Topic: Blog Tours
As promised, today you get to taste Sandy Lender's writing :-) Enjoy this excerpt:
Dunny & Quill
From the History of Onweald ca. 7100
By Sandy Lender
Dunny groaned some more, rolling to lift himself off the floor. "You're a bad man, Quill Valiant."
"You knew that coming into this. What do you think of fire?"
Dunny glanced to the crystal barrier. "How solid you think that is?"
"You're not up for asphyxiation today?"
"It's a small cavern. I think it'd fill up before all that ice melted."
"Agreed. So it's back to the box of rocks." Quill opened the little wood box and set it on the floor between them. Dunny crouched down to peer in.
"I wouldn't get that close to them," Quill whispered.
"Seriously?"
Quill shrugged.
They both leaned back.
From her imprisonment in suspended animation, the dragon did the only thing she could. She rolled her eyes in impatience. Stupid mortals, she thought. The green one!
"So d'you know what all they do?" Dunny asked.
"Well, he talked kinda fast. . ."
Dunny rose to his full height of three feet four inches then and scowled at his human friend. "You cannot be serious. We came on this quest to get a dragon and her chalice out of an ice prison in an ice cave, and you knew that coming in, yet you forgot which crystals would help when we got here?"
"No, no, now I didn't say that. I'm just remembering that he talked pretty darn quickly."
The green one! The green one! Stupid idiot mortal human male! The green one!
"All right. How about the red one there. It looks like it would produce fire. We should avoid a fire one."
"Agreed," Quill said. "And I think you're right. I remember him mentioning fire."
"How about the yellow ones? He gave you several. What're they for?"
"Yellow. . .yellow. . .more fire?"
"Quill. So help me."
"I'm just kiddin' with you. I think the yellow ones raise what you throw them at. For instance, I fling one at the cave floor and shards of dirt and rock come up."
"Useful. We could use them around the base of the wall."
"Agreed again. But let's see what else we've got. There's this pretty blue one. I think that summons faeries."
"Okay. What's this peachish brackish one?"
"Oh, yeah, don't touch that. Pig's testicle."
"What? Whatever for?"
"Edras love 'em. Throw that among a horde of edras and they'll stop to fight over it every time."
Old wives' tale, the dragon thought. Get to the green one.
"Great," Dunny said. "What about this green one?"
"Hmmm. I don't remember. Let's try a couple of the yellow ones."
The dragon had wanted many times in her years of imprisonment to get free of the ice, but never had she been so filled with the desire to get out and eat a human. And so she watched in absolute fury as the human and the dwarf each took a yellow crystal and stood what they thought would be a safe distance from the ice before flinging the stones, full force, toward the base of her prison. She fumed as she waited for them to regain consciousness.
**
You can read the rest of "Dunny & Quill" and other short stories in the upcoming release What Choices We Made, Stories From the History of Onweald, Volume 1 by Sandy Lender. With monsters, magic, romance, humor, sword and sorcery, What Choices We Made will be available at Amazon.com starting on the busiest shopping day of the year!
From Fantasy Author Sandy Lender
Check out Choices Meant for Gods, www.archebooks.com
What Choices We Made, available Nov. 28 at Amazon.com
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