Guardians. I'm alive. This novel has been a labor of love. Real life keeps popping up to draw me off but... It's gonna get finished. Thanks for hanging in there! Also, who's hype for the expansion? More material to work with. Gonna be awesome. [i][b]An excerpt from Chapter 4: Fox[/b][/i] [quote] [i]...And then [b]her[/b]. More precisely, her tails. He would always attest that tails is exactly what they are---they move entirely too naturally to be anything else. That coldly powerful, blue-white sun which had dominated his vision a moment ago was replaced by dangerously warm, writhing golden prominence streaming from a figure which could only have been pretending to be human. When he first saw her, she was kneeling. The twirling bands, like strands pulled from the sun itself, coursing along the path she’d taken to arrive so suddenly. She’d come from somewhere above him. Metal and rock peeled away from her as she stood, the Solar Light warping and convulsing back inward toward its mistress. Smoke and steam roiled upward from the most unobtrusive of living fireballs. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. The still glowing robes she wore seemed to swallow her whole. Golden, featherlike accents on her helmet seemed alight with their own internal fire, which was not at all cooling as the energy of her previous exertion was drawn back in toward her. She wasn’t finished. The Walker fired another volley of those heavy Arc bolts, and her reply was clear and devastating. What this Warlock gained in flooring amounts of power, Darion quickly decided, she lost in her complete lack of restraint. Still, it was impressive. The tails of Solar flame sweeping behind her---he couldn’t count just how many he saw---mimicked for a moment her arms. She drew her arms outward and they fanned out, billowing and blasting the environment with terrible radiance. And then she stepped forward, forcing her arms forward and even leaning into the motion. The tails followed, bending forward around her and over her shoulders. Focusing ahead of her, combining, and then erupting into a directional explosion which again stung Darion’s eyes. He lost the small silhouette of her body in the searing hellfire. He lost his own thoughts in the bone rattling thunder. The bolts of Arc energy simply blinked out of existence, and then the lumbering armored war machine which created them. The insistent whine of his again drained shield system was either lost as well, or he was temporarily deaf. It wasn’t a new sunrise. It was a star itself, born and dead in a directed flash. Titans represented humanity’s engrained, bone-deep ability to make war with terrifying efficiency. No frills, just fight. Hunters represented humanity’s ability to become its environment. The wild was dangerous; so became they. Warlocks? Warlocks represented that tiny glimmer within each and every soul which held absolutely no regard for the natural order. That pulsing, furious vein of arrogance which ran deep in the core of humanity. Rules weren’t about defined boundaries, they were about defining just how hard that rule needed to be stressed to make it snap. She had just created a small sun, and by only her will hurled it at an enemy. Because she wanted to. The silence afterward was equally deafening. The long path of soil between she and what was once an enemy was liquefied, quickly cooling and hardening. Vitrified soil was smooth---glasslike. Darion pushed himself up onto his hands from resting on his elbows, staring past her. “Well shit.” Bishop quipped. Darion was surprised he could still hear him through the helmet speakers. His hearing was intact, it seemed. It was really just that quiet. Like the world in the immediate area needed to recover from what it had just been subjected to. “Get. Up.” It wasn’t a voice Darion knew. He immediately identified it as hers. “Get. Off of the ground. Now."[/i][/quote]