Val Evermech
Writer, creature, divine entity, not necessarily in that order.
BOOM Goes the Bride
BOOM goes the Bride is a pulse-pounding lesbian cyber-romantasy. If that sounds like too many genres, don't worry, there's more.When the twice-dead thief Nil steals a magical dagger from one of the world's angriest trillionaires, the last thing she expects is to fall in love with his daughter Sook, the so-called Mother of a Million Clones. But the heart wants what the heart wants, and in this case the heart wants to be chased, shot at, and possibly exploded.Til death do us part is gonna need a bit of an extension...Follow the Backerkit campaign for preorders and more!Watch the book trailer!
Summon the Mage-Wife
Summon the Mage-Wife is a procedural fantasy web serial about a midwife who delivers babies others can't–or wont.River of Blood is a woman with a dark past and a lust for vengeance. Too bad she's sworn off killing. Now she brings life into the world instead of taking it out.From celestials to kelpies to sphinxes and draconic empresses, everyone gets a baby (if they want). More importantly, everyone gets the help they need–regardless of whether the vampires in government want them to get it or not.Coming soon to patreon and on a delayed schedule for free wherever web serials are read!
BOOM goes the Bride first chapter sample:Nap City BeatsUnder a brown sun that filled half the sky and a red sun that merely twinkled, an elf danced between clouds. Her black hair hung long and loose. Her pale skin radiated in the twilight. She was dressed in loose spider silks, toga-like garments that billowed in the wind, a living kite with one mission: to not only return to the ground but return with a strand of silk intact. A strand she wove through the air, impossibly long and thin, moved by finger and palm without ever meeting either.The elf swirled and dove, rose and plummetted. She burst through cloudwalls and soared into the twilight sky. The strand of silk shimmered in her passing. It followed her as she flew. It glimmered as the clouds thinned. It rippled as she clutched her voluminous robes and softly floated to the ground, where purple grass met red soil.An ancient crone of an elf, dressed in bear hides and bone, stepped forward from a small crowd of elders. People who remembered when they came here through stone arches whose magic had long since faded. The ancient elf recited poetry of her youth, guttural and simple, then embraced the young elf who looked up and gazed into her great-grandmother’s crow-footed eyes.I’m going to flay you alive, just as I flayed your mother, her great-grandmother said in a deep, sizzling voice, like magma running over flesh. A demon’s voice.Nil sat bolt upright with a shrieked “FUCK!” The noise and action spooked a trio of gutter gryphons on her balcony pecking through what could generously be called trash. They squawked and leapt off, flapping between the battered glass towers that she now called home. Rain streaked across the windows, partly skimmed of ammonia and methane by the broken district walls.
A starship roared overhead, carrying refugees from Earth, a world Nil had only ever seen in films.A groan escaped Nil’s black-smeared lips. Why was Luriel in her dreams again? That damn demon had done enough. Nil didn’t need him chasing her to another world. She had enough to deal with.
With another weak groan, Nil rolled over on her mattress and discovered that it was actually the floor. Nil groaned again and pushed off the stained concrete. Once, it had the appearance of marble, but time and the elements had done their job, and now the luxury penthouse she squatted in had a very industrial feel. Especially in the smell department.With the precise opposite of grace, Nil stumbled over to her dirty ass kitchen and mashed the go button on a coffee machine that was almost as old as she was. It gurgled and spat out a simulacrum of bean juice. While it did so, she fished through a bowl of what looked like oblong acorns, flipping them open and shut until she found one in particular. Each phone spoke to one partner unit and nothing else. 86 missed messages, the seedphone stated on its algae-ink screen. Each pleaded for a ride to school in increasingly desperate ways.She downed her coffee, tapped back |On my way|, then went to the bathroom to take a shit. Elves slept for a while. It didn’t take much to get the old log rolling. She scrolled through the news on a beat-up old tablet connected to one of myriad pirate webs.Earth colony ship lost to aether, resources feared lost.ARES acquires another weapons manufacturer. Warmongering or profiteering?New Kingdom Clone model to train your kids in corporate obedience.
