Description
Gryphons 1
Dahli Sandiniti is luckier than most teen girls on her home world of Sferkkaa, and she knows it. She has a roof over her head, her best friend Diza, her older sister Tierra, a room of her own with some posters on the wall, and usually food enough to eat. What Dahli loves most of all is music, especially Sferkkaa’s most famous band, The Mortified Gryphons. She’d love to meet the drummer, but that will never happen. Certainly not by accidentally walking into a bathroom and clobbering him with a door.
Gemma Mayfield has had a very different life from Dahli. Having grown up in Canada, in a safe neighbourhood far away from violence and death, she has no understanding of hunger, fear, and illness. She’s just one more singer-songwriter on a great intergalactic ship, heading to Sferkkaa, invited to join the people there in a five-day festival celebrating the end of the year.
Draephus CZimcocious has wealth, fame, and a beautiful castle to call home, but his life is far from perfect. Arthritis is eating his joints, his lover is dying, and he somehow managed to end up having an affair with his best friend. The drugs he takes keep away the worst of the aching, but now addiction is becoming as big a problem as pain. Draephus is eaten alive with guilt, arthritis, and addiction, and the last thing he needs is one more problem, which just smacked a bathroom door right into the cuts and fractures on his face.
Somehow, all this leads to several teenagers stealing a body and placing it in an unmarked grave…
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EXCERPT:
A light rain fell over the island city, veiling it in heavy mists. A formidable tower of glass that once held the elite of Second City’s invaders was silvery grey, damp, and gleaming eerily from its position in the center of the island; silent and dripping, as if weeping. A trio of satellites shot by on their way to other things, leaving smears of orange behind them in the otherwise grey world, streaks that reflected on the glass tower then quickly faded as the small round objects flew on. The two-thousand-year-old city paid no heed to their departure. The waves lapped around its artificial base of metal, as though reminding it that cities had no business floating out to sea and attaching themselves to small islands.
The war had gone on for eight hundred years. The beginning of it had been a complete shock to the peaceful, and, at the time, relatively primitive Sferkkaans. The invaders had come in gleaming ships of silver, wielding weapons that shot bolts of light, and left bloodless wounds. The invaders, the Kryphisians, pillaged at will, taking advantage of the Sferkkaans, and draining their resources. They committed crimes of unspeakable horror on the gentle people of this rain-shrouded planet, including the extermination of virtually every woman and girl through specially designed poisons in the water. Natural birth became almost unheard of, and the Kryphisians kept up their supply of Sferkkaan slaves by raising embryos in labs, altering them to suit their needs and desires. Few of the current population could boast having parents.
The Kryphisians advanced their sciences at the expense of the natives. They created an elaborate array of gladiators for their own amusement, some huge and hulking, some delicate and lethally fast. The small warriors were called ‘Whips’, bred for beauty as well as violence, kept as pets by the upper echelon of Kryphisian society. Other pets were the exotic ‘Breeds’ – beings created by blending the DNA of Sferkkaans and animals to create creatures of almost preternatural loveliness. Creatures who were considered too fine and beautiful to do anything as distasteful as plot against their masters. Until one night, after years of planning and subterfuge, the walls of the Kryphisian’s grand glass tower came alive, and death poured into their homes.
Even now the city bore scars, not yet cleared away by the new Emperor’s diligent cleaning crews. There were still frayed edges to its base, where Kryphisian soldiers had threatened the delicate floatation devices that supported it. Many roads were still under reconstruction, and, here and there, open spaces marked the absence of a building, missing like a tooth from a mouth.
Warplanes shot by, touching the glass tower with their own reflection, searching for an enemy who no longer walked Sferkkaan shores. The slender white planes banked and wheeled, deadly silent, their underbellies painted wild colours by victorious pilots. They rolled in the sky, flashing their white and gold upper-halves, then shot straight up, out of the perpetual cloud cover and into the light of the sun, a star too deadly bright for the beings on the planet below.
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