《Empathic capacity of a teaspoon》chapter 47
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Bill and I were sitting in our apartment gearing up
Strapping the knife to my shin, putting on the mask and so forth.
“I can't believe we're actually doing this." Bill said.
He didn't sound worried, just weirded out.
To be quite honest, this wasn't what I imagined doing with my immortality either, my plans had been to use my intellect to become an independent worker doing something I liked and just living out life lazily and enjoying myself.
Then magic happened.
I would say it was a nice trade off, who needed peace and contentment when you had the ability to bend reality to your will.
"Me neither, to be honest, but still I think writing a will was going a bit overboard." My words ignoring the fact that I had written one myself.
If only to explain everything to my remaining two friends.
Well, almost everything.
Bill sighed and stood up.
"Whatever, time to go, it's almost two in the morning."
I took his hand and apparated us to the spot we had previously scouted, suddenly we were being sprayed on by foaming sea water and standing on a small rock protrusion looking out at the small island inhabiting one of the most miserable places in the world.
Azkaban, a dark tower rising into the heavens, or as most people in Britain would describe it, hell.
Since Bill had a stronger connection to magic and would therefore not tire as fast it was his job to transfigure the rock around us into a boat.
Sailing towards the prison I was finally able to feel the wards surrounding it.
Anti-Apparition and anti-Portkey, that was it? Narrowing my eyes I looked closer, no, there was something else, hidden between the two was a slight shimmer of blue.
A slight shimmer if blue that would alert the object connected to the thing to scream out alerting the aurors if someone passed it.
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Good thing I had a solution to that then.
Gesturing Bill towards me I pulled out my invisibility cloak and draped it over the both of us, we had to squat a bit to make it work.
.
We weren't far away from the prison now.
I was able to discern its state of shabbiness, cracks on the outer walls, water leaking in through holes and the rotten wooden door that served as the entrance.
But the most important thing I saw were the dementors.
Hundreds of them swarming around the tower like angry hornets, and it looked like they noticed us as well.
A group of three monstrosities were floating leisurely towards us.
Shivering and hearing the chattering teeth of my brother I noted that I had severely underestimated the effect dementors would have on me.
One probably wouldn't have been a problem, but the quantity seemed to correlate strongly with the amount of despair felt.
Thank god we had masks on, making us capable of activating the self destruction spells on ourselves before they were able to suck out our souls.
I liked being in possession of my soul thank you very much.
The things were drawing closer now, close enough that I was able to truly appreciate how ugly they were.
"My god these things are ugly, bloody hell."
Thank you Bill.
"Well no matter how ugly, I'm sure there is someone in this world whose fetish they prescribe to perfectly."
Almost casually I pulled the philosopher's stone out of my inventory, and through the mental agony I was going through touched it to the grasping hands of the closest dementor.
Channeling magic through it I watched in fascination as the thing ever so slowly from the point of contact started turning golden.
It moved its arm a bit cracking the thin layer of gold across it's arm but the ancient artifact would not be denied.
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At the pace of a snail the arm turned golden, perhaps noticing it's approach into non existence the thing started shrieking making me glad I had some noise regulating charms on my mask.
I leaned over to it and whispered into its ear.
"Don't worry too much, life after death isn't too bad." Strangely the thing stopped shrieking and if it didn't have eyes I would have been sure it was using them to stare directly into mine.
The golden curse started accelerating and before I knew it I was left looking at the greatest work of modern art in history.
A golden statue of one of the most dreadful beings in all of existence.
Only Bill and I would know it wasn't simply a statue
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Broken and lost by the dredges of this world a boy awakens once again into life's game within hallowed black halls, his first taste of new life cold and hunger along with the echoing drip of temptation. Deep sickness festering within in him. Given a second chance by either coincidence or something more sinister, follow the story of he who bleeds black. Betrayal, greed and blood littered in droves across this hellbound path. ********** 2000+ words daily for now, will reduce to thrice a week after the writathon. If it wasn't clear, this is a vampire story taking place in a high fantasy environment. Although while its main character is a vampire and that is one main focus of the story it will also lend itself to the magic side of this world as well. Basically, if you're interested in vampires or magic heavy stories, this will have something for you... probably. The synopsis is kinda vague but If you give it a shot, I think you'll like it. Also, feel free to drop any sort of constructive criticism since this is one of my first experiences writing in first person.Forgot to add that the story will be a little less action-orientated until around chapter 20+ when... well... read and see :) Any chapters with the * next to them have been edited or tweaked. I'll remove it once all of them are.
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2/17 NOTICE: I'm putting this on hiatus, possibly permanently. I didn't want to spam with an "update chapter", so hopefully here and in the story blurb will get enough eyeballs. There are a couple reasons for ending SSA for now. 1) I wrote the next chapter but wasn't happy with it. I've been less and less satisfied with SSA's quality the more I thought about it. Part of the reason is... 2) I am seriously thinking about trying to publish some novels to help pay the bills, since I don't have my other source of income anymore. I have never asked for anything from SSA readers, no money, not even a review or rating. SSA is written for fun to amuse myself, primarily, and I would kind of feel bad actually charging someone money for something as unserious as that. I don't think it is good enough to ask anything in return. To use an analogy from music, SSA is more like a jam session with a bunch of friends. You're just chiling and having fun playing some music. I mean, if you are Mozart or even Eminem, your jam session is good enough to sell, but for an amateur beginner like myself, haha, no. If I want to publish something, I feel like I need to go the proper route of practice and rehearsals, which might be more similar to a classical concert performance. With SSA, I work from worldbuilding notes and a loose outline, but what you are essentially getting is the first draft with lots of so-called pantsing. Pushing out a web novel like this also means it is very difficult to go back and improve things without breaking everything else downstream. I wanted to try this "jamming" approach, as it was a good way to teach me about another aspect of writing, but to move forward, I think I need to hone my "classical" techniques, which emphasize rewriting, or at least, revising outlines. 3) While I intend to try to make $$$, my actual current goal is to "get gud". I've spent a lot of time recently trying to understand the self-publishing industry, and I'm pretty sure I can make some money by using short-term strategies with my current amateur skill level. But I've seen too many authors come and go/burnout, and really, the only way that I think I can enjoy writing and still make money on a long-term basis is to become a better writer. And the next step for me, which I haven't done much before, is to spend more time on rewriting and outlines. That is pretty much antithetical to the way SSA is developing. I've always been kind of 20/80 plotting/pantsing, but I want to spend a lot more time outlining before I even start writing. SSA jam sessions don't really fit my goal anymore. If you're curious about what's next, read on... Among other regrets, I regret not finishing SSA. It's the first story I've dropped, but then again, it's the first web novel I've attempted, so I suppose that's not a surprise. I don't think traditional web novel formats suit me that well. The whole SSA story I had loosely planned (beyond a first book or major arc) is way too large as well. Big story = good for neverending webnovel with Patreons, bad for penniless and fickle writer like me. I am currently outlining a complete trilogy to another story in great detail. I want the story to end concisely, and I also want the chance to really spend a lot of time on the full outline to spot pacing problems, character issues, lost themes, and so on. I'll still share this story on RR. What I intend to do is finish book 1, flash-publish the whole thing here for a few weeks, then publish on the big Zon. Repeat for books 2 and 3. The upcoming story will be about crafting heroes. The backdrop is an isekai-like setting, where elves will summon humans to their world as heroes, but the whole hero crafting business is still in its infancy. 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