Alternate History - Blog Posts

HEY, A NEW AU! Zoro, Kuina and Sanji trio?! Siblings?

Well, this is an AU I've been wanting to draw for months.

It's about how, Zeff seeing that Sanji still didn't value his hands as a cook, punished him, forcing him to go to a dojo so that when he hurt his hands, he would really value them.

The blessed dojo is Kou's, where Zoro and Kuina are. Upon arriving, Sanji expresses his displeasure at being there, which annoys Zoro.

Over time, Zoro, Kuina and Sanji begin to get along better, to the point that the three of them began to train hard, unaware that they've gone from strangers to siblings. Kuina and Zoro almost always defend him from ridicule for his very thin body.

Sanji was present but hidden when Zoro and Kuina made their promise. On the day Kuina died, Sanji and Zoro bumped fists before Sanji said that he should fulfill Kuina's dream. at all costs, and Zoro told Sanji that he should become strong so that he would not be underestimated for his thin body. Two years pass, Sanji must return to the baratie, while he is on the return ship, Zoro yells at him from the coast to fulfill his dream and promises, Sanji yelled the same thing back.

Something I didn't mention was that the three of them had told each other their dreams, plus Sanji cooked for everyone at the dojo. Sanji uses two swords, but he uses them for blocking, not attacking. L The bandages on his legs are from kicking a rock for years until it broke. Sanji and Zoro fought a thousand times, Zoro won 501 times and Sanji 499 times, Sanji against Kuina simply didn't, Kuina won. the 800 fights they had. Sanji spent 2 years in the dojo.

Years later they met again in the baratie according to the original story and the rest, well, One Piece 👍

Fact that made me laugh but seems true and correct: I think Zoro was very short as a child which is why I said that Sanji beat him by 10 cm even though Sanji is originally taller than Zoro, and of course,Kuina is a little taller than Sanji, so you can imagine Sanji's teasing of Zoro, which is ironic since Sanji is currently 1 cm shorter than Zoro🤣

About the ch au What about barabarossa it never happened and how did the nazis go with their plan

Uh jeez- well, for starters, there wasn't an alliance between the Germans and Soviets, so there was no need for the most part to invade (except for potentially more power). But that's not really the case??? The nazis were more focused on trying to invade France and the UK early in the war, but they do try to invade the USSR, but struggle due to the Unions prepared border security (a thing I probably should have explained in my og post) and inevitably end up failing and falling back.

Tl;dr: Barabarossa does happen, just later in the timeline and for different reasons.

About a year ago I started working on my Retrograde Earth series, in which I depicted Earth's continents on a backwards-spinning Earth, which would result in a major reconfiguration of Earth's climate. The first map I made in this series was Retrograde South America; however, that map has aged a bit since then as I've learned more about mapmaking and received further input from u/AncalagonTheBlack42 and MolotovJack. This is my attempt to remake that map from scratch. My next project will be to stitch all of the maps I've made thus far into a global map and render it as a globe in Blender or some other program if I can get that to work.

I forgot to post the Retrograde Eurasia map back when I finished it in February. Since we’re looking primarily at Asia and Europe this time, this map is by far the largest out of the five I’ve done. For any further details on the climate check out:

 https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/1bwp6hn/v5_retrogradeclockwise_earth_map_and_accompanying/ 

 https://www.deviantart.com/molotovjack/art/Retrograde-Earth-V5-Final-Version-985503973.

I’ve been wanting to do a detailed tilted Antarctica map for a while now, but the low resolution of the bedmaps up until now and the need to reconstruct pre-glaciation topography made me a bit apprehensive to start it. However, the recent release of bedmap3 to the public gave me the motivation to give it a shot. For this map I used the isostatic adjustment from Paxman et al. (2022) on bedmap3 to create a version accounting for isostatic rebound. I then used the rasters of Antarctica during the Eocene-Oligocene boundary from reconstructions made by Paxman et al. (2019) and tried my best to combine it with my rebounded bedmap3 map, in order to preserve the fidelity of the highlands and add the features which were lost to erosion. I took this heightmap and ran it through Wilbur to carve out valleys and rivers as well as to add more detail to the coasts and ease the transition between the two maps. I then used the topography and likely climate of the continent to create a false satellite map. Finally, I looked up the names for various features, both glacial and subglacial to fill out the map. I also used qgis to help convert between projections and do raster calculations for the rebounded map.

Description:

It’s difficult to picture Antarctica as anything else aside from the vast frozen expanse we see at the bottom of the world today, but as with everything involving deep time, our present is only a snapshot in Earth’s history. Up until the Late Eocene, Antarctica was as rich and varied as any other landmass. From what little we have of Antarctica’s fossil record, its makeup was broadly similar to Pre-interchange South America, home to early Ungulates and Marsupials as well as their close relatives. Antarctica’s habitats were equally diverse, hosting grasslands and even Austral forests, likely resembling the Valdivian rainforests of Southern Chile, with even palms being present during the Paleogene. However, as South America and Australia departed northwards, the circumpolar-Antarctic current took hold, restricting the flow of warm subtropical waters to the poles. This cooled the continent and its elevated interior allowed glaciers to easily take hold, thereby dooming nearly all of its inhabitants to extinction. 

But what if this wasn’t its fate? Let's imagine that over the course of the last 40-45 million years, Earth’s poles slowly change their positions, slowly enough that its disruption to Earth’s climate is about as gradual as the movement of the continents. By the present, the North Pole is over Africa, somewhere in Northeast Nigeria, and the south pole over the middle of the Pacific, adjacent to the Manihiki islands, which places Antarctica squarely in the Tropics with the new equator running through East Antarctica. The tilt chosen for this map is the same as Jaredia from the World Dream Bank’s Planetocopia, an old website which depicted alternate versions of Earth, as well as alien planets. For now, we won’t focus on the ramifications this has for the rest of the planet. 

Being covered in glaciers over the last 34 million years has dramatically altered Antarctica’s topography, not only has the land been isostatically depressed, but the movement of glaciers has eroded vast tracts of the continent. This version of Antarctica never underwent any kind of extensive glaciation, resulting in a landmass quite alien compared to the one we would get if we simply removed the glaciers from Antarctica now. The Northeast of Antarctica is now covered in tropical rainforests, likely filled with a diverse array of marsupials and birds. Things become slightly drier as we travel inland and increase in elevation. Even without glaciers, much of the interior ranges from 1000-1300 meters above sea level, comparable to the South African Plateau; which now supports the world’s largest subtropical highlands, similar climatically to the highlands in Ethiopia. Much of the North-Eastern side of the highlands drains into the Lambert graben, a permian-aged rift, which now forms a bay. Rivers coming down from the highlands introduce an immense amount of water into the bay, making the majority of the bay range from fresh to brackish, and with the sediment supplied by the mountains making this bay rather shallow. During Glacial maximums, this bay transforms into a low-lying plain, the sediment of which now makes the seabed ample territory for seagrass meadows. Further into the highlands, we find Lake Vostok, now relieved of its burden of ice. Without the depression from the ice above, the coasts of lake Vostok sit at about 1000 meters above sea level and are surrounded by subtropical forests. The lake’s depths nearly extend back down to sea level, supporting hydrothermal vents like those in Lake Baikal, with the only indication that something is different being the new flow of detritus from above. 

