© Crimson Quill Quarterly
The Drakvur Challenge is a sword-and-sorcery story of mine that’s just been published in Volume 3 of the magazine Crimson Quill Quarterly. Like all the fantasy fiction I write, it appears under the penname Rab Foster.
As its main character, The Drakvur Challenge features the swordswoman Cranna the Crimson, someone who takes no shit from anyone – male chauvinists least of all. She previously appeared in my tale Vision of the Reaper, published last year in the anthology Fall into Fantasy 2023.
This new story was inspired by the Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden in Bali, Indonesia, which my partner and I visited a year ago. The Water Garden made a big impression on me with its beautiful ponds, its colourful fish, its networks of stepping stones, its towering and gorgeous fountains… and its statues, some of which were startlingly monstrous-looking. The setting of The Drakvur Challenge has similar things as details, though because it’s a fantasy story, they’re exaggerated and made much more dramatic and dangerous.
And if I say that the story was also – like a lot of my fantasy fiction – inspired by the movies of Ray Harryhausen, you can probably guess what happens regarding the statues.
The Drakvur Challenge is a writing milestone for me because, according to my calculations, it’s the 100th story I’ve had published. If I was a gloomy, miserable bastard, I’d remark that I’m delighted to have reached treble figures just before AI technology renders all human writers redundant. But I’m not, so I won’t.
Volume 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly, which also contains six other sterling sword-and-sorcery stories besides The Drakvur Challenge, can now be purchased at Amazon as a paperback here and on kindle here.
© Morningside Productions / Columbia Pictures