This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.
The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real
Previously: All attempts to stop the megaship Probably Better have failed, and it is trying to tear open the fabric of space-time. Rude. While Yana races to complete the spell ahead of the megaship, Erik Vineroot commands a gathering of wizards to hold the ship at bay…
Bruglia. Palinor.
3208. Brightsun.
The ship squirmed beneath their warping shield. Erik could feel it probing with the last of its power, attempting to find a hole in their defences. It had come to rest in a part of the city that had already been mostly destroyed, and now lay inert and on its side, propped awkwardly against a row of buildings like a beached whale that had fallen from the sky. The megaship was difficult to see, of course, being that it was trapped within a refracted absence of light. Even while the sun returned to its normal late afternoon warmth, the streets beneath their shield were black as night.
Erik moved through the air outside of the bubble, observing the assembled wielders. Magic experts from every tribe on Palinor, combining together to maintain a spell larger and more precise than anything he’d ever experienced.
He hadn’t expected the ship to exhaust its own energy reserves so rapidly, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise. The Max-Earth technological wonder was a foolish child crashing about a playroom, burning through magical energies at an unnecessary and vastly accelerated rate. As soon as it had been cut off from its supply, the ship had dropped like a stone to the ground below. Defeating the ship was within their grasp, but it lingered still, operating by the trickle of bounced light from its surroundings, existing in what seemed to be a hibernation state. The ship couldn’t do anything, but it also was not clear how to permanently deactivate it. One mistake, one lapse of concentration by any one of the several hundred wielders who were working together to form the light-blocking shield, would restore the ship to being fully operational.
They needed time. To think of a solution, and so that Yana could complete the old spell and thereby prevent the ship from corrupting it into a reality-ending calamity.
He sighed. Another typical day for a member of the Six Blades.
Yana’s latest scream jabbed at Lola’s mind, as had the previous cries. The woman was still sat in the crumbling office, eyes closed, whispering to herself, occasionally forming patterns in the air with her hands, or drawing with a finger onto the dusty floor. She wore only her underwear, her clothing discarded to the side. Slava was behind her, holding her by the shoulders, her own face creased with concentration. In another context, another time, their embrace might have been beautiful; instead, Slava was working her own magic to knit together Yana’s body as it came apart, threading muscle fibres and stitching skin, sealing burst blood vessels and ruptured organs.
Lola stood by the door, feeling sick. She could do nothing but wait and watch. Always the observer, as Yana bled and her body was repeatedly torn and put back together. At one moment a gushing wound had opened across her belly, to be sealed seconds later by Slava. The floor was covered with blood, and Yana’s body was no longer its normal colour. Slava had asked Lola to shout out any injuries that she observed, in case she missed anything through direct touch and her micrology.
It was a cruel task. Yana was only concerned with the single, inactive portal. Kaenamor had opened multiple portals across three universes, though Yana’s theory was that it had been largely accidental. Still, from what Lola understood of magic it was nevertheless an astounding feat - and no wonder that it had ripped the man apart and destroyed the university of that time. He’d had no support, while Yana had Slava to watch over her.
A trickle of blood from Slava’s nostril. She coughed a spluttering cough.
“Let me help,” Daryla said, releasing Lola’s hand and moving into the room. So transfixed by the awful spectacle, Lola had forgotten she had been stood beside her. Daryla sat in front of Yana and placed her hands on the woman’s knees. “We’ll do it together.”
Slava wasn’t able to speak.
Whatever Erik had done, it had bought them time. Lola watched her friends straining to keep Yana alive, and wondered if it would be enough. Yana would have to complete the spell soon, both to stop Probably Better and also for her own survival.
Erik spotted the first wizard to fall before it happened. It was one of the lecturers from the university, which didn’t surprise him. A theoretician, an academic unaccustomed to having to actually do anything. He’d identified him back on campus and had anticipated him being a potential point of failure. Out of hundreds, he’d been the one to keep an eye on.
The first moment that the man began to falter, dropping to his knees on the rooftop where he was stationed, Erik was moving, racing through the sky in a bubble of anti-gravity towards the inevitable hole in the warping shield. Most of the other wielders were doing so from a distance, projecting their refraction spells. That had never worked for Erik: he was strong, capable, faster-witted than most wielders. That, he knew. There had always been a countering limit, which was the need for proximity. He could hold a monster in a physologists’s grasp at close quarters, but had no reliable ranged capability.
