The Philippine Online Chronicles

“Prose. Poetry. Pulp," reads the tagline of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and that is exactly what we find in this online magazine committed to publishing the best in heroic fantasy. Swordsmen, adventures, fantastic landscapes – HFQ is filled with stories of action, with a hope to “hearken back to an older age of storytelling –an age when a story well told enthralled audiences.” Adrian Simmons, David Farney, and William Ledbetter sit as editors. HFQ releases new issues on the first of July, October, January, and April.

HFQ’s Issue 5 marks the first-year anniversary of this publication.

Let the battles begin.

"Ancient Shades" by James Lecky

“Although the admission pains me, I must confess that, under certain circumstances, I am a man for whom the goods of others become a temptation.”

And so the story begins with larceny. Tulun of Birjand (who first appeared in the story "The Black Flowers of Sevan," also in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly) who has just suffered a blow to his pride after losing at games of chance in the city of Al Mazhar, pilfers the purse of a fat man in striped robes. The purse is light, to Tulun’s grave disappointment, but within he discovers a strange silver coin with the image of an eagle on one side and the face of a young man on the other. Sure enough Tulun admires the coin in a narrow alley, and a man appears behind him, ordering him to hand the coin over…or else!

Tulun ends up killing a brigand, of course, and now he wonders if the coin is indeed worth so much that a man will choose to die for it. He begins by looking for the owner of the purse.

It is a mercy that Lecky’s tale is well written and entertaining with nary a word out of place, or it would have fallen under the category of those cliché-filled stories that I wouldn’t bother reading. Well, the story does take advantage of the plot devices we know so well: the promise of wealth and domination by a once-powerful-now-deceased leader, evil forces burning down the hero’s home and killing his maiden, the race to a tomb (where the wealth is stored, naturally), “You cannot deny me my destiny” and such pronouncements, the cowardly companion leaving the hero – only to return at a crucial moment to save the hero’s life. But the language used is beautiful and there is an obvious nod to Alexander the Great (“And when he surveyed his empire, [he] wept bitter tears because there were no more worlds to conquer...”) that I appreciated. Tulun of Birjand is an engaging narrator, so if you’re in the mood for a fun, action-filled read, this story’s for you.

"Aldrom" by Matthew Wuertz

A blindfolded Thadryn is led down a flight of stairs and into a fortress. His captor tells him that his next assignment is to interrogate a prisoner of war, and we, the readers, are given a juicy detail about this Thadryn through his captor’s curious afterthought: “If you wish to experiment upon his mind in the deprave manner you so often employ, so be it. But spare me the repulsive details in your report.” When his blindfold is removed, Thadryn mistakes the prisoner for a child – but the man in the dungeon is in fact an elf. Thadryn, with help from his elf-hating staff, Ornithìln, enters the elf’s mind and explores his memories.

It would have been your run-of-the-mill attack-destroy-flee plot arc – elves sail to Aldrom, elves are instructed to kill men and leave the harmless women and children, elves kill everyone anyway because they can’t tell the difference – until the story reveals the nature of the inhabitants of the city. The story left me wanting to know more about the poor prisoners of Aldrom, but this is a good read nonetheless.

"No Two Stones" by Christopher Wood

“Still I am the strongest!” is as good an opening statement as any to introduce the unstoppable Captain Gkurz, who leads soldiers in campaign after campaign in the killing of Vluds. They have horns and tails, and to cut or rip off their horns – “the fronts of our skulls” – is to kill them. Created by a ruler who lives underneath the surface of the World, all their life, all the soldiers know is the killing of Vluds. Here they stand looking at a Vlud city, now ravaged, destroyed.

But this is not the first scene. Gkurz jumps back in time to relate the events of two months ago, where their company travel the Twilight Realms to reach the Fifteenth Cantry. Here Cantrices practice their magic, and here the soldiers “culminate” after their battles. Gkurz and his soldiers have already killed the Vluds, and having fulfilled their supposed purpose and having achieved victory, they ask the Cantrix envoy – now what? What, they ask, does our creator exactly mean by “culminate”?

This is a gem, a story about an alien race I cannot even clearly picture in my head when they are first described, but with whom I empathize when they begin questioning their faith. All of a sudden they are three-dimensional, all of a sudden they are real. Even the Cantrix glows with new life as she tries to defend their faith to the disillusioned soldiers: “You will bite His hand, and hope that He forgives you or at least doesn’t punish you. But do not think that He will treat you as dumb animals who do not understand His will. You know! You choose to obey or disobey! If you come here with doubts and questions and ‘evidence’ that you can’t understand, does that not say to you that you are less than our master, that His designs are greater than your ignorance?”

And Gkurz thinks, “If knowledge gives power, does that power alone make the master superior? Is this very question part of the ignorance that sets the follower below? Will all followers, anywhere, whether loyal or suffering doubt, forever be truly ignorant? If mastery depends on the followers’ ignorance, is mastery bad, or ignorance good? Is it simple ignorance, that plague within a spirit that just cannot decide what to do?”

Very well done. This is easily my favorite story in this issue.

Included in Issue 5 are two poems: "Before the Battle" by Vonnie Winslow Crist, and "What Sieglinde Serpentslayer said to the King," by Megan Arkenberg. The poems are like bookends – the former deals with a beginning, the latter with a wish for an end. Both are written with a clear eye and an honest voice. The “I” personas in the poems do not exalt war, and evokes what plunder can do to a spirit. “The truth, my lord, is that I am sick of monsters,” says Sieglinde. It is a perspective worth contemplating.