“Embers Burning in the Night”

Yes, I’ll tell the truth. As best as I can remember it, anyway, and I wasn’t there myself for all of it, so —

Of course you understand that, my lords. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make you angry. Angrier, I mean.

This was originally supposed to be a novel trilogy.

Well, no. Originally it was supposed to be a short story — for all of fifteen minutes, before the idea ballooned up into a trilogy. That was back in 2005 or 2006, and I pitched the trilogy concept to my then-editor, who turned it down. I wound up writing the Onyx Court novels instead, and then other things, and this particular series went onto the back burner.

By 2023, it was fairly obvious to me that I wasn’t likely to ever write that trilogy. The things it was responding to in the fantasy genre had moved on; so had I. And yet, there were some key elements of the concept that I truly loved, and it would make me sad to just abandon them entirely.

Round about the time I had these thoughts, I was also reading Borges.

Now, I’m no Borges — but his work gave me the notion that instead of writing the full narrative, I could approach it from some unconventional angle and just hit the most important bits in far more condensed form. Thus was born this story, which entirely consists of the spoken testimony of a character who was there for the events of the trilogy I’m not writing, and which unravels the mystery of what exactly has happened and why. It was published in January 2024 by Sunday Morning Transport, and it’s one of the stories they have made free to read online!