© Aphelion Webzine
I’m pleased to report that Rab Foster, the penname I attach to my fantasy fiction, has got a new story included in the November 2022 edition of the webzine Aphelion. The story is entitled The Tower and the Stars and is a sword-and-sorcery tale involving a bloodthirsty cult of star-worshippers, who are based in an ancient tower in the middle of a vast and desolate marsh. It’s also influenced by the celebrated American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, at least with regards to the entities that the cult is trying to invoke. The horrors in Lovecraft’s stories were famously ‘nameless’ and ‘unspeakable’ and generally so horrible as to be beyond description, which is very handy for a writer. If your villains are indescribable, you don’t have to spend time and effort describing them.
The story’s main characters are a benevolent witch called Gudroon, who previously appeared in a story of mine entitled The Foliage, which was included in last year’s collection Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3; and a swordsman called Drayak Shathsprey, who was featured in a story entitled Crows of the Mynchmoor that I had published at the start of 2022 in the online Swords and Sorcery Magazine. So, The Tower and the Stars is what in modern parlance is known as a ‘team-up’. Watch out, Marvel Comics Universe – here comes the Rab Foster Universe.
For the next month, The Tower and the Stars can be accessed here, while the contents page of the November 2022 issue of Aphelion can be accessed here.