So I wasn’t planning on writing for NaNoWriMo this year. I’m not one of those writers who takes NaNo too seriously. I did the first couple of years, but since ’13 I mostly use it to help me get moving on a story I’ve been putting off. This year’s pet project? Tamn.
My YA Sci-Fi series, Heaven’s Edge has been on hiatus since ’13 in fact, and while I’ve attempted to re-write and finish #3, Tamn was just so dang stubborn. So here we are. Now that I’m waiting on edits for Scarred Beauty, I feel like I can take a break to dive back into the world of Heaven’s Edge for a little while.
I’d like to say I’ll finish it by the end of this month. I very well may and wouldn’t that be fantastic to finish writing three books in a year again. Something I haven’t done, again, since ’13. But either way, I’m writing and as my editor Jessica agreed, taking time to give Tamn’s voice the attention he deserves. Poor guy has been waiting to tell you his POV for three years after all.
My life both began and ended with a crash.
We stood together, a motley crew of scavengers and formerly royal pirates, abandoned on the surface of a hostile world. All in the quest for chole dust, our most marketable mineral on our journey to heaven’s edge. The alien vessel was visible from our vantage point, a massive almost membranous structure unlike any we have encountered before. I watched with the others, helpless while our families blew up in a shower of burning golden comets, singing overhead.
Qeya’s eyes were that same luminous shade of gold, was the only thing I could process as our world, my reason for living, burned to nothing.
“Tamn, we cannot stay here for too long,” Qori urged beside me. Her hands still smelled like bits of spilled grease.
I couldn’t move, afraid to look away as I tried to remember the exact shade of Qeya’s eyes.
“Get your metal together and move, you bleeding Royal!” Adi screamed in my face, shoved me back with her considerable miner strength.
Captain put it to me straight, his voice weary but firm. “Let’s clear the area before we attract more unwanted attention.”
“You heard Captain,” Qori said, her tone softening as she continued to pull me along. “Please, Tamn, we need you.”
They needed my expertise in killing, she meant. Countless hostile worlds, some where the very ground swallowed you whole, others where the predators were invisible to our eyes, a sea of bodies. Bodies stretching back into my Memory, the bleeding gift my ancestors passed down to me on the day of my Ascension, ages of warfare and bloodshed. Now they were falling out of the sky, the last of our people I was sworn to protect. I had saved our people time and again, until the last time when we were forced to flee Home World. Now they were nothing more than falling ashes raining from the sky. The golden commets streaking across the surface of this new hostile world, the same shade as Qeya’s eyes.
She was the Orona, our healer. We needed her.
I needed her.
“Tamn! Wake up!” my little brother, Min slapped my face. I caught his next punch with my hand, restraining the force with strength I had built for fights worse than this. He grabbed me by the collar of my suit and jerked me forward. “We need you, brother.”
Something broke inside me as I nodded and let the only family I had left pull me away, deeper into the jungle.
Laughter broke past my numbness, earning an odd look from Qori and a scowl from Adi. We were doomed if we were all that was left. Already I could feel my sanity slipping bit by bit. No one would heal our wounded crew now, or fix whatever was broken inside my head. We were already dead.
Like what you read here? Check out the first two novellas in the series
Jennifer Silverwood 