Tag Archives: Akela

Aug 10 2025

Pedantic Patreon: Werewolves on a Waterslide / Trash Men

This week’s a double-header because they’re kind of short. Also, one of them is free-to-read.

“Werewolves on a Waterslide” is the newest story in the pile, written just this last week. The title crossed my mind and wouldn’t go away, but I ended up debating with myself for a while about posting it, since I wasn’t sure that now was the best time for a story about compliance in a repressive environment.

I had a long talk with myself about the sort of bargains we strike to survive in society, about what freedoms we’re willing to sell, hoping that selling them will grant us privileges. An indolent society of peaceful forest denizens isn’t going to have to compromise with humans very much. I decided to go ahead with the story when I realized that compliance can be its own form of dissent if the privilege earned grants access to the tools to change or overturn the system.

Or maybe a bunch of werewolves just wanted to play on the waterslides.

The other story this week is “Trash Men,” the only story I ever wrote about the pandemic, during the pandemic. It’s set in the same universe as the “Akela” novels, where people are haunted by the specter of some great, unnamed cataclysm about to befall the world. A form of bird flu with a 23% fatality rate has put the world on lockdown, but Ambimorphs have relative immunity. Two Raccoon-Men (Procyons) have taken jobs as sanitation workers in a very quiet Manhattan, and grow closer together as the rest of the world falls apart.

Jan 20 2019

AKELA: Coming February 21 from Goal Publications

The humans have taken his friends and family. He’d do anything to get them back.

It’s said that when the first humans evolved, the Ambimorphs were already there, to teach us to hunt and fish and light fires to chase away the cold. For millennia, through rivalry and cooperation, they’ve shared this world with us, keeping their own councils and building their own societies, while always offering friendship to ours.

For years, Ambimorph leader Akela has worked to strengthen a community that would build bridges with the inscrutable Humans. As the keeper of a prophecy foretelling the decline and fall of the human race, it’s his privilege to devote himself to forestalling or preventing the inevitable.

Then a deal with the devil goes wrong, costing Akela three years of his life. In his absence, his family is taken, his community sundered. Desperate to correct his mistake, he’s offered a fatal bargain: to reclaim his family and community at the expense of his heritage, and lose all that his ancestors have worked centuries to save.

But if he loses the prophecy, humanity falls as well…