Azril is a city known for its universities and its brothels, its festivals and its observatory, its merchants and its anchoresses. It is home to the demon Vitrine, who has built and shaped the city as she pleases for centuries. She is pleased with her project, until a quartet of angels come and destroy it in a single night. Left with nothing but the book of names in her heart, she curses them as the leave, leaving a piece of herself lodged in the last angel’s chest. And then they are left to consider what to do next. The City in Glass is a book about recovery and revenge. It is a book about trauma and it is a book about love. Vo’s poetic, tightly worded prose brings a dead city to life as Vitrine wanders the ruins of her home, propelling the reader backwards and forwards in time with an immortal’s perspective as she sifts through the rubble and slowly rebuilds. Her sparring, circling affair with the angel who brought it all down is set against her memories of the city that was, with anecdotes of the artists, pirates, and refugees who had called the city home. A novel written during the Pandemic Lockdown, Vo has poured grief, frustration, and a strange wicked fondness into her characters and her broken garnet of a city. While many of us were making our Animal Crossing: New Horizons islands, Vo created her own bustling port city only to tear it down with holy fire and start again. The story captures and personalizes the god’s eye view of a simulation city builder as Vitrine goes from changing the course of rivers and cleaning up bodies to planting flowers to choosing which citizens to favor and which to spurn. But Vitrine and the Angel are such fascinating characters and the city they are building is so vibrant that I never felt like I was watching someone else’s play-through. Vo pulled me in completely. The City in Glass is a bloody jewel of a novel. It constantly surprised me with its capricious demon building and planning her wonder of a city as she danced through the streets and whirled closer and farther from the distraught Angel that pursued her. You can find it in print or ebook from the usual online sources, or from your local independent bookshop. Or, as Vitrine might suggest, your can get it at your local library. I highly recommend it.
The Pharaoh opened his eyes and found himself in a strange, bright room. He was laying in a glass sarcophagus. It was more crystal than he’d ever seen when he was alive. He sat up, and his body felt stiff and strange. He could feel the layers of wrappings. He had been enjoying the afterlife, but now he was back in this cold, stiff body, laying underneath a sign in illegible Phoenician characters. The mummy angrily lurched his way out of the museum. Until he found a way back to the afterlife, he was going to do so much cursing.
The gargoyle sits on the roof of the cathedral watching the comings and goings of the city below. The rain washes through him, but it doesn’t make him feel clean. He had a monstrous visage, with horns and wings, but his creator had made him to protect the city from spirits and other things. The gargoyle sees the pigeons on the wing and the tame cows that sat in the market stalls, but he is not kin to either. A gargoyle flies only once, stone briefly launching into the air, to protect the city. For now, he watches, and waits.
This certainly has been a start of the year, and we’re still in the thick of it. It’s hard to know what’s appropriate to do right now. Are the arts distractions? A necessary refuge? Something else entirely? Being a writer, particularly a writer on the current version of the internet, means having to make a devil’s bargain for getting your work out into the public. At some point, even if you’re giving it away for free, you have to trust someone else with your baby. This has been particularly true in the last couple of months for social media platforms. I’ve already divested myself from Twitter when it became ‘X,’ and I never really got the hang of Tik-Tok. Up until last month I was publishing Everyday Drabbles on my website, and on a Facebook page. Facebook has very much been a pay-to-play environment for a while now, with constant invitations to ‘boost’ my posts for a fee. I wasn’t really reaching subscribers there, and had only kept it going for a few friends who preferred to view the stories on the platform. With the drama over TikTok’s banning and tenuous return, along with Meta CEO Zuckerberg’s recent statements, I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching. And I’ve decided that I am leaving Facebook, at least as a creator. Meta platforms have signaled that they are not interested in open and free communications but have become an echo chamber of the worst voices on the political far right. They are neither safe nor are they valuable to me as a writer. HughJODonnell.com and its mirror site, EverydayDrabbles.com will remain the home for Everyday Drabbles, and those posts will remain here every morning for free. I will also be continuing to post updates, announcement, podcast reposts, and reviews on this homepage. But with Facebook gone, I have decided to relaunch my Patreon as a place where you will be able to view drabbles for free and also get them by email. The Everyday Drabbles Patreon is already live. Posts go live every morning ET and signing up for the Free tier will also send them to your email. If you want to support the project starting at $1 or more you can get benefits such as behind-the-scenes and announcement posts, early access to posts, and even personalized drabbles in digital or deluxe print formats! $5 and $10 supporters will get access to ebook and print collections as they are released going forward as well. Thank you for your support and I hope you continue to enjoy Everyday Drabbles. Gratefully,
The druid wandered the forest. He watched the movements of the animals and the cycles of the plants. As he travelled, he did what he could to maintain the balance of life in the forest. He felled a tree here and planted a sapling there. He drove off predators in one territory and culled grazers in another. He passed no judgement, believing harmony to be the ultimate good and caring little for the individual lives he touched. It wasn’t until he was cornered by a hungry mountain lion and had to fight for his life that he truly understood Nature.
The cockatrice stood on the bridge, its chicken head pecking at the cobblestones while the snake head tasted the air for danger. I started to rise from our hiding spot, hand on my sword, but our captain shook his head. “Never try and take a monster in a fight,” he whispered. He reached down and picked up a rock. He threw past it the chicken head. The monster squawked and chased after it, diving into the ravine. We crossed the bridge in a hurry, listening to the frantic beating of wings. “A chicken is still a chicken,” the Captain said.
The Naga keep to themselves. On rare occasions, one can be seen in the wasteland, watching silently before slithering away. They don’t mix with the other peoples of the world. Rumors say they are the remnants of a lost civilization conducting horrific rituals and worshiping strange gods in the ruins. The Naga would be bemused by the description. Their ship had crashed and stranded them on this planet decades ago. Rather than twist the world out of shape with their advanced technology, they elected to wait for the native civilizations to catch up before announcing themselves. They are very patient.
The magical forest was home to a vast mycelia network, an intelligence that connected every tree and moved with the speed of a glacier. It sensed that a darkness was coming, and that the lighting-quick creatures that moved through its paths needed to be warned. So it gathered up its energy and budded a myconid to be its messenger to the human world. The child slowly pushed their way through the soil, and broke from their mother network with a pop of fungal threads. But by the time the myconid reached the palace, it had been many years a ruin.
In this episode: Allenby throws boulders, Chibodee beats up a statuary garden, and Domon displays an amazing new technique that we will literally never see again. Plus, The Shuffle Alliance ghost Domon, and Master Asia is great at metaphors but terrible at drawing wolves, I guess.
Ooze burbled its way through the dungeon, trying to find a quiet place to puddle and feel sorry for itself. It never got the respect it deserved. It wasn’t strong, or fast. It didn’t have huge claws or strange magics. It didn’t have a terrifying or majestic visage. But it had its own techniques. It would lay in wait, dripping down from above or pooling to strike from below. By the time an adventurer felt the sting of acid underneath their armor, it was already too late. But it was always that cute dope Slime that got all the attention.
Hugh J. O'Donnell 