Hello, gang. This is going to be confusing to some of you who are here specifically for PotV; I promise that retains priority. But I have been gradually replotting and rewriting a previous and unfinished book of mine, and thought I might share. This is Power Ballad, the sequel to my first ever novel Power Trio, and something that I have always meant to finish, but which required some pretty extensive revisions (Power Trio probably does, too, in order to get it up to snuff, but we'll cross that bridge later, once Ballad is done).
The rewrite is going to be focused on worldbuilding--which I have gotten much better at and less afraid of since my first stab at this--and general quality/character beats. It's going to feature new additional material from the PoVs of the Power Trio protagonists.
I intend to relaunch the Powerverse series soonish on Royal Road. As part of that I am finally going back and re-doing Ballad. I intend to do this in bits and bobs between chapters of my newer work.
If you'd like to follow along but have never read Power Trio you can find an ebook version of it over here or read it on Scribblehub.
***
The first thing he realizes upon regaining consciousness is that he’s naked. Underneath the animal furs, someone’s taken all of his goddamn clothes off.
The second thing he realizes is that he’s underneath animal furs, a whole thick pile of them. This is not his polyester comforter. He is not lying atop his crappy twin bed in his crappy apartment.
His mind flops like a landed flounder, trying to connect the dots. Was he collared? Concussed by some enthusiastic cop’s nightstick? Did someone sell him out?
No, he wasn’t. Of course he wasn’t. Cops throw you in the lockup, not a yurt. He’s lying on the floor of a fucking yurt, surrounded by warm-toned, intricate carpets and tapestries. He greets this realization with a strangled cry of alarm, throwing the bedding from his ruddy chest. He immediately regrets it when he starts shivering violently.
He hears a crunching sound hurrying closer, and a face appears in the yurt opening. It belongs to an orcish woman, with large brown eyes and emerald skin, her round nose flushed with the cold.
“Look who’s up,” she says. The old world brogue is heavy in her voice. “Morning, Slim.”
He seeks for his voice and finds only a malformed, slurring thing. He manages to use it: “Where’s my clothes?” It comes out like wherzmygloaths.
“Didn’t bring ‘em with you.” She comes the rest of the way into the space. She’s short for an orc, two or three inches over 6 feet tall, if he had to guess. A heavy fur cloak, powdered with snow, sits across her shoulders, and she wears an insulated ushanka-style hat with pouched flaps for her pointy ears. She removes both, revealing a cascade of hickory-colored hair and a padded tunic, broad in the shoulder and cinched at the waist with a raw leather belt. Her clothes are durable but artfully made, brocaded with a blue-threaded, wavy-lined depiction of a flowing river down her chest.
His eye goes to her hip, which has a massive chrome revolver hanging off it, along with a line of thumb-sized bullets. “Somebody had a whoopsie trying to do some magic, I’m thinking?” She clicks her tongue. “You crossed over.”
“This is the old world?” Thizztheolworl?
“Never ask a world its age. Little joke.” She uncinches the belt and gun, and steps out of the tunic. She’s got on side-zip nylon riding breeches underneath, and a black Legendary t-shirt. Her muscular green arms bulge from the sleeves. She is built. “Welcome to the O-Dub, buddy. We’re just outside the Packlands’ border. Found you in a snowdrift. Not a stitch on you.” She gestures to her ears. “Not even your piercings.”
She steps out of her hiking boots and kneels down to adjust a space heater nested in the center of the yurt. An Earth import, it must be, like her breeches. Like him.
He lurches under the furs, unleashes another storm of shaking. His body is desperately fatigued; he’s weak down to his bone marrow.
“Don’t wiggle around too much, yeah?” The orc lies on her side and opens the furs. “You got hypothermia, man. I’m here to get you warmed up.”
She slips under the furs with him. She folds a thick thigh over his waist and pulls him close to the furnace of her body.
“Fuckin’ hell. You’re an ice cube. Poor guy.” Her breath on his face is melting-point hot against his frozen skin. “What’s your name, Slim?”
“Nick,” he stutters. “Nicholas.”
“Nick-o-las.” She rolls it around. She smells like leather and wood-smoke. “You’re a half orc?” She appraises him. Distantly his freezing brain becomes aware of his nakedness.
“Yes,” he manages.
“Thought you were just scrawny at first.” She peers at his mouth. “You got tusks, Nick?”
He stretches his lower lip. She chuckles. “Aww, kinda, huh? Look at those little guys.” She tugs the furs up around her shoulders. “Think warm thoughts, Nicky.”
She’s certainly got that old world orcish physique; as she moves her leg, thick cords of supple muscle move below her nylon riding pants and the layer of winterizing cushion. Her round face and her big doe eyes give her a youthful, curious air.