Sacrificial dagger from the other-world at auction; price expected to reach $12B.Upon reading that last headline, the room darkened. Not from power loss but from power gained. Offered in return for blood and service. The shadows spread, wriggling and sharp.From within and without came a demand, a desire, a command. A job, some might call it, but that implied payment. Nil worked off a debt. A thousand years paid off day by day. This job offered more—a decade, should she complete her task to perfection. It seemed like a lot. It always seemed like a lot, but somehow, she always slid back.
The Liminal Lady wanted that dagger. Why wasn’t something Nil bothered to ask. She’d find out later, or not at all. It didn’t matter, so long as she wasn’t the one being sacrificed. She’d been down that road before.A muttered word to the spirits of hygiene cleaned Nil up. She poured her jumpsuit on. The smart fabric reformed across her body, not quite skin-tight but enough that no artist would bother drawing it as anything but. She made loops on her thighs for the blade-like rails of her, well, railgun, tucking in a dozen or so. She slapped the brick-shape of the exorbitantly expensive gun across her lower back, where it attached magnetically. She rolled her whipsword up one hip, and a bandoleer of potion vials and seedphones across her chest. She pulled her hair back into a tight ponytail and slotted the custom earbuds she’d had made twenty-five years ago into her oversized ears. Then, to the discordant sounds of glitchwave, she oozed to ground level, as awake as a doorknob.
Once on the ground, Nil put up her hood and called for her bike. Of course, in the long-flooded Entertainment District, ground meant water. This place had been abandoned since the Pulse by all but the most desperate of corps and folks. Precisely why she lived in it.
Her bike did not appear. She called for him again, using the voice inside her head, not the one for her own thoughts but places beyond, spells and spirits, the voice of one who knew the names.“FUSE!” she shouted with her elven mouth like a goddamn animal.
A jumble of other bikes parked at a nearby pier began to shift and bulge. Fuse slunk out of the pile like a hungover old man leaving a whorehouse.Fuse was a bike and a being, a firebird trapped in a steel cage. Not by choice but necessity. Fusion spirits didn’t last long without containment unless they reached the mass of stars.Fuse’s body resembled a burrito on a spit, achieving a look that was at once angular, tech-wear cool, and pathetically blocky, as though he was a child’s first low-poly model. At each end, two magnetic forks not unlike railgun blades poked out. Between the tines of each fork spun a collection of triangular blades interlinked to form wheels, or propellers, or thrust vector cones—whatever she needed at the time. He used a combination of magnets and straight-up magic to move the blades about. She didn’t think too much about it—at the end of the day she took him to a shaman when something went wrong, not a mechanic. Unless they happened to be both.Fuse’s wheels flattened, and his handlebar displayed popped up a bunch of puppy emojis, adorable faces covered with adorable paws. He slunk up to her like a sorrowful hound.“Spare me,” Nil said. “Honest is waiting.”Fuse’s wheels firmed up. He plastered his screen with barking dog GIFs.“You like dogs too much for a bird.”
Dozens of green parrots filled the screen with heads abob.To frustrate him, Nil went slow and careful along the piers. Kids ran in front of her. People in mobility scooters drove beside her. A taxi dinghy puttered past her, listing heavily to port due to the presence of a troll amongst the smaller commuters. Dressed in the same typical serf wear as the others, the troll no doubt was on their way to work, same as the rest.Same as Nil should be.In the distance, the remaining district walls pumped out the atmosphere of a planet Nil would never have the chance to visit. Long gashes ran along the walls, leading to collapsed sections and the titanic carapace of a long-dead titan, or kaiju as most of the kids called ‘em.“Breakfast, Miss Shadow?” the corner cook yelled. A pair of grey goat horns poked through his hairnet. Nil never had learned his name. She ordered a bugritto, heavy on the cockroach and special sauce.
