into it! It’s really gratifying, you know? Gets you right here.
I’m either pointing to my heart or my butt. I’ll leave that to you to decide.
Onward, to the MAKE THIS FACE category!
Here is Navi rocking a good Dreadaeleon face!
A pretty good one! And here is Neila with a growly Gariath and dog!
The one I chose, ultimately, though, was this one from Carl.
…if only because I’ve always wanted to know what Kataria would look like with dreads and a beard.
Carl also wound up giving a lot of entries to the Fan Art section of the contest!
All pretty cool! But Hannah’s entry was no slouch, either!
Ultimately, though, and I think you’ll agree, Neila probably wins this one…because holy crap.
…mother of God.
Well, thank you all for participating once again! Sorry for the lateness, once again! And I hope you’ll participate in the next ARC Giveaway we do very soon!
Love,
Sam
xoxox