She’s cute. She’s very cute. He’s naked under the covers with a big cute orc’s big thick thigh across him, pushed up against her firm belly and her soft chest. Waking up to this would be very appealing if he wasn’t frozen half to death.
“What’s yours?” he tries to ask. Whuzzyurz.
“Hmm?”
“Nnn. Name.”
“Diak’zinae, of the Voraag River Pack. Call me Dee.” Her muscles tighten a notch around him.
“Dee.”
“That’s right, Nicky.” She puts a hand on his back and moves closer. “You’re already warmer. How about you see if you can sleep for me?”
He wants to sit up, wants to figure out where the hell he is. He wants at least to correct how she keeps calling him Nicky when he told her Nick. But for reasons he can’t identify, he wants more to obey this strange woman.
He blinks. And it’s the evening. His throat is dry, but his body feels much stronger. Dee is gone. Near where he’s lying, there’s a set of clothes, one of those hand-crank flashlights, and a thick fur-lined overcoat. Sitting atop the coat is a bowl of some white filmy stuff he has to assume is milk. From beyond the heavy, decorated felt of the wall, he can hear muffled music. He takes the bowl of milk off the coat; he's hungry, but he's not that hungry. He dresses, and shoulders the overcoat on, then peels the flap of the yurt back.
Two dozen or more yurts like his dot a field of fresh snow half a foot thick. The paths dug out from them, by footfall or tools, converge in a wide centralized circle, a sizable campfire blazing in its center.
A small crowd of people rings round the fire. That’s where the music is coming from, something fast and drum-heavy. Conversation and laughter strains through the air to his ears. He takes an experimental step out into the snow and his new boots are sturdy and warm as they pack the powder down. It’s time to figure out who his rescuers are.
He picks his way down the path to the tent city’s center. Over to his right he hears the whirring hum of a generator and sees a big silvery hitch trailer with a ring of ziptied metal barricades sticking out from its rear. A herd of hairy rhinos, tacked and blanketed, pile together by an outdoor heater set up just next to the trailer.
A pair of humans in gore-tex troop past him toward the trailer, thick multicolored cables in their arms. “It’s good, I mean,” one says. “Sure. But, like, it had a face.”
“Everything has a face, dude,” her friend says. “It’s just in the new world they cut the face off first. Anyway, it’s comped. And it’s only got a little bit of buckshot in it.”
They cast a curious look at the dazed half-orc stumbling through the snow, but nobody blocks his path with a halt, who goes there. So there he goes, he supposes.
He makes his way to the outside of the fire, where the conversation is a cheerful tangle of English, Packtongue, and a touch of Spanish between laughing two middle-aged guys with mustaches and parkas with STAFF stamped on the back in reflective letters. A figure on the other side of the bonfire stands at his coming and circles the clearing. The firelight glints off Dee’s revolver.
“There he is!” She slaps a mittened hand onto his shoulder. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Nicky. We got cider. You want cider?”
“Sure,” he says.
She hitches a thumb into her buckskin belt and rattles off a burst of guttural syllables toward one of her packmates. When she repeats a few words, he realizes that a bit of the tail end was intended for him.
“Razkrtha Pakdra?” she asks again. He knows that one; he’s fielded it plenty of times back on Earth from disappointed orcish aunties. Do you speak Packtongue?
“Wiek,” he says. “Tere’nek nai.” No, hardly any.
She looks back at the collection of travelers around the fire. Roughly half of them are orcs, bundled up in a mix of old- and new-world insulation just as she is. They survey the newcomer with wary curiosity. “Anyone know if you’re not supposed to drink after hypothermia?” Dee asks.
An elf sitting at a metal folding chair, with a chipped mug in his hand, shrugs. “Who knows.”
“Hey,” he says. “If that shit didn’t kill me, this won’t.”
Her eyes crinkle into a smile. “Cheers to that, brother.” She throws an arm around him and steers him closer to the heat. “Say hi to Nicholas, everyone. This was the snowbank dude.”
“Oh, thank fuck.” A lanky purple orc comes round, long black hair hanging out of a machine-knitted toque. Unlike most of the tusked ones, her winter clothes are entirely Earth-made, layers of puffy polyester down and waterproof fabric. “You looked dead as disco, dude. I was like I’m seeing my first dead body. Jesus H. Christ.” She sticks a hand out. He shakes it. “Name’s Kell,” she says.
“Nicholas.”
“I heard you like Nicky?”
“How about we go with Nick, please.”
Kell points at a bundled-up goblin redhead, who peers at him through big round glasses that reflect the fire. “That’s my wife Thekla and my husband Evan is over there by the stove thing.”
The goblin gives him a little smile and a wave. “Hey, it’s the isekai dude. So glad you’re up. Thanks for not being Kell’s first dead body.”
