elizabeth_oswald

TBK Chapter Forty

Kaz backtracked toward the den, looking for an area with evidence of recent gathering. Gatherers usually went a little further from the den each day, until the earliest patches of plants had had time to recover. Then, they started over again, work...

TBK Glossary

I gave the kobolds their own words for a lot of plants and critters, so I have a little glossary of the ones we've met so far (and a few we haven't met yet). There are no real spoilers, so I thought you might like to have it! They're mostly in ord...

TBK Chapter Thirty-nine

Kaz ran as fast as he dared, nose twitching as he tracked the warm, sweet scent of things that didn’t belong in the cool, dank caverns and tunnels of the mountain. Someday, he would have to ask Lianhua what made those smells, and why their scent...

TBK Chapter Thirty-eight

Kaz crouched by a totem made of a pale gray skull whose eyesockets were filled with hundreds of tiny copper teeth. It was familiar, but he thought he’d heard of it, rather than seen it with his own eyes. He didn’t know how many tribes of kobol...

TBK Chapter Thirty-seven

They ate what they could find, and drank when they followed the sound of water to tiny pools or glittering droplets slowly falling from the ceiling. Twice, they ran into lopo, but in Kaz’s new vision, they burned with shades of yellow k...

TBK Chapter Thirty-six

Li was staring at him. Her wings were pinned tight against her sides, and her ribs protruded beneath her dull scales. She had always been slender, but now she seemed emaciated. Her eyes were deep pools of pure black, watching him as if he was a de...

TBK Chapter Thirty-five

At first, it was difficult to block out everything else demanding Kaz’s attention. Each time he tried, his heart would pound, his head would throb, or his abused muscles would cramp. Surprisingly, it was when he focused again on his breathing th...

TBK Chapter Thirty-four

The monster dragged Kaz down the passage, before it turned sharply, readjusted its grip on his arm, and began to slither down a slimy, narrow crevice. Jagged rocks tried to catch and pull at Kaz’s flesh, but they had no more luck than the sharp ...

What do you think?

I'm a good chunk of the way into The Broken Knife now (a book will be about 50 chapters) and since I'm not posting it on RoyalRoad, I need to know...

Is it good? Is it okay? Should I ditch it and do something else? Do you want to find out wh...

TBK Chapter Thirty-three

The loud ringing of a bell woke him, and he, Nadi, and even Yumi scurried to gather up the littlest pups and lead them to the eating area. Their meal was a simple bowl of cooked meat with fungus, but it was well-seasoned and filling, Kaz was even ...

TBK Chapter Thirty-two

Playing with the pups was surprisingly enjoyable. A group of them would tumble over one another, growling and snapping, right up until they all fell asleep in a pile of puppy fuzz and tiny snores. Only a few were old enough to speak more than a wo...

TBK Chapter Thirty-one

Power flared around all the humans, startling Kaz, and he realized that he had become so used to pushing power into his eyes that he was doing it without thinking. He thought back to their meeting with the Blackbow female, and realized that he’d...

TBK Chapter Thirty

Behind Kaz, the humans tensed, and Kaz saw the two males in the back shift their arrows to point toward Raff. Quickly, Kaz held up a hand, hoping that would be enough to keep the humans from doing anything drastic, though he didn’t dare look aro...

Can you hear me now?

Alas, I cannot. I feel like I've been giving you a lot of excuses lately, but about a week ago, I experienced something called Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss. It's only in one ear, thank goodness, but I am now completely deaf on my left side. I...

TBK Chapter Twenty-Nine

Times for waking and sleeping were no longer defined by the females brightening or dimming the lights around the den, so Kaz had no idea what time it was when sounds of movement woke him. He opened his eyes to see Raff and Chi Yincang preparing a ...

TBK Chapter Twenty-eight

The passages were strangely silent as Kaz passed, without the chittering, scratching sounds produced by the things that lurked just outside the light. He grabbed a few more handfuls of lichen on the way, refilling his pack a bit, then stopped just...

TBK Chapter Twenty-seven

Kaz leaped backward just as the owner of the green eyes lunged forward, revealing the largest fuergar Kaz had ever seen. Like the lopo, this beast was larger than Kaz would have thought it could possibly grow. Its body was as lon...

TBK Chapter Twenty-six

The deeper darkness turned out to be a tunnel, and Kaz had only traveled a short way down it when he found a totem. It was old, but in the dim light of his ki orb, he could tell it was made from the rocky skin of a lopo, dried and stretch...

TBK Chapter Twenty-five

Cleansing a wound of the lopo’s paralytic was no rapid process, and with the humans lying still and silent, Kaz soon found himself sinking toward sleep. He was exhausted after the long climb and the terror of the battle with the lop...