To the West we find a desert encompassing almost all of Marie Byrd Land and the Southern portion of the Palmer Peninsula. Sediment derived from the Marie Byrd land volcanic field, dispersed by the winds, colors vast swaths of the desert red. A few of the shield volcanoes in the Marie Byrd Land volcanic province rise high enough to capture some moisture, creating small oases of highland grasslands and in rare cases cloud forests. The Northern tropical forests of the Palmer peninsula are uniquely isolated from the mainland by Ronne bay to the East and the West Antarctic desert to the south, meaning any fauna here would likely be endemic to it. In the Ross Bay, the Transantarctic mountains cast a sizable rain shadow to the west, helping to form a narrow desert on the leeward side. In Ross bay, we also find a small archipelago of desert islands, with the largest being Penwell Island, a remnant of which exists in our Antarctica as Penwell Bank. To the South we reach the boundary between the tropics and subtropics. Near Antarctica’s new southernmost point we find the mouth of the Wilke’s river: the longest river on the Antarctic continent and which terminates with a wave-dominated delta. It’s also here that we find the largest permanent glacier on the continent, limited only to the highest points of the Victory Mountains.

Even without the circumpolar Antarctic current, Antarctica remains an extremely isolated landmass. No land bridges have connected it to any other continent since the Eocene, though South America (Now north of North America) remains just within reach. Ocean currents in the Drake Passage travel primarily from East to west, meaning that rafting events are unlikely to take settlers from South America to Australia, but could take settlers the other way around. It’s possible that South America could receive a regular influx of marsupials and other fauna from Antarctica over the course of millions of years. 

Resources Used:

Bedmap3: https://data.bas.ac.uk/full-record.php?id=GB/NERC/BAS/PDC/01615 

Reconstructions of Antarctic topography since the Eocene–Oligocene boundary: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2019.109346 

Total isostatic response to the complete unloading of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-15440-y

I almost forgot to post the Retrograde Australia map here!

Retrograde Africa (Africa on a backwards rotating Earth)

Retrograde North America (North America on a backwards rotating Earth):

I think this is my favorite retrograde Earth map I’ve made thus far, I’m hoping to work on Earth piece by piece until I have a full map.

Retrograde South America

This is my attempt to emulate a satellite map of South America on a backward spinning Earth, I based this on the climate maps made by Molotovsnowman and AncalagonTheBlack42: https://www.deviantart.com/molotovjack/art/Retrograde-Earth-V5-Final-Version-985503973

Which themselves were based on this study and this map from the Worldbuilding Pasta Blog

https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/9/1191/2018/

https://worldbuildingpasta.blogspot.com/2023/06/climate-explorations-day-length.html

Adelie, a tilted Antarctica

Tilted Africa

What if Australia was as it was during the Miocene?

Modern Messinian salinity crisis

(In the Paratus universe, the Soviets landed on the Moon first.)

Newly Released High Resolution Film Scans from Apollo Missions

8,434 photos from the Apollo missions were just uploaded to flickr by NASA! 

Countryhumans: The Commanders of Gilead

Drew this back in December 2022 and finished it on April 13, 2024.

I wanted to draw the Commanders of Gilead from Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale in Countryhuman style. I wanted to make them as accurate as possible. *Yes, I also added Donald Trump because for my headcanon I'm working on for the Hulu series' alternate history, he's a Commander in Gilead* I previously drew my first Gilead design back in November 2022. At first, I liked it but now I don’t like the head since most Countryhumans have round heads like Countyballs. So, when I drew the Commanders, I wanted to make them more human-like heads than round but keep the style of Countryhumans like the white eyes

Commander Fred Waterford played by Joseph Fiennes

Commander Nick Blaine played by Max Minghella

Commander Joseph Lawerence played by Bradley Whitford

Commander Andrew Pryce played by Robert Curtis Brown

Commander Warren Putnam played by Stephen Kunken

Commander MacKenzie played by Jason Butler Harner

Commander Donald Trump as himself *obviously*

Commander George Winslow played by Christopher Meloni

Countryhumans: Republic of Gilead

Drew this a while back on November 22, 2022. This is the Republic of Gilead or simply just Gilead. He’s the fictional country from Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I wanted to draw him as a Countryhuman since I saw how popular the fandom is. I joined in to draw Gilead in CH style and gave him a bio. The person I based him on is Commander Fred Waterford, played by Joseph Fiennes.

For those who don’t know much about The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s based on the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood. It’s set in a dystopia where the world suffers from low birth rates due to pollution that causes a fertility crisis. In the US, a Christian fundamentalist group called the Sons of Jacob or SOJ, a Puritan Christian group, violently did a coup in Washington DC on President's Day, by killing the President, Congress, and the rest of the Cabinet, to overthrow the US government. They seized power and transformed the former US into the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian patriarchal Christian theocracy that rules most of the former continental US. They strip away women’s rights and make them handmaids to be impregnated by their Commanders, who are the leaders of Gilead, for their barren wives. Their laws are based on the Bible, mainly the Old Testament for the authoritative laws against women.

In the Hulu series, it does the same element as the book but it is set in an alternate 2014 where the SOJ did the coup in Washington DC on September 11, 2014, by staging a terrorist attack to kill President Obama, Congress, and the Cabinet. The SOJ blamed the attack on Islamic extremist groups for the attack, quite possibly ISIS at the time of 2014. They then removed women's rights by first firing them, leaving them unemployed, freezing their bank accounts, not allowed to own property, and finally a nationwide abortion ban. All of these led to a 2nd Civil War from 2014 to 2017, as the setting for Season 1 of the series.

I already finished watching the series back in February 2023. I'm still waiting for the release of Season 6, which won't come out until next year due to the writer's strike last year. My mom got me hooked to watch this show. I mainly watched it for its alternate history since it talked about a fictional 2nd American Civil War.

It's a good show to watch. I highly recommend watching it as it parallels how US politics are right now.

I refuse this bullshit.

What if Israel was created in Bessarabia?

by carpathian_mapper/instagram

So I googled Elvis on the DC wiki

It was mostly empty, but I noticed that there was a version called "President Presley" from Earth-1098

Researching Earth-1098 reveals that this is a hypertime variant or something? And I thought this it was like a variant of Kingdom Come universe because it first showed up in the second issue of "the Kingdom" but it's not? Cuz the costume designs don't match at all?