And so, given no other choice, he moved himself into position by the very edge of the shield, itself invisible other than by the refracted light and the darkness on its inside. He plugged the gap before the other wielder collapsed, and the shield remained intact. Erik was the vanguard, and knew that the others would all be looking up at him for affirmation. He would inspire them to keep going, for as long as it took.
Seconds passed, then minutes. The sun lowered in the sky. Half an hour. Then an hour. Still they kept going, until the concentration burned their minds and cramped their limbs. The shield held, and the Max-Earth ship remained trapped and depowered on the darkened streets below. Across the city, in the ruins of the university, Yana would be working even harder to complete her spell. Kaenamor’s unfinished opus. The woman was a physologist on an entirely different level to him, but Erik knew enough to understand. She was unlikely to survive the effort, and as such he could do no less. If she continued, he would continue. He would give it all.
If he could have generated the entire shield by himself, there was a possibility it would have held forever. Erik Vineroot was only one man, one wielder among many. Occupied as he was with sealing one hole, there was no possibility of him moving to another spot. He could not be everywhere at once, and even as he bellowed encouragement to anyone who could hear, there was no escaping the faltering of the others.
When it happened, it came all at once in a cascade failure. One mage fell from the sky from exhaustion, then another. The shield rippled, the air puckered and light flooded back onto the streets within. There was an immediate response from the ship, which ascended to the same height as Erik.
It hung in the air before him, huge and impossible and unknowable, almost entirely featureless.
Ordinarily, Erik would have thought of something witty to say. Instead, he propelled himself forward, dropped his refraction spell and channelled all of his power into a single gravitational punch, impacting upon the hull of the ship. If he’d done his calculations correctly, the speed and force of his approach would not be survivable for him.
But perhaps he would make a dent.
When the moment came it was so quiet, so subtle, that Lola almost missed it. A gust of wind through the open door, and plumes of dust blown into the air by the portal.
Yana slumped, her body giving out at the moment of victory. Lola felt tears running down her face, watched as Slava hugged her dead wife and Daryla tried to comfort her, all of them covered in blood. She wondered if Yana had known, whether this had been part of her plan all along.
Turning away from the cries, Lola stumbled from the ruins of the building and across the courtyard towards the huge, black oval that was the portal. Inactive for over two hundred years, existing as nothing more than a curious landmark. It seemed, at first, that nothing had changed. Had Yana been successful?
Then a figure stepped out of the portal: a man, dressed in smart clothing, perfectly coiffured hair and an actor’s jawline. He looked around, taking in his surroundings, then smiled at Lola.
“Oh, Detective Styles. Hello there.”
Despite the chaos and the tragedy, Lola smiled. A small laugh escaped her. “Justin?”
“Please advise everyone to step back.”
An enormous, oblong shape pushed through the portal, filling it entirely from top to bottom and side to side. Another megaship, subtly different in appearance to Probably Better: more rugged, older in texture.
Lifting away from the campus, it accelerated across the city.
Meanwhile.
I did that hand drawing a few years back, and have always rather liked it. This chapter seemed like an appropriate fit.
A quick callout/heads-up to any serial fiction writers out there: looking into 2026, I’m hoping to spin up a series of interviews with other serial fiction writers. Probably in the form of a podcast and via this newsletter. Very much craft-based conversations. If that sounds like something you’d like to do, let me know in the comments.
Some reading stuff for the weekend:
I thought this article had some decent advice in it for any fellow Substack writers:
My lovely ex-colleague over at One Further, Louise Cohen, put out a list of 9 very sensible and insightful things for anyone making content (including to stop using the word ‘content’, I’m pleased to see):
And here’s a cheeky anecdote from me:
Author notes
I have a confession to make. I am entirely obsessed with the Netflix show Physical 100 and its recent spin-off Physical Asia. It’s a hyper-stylised and slightly weird show that purports to be able finding the ‘perfect body’, but is actually The Crystal Maze on a grand scale and with real athletes.
Anyway, a common theme in the show is that these contestants simply do not give up, EVER. They have energy reserves unlike anyone I know. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that a lot of today’s chapter was inspired by that attitude. “I’ll give it my all!” exclaims the Korean teammates, over and over again.
That’s Erik and Yana in this chapter. We’ve all done it to some degree — for me, running a 5k is my version, which often feels impossible until I do it. One day I’ll get below 25 minutes! Physical 100, and today’s chapter, is about that sensation of smashing through physical limits.
I’ve been doing more working out of what’s coming up in the story. I shared a (redacted) version of my overall finale plan a few weeks back:
The planning I’m doing now is getting down into the fine detail, working out specifics chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene. And without putting a precise date on it, my current estimation is that Tales from the Triverse will wrap towards the end of January/early February. Of course, we have Christmas and New Year which can be unpredictable right in the middle of that.
