This week, to celebrate the Jewish festival of Sukkot, we are putting online one of our favorite stories. We’re calling it “Of Kings and Monsters” and it is all free to read on the web, no downloads required. I personally adore this story; it cracks me up whenever I read it. Check it out, what can you lose?
Story Blurb:
When a monster decides to spare the life of a child, he changes the fate of kingdoms, curtails an expanding empire, restores a lost royal dynasty, and most especially, alters his own life forever.
Ja’kh’redd, a monstrous Vidos, was out hunting when he came across an orphaned human child amidst the ruins of a recently destroyed caravan. Taking pity on the ‘human cub’ he saved her, attempting to return her to humankind to grow up among her own.
A decade and a half later, Ja’kh’redd would come across the same human cub once more, this time grown to adulthood… and on death’s door. Rescuing her a second time from a fatal wound begins a journey that will take the humble Vidos from the life of a simple hunter to the halls of ancient Kings, the feasting table of conquerors, and into a life he never could have imagined.
With a strange but elemental love story as its backbone, Kings and Monsters is ultimately a story about humanity, compassion, and what makes a soul noble… and it isn’t the color of the skin, or whether or not there are horns.
Did you ever want to fly? Can you imagine what it would be like to crouch down on a two by three foot skyboard, press the speedgrid, and take off at over a hundred miles an hour with nothing between you and the wide world? Especially if nine angry Jelka were following you?