Anyways, after some google-justu and some (un)educated guesses, I've come to the conclusion that 1098 takes place in 2013 - 16

Cuz Supergirl generally arrives at least 20 years after Kal El (he's generally an fully grown man when she arrives) and when I look at the images of 1098 S-Girl I think she looks around the same age as Power Girl(?) maybe? I dunno but power girl is like 30 years old when compared to Supergirl. anyways S-Girl (alt name used 1098 Kara) says that Wonder Woman and the Justice society raised her. Also Batgirl seems to be around the same age as Bruce Wayne (or at least old enough to confide in him about this stuff), and as we all know, Bruce is a 30 something year old playboy. Therefore that means that Batgirl is in her 20s-30s as well. I guess. And when you compare that to the young adult/teen counterparts from the main continuity, this leads me to believe that earth 1098 takes place at minimum 15 years after 1998. Though tbh I think that it's more likely to be closer to 18/20 years as that feels better in my head. Anyways.

With this timeframe I have concluded that Elvis either beat Obama in the 2008 election, or he Beat Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Or maybe he ran Republican. Not much is known about the Kings political beliefs, but what is known (thru very confident google results) is that he was a Democrat back in the days before the parties basically swapped(I think? I dunno political history), and would probably run as a Republican. But not like a modern Republican, more like a "liberal conservative" question mark? Either way I doubt he could be much worse than the orange ogre. At least he can sing. That's a better quality for a president than being an ignorant buffoon, right?

PRESIDENTIAL TRIGGER WARNING-----------------

I dunno what to fill this empty space with

He's hideous. We shoulda gotten Elvis.

Кто такая Екатерина? Или порнография, насилия, убийства, и хардкор в истории России.

Who is Ekaterina? Or pornography, violence, murder, and hardcore in the history of Russia.

Не так давно наш доблестный кинематограф выдал на телеканале Россия-1 «Екатерина» сериал в несколько серий, про ту что была второй. Сериал интересный, гламурный, героиня - в исполнении Марины Александровой - сексуально привлекательна, нарядна, почти весь фильм занята своими любовными похождениями. Вообщем - то что доктор прописал, если ты - одинокая тупая домохозяйка. Сериал кстати достаточно интересный, опять же повторюсь гламурный, но как и все остальное творчество наших деятелей культуры, не имеющий к реальности отношения. Но мне намного более интересна та Екатерина что все таки была Первой. И какой была ее судьба? К сожалению, история, самая лживая из всех возможных наук. И думать, что ты можешь понять суть каких-то событий, изучая ее, как минимум наивно. Скорее наоборот. Начнем издалека. Насмотревшись роликов в интернете я пришла к выводу что ранее на земле существовала одна цивилизация. С центром власти, или столицей расположенной на террритории современной России. В пользу этого можно отнести одинаковые архитектурные сооружения что в Африке, что на территории современной Европы. Эта цивилизация постоянно подвергалась атакам некоей другой расы. Постоянно вела войну. И в конце концов была захвачена пришельцами из вне. Ну а народ ее был почти уничтожен большим потопом. В следствии чего например, мы имеем сейчас закопанные этажи, или "Венецию". Кому интересно посмотрите в интернете много роликов на эту тему. Захватчики, сохранили жизнь некоторым представителям захваченных, назвав их "дворянами и царями". Этому есть как минимум две причины: первая - они были хранителями научных знаний этой цивилизации, не случайно науку и культуру творили именно дворяне, а вторая – остатки простых людей были готовы им подчиняться. По праву их кровного превосходства. Хотя потом конечно дворяне выродились смешавшись с пришельцами, но а тех, что оставались добили революцией. Сумев уже к тому моменту убедить нас в легитимности такой власти.Так кто же такая Екатерина? Во всяком случае та что была «Первой». Ее судьба видится мне невероятно увлекательным, хоть и хардкорным сюжетом для фильма. Тем и обидно, что сняли сей кичливый фарс про любофф Екатерины 2й, обойдя вниманием ту что первая. Итак. Представьте, есть красивая, чистая молодая девушка, пережившая травму ввиде случившегося потопа. В котором погибли все кого она знала, в том числе родители. Может и младшие сестры, братья. А сама она лишилась не только дома но и того мира в котором жила. Своей родины, своих прав, а может и памяти. Вокруг нее бегают дикие озабоченные варвары. Срущие из своих окон. Немытые и злые. Их развлечения - это оргии, пьянство, пытки. Таких как она святая инквизиция ловит, и после многодневных страшных пыток отправляет на костер. Она моет посуду в одном из трактиров этих варваров. Ее гнобят, унижают многие годы. И в конце концов все кончается групповым изнасилованием. Что завершает травму для раскола и обработки ее сознания. С тех пор в одном человеке Екатерин становится - две. Первая - та, что непрерывно страдает от происходящего, и та, для которой - все это норма, и в дальнейшем она даже соорудит установку для кекса с конем. Но при этом, эта вторая абсолютно подконтрольна воздействию из вне. И управляема представителями каганата. И вот тут то каганат за ней и приезжает. Не раньше, не позже. Понятно что для вербовки они направляют к ней таких же обработанных Петра 1 и Менщикова. Видя в них "родные души", и представителей своего арийского народа, она сначала влюбляется в Менщикова, но тот потом демонстрирует ей свое второе «я» на оргиях с Петром. Снова травма. Снова невозможность уйти от происходящего. Меньшиков «передает» ее Петру. Ну а дальше история известна. История грязная, трагичная, страшная. В дальнейшем обработка каганатом представителей дворянства, а тем более царей была поставлена «на поток». При чем под «каганатом» я не имею ввиду евреев. Они лишь один из инструментов на мой взгляд. Будь я режиссером или сценаристом, вот о чем бы я сняла интересное кино. Но домохозяйки и их интересы важнее, поэтому дружно любуемся на Александрову в рюшах…

Not long ago the series “Ekaterina” was released, a series of several episodes, about the second one. The series is interesting, glamorous, the heroine - performed by actress Marina Alexandrova - is sexually attractive, elegant, almost the entire film is busy with her love affairs. An English series starring Anne Fining is about the same thing. The series are glamorous, interesting, but like everything in our cinema, they have no relation to reality. Personally, I am more interested in the fate of Catherine the First. In the history of Russia, if anything, there were two Catherines.

