DISTANT FUTURE TEASER

Hello all! Did anyone notice the date today? It's the 21st! Only four more sleeps 'til Christmas! How did this happen? *Hugs self with mingled panic and excitement*

In honour of the holiday season, I'm going to be taking a tiny hiatus here, and won't be posting on Friday this week or Monday next week. This is to ensure that the levels of nonsense on the blog remain low, because what with sorting out last minute presents, cooking Christmas dinner and various other baked treats, dealing with relatives (including my brother who only comes home once a year) AND the fact that I just got my edits back for The Night Itself, anything I post is highly unlikely to be thoughtful and good quality. What can I say? I'm good, but I'm not THAT good.

So, as a special treat this Wednesday, I'm going to share a teaser from a book that you won't be seeing on shelves until 2015 (although I will be telling you more about it before then!). It's not one of the Katana Trilogy books. It's a standalone high fantasy, but it's set in Tsuki no Hikari no Kuni (or The Moonlit Lands), the setting I invented for Shadows on the Moon, and like Shadows on the Moon, it is inspired by a fairytale. This book is literally only a few pages and a synopsis at the moment - the literary equivalent of a twinkle in my eye, and that means the sample you're getting is even more subject to change or deletion than normal.

Bearing that in mind... Follow the cut for teasing!

“There is a monster in the forest.

Do not sneer at what I say - and do not protest, for I saw the look in your eye, the flash of pity and doubt. You think me a foolish child. But I am not a child. I am not a fool. I do not speak of some sinister, shadowy figure used to threaten babies to obedience, a half-seen terror dreamed up by drink and superstition. The thing is real. Its slashing fangs and claws, its night-glowing eyes, its hot carrion-stinking breath, are real. I have known this all my life.

Before I was born, it stole my grandmother. By the time I was old enough to walk, my uncle had gone to join her. When I was ten...my older brother was taken.

Oh yes, there is a monster in the forest. And it craves human flesh.

It is a truth we cannot escape, those of us who make a life here on the mountain. Sometimes, at the dark of the moon, men and women are drawn into the trees. No one knows what calls them, what they see or hear that makes them fling aside a lifetime of caution and care. What sings to them so strongly that they will abandon everything they love for the embrace of the darkness under the rustling leaves. We only know that they go. And they do not come back.

All except one. 

One returned. But it was already too late for him, so the healer says.

Why do we not leave this place, you ask? Why stay here on the green slopes of Mount Moonview, when the great city, the city of the moon, the jewel of the Moonlit lands, is there less than two week's journey away? Why not pack our things and flee while the sun is high?

Why not run from the thing in the forest?

Perhaps we are too stubborn. Too proud of the ground our great-great-grandparents cut from the hillside with nothing but stone picks and the sweat of their skin. Or maybe too frightened, for among the trees, with no beloved walls to shelter us, no familiar paths to lead us, we might all succumb to the enchantment of the trees, regardless of the shape of the Moon.
 

Both those things might be true, or neither. I only know that this mountain is within me as well as without. The iron-hard rock of the mountain is in my bones, strong and craggy under my skin, and my skin is tanned brown as the earth. The perilous shades of the trees are like the shadow of my hair, and the rushing, thundering song of the leaves the same as the music of blood in my veins. I do not love the mountain. No more than a man loves his right hand, or his eyes. I am the mountain, and I could not live anywhere else. Not if I wished to remain me.

And besides, it is not the mountain that takes loved ones. It is not the mountain that breaks hearts. No. The monster does that. The monster that takes what it wishes and never lets it go. All except once. All except one...

My grief is as sharp and hard as the point of an arrow and I know what I will do. I will go into the forest. I will go, though everyone I know believes I am mad. I will find the monster. I will make sure that it never takes another brother or father from the family that loves them. I will kill the beast with my own two hands.

Even if I die in the doing."