The YouTuber KLA the Wanderer was kind enough to offer me an interview for his channel wherein I would get to talk about my artwork and writing. Please do check it out!
Featured on Koprolitos!
The Spanish-language paleontology blog Koprolitos has an article about me on their blog, sharing samples of my artwork with my permission. If you can read Spanish (unfortunately, mine is very rusty at best), please do check it out!
Historia antigua, mundos fantásticos y fauna del pasado por Brandon Pilcher
Goddesses of the Hunt
A loud blip from the sonar screen knocked Captain Tanaka Hideyo out of his semi-slumber. His eyelids fluttered like moth wings as he leaned from his chair to examine the screen. Whenever the sonar’s spinning “needle” swept over the lower right corner, a large green silhouette shaped like an elongated teardrop blinked into view. And each time it reappeared, the mysterious form appeared to have drifted one bit closer to the screen’s center.
“What do you think it could be, Captain?” Lieutenant Suzuki Kenji asked. His tanned yellow-brown face had turned paler than usual.
“Probably a whale,” Tanaka said.
Suzuki shook his head. “I’ve never seen a whale leave a blip that big. Not even a blue whale. And it’s coming straight toward us!”
The captain groaned. “Don’t tell me it’s one of those fictional sea monsters, then. I keep telling you, Lieutenant, you watch way too many silly kaiju movies.”
“Maybe, but with all due respect, Captain, you should at least keep an open mind.”
Tanaka took a deep breath and stiffened his arms to suppress a desire to slap his subordinate for talking back. “Very well, you can check the stern. But do expect to be disappointed.”
Suzuki hurried out of the bridge with a flashlight to pierce through the nocturnal darkness. Tanaka shook his head with a mutter as he sank deeper into his chair. His lieutenant may have still been young, but nonetheless he should have had enough experience on board their vessel to know that kaiju, or sea serpents, or whatever it was he imagined did not exist outside of myth and movies. There were massive sea creatures such as the blue whale to be sure, but even the largest blue whale on record was less than a hundred feet long, or more than sixty-four feet shorter than the Hayabusha-class patrol boat they had manned.
Tanaka checked the sonar screen again. He had to admit, the blipping silhouette looked to be over twice the size of the last whale he remembered passing by. And it was still approaching their vessel.
The whole bridge jolted and rocked, almost pushing the captain off his seat. That was strange. As far as the boat’s masthead light could let him see through the darkness of the night beyond the bridge, the sea had been calm before, without any rain or howling wind. What Tanaka could hear was the crew shouting and the clapping of boots on the metal deck.
Lieutenant Suzuki burst back into the bridge from the starboard door, his face as pale as the snow on Mount Fuji and glossy with sweat. “It’s a kaiju, alright! And it’s surfacing!”
Tanaka ran out where his subordinate had entered and advanced along the boat’s starboard toward the stern, clinging to the railing as the vessel rocked and crewmen brushed past him. He had reached halfway to the stern when he froze in place, the blood draining from his face and leaving it cold. The boat’s sidelights shimmered on the surface of a giant spiked fin which pierced up from the ocean. In front of the fin rose a titanic scaly dome which parted to show a mouth lined with ivory spears longer than men stood tall, with the stench of rotten fish hitting Tanaka like a fetid gale. Above the cavernous gape burned a pair of luminous green eyes with snake-like slits for pupils.
If it was not a kaiju, or giant monster, then Tanaka would be at a loss to imagine it being anything else.
As the leviathan spurted toward the boat with a velocity impossible for such a giant creature, the two machine guns mounted behind the bridge sputtered at it. Their bullets bounced off the monster’s flesh without leaving even a dent, as did those of the crewmen’s rifles. Without any time being left to launch the boat’s guided missiles before the kaiju struck, Tanaka could think of only one way he and his men could come out alive.
Continue reading “Goddesses of the Hunt”Barrow of the Grail
800 AD, in a parallel world…
A thumb of stone stuck up higher than a man from the forest floor. Halawa would have thought little of the outcropping had her companion, the old mawlawi Ishraq, thrust his finger at it while whistling for her attention.
“Look at it closely,” he said. “Do you not see the inscriptions?”
Halawa leaned her head toward the monolith and squinted where Ishraq pointed. Through the mossy crust which had grown over the course of centuries, she could indeed make out lines indented in its surface. After she dismounted her stripe-legged horse and approached the stone on foot, she used her scimitar to clear away the moss, exposing the eroded inscriptions underneath.
Some were strings of unintelligible symbols of circles, crescents, and notches, which Halawa guessed represented some ancient language. What she could recognize was the larger illustration chiseled into the rock above the rows of text, with scattered flecks of red paint clinging to it. It was a creature with the wings of a bat, the taloned legs of an eagle, and the sinuous tail and neck of a serpent, with the horned lizard-like head bearing sharp teeth in its gaping jaws. A sphere of amber embedded in the rock winked from where the beast’s eye would be, making Halawa’s dark brown skin creep over her body.
“The Red Dragon of the Brythons,” Halawa said under her breath. “Does this mean we’re nearby?”
“If the old map doesn’t deceive, Amira, then of course,” Ishraq said. “Keep your eyes out while we press on. The barrow could be anywhere around here.”
Continue reading “Barrow of the Grail”The Raid on Camp Struthers
British East Africa, 1896 AD
The mountain rose from the plain as a rugged dome of black rock with a crater for a summit. Jack Erwin figured his old man, ever the amateur geologist, would have identified this natural edifice as a volcano long gone extinct. Comparing it and its surroundings to the drawing on the yellowed map he had bought in Mombasa, he smiled. This had to be it, Mlima Unaometa, known in English as the Sparkling Mountain.
Maulidi, the grizzled Swahili huntsman whom Jack had hired as his guide, hugged his musket with shivering arms the way a scared child might cling onto their doll. His eyes darted side to side as he faced the stone ruins that lay at the mountain’s southeastern foot.
“There could be djinn here,” Maulidi said, “Allah please watch over us.”
“I should’ve figured you’d be scared of ghosts, old man,” Jack muttered.
Even he had to admit, if there was any place out here that would be haunted, it would be these ruins. Lichen-stained walls formed rings in scattered clusters, with each ring enclosing a circle of crumbling columns. Here and there stood the weathered stone likeness of a human figure, or an animal of the savanna, or a fanciful hybrid with a human body and an animal head not unlike some ancient Egyptian gods. Whatever local people had erected this deserted city must have numbered in the hundreds if not thousands.
It recalled some of the ghost towns that peppered Jack’s native Kansas, right down to the yellow grass of the surrounding plains and the howl of the evening wind that blew between the abandoned structures. With the chill crawling up his spine, he wondered whether he should have been so dismissive of his guide’s discomfort.
“Just to be sure, I’ll try drawing them out,” Jack said.
He unslung his rifle and fired into the sky with a cracking report. Birds squawked as they fluttered from the nearby acacia and bushwillow trees, and a herd of impala galloped away from the ruins’ far side. Other than that, nothing suspicious. Even the wind fell silent.
Jack gave Maulidi a confident smirk. “Seems even your djinn fear gunfire.”
The guide gulped. “I can only hope you are right, Bwana Erwin.”
Guiding the donkey that carried their supplies, they advanced up a grassy avenue that divided the ruined city in half until they reached the foot of the mountain. A pair of obelisks inscribed with worn pictographs stood on opposite sides of a spherical boulder which blocked the entrance to a tunnel in the mountainside. When Jack slipped his hand into a crevice between the big outcropping and the tunnel wall and pushed on the former, the blockage would not budge.
“Ah, Christ, looks like we’ll need to get the pickaxes out,” he grumbled.
The donkey snorted with its long ears erect and twitching. Maulidi pointed his gun back at the far side of the avenue with narrowed eyes, whispering an anxious prayer in Swahili. Jack looked in the direction his guide and their animal were facing, while also holding his rifle out but saw nothing. All he could hear was the familiar buzzing of savanna insects and the return of the wind’s howl.
With a shrug each, both men slid their pickaxes off the donkey’s back and went to work wedging the tools’ long flat heads along the boulder’s sides. They groaned through their teeth and stretched their arm muscles taut as they pulled. It took several pulls before they finally got the big rock rolling out of the way and exposed the tunnel’s open maw.
After asking his guide to stand outside and guard the donkey, Jack lit a lantern and waded into the blackness of the mountain’s interior. He scanned the walls of igneous rock for the dimmest glimmer of diamonds, or maybe gold, or whatever precious rocks they had named the mountain for. Cold sweat streamed down his brow, for the pure silence within the tunnel could be even more eerie than the wind that wailed outside.