After watching enough videos on the Internet, I came to the conclusion that previously there was one civilization on earth. With the center of power, or capital, located on the territory of modern Russia. This can be supported by the same architectural structures both in Africa and in the territory of modern Europe. This civilization was constantly under attack from some other race. Constantly waged war. And in the end it was captured by aliens from outside. Well, her people were almost destroyed by a great flood. As a result, for example, we now have buried floors, or “Venice”. If you are interested, watch a lot of videos on this topic on the Internet? The invaders saved the lives of some representatives of the captured, calling them “nobles and kings.” There are two reasons for this: the first is that they were the keepers of the scientific knowledge of this civilization, it is no coincidence that it was the nobles who created science and culture, and the second is that the remnants of ordinary people were ready to obey them. By right of their blood superiority. Although later, of course, the nobles degenerated by mixing with the newcomers, but those that remained were finished off by the revolution. By that time he had managed to convince us of the legitimacy of such a government. The fate of Catherine first seems to me an incredibly fascinating, albeit hardcore plot for a film. That’s why it’s a shame that they filmed a farce about the love of Catherine the 2nd, and not the first. So. Imagine there is a beautiful, pure young girl who has experienced the trauma of a flood. In which everyone she knew died, including her parents. Maybe younger sisters and brothers. And she herself lost not only her home but also the world in which she lived. Your homeland, your rights, and maybe memory. Wild, anxious barbarians are running around her. Shitting out of their windows. Unwashed and evil. Their entertainment is orgies, drunkenness, torture. People like her are caught by the Holy Inquisition, and after many days of terrible torture they are sent to the stake. She washes dishes in one of these barbarians' taverns. She has been oppressed and humiliated for many years. And in the end it all ends in gang rape. Which completes the trauma to split and process her consciousness. Since then, Catherine becomes two in one person. The first is the one who constantly suffers from what is happening, and the one for whom everything is the norm, and in the future she will even build an installation for a cupcake with a horse. She becomes subject to the influence and control of the representatives of the Kaganate, who come for her just in time. Not earlier, not later. It is clear that for recruitment they send to her the same processed Peter 1 and Menshchikov. Seeing in them “kindred spirits” and representatives of her Aryan people, she first falls in love with Menshchikov, but he then shows her his other self at orgies with Peter. Menshikov “hands over” it to Peter. Well, the rest of the story is known. The story is dirty, tragic, scary. Subsequently, the Kaganate’s processing of representatives of the nobility, and especially the kings, was put on stream. Moreover, by “Kaganate” I do not mean Jews. They are just one of the tools in my opinion. If I were a director or screenwriter, this is what I would make an interesting movie about. But housewives and their interests are more important, so we admire Alexandrova and Ann in ruffles ...

Image credit: Harper Collins Publishers, Matt Murphy, Joel Tippie

Marita here. I’m apparently incapable of writing brief reviews, so buckle in.

World War II seems to be having a moment in YA, between Code Name Verity and Salt to the Sea and Wolf by Wolf (Hi, Melissa!), and it seems like I have been sucked in, too.

I picked up this book because I thought the cover was amazing, and something about the author’s name tugged on my memory.

So then I opened it up and read the first line of the prologue: “I’m not going to tell you my name, not right away.”

And WHA-BAM! It hit me. Michael Grant, the author, is married to K.A. Applegate, the author of Animorphs. For those not in the know, every Animorphs book begins something like, “My name is ____. I can’t tell you my real name. It’s too dangerous.” It’s a bit of an open secret that although his name’s not on the books, he collaborated with her on the series that pretty much defined my childhood. Some people know Harry Potter forwards and backwards, and some people know Lord of the Rings and some people know Star Wars, but I am a scholar of Animorphs.

So, yes, this made me very happy. 

The real strength of Animorphs is that it used fantastic settings and characters and circumstances to explore very real and important issues. It’s about a war between two alien species that humans got caught in the middle of, but the fact that it is a war is never forgotten. There are casualties and sacrifices, and it hurts.

Over the course of the series, each character is slowly broken in their own unique way. It is, at heart, the story of six children (OK, four children, a hawk, and an alien) who are thrown into a war they simply aren’t prepared for. Their only choices are to become soldiers or die.

It is a science fiction series through and through, but the brutality and the horror and the cost of war feels very, very real.

After reading Front Lines, I have to believe that that gritty, realistic tone was in large part Michael Grant’s contribution.

Front Lines, the first book in the new Soldier Girl series, is not science fiction or fantasy. It is a meticulously researched historical epic. There is exactly one fact that is not historically accurate, one court case detailed in the opening pages:

FLASH: “In a surprise ruling with major ramifications, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Becker v. Minneapolis Draft Board for Josiah Becker, who had sued claiming the recently passed Selective Service and Training Act unfairly singles out males. The decision extends the draft to all US citizens age 18 or older regardless of gender.”

--United Press International--Washington, D.C., January 13, 1940

Women became draft-eligible just in time for World War II. This is the single cog that Grant fits in to the machinery of history, and the whole thing spins out naturally from there. And my God, is it incredible.

Told in a roving third-person point of view, this is the story of three teenage girls heading to war. Rio Richlin is a sweet, innocent California farm girl who is thrown off balance by the death of her older sister in the Pacific theater. Almost on a whim, she lies about her age and enlists with her friend Jenou. Frangie Marr is small and unassuming, but dreams of being a doctor. However, because she happens to be black and female in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 1940′s, this is little more than a pipe dream. She enlists because her family desperately needs the money, and because being an army medic might pave her way to the MD she’s hungry for. And Jewish New Yorker Rainy Schulterman just wants to give Hitler a taste of his own medicine. She’s icy and intelligent, and even though the men around her are quick to write her off, she’s determined to put her skill with languages and numbers to good use.

Our heroines make it through boot camp just in time to join the fray in North Africa and become embroiled in the Battle of Kasserine Pass.

Why is this book important? For a couple of reasons.

The one at the top of my list is that it makes war immediate and real. I’m a girl. I’ve never had to think seriously about going to war, and I don’t have any immediate family in the armed forces, either. War is a distant concept to me. I can have sympathy for the experiences of soldiers, but empathy simply isn’t possible because there’s nothing I’ve experienced that can compare. Sure, I can appreciate Saving Private Ryan, but once again, I can’t really empathize. I’m watching men I don’t strongly identify with going through things I can’t comprehend.

This book of teenage girls on the front lines made the battlefields of World War II feel personal. These are girls I could have been in another life, reacting like I would have reacted. They’re as confused and determined and angry as I could see myself being in the same situation. I may not know what it’s like to fire an M1 Garand and take a life, but I do know what it’s like to walk into a room full of boys and have them size you up and dismiss you in the same glance. And I do know what it’s like to want to show the boys you’re competing with that they’ve dismissed you at their own peril. I can definitely put myself in the shoes of these soldier girls.

(Side note: I’m almost resentful that this book was written by a grown man, but captures the feeling of being a teenage girl so incredibly well. He writes with such sensitivity about things like schoolgirl crushes and nail polish and hairstyles without being belittling or dismissive. It’s just not fair.)

There’s so many perfect scenes, so perfectly experienced by our heroines. This book is filled with countless moments that bring the war to life. Not a word is wasted. Every little instance of disenchantment and demoralization and rage and fear hits hard. You’re there on the transport ship on your way to the front for the first time, realizing that you’re still just a civilian in an army uniform. You’re there in the foxhole, aiming an M1 at another human being and hoping you miss. You’re there in the medic tent, making the impossible triage decisions. That experience alone makes this read so worthwhile.

