ALL ELSE AFTER

STATUS: QUERYING JOURNALS

...Cullarden's shape was an alloy of tortoise and man. His shell, a landscape of crags and valleys, black and veined with gold and green. His legs, two mighty buttes. His four arms, wide and powerful as rivers. A crown of bone sat atop His head and above a face nearly, eerily, human...

Ardenheim had rarely known peace. Founded by refugees and castoffs, it was a land of deprivation and conflict. Then Cullarden came ashore. And with His third eye, He saw everywhere and everywhen. He led Ardenheim in finding peace at last.

Then, eighty years ago, exhausted from His efforts, He laid down to sleep. Yet He still guides His beloved people, whispering what His third eye, ever awake, sees. Since then, the world has felt, for the very first time, all right.

Cullarden sees much, holds great power. But even He cannot see all the troubles of peoples' souls. And not even He has the power to solve them alone...

All Else After is a fantasy novelette exploring a world that is, outwardly, peaceful but filled with people whose own inner worlds are anything but. All Else After is an example of what I call "Psychological Fantasy," a subgenre which centers character psychological and sociocultural worldbuilding

while utilizing traditional fantasy elements such as magic, monsters, and adventure.

HAUNTED HEROES

...Thirty-five years. A lifetime. Thirteen-thousand days given to the Citadel, to the Ministry... A lifetime, Helia had already spent. Everything remaining was just her epilogue...

Helia was a Vigilant, a knight, of sorts, charged with protecting the peace Cullarden brought to Ardenheim. But after many long years of sacrifice, she achieved a feat commonly thought impossible: Retirement from the Vigilants, an order whose bonds of duty last for life. Now, she lives a quiet life with Eym, her precocious young daughter.

Helia's long career has left deep scars, both in body and mind. She fears her life has already been spent. So, she comes to where Cullarden sleeps, Eym at her side, to show her daughter a glimpse of God Himself. And to remind herself that anything is possible, even healing. Even forgiveness.

However, Cullarden has laid suspiciously quiet for the last few years. His third eye still sees, but He tells the people of Ardenheim little. And the same anxiety Helia feels is felt the world over...

A JOURNEY INTO DARKNESS

...Its serpentine shape, too short for a snake and far too large for a worm, glistened like black oil. Wild, blind eyes dotted its length like fever sores, and its lamprey mouth bristled with needle teeth...

Volnburg. A prosperous town known for mining and its beautiful mountain views. Six years ago, it was visited by a murderer, a bowman who hunted people like game. Fourteen people he slew before Helia brought him down. But the damage was done. Damage that Marxen, only seven years old, would carry forever. His younger sister was lost in the chaos. Lost, he knows, but not dead.

Legends say that within Cullarden's shell exists a world that defies known laws of space and time: The Abyss. Those same legends say that anybody who enters the Abyss and reaches its innermost point will find the Wellspring, the source of Cullarden's otherworldly power and that the Wellspring will answer any question asked. But the Abyss is dangerous. Monsters and perils haunt every tunnel and chamber. Very few who venture in will make it out.

Volnburg binds Marxen and Helia together. And Marxen's brazen desire to enter the Abyss, to find his sister at any cost, will bind them yet again. The secrets that will be revealed to them both in the Abyss, that world of supernatural darkness, will change them both forever...

A WORLD OF QUIET WORRY

"...The longer this goes on, the more dangerous the bowman becomes. Cullarden's eye will roll his way, his wick will burn out, one day. The bowman will make use of every hour..."

Outwardly, Ardenheim is at peace.

But in the souls and minds of men and women, trouble never sleeps for long. There are those who still wish to do evil in the world, and they who do often commit their crimes with even greatyer intensity, knowing Cullarden's third eye will one day reveal their misdeeds to the world; they have no illusions about evading punishment.

Helia and Marxen have both dealt with the consequences of Ardenheim's new order. And, even as they brave the Abyss together, long-ago misdeeds- envy and nihilism, obsession and aggression- will haunt and hound them. Perhaps the only way to survive the dark of the Abyss is to overcome the darkness within oneself...