Ahoy friends! I am trying to choose which bonus chapter to upload this week to my work, Divira: The Magic Extinction. Please pick your favorite between the following two excerpts and the full bonus chapter will be posted along with the next story chapter on Thursday, May 7.
The options:
- A mini chapter prior to the beginning of the story:
>Rophen: The day before
>Like any good soldier in peacetime, Rophen had learned to divide his job into two categories: the parts worth enduring, and the parts worth loving. The training, the fighting, and the particular, wordless loyalty of a squadron that had bled beside you, those were easy to love.
>Days like today were the other kind.
>He'd been lacing his boots for morning drills when Maeria's note arrived, slipped under his door the way her unofficial correspondence always did, in plain ink, plain paper, and no seal.
>Rophen. You've been working too hard. Take the day off and enjoy yourself. The city is beautiful this time of year.
>The word enjoy was bolded.
>A day off. In the city. With the people.
>He had options, of course. He could spend the morning hazing the new recruits in the training dojo, maybe even borrow Maeria's rifle for the added psychological effect. He could run inventory in the armory, which he found genuinely calming, though he'd stopped admitting that after one too many concerned looks. He could go to the Archives and ask ARA everything he'd accumulated over the past week; there was an ongoing, unofficial contest among the senior officers to see who could be the first to make the AI contradict itself. Or he could simply stay in his quarters, away from his squadron's jibes and the recruits' endless, exhausting questions. Read something. He'd heard rumors that civilians sometimes slept during the day — voluntarily. He could investigate that.
>But disobeying a request from your mother was never easy.
>Disobeying a request from the Commander of the most powerful military force on the Western Continent, even less so. And it became something close to impossible when said force had spent the last five years plastering your face on every recruitment poster from here to the border, which meant that whatever you did in public was, technically, always on the record.
>Rophen read the note a second time. Flipped it over, searching for a secondary message, a subtext, anything that would give him an out. Nothing. He turned it upside down. Still nothing.
>He set it down.
>Fine. He would take the day off. He was a grown man and a decorated soldier and he could walk out into that city without complaint.
>But no one could make him enjoy it.
- A booklet for the card game that the main character is often seen playing in the story.
>Pharos and Shadows: Official Rules & Field Guide.
>A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE GAME (For Nerds. You Know Who You Are.)
>Pharos and Shadows was created in the aftermath of the Intercontinental War, more or less simultaneously with the founding of the Guardians of Vigeren themselves. This is not a coincidence. It began as a private joke among soldiers and escalated, as most private jokes do, into something that consumed an entire continent.
>It is currently the most widely played card game in recorded history.
>A persistent and widely circulated rumor attributes the game's design to Commander Maeria herself (note: not the goddess). According to this account, after one argument too many among her troops, who could not stop comparing their own combat performance in statistical terms — who had higher kill counts, whose defensive positioning was more efficient, whose supply routes had held the longest, etcetera, often reconstructing battles using whatever was available at the mess table.
>After one argument too many, Maeria stormed out of the mess hall, and returned the next day, passing along printed record sheets, hoping the cold facts and logic would put the arguments to rest.
>That didn't work.
>Soldiers were far too happy to argue about whose facts and whose logic were better, and by the end of the week they had copied, laminated, and scaled down the record sheets to card-size, adding flattering art to the individuals depicted.
>The fact that the game became one of the Guardian's main sources of income is observed by modern historians as Maeria's both greatest move and worst failure.