So! My foray into writing poetic filth is free for another few days (till Friday, March 8th), and NO, that alliteration was not intentional. Which means if you’re into things like my attempts to write pretty prose about a sexy, luminescent orc with morals gone to dubious extreme (i.e., he cages a princess and makes her trade favors for perks), here’s your chance to buy him for nothing.

The Wicked Orc and all its sexytimes are free (worldwide) on Amazon.

Here is the beginning & (part of the) 1st chapter.

Sun-Drenched

Once, on an omen-drenched day, in a sun-drenched garden, a girl knelt in the grass by a death-drenched boy.

(No, she thought later, as a grown woman, there was more to the tale than that—something had happened earlier—but in truth, she didn’t want to think about that tale at all. Unfortunately, old tales sometimes sleep badly and wake at the worst of times.)

He wasn’t human, as she was, but a young orc, all long, reedy limbs, bare feet, and torn clothes, his skin the periwinkle-grey of a summer storm. He sprawled there, twisted into pain like a living, cracked twig beneath an ancient maple.

Above him, tree branches flowed outward as black as pitch, like dark tributaries between the shivering leaves, and brassy sunbeams sifted through those leaves to gambol across his bluish skin and the… gemstones, cherry-dark, that rolled down his arms.

Only, those warped red spheres weren’t gems, but blood. Deep lacerations below the orc boy’s collarbone etched deadly artwork into his skin, cutting all the way down to his snow-white bone.

Melancholy wreathed the girl’s heart at his imminent end.

But the orc boy laughed.

His laughter was serrated by insanity, that was true, but his fury skewered this fate. And his question skewered her. “Come kneel beside me, royal girl?”

What could she do? Shouldn’t an orc boy be granted his last request just as much as any fusty old eldster on a deathbed?

But that wasn’t his last request.

He whispered his real last request to her: into the space of held breath beneath her bowed head—into the intimate space that existed, right then, just between them.

The world seemed to bate its breath for her answer.

The blossoming perfumes that saturated the summer air surrounded her as she…

…leaned down…

…shut her eyes…

And although she’d read all the tales in the royal library—shelves full of histories, tragedies, and adventures—none of the storybooks she’d read had ever said how orc boys kissed.

His tusks pressed strangely, excitingly against her tender lips, and his quiet laughter brushed a thrill against hers. Exhilaration leaped inside her heart, fiery and fierce and vivid with potential.

Wasted potential, because his lesions, life, misfortune, and the girl’s father (the king) denied the orc boy all the poignant possibilities of life that he might want.

That was her first kiss.

And his last.

*

He had been long slain.

Since then, the girl had given up the hope of saving anyone at all.

Even herself.

*

To survive, in time, she thought it best to imagine that moment had never happened.

She deemed that the orc boy had been a phantasm.

A dream.

Mere dust motes in the sunbeams that she eventually blinked from her eye.

*

But what did we say about old tales sleeping badly?

*

(The orc boy’s fate wasn’t the only thing to sleep badly, she thought later.)

*

Somehow, she grew up.

(What made it easier was that she became a young woman who dared not dream anything at all, since dreams are only future lies, anyway.)

But then came that hostile night. (That cursed night.)

The sky was trying to destroy the earth. A brutal tempest riled angry branches to shatter countless windows; one airborne stick even impaled an ill-fated wretch straight in the chest.

And under that squall’s disguising clamor, someone sneaked in and stopped the young prince’s heart.

The next morning, the young woman found her little brother in his bed, with an unkind slit in his throat.

She told herself it was a nightmare.

Only, well, she wouldn’t wake. She slapped and pinched and (didn’t scream), but she would not wake.

And she was too aware that this unkind act could not be undone. Her brother’s neck could not be stitched up. His escaped soul could not be stuffed back in, not like she stuffed her scream back in.

She thought then that she might blaspheme and disown the all-god Luminus, but no god had done this.

Some creature who walked the earth—perhaps a silver elf whose speed no human could match, or an orc who prowled with corded muscles no human could surpass—some race that reviled humans so much that they would kill an ungrown boy in lieu of the manmade monster who truly oppressed them.