Also important is the fact that Grant doesn’t pull any punches--not when it comes to the reality of war, and not when it comes to the prevailing attitudes at the time. This book is not for the faint of heart. There are scenes of extreme gruesomeness, and there is explicit and offensive language. It’s a hard book to read, but it has so many important things to say that you’re not doing yourself a favor by avoiding that pain.

A lot of war movies focus on the glory of battle and the unbreakable brotherhood between soldiers, how noble and brave they all are. But that’s whitewashing history. The soldiers who defeated Hitler were a bunch of scared kids. They were also, by and large, sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic. Many WWII works avoid acknowledging that the US army was still segregated at that point (probably because it would detract from our hero worship of those soldiers), but this fact is never sidestepped or excused or swept under the rug in Front Lines. In one scene, a soldier comments on the irony of sending a segregated army to fight a white supremacist and is immediately booed by the rest of his barracks, and that’s probably one of the least upsetting things that happens in the book. The fact that our three heroines are the continual targets of this bigotry drives that point home perfectly, if painfully. They don’t have to be as good as the white male soldiers they’re constantly measured against, they have to be better to earn any grudging respect.

World War II was that rare war that truly needed to be fought. Unfortunately, we’re a generation that has pretty much forgotten the lessons learned there. We’ve forgotten that Hitler was democratically elected. We’ve forgotten that the disenfranchisement of the Jews happened by inches and feet, not all at once. We’ve forgotten that the Holocaust happened because too many people saw evil happening but refused to speak up out of apathy and convenience. We’ve forgotten what it’s like for our country to go all-in on a war with rations and drafts. We’ve forgotten how it feels to live under a constant umbrella of fear. We’ve forgotten that lofty ideals don’t win wars, ruthlessness and violence do. And we’ve forgotten that the soldiers of that war weren’t glorious heroes. They were fallible, imperfect humans like the rest of us. He (or she) who forgets history is doomed to repeat it, though. By revising history, Grant manages to undo a lot of historical revisionism.

This is, all in all, an incredible tale that sucks you in, gets under your skin, breaks your heart, and shows you a whole new side to the story you thought you knew.

Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin

Man oh man oh man oh man OH MAN OH MAN.  This book was ammmmaaazzzziinnnngggggg. So good. Wow. Five stars. Fiver.

Let me break it down for you.  So let’s pretend that Hitler and the Axis powers never actually lost WWII.  IN FACT, they won and slowly began taking over the world, filling it with death camps and just lots more death.  Enter Yael. She and her mother were taken to a camp, and Yael became the subject of some extremely nasty German experiments. Unfortunately for the Germans, the experiments that were just supposed to change the pigment of Yael’s skin to that trademark Aryan White actually gave her the ability to skinshift, i.e. the ability to change all aspects of her appearance.

Fast forward ten years, and Yael has found the perfect opportunity for revenge. Every year the Third Reich hosts a cross-continental motorcycle race to commemorate their great victory, and the prize is an audience with Mr. Adolf Hitler himself.  Yael only has to enter the race as Adele Wolf, the only racer and person Hitler has ever let close to him, win it, and then kill Hitler.  Easy Peasy!

Unfortunately killing Hitler is not as easy as that, especially when Adele’s older, overly-protective brother Felix enters the race, along with past love interest Luka–two people who know Adele PRETTY well.  WOWWWW.

Let me further break this down for you:

Alternate history!

Sci-fi skinshifting!

Super attractive love interest with murky past!

Hunger Games-like competition that pits teens against one another at the expense of their safety and lives!

Knife fights, and fist fights, and gun fights, oh my!

Death

Basically everything you could ever want from a YA.

ALSO let me just say that Yael is the most badass girl I have ever encountered.  She puts Katniss Everdeen TO SHAME.  She’s super complex, cares a lot about people, and has trained to KILL HITLER. idk what else you could really want.

I am also going to add that I have an extremely awful habit of reading the ends of books before actually finishing them (I am fully aware that this is shameful bye). I did that while reading this book. I WAS STILL COMPLETELY BLINDSIDED BY THE ENDING.  Don’t ask me how that happens, idk.  And predicting endings is kind of my job (editor over here y’all). Surprise endings don’t really happen for me anymore.  But this IS an alternate history with skinshifting and motorcycle races, so what really could I have predicted lol

Read this book. It’s amazing.

~Melissa, Book Wench

A timely quote.

Dutch was many things, but at the end of the day he was a Dreamer.

RDR2 informs a lot for the show and if you ever want a peak into the creative process of the podcast know that most episodes of DW come with a few hours of riding around in RDR2.

Faustus '47: Ch. 2 - Darkness

Photo by Veit Hammer on Unsplash

Chapter 2: Darkness

  The night’s darkness descended on them as they slowly crept into the cemetery, and soon Caldwell was squinting and swearing under his breath as the Scot ahead of him kept disappearing. The clinging rain-mist that had descended was not helping either. Knee-high grass clung wetly to his legs as he hunched forward, one foot slowly in front of the other, and every so often he found himself suddenly lurching into a gravestone or cast-iron railing around a small family plot. Wicker would turn back and hiss, and Caldwell would slowly fumble onwards in the new direction, trying to home in on the hiss and instead just discovering more gravestones with his kneecaps. The darkness was absolute.

  Caldwell felt the grass underfoot changing, becoming shorter, and suddenly he was on what felt like a gravel patch. The grating of the stones overfoot sounded like a gunshot to his straining ears, and Wicker was at his side moments later, gripping his upper arm.

  “Careful now. We’re almost in the old Breton district.” Wicker breathed the words into Caldwell’s ear, the sound barely audible over the soft patter of the rain. “It should be over the little rise ahead.”

  Caldwell murmured agreement, and wondered how the Scot could see a little rise ahead.

  True to his word, after another handful of minutes of slowly shuffling up what felt like an incline, Wicker stopped Caldwell and pulled him down to his knees, and the two crept forward on hands and knees from there. Caldwell kept the Sten slung around his neck, praying that the muzzle or action would not foul on something in the grass they snaked through. The ground was cold and sharp beneath his hands and knees, and his woollen trouser legs were soon soaked through. Pebbles and stray shards of gravel dug into his palms as well, making him grit his teeth at the sharp pains that sporadically flashed up his arms.

  After almost colliding head first with another gravestone, the first hint of light ahead crept into Caldwell’s sight. Buttery yellow flickered and twisted through the grass ahead of him, and upon reaching the crest of the rise, he found himself looking down on the Breton district of the Sains Grieu cemetery. Wicker was already there, flat on the wet ground, and pulled Caldwell down beside him to study the scene below.

  The Breton district, based on the old records that Caldwell had been able to scrounge up in Ireland, dated back to the time of the Crusades - if not earlier. A long list of noble - and a shorter list of less noble - knights and lords had been buried here in those years, and the centuries since had seen the district expand with more tombs, mouldering mausoleums, and burrowing crypts as others had been laid to rest in the same area. Statues of weeping angels, broken-armed men, and a host of other funeral themes loomed into the night sky here, and only the faint light of the distant lanterns made their outlines visible. Darkness loomed thick and heavy where the light failed to fall, and created a veritable maze between their position and the light ahead.