“Isekai?” Kell squints at her apparent wife. “Is that a goblin word?”
“Nicholas. Good to meet you.” A blue-eyed, bearded human passes him a hot tin thermos head full of steaming cider. “I’m Evan Kamiyon.”
He knows this human. He knows all three of them. “You guys are Legendary,” he says. “Holy shit. You’re them.”
“Yessir. That’s us.” Kell’s hand lays proudly on her husband’s back. “You got some titties you need signed?”
Thekla dismounts from her chair and pours more cider. “You gotta stop asking people that, baby.”
“You’re wondering what’s going on,” Evan says, apologetically. “Where are you from? New Laytham?”
“Born and raised. You too, right?”
“Tennessee at first, but New Layth in all the ways it matters. What do you play?”
“Guitar.”
“And you were trying to incant?”
He hesitates. He lies. “It was just a little experiment, trying to light a match. That was it.”
Kell tsks. “You licensed?”
He thinks about lying again, but there’s only about two dozen licensed bards on Earth right now, and he has a feeling Legendary knows most of them. “Not as such.”
“You got crossover’d,” Evan says. “Happens sometimes when an incantation backfires, ever since the Door opened back up.”
“That, I already get. Dee—” He looks around. Dee’s having a low-voiced conversation with a pretty but frazzled-looking high elf woman with green hair and golden skin. He feels a weirdly juvenile pang of jealousy that the packmistress isn’t next to him anymore. “Dee told me you found me. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Thank her,” Evan says. “She’s the scout who spotted you. If it had taken long enough for the whole convoy to roll through, you’d be dead or down a limb to frostbite.”
“One way you can thank us is don’t try magic again unsupervised.” Thekla puts her hands on her hips. “There’s a reason it’s illegal unlicensed, man. Shit is dangerous.”
“Not that we can take the high ground, exactly,” Kell says.
He knows what she’s implying, was actually thinking the same thing himself. Two years ago, at their first UK concert, Legendary inadvertently opened the Door to the old world, using the first spell the Earth had seen in centuries.
“Okay, but that was different.” Thekla purses her lips. “We’re licensed bards now.”
“Double-licensed.” Kell digs into her pocket. “With the DOHM on Earth and with the Lutorius Guild in the O-dub.” She produces a battered wallet and plucks a pair of cards out. One laminated with her grinning face on it, one made of wood-pulpy card and stamped in movable type:
LET IT BE KNOWN TO ALL THAT KELLAX FALRAK, BY BEARING OF THIS BADGE, PROVES HER SORCERY SANCTIFIED BY THE SOVEREIGNS OF ELFHEIM, ITS LORDS OF MAGIC, & THE PRINCES OF LUTORIUS.
And then a spiky signature beneath. The thing strikes him as eminently forgeable.
“Fancy,” he says.
“Right?” Kell places her card back in the wallet. “Got a bunch of magical regulators on this side of the Door, too. Who knew, right? You can get one of these pretty easy just by showing your DOHM card.”
“Which you better have,” Thekla says, “if you’re gonna try and do magic on the tour.”
“I mean, how would we know, right?” Evan says. “No way he could’ve brought it over.”
His halfway recovered mind strains to take all this new information in. “Tour?”
“Yep,” Kell says. “You abracadabra’d your way right into the path of Legendary’s inaugural Old World Tour, bro.” She spreads her arms out and indicates the yurts. “Twenty-four spots and then Elfheim. Well, twenty left now. You caught us right at the beginning. First leg is the packlands.”
“Lucky for you,” Evan says. “The Door’s just a few days’ ride south.”
Thekla nods. “I bet we could spare a couple orcs to get you back there.”
“We could. We surely could.” Kell is nodding along with her. “But, uh, Thek…”
“Kellax Kamiyon.” Thekla’s eyes narrow. “No.”
“Maybe let’s let Nick introduce himself around, and we go have a little conversation.”
“Babe, no. Not again.”
“What, because it went so terribly last time?”
Evan gives him an apologetic smile. “Would you excuse us for just a moment? That’s our manager right over there.” He points to the high elf, who’s glancing over with almond shaped eyes as golden as the finely featured face they’re in. Her lips are green, like her hair. He wonders if that’s natural or if she’s made up. “Her name’s Anise. She can get you situated better than we can, I think.”
“Evan, please tell our wife that she’s being crazy,” Thekla says, as the Kamiyons’ boots crunch the snow.
“He’s gotta be good, Thek,” Kell is trying to whisper, but she’s not great at it. “You can’t even fuck up a spell unless you’re good.”
Dee’s whistle carries across the fire-warmed air. “Yo! Nicky!”
Nick, not Nicky, he thinks. But as he jogs toward the woman who saved his life, he doesn’t say it aloud.