Stygian Sagas

This is one of the oldest stories I ever thought up, younger only than Lawton. But the first draft from the early 2010s was always far too rough to release, and had been outgrown by the time I began recording and releasing stories here. This month, I wiped the slate and rewrote it from the ground up, and hopefully breathed new life into it. It's a Delve story, simple and providing only a glimpse of the things from below ground, as with a lot of early Delve stories. This was mostly an exercise in trying to write a truly short (less than forty minutes or an hour) horror story again, but this version still ended up nearly twice as long as that original rough draft from over a decade ago would have been.
 
It was hard finding a place to record this, as I've had a lot of unexpected travel come up this month, but I think I did well enough. Due to those difficulties, there's a place near the middle where the audio goes toaster mic mode for a minute or two due to some noise removal I had to do for background sound. While regrettable, it's short and will, as ever, serve to weed out the sort of pedantic people I don't want consuming the work anyhow, so I've left it in. The first draft of the South Sea Cycle horror novel is completely finished, and while it'll likely still be a month or two tinkering on it before I'm ready to record and release it, you might want to revisit those stories in the South Sea playlist if it's been a while. You certainly won't have to have read/listened to any of those older stories to understand and enjoy it, though.

I'm repulsed by the 'essayification' and 'wikification' of fiction in general, and this is not something I'd normally consider releasing. However, after a long talk with a person whose judgement I trust, given the nature of this ongoing project, I've decided a good compromise for people who actually enjoy this sort of presentation is, like the history series, to present it in-universe as a document, and therefore lend it a tiny bit of the literary worth it would otherwise lack. That being said, this is not the way this civilization should be encountered for the first time- this should be seen as a supplemental presentation.
If you have yet to listen to He Who Thunders, a novel entirely set among and about Xoloxaitians, it is available for free, like all my work, as an audiobook here: https://youtu.be/yRDaiblgHDg
This work was pieced together from my own personal notes, and I've been careful to remove details I think would get a deep treatment in future novels or short stories. You can see a small example of these in the Robert E Howard Stygian Sidetracks I put out a while back reading about Khandar from one of these journals. I already have these notebooks filled for all twelve of the kindreds, so the next countries on the list will be the Duumvirate of Lautan, then Gunug, as featured in Solar Tide. As my plans stand, I will only release these anthropological, in-universe presentations after a given civilization has been featured in its own novel. I am not a visual artist. All images were either (very poorly) smudge painted by me after Frankenstein-ing them together in GIMP, were made in Wonderdraft as maps, or are pictures taken of landscapes/items I think fit the settings being described well. The images should not be taken as gospel- the focus of the writing is the writing, as that's my pursuit, not visual art. I only toss these things together to give visual people something to look at. Always take something I've described much more seriously than something I've shoddily illustrated. Moreover, this is a living setting in the sense I'm still working on and in it, and will continue to do so as long as I live. I'm constantly tweaking and shifting things to be better in line with the in-universe cultures as they develop, doing everything I can to make them feel alien to a modern audience, and yet relatable enough to serves as good windows on the world. I'm aware there are very small inconsistencies in the setting over the years, but these are choices of alteration I have made, and things won't be standardized and finalized until, in all likelihood, I'm dead and can't workshop them anymore.
Installments of the history/mythology series (to be continued this year) can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLurTA68FnURj0HcRzXHA9w8UPZYoilmCq  
Better-quality maps, as well as rough mockups of a lot of the kindreds, etc, can be found in the discord.
For my own sanity, I do not read comments anymore save for Stygian Sidetracks member's early releases, just to show appreciation to them. That said, anyone can always contact me by Email, Discord, or Patreon (as a free follower) should you want to get back in touch with me, I check them a couple times a week generally. Thank all of you for listening, if you did- it's always heartening there are still some people out there who enjoy stuff like this.

A witch with strange servants is at work above the streets of Century City.
 
Music by CO.AG Music

A bit of folklore from the Philippines made flesh in the bowels of a half-empty apartment complex.

Working to get Libsyn to fix the podcast feeds and get old episodes back up, be patient and find them on other platforms if you need them for now.

Music by CO.AG Music

The Dreamer returns in this wintery Tale set in Red River Gorge.
Music by CO.AG Music