  It was the list of less noble dead that had drawn them here, after the informant message had arrived those weeks ago. The Paranormal Division had been canvassing the French countryside for years now, seeking out old tombs and burial places - but Sains Grieu was different. Sir Jacques Montbard was allegedly buried there - the same man who had, according to the rumours, sold his soul to the djinns of Persia during the Crusade, and returned a changed man. The story had been legend and myth for centuries, recorded as a footnote in the serious histories of the Crusades - until Caldwell and the other researchers in Dublin made the link between the stories told of Montbard, and those coming out of Occupied Europe. What the stories recounted of Montbard and his deeds in France had sounded like pure fiction - until 1942 changed everything.

  Someone else had made the connection too, though, which was what brought Caldwell and Wicker to this place. More lights were going up in the distance, achieving little more than multiplying the number of shadows and pools of darkness that lay ahead of them, and after a signal from Wicker they both set off down the other side of the rise. The grass here was shorter and thinner, and crawling along on their bellies took them into the shadowy alleys between the tombs in no time. Here, over moss-caked gravel and through standing puddles of water, they wend their way steadily closer, until eventually they found themselves at the perimeter of the light. Drawing up close behind a gravestone, Caldwell took a moment to check the muzzle and action of his weapon, fumbling through the motions with cold, stiff fingers, before turning his attention to the sight ahead.

  There were seven of them.

  Four were regular footmen, clad in bulky field-grey trench coats and with the lantern light gleaming off their rain-streaked coal-scuttle helmets. They had rifles slung across their backs, and were hauling more lantern stands into position from a stack of crates further away. Drops of rain glistened on their equipment and on the damp patches on their coats, but they worked in silence, without complaint.

  The other three were as different as could be. The first was a field chaplain, with a purple sash around his neck that reached down almost to his knees. A peaked cap gave him no protection from the rain, and the medals on his chest glittered wetly. He stood with head bowed, as if in prayer - Caldwell thought he could see his lips moving, but the distance was too great to be certain.

  The second was one of what the reports were calling necromancers. His uniform was black from head to toe, and a leather coat hung around his shoulders like bat wings. He too wore a peaked cap, but where the death’s head of the SS would usually leer there was instead an eye symbol in silvery metal, lined with purple. The same purple eye was visible on the collars of the four footmen, and had become the unique identifier of the Paranormal Division in 1942 already. By now, five years later, it usually evoked feelings of bowel-churning terror wherever it surfaced.

  An articulated, cable-clad gauntlet covered the left hand and much of the left arm of the necromancer, and a faint blue glow emanated from the shoulder area where it was strapped onto the man. Caldwell squinted and tried to see what powered the device, but the telltale cables which usually linked them to a generator of some kind, were conspicuously absent for this unit.

  Wicker nudged Caldwell, and pointed at the third figure.

  “Is that our contact?” The Scot’s eyes were large in his darkened face, and Caldwell could only give a grim-faced nod in return.

  The third figure was Codename Merida, and she was already soaking wet. Clad in only a thin white shift, and with her hands bound together in front of her, the Special Operations Executive agent knelt on the ground between the necromancer and the chaplain. A livid bruise covered one side of her face, where it was visible under her wet, dark hair, and a fabric strip had been used to gag her quite thoroughly.

  In the centre of attention, ringed by the lantern rigs, stood a waist-high stone casket partially overgrown with vines. A stone statue of a knight, depicted in Crusader grab and almost black with lichen, stood with arms and sword raised behind it, warding off a sun that had already fled hours before. The lanterns around it limned the statue in orange and yellow, and its outline blurred and shifted in the thin veils of rain that swept down.

  The rain tapered off just as the last lanterns got hauled into position, and when their lights were finally lit, the four footmen began to spool out reels of copper wire, connecting each lantern rig to the other via some complex pattern. Caldwell followed their movement like a hawk, drawing a mental image of the copper outline as it took shape, and when they were halfway done he could already see what the final design would be: a giant septagram, each arm tipped by a lantern rig, and with a large ovoid eye shape in the middle, centred around the casket. The reason for the oil lanterns, and the lack of generator lines on the necromancer’s gauntlet, suddenly fell into place in the professor’s mind: they were crafting the Eye of Ankara, a ritual that was notoriously troubled by the presence of mechanical machines.

  Whatever they wanted to do here, was going to be a highly sensitive ritual.

  A plan began to unfold in Caldwell’s mind as he studied the setup, and when the footmen were briefly on the other side of the clearing, he rolled sideways and ended up next to Wicker. The Scot was a puddle of darkness and mud, invisible except for the whites of his eyes. Caldwell realised that the man’s Enfield was aimed unerringly at the necromancer, and hastily clapped his one hand over the rifle’s rear sight.

  “Don’t shoot until I give the signal.” It was Caldwell’s turn to hiss, and it took a long moment before Wicker’s eyes shifted from the Germans and met the professor’s. Caldwell saw blackness there, blacker than the night that surrounded them, and the cobwebbed voices in his head seemed to titter with glee. “They are going to use Merida as some part of this ceremony, but before that there is going to be a lot of talking and ritual. I need you on the other side of the clearing, behind that angel with the missing head. Wait for my signal there.”   Caldwell pointed to where he wanted Wicker to move, and after a brief moment the Scot grunted and lowered his rifle. He scuttled sideways behind another gravestone, drawing his rifle close to his body, and was gone from sight a moment later. Caldwell blinked and squinted hard into the darkness, but there was no sight the man had ever been there.

  In the ring of lights, the necromancer barked an order at the footmen once they were done with the copper spools, and the four men retreated out of the circle to where the distant supply crates squatted in the dark. The man’s voice was low and hard, and when he ordered the chaplain to the head of the stone casket, Caldwell caught a glimpse of hard blue eyes flashing below the black cap. The recruitment and training programme that produced these men for the Paranormal Division was a great mystery to Caldwell and his colleagues, although it seemed to favour candidates that were cold, calculating, and very much in control of every encounter and event they partook in. Shrieking demagogues and bloodthirsty lunatics did not seem to pass into their ranks.

  Caldwell shifted, trying to make himself more comfortable atop the grave mound he was lying on, and gently drew the journal from his jacket pocket as the three figures in the septagram moved into position. Merida, still kneeling, was dragged to her feet by the necromancer and taken to the foot of the casket, where a loose end of one of the copper wires was quickly wrapped around her left forearm. The Crusader statue loomed over her, as cold and as silent as the hands that worked the copper wire. Caldwell waited - prayed - for her to struggle and resist, but the woman was limp and unresponsive to the hands that dealt with her. Whatever the interrogators had done to her, had taken its toll, and now she could only shiver in her wet shift.

