The Final Calling: Progress Report Two

Well, here we go — Chapter One has been posted. This is very nearly the same text as “The Warlock’s Refuge”, but not exactly — it’s been revised to fix some errors and inconsistencies (some pointed out by readers, some that I found myself).

All future chapters will be all-new, never-before-seen material.

The announcement went out less than three hours ago, but the next two chapters have been paid for. Chapter Two will be posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, and Chapter Three will be posted on Wednesday, June 30th. This bodes well.

As far as the writing goes, I’m a page or two from finishing Chapter Five.

A reminder: The serial of Realms of Light is still active; I don’t see any problem in handling both at once.

Please feel free to spread the word; I’m always looking for new readers.

I welcome comments!

21 thoughts on “The Final Calling: Progress Report Two

  1. I’ve just donated my $25. I donated to the previous serials, but under another email address, so I didn’t get the notice about this one until you posted to rasfw. (I have a new email address, included in the headers here, and a new mailing address too, which should be included in the donation info.)

  2. Dear Sir,
    Got your email notice just after midnight this morning in my inbox, read the chapter after work and sent the first $2.50. I always wondered what happened to the first ones from Night of Madness, thank you for telling us 🙂

    Paypal worked just fine for me so whatever the glitch is I escaped it.

    Thank you for your excellent stories, I received my copies of The Vondish Ambassador and The Spriggen Mirror the last two times you did an Ethshar serial and am looking forward to this one as well.

    Allen W.

  3. Paypal took the donation just fine. I’ve paid my first $25.00. If I pay a second, can I get a second book when they come out? This is really the book that completes Esthar collections and I’m thinking of getting several for friends.

    Thanks for going forward on this.

  4. I don’t believe that the Council wouldn’t try sending someone through again. An apprentice Warlock who hasn’t begun feeling the calling for instance, or a Warlock who’s just *barely* begun to hear it.

    Personally, if I was such a Warlock I’d volunteer for such a mission, so I can’t believe no other Warlock wouldn’t.

    Disbelief can be suspended for the rest of the novel though. I’m looking forward to this and Dumery.

  5. You’re assuming that the Council is sufficiently organized to worry about it, especially after the tapestry has been rolled up and put away. They were probably more concerned with finding a new chairman.

    You’re also assuming that no wealthy warlock created his own refuge, just for himself and a few friends, with no way back, rather than messing with one that had demonstrably failed once.

  6. The stupid part is where Hammer goes through alone, but that’s understandable. He’s distracted and he thinks it may be risky, so he doesn’t take anyone else, but the part of the plan where he COMES BACK to report struck me as unnessessarily risky even prior to reading the result.

    Of course I had two advantages Hammar didn’t. (1) No distraction from the calling and/or its absence and/or a new world, (2) I knew in advance it didn’t work since there’s still a problem 19 or so years later, so he couldn’t have solved it….

  7. Doug, I agree with you that he shouldn’t have gone there alone. But once he did, he *had* to return to report. If he’d stayed there and *not* come back, the council probably would’ve done the same thing – written it off as a loss, elected a new leader, and put the tapestry into storage.

  8. Transporting tapestries work on objects.

    If he can find a way to write he can throw a message back through.

    If he can’t find a way to write he can still throw SOMETHING back through and see if that attracts an investigator.

    Coming back through yourself is the last resort.

  9. “You’re assuming that the Council is sufficiently organized to worry about it, especially after the tapestry has been rolled up and put away. They were probably more concerned with finding a new chairman.”

    I didn’t even consider the second option, but it’s still personally hard to buy the first point considering what’s at stake.

  10. You are making some huge assumptions here — first off, that the Council as a whole is capable of doing anything.

  11. I’m actually assuming that there would be a person or two on the council (or associated with it) who would go off on their own to try this (and let the others worry about electing a new chairman). I don’t think in terms of organizations and teams, even when I’m involved with them. But I habitually think about trouble-shooting experiments gone wrong And I know I’m not alone.

    This is one of those “Why didn’t they call the police?!” issues for me, and is probably going to stay that way. You can’t please everybody all the time. 😛

    Off topic – I’m re-reading the God in Red yet again:
    “Dagyu forrek woprei shenyu mei ganau! Empro em!”

    This seems quite a bit like baby talk. Has any baby or Grand-aunt ever accidentally summoned a god or demon by babbling in baby talk?

  12. Doug: Transporting tapestries work on objects? Really? I must have overlooked that part. On further thought, I guess if that were not true, they wouldn’t have tried to use one on the seething death…

  13. Transporting Tapestries do NOT work on inanimate objects except in special circumstances; you can’t just throw something through one. Notice that the attempt to use it on the Seething Death emphatically didn’t work, and that they even made the attempt was based on the theory that the Seething Death wasn’t an inanimate object (as, in fact, it wasn’t).

    Robert, the words used in spells, in any form of magic that uses incantations, are all in various esoteric languages — mostly ones I made up. If someone did accidentally stumble on the right combination of sounds, they might get a deity to take a look in, and say, “Oh, not talking to me,” and depart.

    Demons require symbols as well as words, so accidentally summoning a demon is less likely, but it has happened, usually with unfortunate results.

  14. Hey, Robert? As far as the Council doing anything, let me remind you of this:

    “Chairman Hanner, you specifically forbade us from telling any other warlock anything about this project. That was part of our contract, and we have abided by it.”

    Nobody on the Council, except Hanner, knew anything about the refuge until after it had failed. They have no emotional investment in the project. They only know what Mavi and Arvagan told them.

    While some of them would probably want to try other ideas, I really don’t think any of them would try that tapestry again.

  15. I’m so excited! I’ve been waiting for this Novel for who knows how many years! Probably ever since I read my first Ethshar novel 20+(?) years ago!

Leave a Reply to Lawrence Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *