WeWriWa #7: 23 August 2015

Partly because the anthology is being released in the next few months, and partly because I’m going to be working on more Southeastern inspired stories, I finally decided on an excerpt!

The passage describes the Philippine Islands after a cataclysmic disaster of volcanic eruptions.

“There’s not much to see below.”

Nothing but barren land and scorched earth. Nothing but cracked floor covered with hardened lava and ash and tephra. The rivers had become poisonous to its inhabitants, and if there was freshwater to be found in the lakes, it would have dried up by now. Even the skies seemed to add to the bleakness, for the sun was often obscured with clouds that rained acid and fog that seemed almost impossible to pierce unless one used a specific type of goggles. Northern Pinas had remained this way for twenty years, so ravaged by the continuous eruptions of its local volcanoes: Pinatubo, Taal, Mayon. The major figures that caused The Great Explosions of 1816, which led to the nation’s Years of Ash Winter. Unlike the cold white snows of Wakoku and Zhongguo to the north, Pinas’ snows were made out of broken rocks and ash, gray and dark and oppressive.

Story Notes: The excerpt is from “Chasing Volcanoes”, a story about a volcano-chasing captain and her encounters with a hidden princess whose capture can very well lead to the crew’s salvation. It is part of the upcoming The SEA Is Ours anthology, to be published by Rosarium Publishing this fall.