“Who you robbing tonight, Miss Shadow?” a local kid yelled as she rolled past.“Your mom,” Nil yelled back. The kid’s friends hollered at him. She had a soft spot for kids like that. Human childhood lasted such a short time. Every year you changed; every winter was experienced by a new person. Elves got to stay for a while and listen to the snow crunch underfoot. To learn, to love, with simplicity and awe. When their adult minds emerged, it was with a far deeper expression of feelings, if not true understanding. Even seventy-year-old humans sometimes failed to learn the extent and shape of their own feelings. Time aided in gaining nuance, but experience mattered more.So Nil pitied these non-elven youths—these teens—though she wasn’t far out of her own elven puberty. As much as she had two centuries on most of the people around, in terms of how horny she got on any given day and how badly she took an insult, she was little better than the average twenty-year-old. She just knew it.The boy she was on her way to pick up was much the same. Young, but wise. A smart kid, people said. Someone who deserved to be living in a real flat. A house, even. Not some dilapidated ruin left for vermin and rot.Honest’s tower complex was much the same as her own, albeit more intact. It had running water. Sheets hung from balconies, and clothes flapped on strings across flooded alleyways. People walked across jerry-rigged bridges from one tower to another. A lucky few travelled at height in sputtering old levcars and homemade helicopters.She patted Fuse on the side, and his wheels rotated. He gently climbed the tower, segmented wheels digging in only enough to push them upwards.A decrepit old pegasus watched her crest the flat-top tower, eyeing her as he always did. A teenage boy with long black braids and big white sneakers stroked the pegasus’ mangy flank and offered him freeze-dried snacks, old spacer food given out by the well-to-do on hunger drives. The pegasus did not eat. He didn’t have much of an appetite—like most of the creatures brought through by the Pulse, he couldn’t withstand the radiation constantly bathing this dingy moon. He was covered in boils and tumors, and every time she came here, she thought he would be dead, but she was always wrong.The boy followed the pegasus’ gaze and waved.“Miss Shadow, you’re late,” the boy said. His name was Honest Mbutu, and he almost always was.“You know I know that,” Nil said. She jammed her black-gloved thumb towards the back of the bike. Honest hopped on with a broad smile. He pulled a harness from her saddlebag and clipped himself in with practiced ease. Despite being less than a tenth her age, he towered over her. While elves were not particularly diminutive, Nil was—a factor she took advantage of frequently. No one expected the 165cm girl with too-long ears to be a threat.“How you doin’, Fuse?” Honest said.
Fuse answered as he always did, with a series of emojis plastered across the viewscreen on her handlebars. Smiley face, stack of cash, dog with tongue lolling.“Big night then?” Honest laughed. “I got something for you.” He pulled out an old soda bottle filled with a strangely glowing purple fluid. “I met a witch doctor who said this is pure pixie blood. He said spirits love it.”
“Give me that.” Nil snatched the bottle from him. Even though he was half-again her height, he did not resist. He knew better. She unscrewed the cap, sniffed, and gagged. “You are not giving this to Fuse.”“Aw, but he wants it!” Honest whined. Fuse rumbled beneath her, in complete agreement.“It’s just antifreeze and the shit they put in glowsticks,” Nil said. She sniffed again. “And maybe some pee. He doesn’t need it.”Honest pouted. “Man, I paid fifty coin for that.”The liquid went straight from Nil’s downturned hand into a gutter. She pointed to a different vial of shimmering effervescence contained in crystal walls.“This is pixie blood,” she said, “And it makes Fuse go crazy. So you never give it to him unless he has been a very good boy.”Fuse whined.“But you can give him something else.” Nil pulled a vial of black oil from her bandoleer and handed it to Honest.“So what’s this?” Honest asked, hefting the oily vial.“Midnight Tar. It’s basically a boiled down ooze. Imagine if an engine could chew toffee. It’s a very special gift for a very special bike who didn’t come when I called him.”Fuse whined again.“But he still can have some because I know I left him alone for a while.” Nil patted his flank. Fuse popped open his fuel hatch. Honest pulled the cork on the vial and shoved it into the hatch. Fire shot into the vial, replacing the inky fluid in an instant. Nil grabbed the empty vial and reholstered it.Applying only the tiniest twist to Fuse’s throttle turned his rear wheel into a thrust cone, and his front folded out into winglets. They left the tower in the dust. The pegasus snorted at her passing and curled up to sleep.She travelled at a stately one hundred kph, slow enough that she only had to maintain a weak barrier to break the wind. The rest of Nap City spread out before them, sky-piercing towers and glowing levways, millions of cars both ground and airborne, millions of people trying to make ends meet in the last and worst city of all time. Starships splashed down in the bay, bearing cargo and people from a world that, for all intents and purposes, no longer existed.