The conclusion of Along the Forest Road.

If you've made it this far, thank you for being so patient with me. Most of my stories won't be this long now that I have our protagonists established and sent off on their adventures. The next one will be ready in a couple of weeks, and it's a short story that will go up in two parts at most. It's currently 10,250 words or so, and I hope to cut it down at least a little before I post it. After that I have one more very short story in the pipe before I need to start writing entirely new material. The one story I have in mind doesn't have much of a plot, so I hope it develops into something as I go! It's the one that I wrote the very beginning to as a response to a challenge at runaway_tales  and the working title is "Desert Jackals". But first you'll see "The Shadow Duke" followed by "Barbaric Treatment".

Triage is no fun.

 

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Well, I think this may be about as good as I can make it.

Boy, I'm taking my own sweet time getting there, aren't I?

Those who aren't involved with either horse racing or the history of English measures may not know that a furlong is 1/8 of a mile. In fact, the reason for the odd length of a mile in feet is that the 15th century (I think) English government redefined it so that it came out to an even number of furlongs. And we all know how important that is.

Actually, it was. The furlong was used in surveying land for tax purposes. One furlong by one chain is one acre. The furlong was more or less an ancient convention but depended on things like local soil conditions; the length of a furrow ploughed by man and a yoke of oxen before resting. The chain was a surveyor's tool, a literal chain 66 feet long. One chain was four rods, the rod also being a surveying tool based on the length of an oxgoad.

Now you know why they invented the metric system.

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So I ended up splitting Chapter 8 as I originally planned it into three parts. Some of the parts make for fairly short chapters -- as this story goes, anyway -- but it makes more sense this way and will be less of a monster to read all at once.

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And here's the rest of the chapter.

 

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I wonder how you become a brigand. Do you have to go to brigand school or something? Is it something you can get a degree in from a community college? Just asking...

 

 

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Unlike Chapter 3, I'd consider this to be genuinely long, but a lot happens and I hope you find the events depicted worth the effort.

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And here's the rest.

 

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There's an inn in this one. It's a fantasy story. There's always an inn. Strangely enough, Our Heroes are neither engaged to go on an adventure by a mysterious cloaked stranger, nor do they get into a bar fight. I know that's the kind of thing you're supposed to use inns for, so I apologize for this gross misuse of a venerable, respectable cliché.

Part 1 of 2. Sheesh. Less than 5,000 words and LJ chokes on it.

 

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Chapter 2

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This begins the second story of Tales of the Tempest. I hope you like it.

Many thanks to beta readers totalcrash5 and Anfitere of y!Gallery.

 

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