matt_doyle

Got my word count in early today. Not satisfied, exactly, because I want to be working on Hellion Prince and I really really want to be putting Starstuff on the back burner. Guess what my caffeine gave me words on?

But, what the Hell. An excerpt:

Imagine what a person would look like if they had turtle-shell covering their skin. Hundreds of faceted hexagonal scales, mottled and tesselated with weird patterns, giving them all kinds of corners at the joints, spikes and growths like a living suit of platemail. Now imagine those quilted tiles of shell were made of rock – glittering pyrite, smooth marble with swirls of color, shining pearl, and so on. Arms and legs that were very long for how stocky the body was, with small, weirdly delicate hands and feet that had no fingers but four opposable thumbs, and seams along the sides of their arms and legs, where you could see orangey ripples of what looked kind of like tightly folded bat wings, but mostly like crumpled and compacted fabric, like someone had bunched together creamy orange-colored silk sheets and stuffed them as tightly as they could into those seams. A head that looked humanish, but beaky, almost like someone had taken a dinosaur head and squashed it flatter; with big gleaming eyes that constantly had multiple nictating membranes flickering across them, making them look like they were blinking from three directions at once. And last but not least, stab them through the middle of the chest with a hexagonal crystal six inches thick, until just the ends of it are visible on the middle of their chest and back. That's what the Sidaji look like – what Ether looks like – and so that's what I saw.

Naturally, I freaked out.