Either way, though, there’s not much to go. Thanks so much for reading, and sticking with this story for so long. Amazing!
I've been enjoying this even though I started reading somewhere in the middle a couple of years ago. Mike did a great summation of things with a little speculation of how you wrap this up, including Mid-Earth is no longer in the middle, so what will they call it now?
I have one question about what I found as awkward wording in Lola's POV. All 'was plus verb' like 'was sat' had me stopping the flow of reading.
As for fellow writers spinning serial fiction, I'm one of them, but definitely not on the scale you have done. I'm also a novelist, so I'm not always serializing if in the deeper throes of novel drafting. I'm in the finale for this year's serializing, and I'm wondering how many more episodes it will take to wrap it up properly. Of course, with everything else I did this fall along with the crazy unexpecteds of life, I haven't always been on time either. Today may be the last time I'm late though because other things I signed up for are wrapping up until they happen again next fall.
Writing a serial fiction for me is far different from writing a novel because I can spin it in pieces and see what feedback comes as if it is a beta read. When I sit down to write a novel, I'm slamming the draft out and have it planned a little better. Pushing a novel out in a year to be ready for publication takes way more energy than an episodic share. The serial I'm doing this year will turn into a novel, but that includes the whole serious editing phase to morph it into a polished novel. Something I plan on doing around the months my next novel is with beta readers and/or editors. So who knows? I might publish both a fantasy and a space opera style spies in space by the end of 2026.
It will be fun to see what 2026 holds as you come out of a huge serial years in the making. I'd have fun chatting with you about it because neither of us tackles writing quite the same way.
For a couple of paragraphs I thought maybe Lola would step in with her vaen'ka abilities and be able to help. Ease Yana's burden, or Slava's, or Daryla's.
But, no. Of course not. That would merely take someone else's powers, and, while Lola would be fresh, she doesn't have the skill.
So... Rough on Lola to just sit there and watch.
Rougher on Slava.
Then there's Erik.
Side note... Earlier Probably Better defeated a literal God, to be stymied by mere mortals. Do I detect a little B5-style "Third Age of Mankind" rejection of higher powers guiding and controlling people, in order to choose one's own destiny here?
Right, back to the story... For half a paragraph I absurdly thought Kaenamor would be the one to walk through the portal... But, no, of course it's Justin.
So, let me see if I've parsed out what I'm going to call your "Law of Dimensional Frequencies" correctly.
A jump of one dimension seems to weaken, but not immediately extinguish things. One cannot cast magic in Mid-Earth, but active spells linger for a while before fading, while Max-Earth power cells discharge quickly on Mid-Earth. Never explicitly stated, but perhaps happening might be Mid-Earth tech being less efficient in Palinor. So those tanks and helicopters weren't getting as many miles per gallon with their combustion engines, shells/bullets not packing as much punch, maybe? But still enough.
A jump of dimensions -- Palinor to Mid-Earth to Max-Earth exponentially increases the instability to the point of instant shutdown. So, when Daryla had her glamour spell up at that party so long ago on Mid-Earth, crossing to Max-Earth would have instantly disrupted the glamour, yes?
Now we've had Probably Better able to function on Palinor because it was built with local material so PB's substance was on the correct frequency to access magic.
Thus, with the spell complete, Justin/Just Enough can function on Palinor for a short time because it's a single-order jump directly from Max-Earth.
Nice. It's all been there from the beginning. The whole system is internally self-consistent, and was set up fairly with the audience, but still afforded room to pull some big twists. Take your bow. You earned it.
Now... I'm sure Just Enough had to pull some strings and much quick work had to be done to open up the Max-Earth London location of the inactive portal location to get their hull into position. That was fun...
And, after all that, with Probably Better having been in constant action, hits taken from Could Kill, re-entry, crashing, it's Max-Earth reactors offline, capacitors and batteries drained, ammunition depleted, physical mass expended in the battle with Could Kill, lost robot drones in Palinor, and damage inflicted during battle with all of Bruglia, and, fucking GODS -- and Erik's dent (which, given the above list might actually be significant, though he'll never know) -- while Just Enough sat waiting in London, sipping on a charging port and loading for bear, shark, tiger, wolf, and Godzilla, Just Enough should finish off the insane Quantum AI quite handily.
But that's the next story.
Hey, you might even do it in one chapter, leaving the (presumed) one-story-per-world epilog.
Maybe you will wrap it up in February.
Shit. What's my Friday read gonna be now?