“So,” Honest said, in the way that meant he was about to tell her to speed the fuck up. “You didn’t get my other texts.”“I don’t text and fly,” Nil said.“We’re going on a field trip today, and the bus leaves at first bell. Which, uh, is in two minutes.”Nil closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She felt Honest’s hands reach around her waist, waiting to receive the spell they both knew she was about to cast. With a whisper and a twist of her fingers, she made them light as feathers, bound to Fuse as certainly as his own chassis.“Did you remember to pack a lunch?”Honest grimaced. “Oops.”“Alright,” she sighed. She didn’t even have to say hold tight because Honest already did. He knew what was coming.She gripped Fuse’s handlebars, centered her mind, and looked into that part of her that understood that speed was nothing, only a relative term to describe the difference in velocity between two objects. In terms of the universe, she was already going faster than a bullet and slower than a stone. Everything in this world was in motion already. All she had to do was listen and watch.Fuse hummed, then roared.They broke the sound barrier in two seconds. Twice. The sea whipped by beneath them. The city practically lurched into a sprint, towers moving in parallax as though trying to get a better view of this insane school delivery system. A starship descended overhead, heedless of their miniscule presence. She swerved up, inside, and through, drifting between its scaffold-like hull sections and flaming motors. They burst through clouds and, in seconds, approached the foggy expanse of the Commercial District, broken by curving jade towers and the vast ziggurat of the Ultimall.
She spotted a fly-thru McChao’s with a lineup of quasi-luxury levcars waiting for their turns. A sleek black arrow of a car drifted to the pickup window, where an outstretched arm held a waiting bag. She took its place in a heartbeat, snatching the bag from the poor cashier before they even had a chance to look confused. The sleek black car disappeared in her rear, unable to reach speeds that only missiles were meant to match.She knew Honest hollered and whooped behind her, but the speed of sound couldn’t compete with the speed of Fuse. She shoved the oil-smelling bag into Honest’s arms and hoped futilely it was something vaguely nutritious, then kicked Fuse into a wide drift to slow down enough to drop Honest off without turning him into paste. Flame poured out of the scintillating blades of Fuse’s nose and tail. Sound began to return, and the air felt less like a concrete wall and more like a breeze one could breathe, however much like farts it smelled. Commercial had no atmosphere-cleaning walls save for a few wealthy enclaves.
Honest’s school came into view, a squat but beautiful structure of glass and bamboo that barely managed to rise above the ever-present fog. A few modest levcars pulled up to the landing pad, delivering equally late prep kids to waiting groups of their peers. Likely a few cars on the ground, too, but she couldn’t see them. A large levbus waited on the landing pad, its engines pulsing. At the far end of the landing pad, a Long Reach police levcar waited and watched.“Miss Shadow, you gotta do the slide!” Honest shouted.“Why do you deserve an Akira slide?”“There’s a new cop working security, and I want to show off.”That was all he had to say.Nil boosted towards the school and swerved at the last second, spinning Fuse’s thrusters into segmented metal wheels. She slid sideways down the landing pad, past gawking teens and flustered teachers, one foot on the ground, both eyes on the cop car at the end of the pad. Sparks flew from her wheels, mixing with the leftover flames. She came to a stop right in front of the bus doors and unclipped Honest with a wave of her hand.“See you tomorrow, Miss Shadow!” Honest said with a much bigger wave. He ran over to a group of well-dressed friends who high-fived him and laughed.The cop car sat there, and she puttered over to it. Inside were two men. She recognized one, a rotund balding individual she had nicknamed Porkchop, and he had never corrected her. The other was thinner, younger, and much angrier. New to the job for sure. Porkchop hadn’t even looked up from his phone.“New partner, Porkchop?” Nil said, pulling up to his window.Porkchop took a sip from an iced coffee-like and nodded. “Jenny finally got that desk job,” he said wistfully.