  One of the lanterns guttered and suddenly went out, right in front of the headless angel where Caldwell had directed Wicker. The professor found himself holding his breath as one of the footmen hurried up, tinkered with the lantern to relight it, and then returned to his previous post. Caldwell thought he could see two eyes gleaming in the dark behind the statue, but it was probably his imagination. Wicker would not be seen until he wanted to be seen.

  With his journal opened before him, Caldwell slowly paged through it until he found the section containing the Ankara notes. The lantern light was fragmented and dim here, between the gravestones, and he had to squint hard to make the letters on the page focus. It was one of the rituals they had discovered second-hand from sources here in Europe, and had never managed to replicate in Dublin. It always seemed to fail at a critical moment - after they learnt to do it far away from anything mechanical and moving - and the longer Caldwell studied the scene in front of him, the more he began to suspect the reason for their failures.

  They had never tested it with a human sacrifice.

  At the casket, with Merida finally secured and the chaplain still standing with his head bowed, the necromancer positioned himself at the midpoint between the two, and began to speak in a clear, sharp voice. His German was only mildly accented - Caldwell placed him around the eastern side of Berlin within a few words - and carried through the lit clearing with ease. With Merida on his left, and the chaplain on his right, the necromancer stood looking across the casket - almost directly at where Caldwell lay, and the professor had a disconcerting moment of terror when he imagined that the German was actually looking right at him.

  The German words soon snapped over into something else, something Slavic, and Caldwell felt his eyes drawn to matching phrases on the journal pages. The paper seemed to shiver under his fingertips, vibrating in sympathy to the words being uttered, and the first outward sign of the building power was when the lanterns started to dim.

  Merida’s damp shape seemed to come to her senses at that time, and she began to struggle, but the necromancer clamped his gauntlet onto the back of her neck and kept chanting, never missing a beat. Caldwell could see the pain etched across the woman’s face even across the clearing, but between her bonds, the copper tying her into the septagram, and the gauntlet on her neck, she could go nowhere.

  The chaplain lifted his head at the same time and started chanting something in Latin, words that Caldwell could only half-hear, as a counterpoint to the chanting from the necromancer. Frantically trying to memorise the phrases, Caldwell did not even notice the copper wires starting to glow - until the lanterns suddenly popped out, and the blue glow of the septagram was the only light left in the clearing.

  That, and Merida’s shrieking as her forearm began to glow and wither.

Faustus '47: Ch. 1 - Fibres

Photo by Carl Tronders on Unsplash

  The first reports crossed our desks in 1940. The Germans were digging in Poland, in the middle of nowhere, ripping up ancient forests and tearing down old castles at a breakneck pace. Hunting for something, something that their people were desperate to find. The next year, when they turned on the Soviets and chased them out of Poland, the first thing they did was dig some more in the territories the Soviets had held. Scattered reports, unreliable witnesses, informants that went missing as soon as they spoke about it - it was a fog to us, and there were more important things to deal with at the time.

  Or so we thought.

  We suspect that between the digs in Poland, and the raiding of the Soviet science facilities that they captured, the Germans finally - some time in the autumn of 1941 - got their hands on whatever it was that had been driving them . Our informants grew frantic - and then disappeared. One by one the stations in their territory stopped transmitting. Our last report was from Warsaw, in December 1941. The agent spoke of a new German unit, the Paranormal Division, and that was the last we heard from that frequency.

  Spring 1942 saw the first dead walking in Russia.

Chapter 1: Fibres

  Caldwell stubbed out the last bit of the cigarette against his boot. The forest around him was dim, the midday rays already hidden behind a thick blanket of iron clouds. The drip and splatter of infrequent raindrops seemed to reduce the world around him to the clammy confines of his lean-to. The manual said it was a Tent, Canvas, Standard - but the reality was a bit of a wet mess that barely managed to earn its title as a tent.

  Wicker was outside somewhere, stalking along the perimeter. The Scot could not sit still to save his life, and his highlands experience made him a woodsman second to none. Here, in the damp woods of France, he could at least put that energy to use. At the Dublin camp, he had been as cagey as a hound with a sore tooth, and when their Whitley had finally taken off two days ago, Caldwell had breathed a sigh of relief. Dropping Wicker into the wilds seemed to be the only way to keep the man sane.

  Caldwell missed his books and his smoking jacket. To him, the wilds were a place best experienced between two sturdy book covers. The journal he sat with now was something else, something that felt wrong to him somehow - despite all the practising back in Dublin - and he could not look at it for long before bundling it back into its waterproof wrap again. Then, wrapped up, it would nag at him, with that little voice that felt like cobwebs in his mind, until he opened it up again.

  Footsteps crunched outside, and the tent flap opened. Wicker was dripping wet, from his tartan cap all the way down to his muddied boots, but had a smile plastered across his face that showed more teeth than Caldwell had seen in a long time.

  “I found them. On the northern road, heading east. Purple pennants on all the cars,” the Scot burred. Caldwell had spent enough time with the man to at least make sense of the accent without much effort by now. “One staff car, two trucks, handful of motorcycles. They are heading towards Sains Grieu.”

  “About bloody time we had some good news. Small mercies for informants that are reliable, these days.” Caldwell got to his feet, stuffing the wrapped journal into a jacket pocket, and reached for the over-loaded backpack that stood waiting. “I trust you can get us there in time?”

  Wicker grunted as he swung his own pack up and onto his back. Both of the men were laden with enough supplies to last them the next three or four days, if all went to plan.

  The rifles and the dynamite were there for the alternative.

  “There’s an old lumber trail that runs to the village. I walked it yesterday - dead quiet. I think even the locals must have forgotten about it.” The Scot had his Enfield wrapped in an oilcloth cover that left only the muzzle and trigger free. It went onto his shoulder, next to the pack, with a muffled clink. “We follow that until night falls, and then we should be close enough.”

  Caldwell took his own rifle - one of the last Sten guns, smuggled out of England before it fell - and made sure the waterproof cover was tight before also slinging it across his chest. The little guns were nasty and scrappy, and failed as often as they worked - but when they worked, they gave a terrible accounting of themselves. His woollen commando cap went on last, keeping the inclement weather mostly at bay.

  “Good enough. Let’s get this done with, then.” Caldwell stepped out behind Wicker, receiving a gush of rain in the face as he exited the tent, before turning and kicking in the lone tentpole that kept the canvas up. With a wet sigh, the tent folded in on itself, taking with it the loose branches that had been propped against its sides. Within moments, no part of their erstwhile shelter was visible except a tangle of fallen branches, and a guy rope which Wicker stomped on to push deeper into the mud.

  The Scot set the direction and pace from there, and Caldwell had to stretch to keep up. This region of France was far from the gleaming civilisation of Paris and Vichy, and after the culls of 1945 and ‘46, it had become an empty, dark place. The Germans had little use for this region, and left it to the devices - and ghoulism - of the Paranormal Division and its creatures. The handful of villages that survived here were fortified affairs now, walled and gated and barred against the night. Only the most critical of industries survived if they were fortunate enough to obtain a gendarmerie guard from the Occupation Government.