Why not attack her father? A king made of the trappings of war: of elements like iron and fire and brimstone, a sulfuric man who’d carved his soul from his body.

Why take her brother, who’d been made of unarmored heart and vulnerable throat and paper-thin flesh?

(It’s because those with unarmored hearts and vulnerable throats and paper-thin flesh are easiest to catch. And unbeknownst to her, her unarmored heart was next.)

Snow-Swathed

If it hadn’t snowed, Altheira never would have fallen—off the ladder, into love, or into… all that came after.

Beneath a thousand twinkling stars, she balanced in her white gown on the rungs above the snow-swathed earth. Her scarlet cloak dangled haphazardly across her shoulders, her balance hazardous on the icy metal ladder.

Around her, crystalline moonlight illuminated the winterberry garden and set the frosted fruit globes to sparkling like jewels.

Had the cold air not pricked her with a thousand knife-like jabs, she might have found the tableau beautiful: the layers of ice that coated the winterberry branches like glass, turning the tree into a fantastical frost sculpture that might exist in some wintry cavern underground.

Not that she’d ever been underground, of course. She could only imagine the hollows in the earth where twisted flora unfolded frozen, maze-like limbs from hoarfrost-encrusted rocks.

Only orcs roved the underground caverns, being a race that reveled in extremes: extreme temperatures, extreme heights, depths, and—Altheira blushed—extreme passions—so the servants whispered, at least, when they thought their princess’s ears weren’t perked, although wasn’t there that rumor, they prattled with lurid glee, that the princess had, once—

Altheira shivered—from the cold, she assured herself.

She curved her slippers more carefully on the perilously ice-slicked ladder, her palm burning glacially on the rung she grasped. Her woolen gloves hardly helped; her fingertips froze, and her knuckles ached—her toes, too. And her breath whorled into steam between the boughs as she reached for the frost-crusted cluster of berriesdangling just beyond her stretched fingertips.

She needed them. Now. Their ripe plumpness taunted her with much-needed shut-eye.

She craved a brief respite, at least at night, not to think of everything else.

Even here, in the barren winter, with the snow-covered sward and the timeworn castle walls to divide her from him—even now she dared not voice defiance of her father.

Instead—a coward countless times over—she sought escape.

One more try. Reach… farther.

The cold froze the grimace to her lips and stiffened her fingers in her gloves as she reached again for the winterberries bunched on the branch…

Then she was falling, weightless, scream-less—

And landing on a very male body.

He crumpled under her, cushioning her fall, and a billowing mist of displaced snow puffed into her face.

She battled off him and out of the snowdrift and spat out the disarray of her partly braided hair from where it had tangled in her mouth.

He clambered up, too, the man she’d fallen on; she heard his laughter as he dusted snowflakes off his leather trousers and dislodged more snowflakes from his tousled hair—white hair like that of the silver elves.

She froze, frantic, the snow melting inside her slippers and through her stockings, while he—

—lifted his head, letting moonbeams shine on his smile, which sparkled with straight teeth and nicely shaped lips.

No. Beautifully shaped lips.

Her breath sucked in, stolen from her fear and given to silly admiration by a mere glimpse of his silver-elven features: almond-shaped eyes in a lovely, defined face.

He caught sight of her then, too, and his eyes rounded. “Princess?” He sank to his knees, obeisant. “You are the princess, aren’t you?”

Hardly able to breathe, she raced through a crazed array of thoughts, then tumbled into an impulsive decision that spilled out of her mouth: “Call me Altheira. We’ve just been—” she sought a word “—embedded together in the snow. We need not be formal. Please rise. I dislike…”

“Dislike…?” He glanced up from his moonlit curtain of hair, his prompt hovering on the air, the word in his mouth discomfiting her in unexpected ways.

I dislike inequality, she could have answered. The idea of another person being inferior and needing to bow disturbs me acutely.

She settled on: “…homage. I dislike homage.”

“Do you?” The glitter of starlight shielded whatever emotion he held banked behind his eyes. “Your father demands it.”

“I’m—I’m not my father.” Mercy, she needed to hide her fear better before he sensed it.

Though by the look in his eyes, he already knew—knew how she quaked inside, knew that she stood no chance of escaping him if he didn’t want her to.

