New story collections available

Download for free: the ‘Powers of Ah’ series.

Now available for free download exclusively on this site is an unpublished collection of works, unofficially titled ‘Powers of Ah’.

For two years, after putting my writing career on hold, I’ve been working for my own enjoyment on a series of story collections.

Initially the idea was for a single ambitious volume. Posing as a non-fiction collection of ‘real’ myths, much like a book you might read on Greek or Egyptian mythology, ‘Gods of Sen’ was intended to be a single book, a complete project. My notes tell me that I first had the idea around ten years ago.

In a fictional introduction, disguised as popular history, I would pose as an editor who has come into possession of a set of translations, the original texts of which were found etched or painted upon stelae, potsherds, tablets and parchments uncovered at an illegal dig site in the English Lake District.

A small earthquake had led to an astonishing discovery: buried beneath the mountains were the remains of Sen, a lost city dating back to the ‘Celtic’ age before the coming of the Romans around 43 BCE. In secret, a team including an archeologist, anthropologist, folklorist and linguist unearthed a wealth of inscribed artifacts.

Through painstaking effort, this team was able to translate a near-complete record of the stories of the Sena tribe, including their beliefs about the origins of the cosmos, the creation of the Earth, and the first humans.

My book, ‘Gods of Sen’, was to be a collection of those mythic tales. Merging fiction with (apparent) non-fiction, it would be peppered with footnotes and citations. Ideally, a classically-styled illustrator would bring the stories to life.

This kind of book would be hard to sell to literary agents and publishers, who prefer easily categorised (and easily marketable) fiction. It would be particularly difficult to convince them to invest in a debut author without a strong social media following. I had planned, all those years ago, to wait until I was an established author before working on the idea, but two years ago I decided that I would set to work on this difficult but fun project without thought of trying to get it published.

A funny thing happened as I wrote. I had invented my secret cosmology - beginning with the Creator God, Ah, manifested fully-formed in a featureless void, soon to create his offspring, the three Elder Gods who would become the earth and sky - but the ideas kept coming. One story led to another. By the time I had finished ‘Gods of Sen’, I already conceived of a second hidden culture, whose religious beliefs were connected but different, who had different views on the actions of the Gods and their first human creations, the Immortals. Inspired by the early Brythonic legends that eventually evolved into the Arthurian Cycle, I began work on a second volume, ‘Heroes of Rin’ - stories of druids, warriors and the rise of a powerful tyrant: Hoden the Timeless.

Rapidly this spun out of control. That second book was almost three times the length of the original. Eventually I split it into three volumes: the first, ‘Host of Rin’, covered the cosmology. The remaining two would be comprised of the heroic legends of the Knights of Rin - ‘Heroes of Rin’, volumes one and two.

And still the ideas kept coming. It was already 2025. By then the mythology had become rich, epic, weird and (to me, at least) fascinating, but it was also complex. Every story seemed to come with small seeds of ‘history’ and legend, which would inspire another story, which was replete with more seeds … Mystery was abound, and soon what I had intended to be tantalising, enigmatic gaps in the ‘historical’ record became too enticing to ignore.

Thus came the third collection (volume five): ‘Vagrants of Gon’.

Together these five books were leading up to something big. I had a long sequence of overlapping chronologies, and multiple casts of gods, mortal heroes, mysterious beings and frightening monsters. There were questions unanswered, mysteries unaddressed, conflicting opinions from my ‘narrators’, and a developing narrative in my ‘non-fictional’ framing device. Almost unbidden, a plan emerged for a capstone to all these efforts, a book that would be halfway between a short story collection and a novel, the end of my hidden mythology of the British Isles: ‘The Book of Hoden’.

I didn’t get to finish ‘The Book of Hoden’. I have scraps of scrawled concepts, notes in an app, and a spreadsheet of story elements, ideas and characters who would populate a story spanning 300 years. But I was running out of time. This final, unfinished volume became merely something with which to while away the days, and nothing more. I do not include it here.

But the true myths of our world, spanning all of recorded and prehistoric time, are as mysterious, contradictory and incomplete as they are enthralling. My own secret mythology would modestly fit that magisterial mold. It is only as unfinished as any other lore from the great cultures of the past.

So I give to you now, free to download, the ‘Powers of Ah’ series as it stands:

(1) Gods of Sen
(2) Host of Rin
(3) Heroes of Rin, vol.1
(4) Heroes of Rin, vol.2
(5) Vagrants of Gon

Click the images below to download.

The AI-generated images are courtesy of Midjourney, with credit and respect due to Edmund Dulac (1882-1953). The written works owe a significant debt to J.R.R. Tolkien, amongst many others.

My eternal thanks to all of my readers over the years.

—db

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