  Caldwell walked, lost in thought, as Wicker led them up stony hills and down mossy, leaf-choked forest paths. The place reminded him of home, of England - of the England that had been before the Germans came.

  1942 was the first time the dead walked. The Russian reports were confused and contradictory, and the British agents were hampered by the Soviets’ insistence on keeping them away from things. Communism could not admit to failure or weakness - every comrade knew this. Moscow fell when the dead from the disastrous winter of ‘41 rose from their graves, and swamped the city in their thousands. Stalin disappeared, rumours took his place. Leningrad and Stalingrad followed - the mighty Soviet citadels, overrun by their own dead. In the south, the Libyan desert twitched and stirred, and the dead there did what the living had failed to achieve the year before. Rommel marched into Alexandria by the end of the year, and the eagle of the Reich flew over the Nile.

  The next two years were chaos. The Soviet front collapsed, infighting and petty politics turning the communists against each other as they scrambled to make deals with the Germans. In England, there were reports of German paratroopers landing in the countryside, and the dead there too rose. Caldwell received a last frantic letter from his family outside Cornwall, and then he was on a boat to Ireland. Poison gas fell on the cities from bombers at night, and the dead would rise by morning. Buckingham Palace signed the surrender documents after that, while Churchill fled to Canada. Ireland played up their neutrality, like Spain, and managed to escape an invasion - but the Germans sent their agents over anyway, and one by one the resistance members and “government in exile” voices fell silent. No-one was brave enough to make a fuss about it.

  The Americans sued for peace in December of 1944. They had no bases in Europe any longer, and the fighting in the Pacific had achieved nothing. Russia had fallen as well, and the Lend-Lease ships turned around and went home. The Germans agreed, everyone shook hands, and the Atlantic became mostly peaceful again - at least on the surface. It was a big ocean to carry a grudge over.

  Wicker’s hiss broke Caldwell out of his reverie. They had approached the edge of the forest, and the distant outlines and hazy smoke lines of the village of Sains Grieu swam through the fog and the murk ahead. Its boundary walls were wooden palisades over a brick base, with lone watchtowers swimming in the fog. Blind sentinels that watched the forest, yet saw little. The two men found a lightning-struck tree as a landmark to stash their backpacks, unwrapped their weapons to do a last ammunition check, and then carefully transferred the waxed dynamite sticks to their knapsacks. The rain had not let up, nor had it gotten worse, and the pervasive damp was raising all manner of paranoid alarms in the back of Caldwell’s head. The Sten would not like it - nor would the explosives. Caldwell had a backup revolver, but in a firefight it was barely one step above having a letter-opener. You were already royally sunk if things deteriorated to that point.

  In his coat pocket, the journal with the drawings and the phrases still waited, wrapped in its waterproofing. The voices were silent now, for once. Caldwell did not trust those voices.

  Lightened and with weapons in hand, the two snuck the rest of the way in. Wicker had a knack for finding gaps and spaces to move between the foliage, while Caldwell felt like every branch and twig and errant bit of foliage somehow ended up in his face. The Englishman gritted his teeth and pushed on, trying to not lose sight of the flitting Scot ahead of him. Raindrops rolled down the back of his collar, icy cold against the sweat from the ruck march, and the forest floor swallowed his feet up to the ankles, soft moss parting and shifting as his boots came down.

  The cemetery was surprisingly large for the size of the village, and was located at least partially up the side of one of the small hills that dotted the area. Caldwell’s first look at the overgrown space left him with an impression of blackened trees, heavy bramble hedges growing up and over rocky walls, and a strange procession of tombstones that twisted and tilted in every which way. A neck-high stone boundary wall looped around it all,  the grey stones capped with wicked cast-iron spears that seemed to keep the clouds propped up from below. There appeared to be little rhyme or reason to the layout of the place, and while Wicker loped down the boundary wall to look for a gate, Caldwell burrowed into one of the wall-hugging shrubs. His hidden vantage point allowed him to peer over the wall and study the cemetery’s interior, the iron spears beading with moisture this close to his face.

  What was it about this place? Caldwell could not put his finger on it, but the longer he looked at it, the more it felt like there was something pulling at the edge of his vision whenever he looked for too long at any one area. Random jumbles of headstones would suddenly seem to form a pattern just aching at the edge of recognition - and then he would blink, and the fog would shift, and the pattern was gone. A black tree split in two as he watched, the trunks widening and moving away from each other as if born on the backs of some subterranean beast - but then they were one again, and dripping silently and unmoving in the grey that swirled over the ground.

  Caldwell felt his mind starting to spin into the pattern of dread that he had come to associate with the practice fields of Dublin. There was an energy here, something that spoke to the journal that lurked against his chest, and it was reaching out for him with fingers of ice and fear.

  Wicker was at his side the next moment, silent as a ghost, and Caldwell’s lurch of surprise almost sent him toppling back onto his backside.

  “I found a way in. There’s an old breach about a half-mile thataway,” The Scot pointed back the way he had come from. “The rest of the wall is brambles and spikes all the way, we’re not getting over it without a fight.”

  “Any signs of life?”

  “Dead quiet, all the way. The main gate looks to be past our breach, I reckon the main focus will be there.” The Scot had his Enfield in hand, the rifle cradled expertly under his one arm, and with the other hand he dug up a handful of muck from the forest floor. “Put this on your face, and then we can go.”

  Caldwell shuddered at the touch of the slimy soil and leaves against his skin, and soon both men were muddied and darkened. The sun, long lost to the clouds overhead, had been sinking towards an unseen horizon all afternoon, and the gloom of evening was fast approaching.

  “So, professor - are you ready for this?” Wicker’s voice was low when they were finally ready to set out.

  “Can I lie and say yes?” Caldwell tried to smile, but instead of relief felt only the trickle of mud down his cheeks. “I do not have great faith in our chances.”

  “I have great faith in this,” Wicker replied, and patted his bag of dynamite. “It’s not every night I get to hunt Germans, and I have never - in the entire history of my family line - heard of anyone in my family who has hunted the beast that we face tonight.”

  “An interesting perspective, for sure,” Caldwell muttered.

  The Scot grinned toothily again.

  “Come now, professor - how often do you get to tell people that you spent your summer hunting necromancers in France?”

  “Hopefully never, if we survive this - and then hopefully never, because of all the paperwork we signed.” Caldwell sighed, and rolled his shoulders to try and lessen the tension there. “You know we can never talk about this, to anyone.”

  “I know, I know. So we better make sure it’s a big beast then, to match the size of the secret.” Wicker winked, and set off down the side of the wall. Caldwell gave one last look at the cemetery on the other side, then crossed himself briefly before setting off after the Scot.

  In his jacket pocket, the journal voices started speaking again.

  They sounded hungry.