Here’s another of those fragments I promised you’d see coming.  Mori’s story is one I still don’t have a title for or much detail in; though I have the broad outline for it, at the moment it’s mostly just something that gets put on paper as I go along.  For example, when I was working on this page it somehow became one of my goals to use the word ‘inhastate’.

Now, ordinarily a golem wouldn’t hurt a fly. They can’t really; it’s not just in their programming, it’s in principle—the magic that animates a golem just doesn’t work if you try to build hostility into it.

Seeing my golem wrestling with the gryphon-man for a weapon was, to put it mildly, more disturbing than the monster in the arena.

When it succeeded at winning the spear from the kelvin, I figured it might be a good time to bail out and jumped off its back. Munk leaped back into the arena, landing with a heavy thud, and started swinging the spear around wildly.

It didn’t look like it had any idea what it was doing.

I looked up at the now-inhastate kelvin, but he was just watching as if nothing had happened, holding its candle in front of it with both talons.