“Aw, that’s too bad. You two had good banter.”The skinny guy bristled. “Are you seriously just going to let her fucking go? That elf is number one on the most wanted list!” His voice was tinny and shrill, like a rain gutter when smacked. Nil decided his name was Lean Meat.“We can’t stop Miss Shadow from doin’ crimes.”Lean Meat bristled. “Maybe you can’t, and that’s why you’re stuck on schoolyard duty.”Porkchop sighed. He looked to Nil and raised his hands in mock surrender as if to say, I’m doing my best here.Nil took the hint. “You know, I’m sure the brass would love to catch me. Why don’t you give the kid a chance?”Porkchop slid the steering wheel across the dash to his partner. “Be my guest,” he said.Lean Meat grinned. “You know this car is equipped with homing missiles, tracking cannons, and every kind of electronic countermeasure known to man, right?”All Nil could do was roll her eyes. “Good thing I’m not a man, then.”
“You dumb bitch,” Lean Meat said. Then, he frowned. He tapped the dash, looked at her, then looked down again.“Something wrong?” she said.Lean Meat whispered to Porkchop, but not so quietly that she couldn’t hear—her ears were thrice as long as theirs, after all. Also, he wasn’t very good at whispering.“The computer can’t pick up her face. Or even the bike.”“That’s the glamour,” Porkchop said, staring into his phone, where young people danced in revealing clothing.
“Glamour? She’s not a fucking fashion model. She’s as plain as rice.”“That’s the glamour, too,” Porkchop said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It’s magic bullshit. Only certain people can see and remember her real face. People that she likes. Namely, not us.”It was actually people who liked her, not the other way around. Much less fallible that way. PC might even be able to see through it. Nil would never ask him, though.“Don’t we have mages, too?” Lean Meat complained. The idea that the police themselves were fallible bewildered him. He was definitely new.“Neon mages,” Nil scoffed. She put her hand on the throttle. “Corporate lackeys. I grew up with threads of fate on my fingers. I’ve spoken with dryads, with elementals, with dragons. I’ve drank the blood of unicorns. Your morons studied scraps of my grandmother’s recipes in a goddamn class. On my mark, Lean Meat.”Lean Meat looked far less certain than he had a moment ago.“Three.”He leaned over the wheel, pressing buttons like mad.“Two.”Porkchop put on his seatbelt.“One.”Lean Meat scowled. He reached for his sidearm and, with respectable vitesse and finesse, pointed it at her face.“You’re under arrest for grand theft auto, burglary, and disrespecting an officer of corporate law.”Nil’s expression darkened, both literally and figuratively. She drew power from the unholy bond between her and her fell goddess—her tormentor, employer, and savior—to grind Lean Meat’s spirit into metaphorical dust. Shadows fell across the car, deep and black despite the triple suns hanging above the horizon. The air chilled, an icy sting that had nothing to do with the state of water at temperature and everything to do with the state of the soul.Nil bared her teeth, and hissed. “You should have taken the shot, shithead.”Lean Meat shook in the driver’s seat, frozen in fear. Even if he could have pulled the trigger, he would have missed, but she didn’t want to take the chance that he would cause some collateral damage.
Porkchop reached over and took Lean Meat’s gun from his shaking hand.“Sorry about that, Miss Shadow,” he said, not looking up.The shadows evaporated from the car but not from her. Her goddess was not done. Unlike these lugs, Nil had a job to do.“No problem, PC,” Nil said with false cheer.Nil blasted off, free from the cops, free from gravity, free from everything but herself.