But he didn’t move. Still kneeling, he merely measured her with a bland mien. “If you’re not your father, then you don’t want respect?”

“Respect is freely given, not commanded.”

He inclined his head, pointedly keeping his knees buried in the snow. “Then I freely give my respect to you.”

“Why?”

“Because you fell on me with impeccable timing.”

“Impeccable—”

He rose to his feet with the lethal speed of silver elves, startling her into expecting an attack.

But he kept his distance—just barely—and something intense and intent inserted itself into his unwavering attention. “What are you doing here, Princess Altheira?”

Her nervous gaze found the cluster of berries that her final grab hadn’t quite grasped but, thank the stars, had dislodged from the stem. Their bulbs, now partly buried in the snow, would normally match the ruby hue of her cloak, but night had blanched them of color and turned them black.

Feigning an unruffled demeanor, Altheira bent down. While straightening back up, she thumbed snow from the ripe globes swollen with pulp. At their most potent, their soft flesh would catapult her into the deepest of dreams.

Her mouth watered. “I’m stealing a bit of shut-eye.”

“Shut-eye?” Her nocturnal companion’s lips curved upward in a pretty but mocking way, inviting her to jest. “But whatever could trouble a princess’s sleep?”

She focused on dusting snow off the wine-dark winterberries. “With the city rife with poor and riots, what princess who cared could sleep at all?”

“But you are safe behind these walls.” His put-on smile never faltered. “You have guards here willing to lay down their lives for yours.”

She made an impatient gesture. “Those guards should not have to lay down their lives! The city should live at peace. And it is not myself I worry for, but those who survive the streets outside these walls. I would fain know they were safe and healthy, as well. Not fighting. Not starving. Not freezing in—”

He suddenly stood right before her, having used his speed to shift position. “Pitiful princess.”

She didn’t move. His fingertips lifted and hovered so close to her chin that she had to tilt her head to keep them from making contact.

His whisper no longer mocked, but contorted through his lips. “You poor little humans.”

“You mistake me,” she rasped. “I do not mean humans—or not only us. Everyone suffers when we are divided—you silver elves, orcs, goblins—”

“You are right that we are divided.” His tone implied something even more personal, an enmity between him and her, and—

Belatedly, it struck her that only royal family members should be here in this private garden.

He shouldn’t be here.

Like that orc boy so long ago.

(No, she told herself, that hadn’t really happened.)

Scrounging up bravado from where it quivered in her heart, she flung her intruder a challenge: “You asked why I am here, but why are you?”

Mercy, the way he stilled; the way his head tilted.

The false smile he pinned on.

She’d gravely erred.

The strangest feeling overcame her that she was already dead, and she glanced dazedly down, expecting to find his dagger already embedded in her midriff.

It lay in his hand, slanted flat on his white-gloved palm, the glossy blade reflecting her bloodless skin. “I have a dark confession,” his murmur rumbled through her numbness. “Guess what task I’ve come to fulfil for the good of the kingdom.”

DUN DUN DUN! Lol fun times. There might be a wee love triangle, but there is a happy ending, I prooooomise! Again, the book is free here if you want it, but IT COMES WITH A WARNING! –> “This story is a little dreamy, a bit dark, somewhat twisty, and a lot emotional. It’s the love story of deeply troubled characters blundering through a battlefield of bloody thorns. Enter at your own risk.“

Also, I did a story in images for it here. [PLEASE NOTE! The images in the linked post were AI-generated, but I’ve since stopped using them.]

Thrice the Shadow. [Nope, I still don’t know what that is.]

I hope everyone out there is doing okay this week! Be kind to others, y’all. You never know what battle they’re fighting.

And if you want to, support me if you can! –>

1. read my books and recommend them to those you think will like them…
2. OR sign up to my ARC list if it’s still open at the bottom of this page
3. OR if you want to throw money at me (foodz, y’all, I always need monies for foodz!), you can ‘buy me a coffee’ via buy me a coffee
4. OR support me regularly via the patreon (though I never post anything there ‘cuz I suuuuuuuuck)

The Orc link strikes again, this time disguised as the book cover: