Hunger and the Green: A Peridot Novella

By R J Theodore

This description and this book contain spoilers for the author's Peridot Shift series. It is recommended that you read FLOTSAM and SALVAGE first!

A gothic horror set in the world of Peridot, Mary Shelley's influence permeates this magic-infused tale of hubris, horror, and obsession.

Following the events of Peridot Shift Book Two, SALVAGE, a Yu'Nyun gas released on the trade winds is tearing people's  souls from them, leaving their bodies violent, anguished husks. Ada's brother, Elias, is one of many of the foul winds' victims.
Launching a desperate plan to bring him back, Ada hires a bounty hunter to procure an empty body for her brother's preserved quintessence. If Ada can re-bond Elias's soul to this new body, they can help the other citizens of Peridot who were similarly devastated.

But when the bounty hunter brings her a mermaid, one of Onaya Bone's soulless experiments, Ada's plan for redemption spirals into a hellish nightmare. The flesh-eating mermaid may not have a soul, but she won't allow Elias to have her body without a fight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Creative Jay
• Release date: Oct 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781732525962

R J Theodore

R J Theodore is hellbent on keeping herself busy. Seriously folks, if she has two spare minutes to rub together at the end of the day, she invents a new project with which to occupy them. She enjoys design, illustration, video games (mostly spectating, for she is not as adept at them as she would prefer), reading, binging on media, napping with her cats, and cooking. She is passionate about art and coffee. R J Theodore lives in New England with her family. She co-hosts The Hybrid Author Podcast and writes non-fiction as Rekka Jay.

Book preview

Ada receives a visit from Captain Frankie Vitnir

Ada Ziryab closed the back coverplate on the gearwork necklace and rubbed the soft flesh between her chitin faceplates. The morning had been productive. It was nearly finished, except for the final, critical component.

Lilting birdsong led her across her workshop, up the step to her residence and down the portrait-lined corridor to the parlor. The chatter and activity of the wrens was so disruptive that her brother, Elias Ziryab, had long ago insisted their cage be moved out of the workshop. The parlor was as good a place as any, as neither Ada nor her brother left the workshop between breakfast and bed, except to replenish their tea. The parlor furniture was draped to protect against the feathers and dust of the birds. The wrens seemed content to sing and squawk all day, whether they had an audience or not.

But the isolation had undone their socialization. The wrens scattered in alarm, seeking higher perches, as Ada lifted the cage door and reached in to lightly close her fingers around the nearest bird. Elias had named them all and could tell them apart by personalities she seemed incapable of detecting. At the moment, her detachment was a happy coincidence.

Back at her workbench, Ada turned the bird over in her hand and clipped it into the restraining tray. Ignoring its desperate, feeble kicking, she made an incision into its breast, then snipped its keel bone with an unpleasant wet crack. From memory, she navigated past the creature’s ribs with a sure, skilled hand, heedless of the blood that welled to obscure her work.

Ada had only moments, while the tiny heart still beat, to transplant it into her charm. She applied electrical charges from a pre-cranked battery, touching the contacts to the muscle to shock it gently back to its rhythm. Her breath caught as it seemed that the practice was failing, carrying on past the point of hopelessness, but finally the pulse steadied and held. Ada found her breath again as the tiny copper gears lurched into movement, turning with the bird’s strong, panicked heartbeat. The pendant warmed in her hand, the polished metal feeling as delicate and wild as the living creature had.

She regarded the cooling shell of blood-soaked, rumpled feathers in the tray before her. Her procedure was a success. She had transferred the tenuous murmur of life to a cask of mechanics.

She had gone against the gods’ own commands. Even Arthel Rak, her own Divine Alchemist, would have had harsh words for her, though he often encouraged his people to experiment in the face of the other gods’ taboos on alchemy. Alchemy had shattered the planet, prompting the Divine Alchemists to forbid its use by mortals, but Arthel Rak didn’t believe the answer was to make people more ignorant of its power and danger. Still, even for him, Ada’s experiments would have been a step too far.

But she had to. And she wasn’t done yet.

The wren was merely a proof for future, larger, even more heretical constructs. If all went well, she could commit her brother to such a device, soon.

Elias would also have forbidden it. As he was, a glowing green mercurial liquid now pooled in a warded jar in the cabinet over her head, he could hardly stop her. And she had to try.

She fed the pendant, crafted in the shape of a wren, onto a long chain and crimped the last link closed. The metal of each link was stamped with alchemical sigils, now a loop of kinetic energy that would conduct the electrical impulses from the delicate heart back around the circle to stimulate the next beat. Copper and gold glinted under her low lamplight as she ran the links over the rigid plating of her fingers. The heart lived. She traced a sigil on its surface, and the ink flared with green. The bird’s small share of quintessence had transferred to the charm. But could she build a larger construct, something big enough for a person’s soul?

Elias had made the individual components of this necklace himself, designing and stamping cogs, winding coils for springs, and folding delicate hinges. The gearwork gifts that Ada made from them—music boxes, charms, and wind-up creatures—helped supplement the income from the siblings’ more intricate and custom alchemical creations.

But the glass-topped case she used to display her jewelry in was empty. After the Yu’Nyun solution was released across the skies as a soul-rending gas cloud, her customers stopped coming by to browse frivolous novelties. All the customer order forms sitting in her tray were for medical devices, custom gas masks, and air filters. Nobody exchanged gifts anymore. They focused on survival, on protecting their families. And so did Ada.

To capture her brother’s soul in gear-wound metal was merely Ada’s backup plan. The Yu’Nyun, who had brought the devastating formula to Peridot, had also brought simulas. The steel and silicone bodies, from the descriptions Ada had heard, were the perfect devices for housing souls. But the alien automatons sounded so fantastic, able to reshape into any form the owner desired, that Ada had to admit they might be little more than rumor. Yes, the Yu’Nyun had come from the stars with advanced alien technology, but bodies that could house a soul?

Of course, if the Yu’Nyun also brought a formula that could forcibly eject a person’s soul from their original body, having something on hand to capture that soul would make sense. Ada clung to that hope but prepared her own alternative, inspired by the concept of simulas, even if she had never seen one for herself.

The pendant’s heart was still beating hours later. Ada had been watching the time pass, tick by tock, not only to judge the success of her experiment, but also in anticipation of an arrival at the docks. She stayed in her workshop, fiddling, tidying, and studying, for as long as possible. She was eager to greet her visitor but not at all eager to be above ground and so close to the docks.

She disconnected her creation from the meters and monitors whose thin metal fingers had assured her of its stability and slipped the chain over her head to settle against her chest. She dressed to go out, hanging up her leather apron and changing out of the stained and patched blouse she wore as a smock while she worked. She tied up the waves of her long red hair into a smooth coil, secured it with a hair stick, then put on one last accessory, her face mask with air-filtered mouth and tinted goggles, and walked through the city tunnels for the exit up to ground level.

The ship she wanted, Rascal, had not yet arrived. Ada’s inclination to pace was offset by her fear of being above ground. Any movements beneath the dizzying purple, an open expanse of cloud and darkness pinned back by stars that twinkled with malice, made her feel as though she would tip off the edge of the island and fall forever. She clung to the doorway of the sheltered transportation depot, reassuring herself with its solid presence as she forced her goggle-filtered gaze out over the finger-thin docks that branched over the nothingness of empty sky.

The island of Hornblende had been spared, but Ada was not the only one in the depot wearing a mask to protect against any stray wisps of toxic gas. There was a small crowd but a proportionately wide selection of designs. There were two or three of the simple style handed out by the Tempest aid ships that had passed through several weeks ago, which had taken Elias with them when they left and returned soon after bearing his soul in a warded jar and insufficient apologies.

Ada averted her gaze as if to reject that memory and glanced over the other unique, hand-made designs of masks, many repurposed from magma-flow gear. Hornblende was home to deep rivers of magma that kept the floating island’s subterranean cities warm, provided it with energy, and served as a constant reminder of the love their Divine Alchemist, Arthel Rak, Lord of Fire, had for the Rakkar people he had created.

But Arthel Rak could not save Elias when his mask failed. A brittle seal had crumbled, and the befouled air had gotten to him. That was all it took. When in the path of the trade winds, everyone—no matter how prepared—was one bad seal away from losing their souls.

Hornblende was far outside the trade winds that spread the aliens’ soul-stripping gas around Peridot, but fear kept their masks on. Fear of a world where the gods could be killed and nothing felt certain anymore. The wind was the domain of the Cutter people’s god, Silus Cutter. The first victim of the Yu’Nyun. With their creator gone, who would the winds obey now?

The Rakkar people were familiar with theory versus practical application and knew better than to rely on anyone but themselves.

Ada was no different. Not with her mask, and not with the matter of reinstating the disrupted souls. Not just for Elias, but for everyone in the world whose souls had been—or would be—reduced to a glowing puddle of quintessence, while their vacant bodies raged like rabid animals, mindless and tormented.

The Tempest, a group of Cutters with repurposed Imperial airships, had visited to give out blankets and breathing masks. But then they had sailed off into the skies again, as if a few handouts made up for the damage they had done, the treachery against their own world. It was the group’s own leader who had tried to use the Yu’Nyun formula against its creators and instead set the gas loose to follow the trade winds around Nexus, spreading its poison to the other four races. The Cutter people, much like their winds, could not be relied upon. They believed themselves as pure as the golden glint of their skin and behaved as if there were no need to prove it. Elias had gone with them, taking their gas mask designs, filtration mechanisms, and blowers. The Tempest had convinced him his help would make a difference, help people who were cut off and isolated from the gas and survivors who had managed to seal themselves off from it in their homes but were now running out of time. Instead, only days later, the Tempest had made a brief stop to return his soul to Ada in a warded jar, apologizing for having had to destroy his body (for the safety of others), and asked her to take up his cause. In her anguish, she sent them off with harsh words she could not remember even now.

The docks had been quiet since then. Occasionally a ship would make berth to resupply and bring news of the world, but there were few ships in the world with healthy crews these days, and Hornblende was just one of many islands desperate for their visits.

A familiar shadow peeled away from the purple expanse of sky, and Ada rose to watch through the narrow window as Rascal pulled up to Hornblende Harbor’s docks. It was a Bone sloop, long and lean as its owner, Captain Vitnir, who inexplicably preferred the moniker Frankie. She was