Maris splashed through another shallow pool, submerged nearly to her knees. Grime and sweat matted her dark hair; the messy bun she’d started the day with was thoroughly compromised. Dirt from the nameless faun’s grotto streaked her pants and jacket. Water flowed in through the tops of her boots. Even after climbing out of the pool onto uneven, sharp-rocked ground, each step squelched and dragged with moisture.

Maris remembered the night after she’d found the nameless faun. The petals were slowly closing as Antillia drew toward nastic night. Each of the bloom’s five petals were a long ovate shape, narrow where they met at the central pinion, broadening several kilometers up-petal, then tapering to a point over several more kilometers.

The thump and tremor of the passing mechafauna rarely woke Maris anymore; once every week for five years gave her plenty of time to learn to tune out the noise.

“The trail that led me into the Icano Disaster Area was rough and bloody. I don’t think anyone who died on the way down there deserved it. Not Borread, not Vedos, not the enemies who we never identified.

Now that I know a bit more about what motivated the mission in the first place, I think maybe there are some other people who do deserve it. Regrettably, right then, none of them stood between us and survival. The people who deserve it usually don’t.”

-Excerpt from In the Serpent’s Maw: The Secret Conflict on the Icano Peninsula

“The things down there just aren’t accounted for. Not in our military doctrine, not in our legal framework, not in our laws of physics, and certainly not in our social contract. It’s all jagged and uncertain. But people still have to make choices, and I have to believe that I witnessed choices that mattered.”

-Excerpt from In the Serpent’s Maw: The Secret Conflict on the Icano Peninsula

“‘And there are monsters,’ he said. I didn’t know what Tahl had seen on his last trip in The Serpent’s Maw, and he didn’t elaborate that day. I thought he was trying to rattle me. Maybe he was. And maybe it should have rattled me more.”

-Excerpt from In the Serpent’s Maw: The Secret Conflict on the Icano Peninsula

Less than a day into the scouting mission, the Varallen Irregulars were half way into the crater, stuck atop a teetering platform, and engaging an unidentified enemy. As I lay flat on my face from the blast, I remember thinking ‘This cannot possibly be a routine operation.’

“This story began with a question that nobody wanted to answer. ‘Are we at war in Varall?’ When my old friends in the brass got evasive, I sharpened my inquiries to ‘Who are we fighting?’ and ‘If the Astiagen Coalition isn’t at war, why did the Council approve sending so much advanced military hardware half way around the planet?’