The darkness did not go on forever. The spark of daylight in the distance expanded until it flooded Jack’s vision with a brightness that almost blinded him after the hour or so he had spent following the tunnel’s crooked path. Once his eyes readjusted, he found himself on a ledge overlooking a vast pit that yawned into the earth, with sunlight pouring down the volcanic vent overhead. Terraces conjoined with ramps formed a spiraling path around the pit, leading to a pool of brown water at the bottom.
The sides of the terraces all sparkled. The legends were true, this would have been a mine far bigger and far older than the one over in Kimberley to the distant south. Cecil Rhodes himself would be red with envy if he were to see this.
Jack struck his pickax at a random twinkle in the rock beneath his feet. It did not take long for him to excavate the one thing he had spent half his family’s fortune coming to Africa for, the one thing that would lift them out of poverty back in Kansas. Plucking it out of the ground, he laughed with victorious glee as he held between his fingers a diamond bigger than a chicken egg.
There followed a scream and a donkey’s panicked braying, both shattering the silence even when muffled by the volcano’s stony walls. Pushing the diamond into his pocket, Jack hurried back through the tunnel, his heart palpitating even faster than his running. When the light of the entrance returned to his eyes, he tore out his rifle and accelerated despite the strain burning his legs.
Continue reading “The Raid on Camp Struthers”“Women of the Plains” is now released!
Today, my second full-length novel Women of the Plains has been published and is available in paperback and e-book format!
Set in eastern Africa 100,000 years ago, Women of the Plains tells the story of a confrontation between two cultures of early Homo sapiens, the ancestors of all modern human beings. When the young huntress Oja gets separated from her nomadic band after a hunting accident, she finds herself in a strange place where the people have settled into permanent villages. As she struggles to find her place in this new world, her old friends Uru and Namak go looking for her. Oja must eventually choose between the way of life she has always known and that of the people who have embraced her as one of their own.
Family Reunion
Southeast Asia, 50,000 years ago
A high-pitched scream pierced through the jungle. Ungu stopped in her tracks, stunned by the noise, and plucked out her ivory knife from under the deerskin bands around her thigh. She darted her eyes over the surrounding undergrowth, searching for the source, while chilled perspiration collected on her brow. She could mistake it for nothing other than a human cry.
The rattling of leaves and branches, the cracking of twigs, and the scuffing of little feet on the damp earth followed another scream. To her left, Ungu could see a nearby tree-fern’s feathery fronds slap a short, dark shadow that ran past it. Close behind shot a larger, orange blur that leaped and fell upon the former figure, with both disappearing behind a screen of thrashing foliage.
Ungu dashed toward the disturbance to find a little boy pinned beneath a tiger’s paws. The poor child yelled and squealed as he flailed his fists at the striped cat’s face. Undaunted by his pathetic efforts to keep it at bay, the huge feline opened its drooling maw, lowering its fangs to his gullet, while its claws cut into his body.
Shrieking her huntress’s cry, Ungu launched herself onto the tiger. She squeezed her arm onto its thick furry neck and pulled it away from its victim while drawing her knife overhead. Before she could stab the beast, it bucked her off, throwing her onto the jungle floor. Ungu rolled back to her feet and jumped to cut the cat off from the boy, who had in the meantime scurried to hide behind the buttress root of a tapang tree.
Continue reading “Family Reunion”The Skull of Stone
East Africa, 500 BC
Wangari felt a jolt as Kimani, her white rhinoceros, stopped in mid-canter. The animal lifted his horned head to sniff the air and let out a nervous, whinny-like groan. Smoke. Wangari could smell it too, and she could see black tongues of it licking the sky from behind the grassy hill to their left. It could have been a wildfire, or it could have been local villagers clearing their grounds to make way for crops or pasture. Or it might have been what Wangari dreaded it was.
The only way to find out was to investigate it herself.
She squeezed her legs on Kimani’s flanks, her usual way of commanding him to go. He stayed put with a stubborn snort. Wangari squeezed harder, flicking the rhino’s reins, but he still would not move. Not that she could blame him, for it was not in the nature of grazing beasts to approach signs of fire. If she could not force the rhino to go, she would have to encourage him somehow.
Wangari dug into the leather pouch under the sash around her waist, plucked out a handful of ripe green jackalberries, and tossed them toward the hill. Kimani burst into a jog in the direction his rider had thrown the fruit, carrying her uphill as he sucked up and devoured as many of them as he came across. After giving her mount a playful rub on his tough and pale gray forehead, Wangari hopped off him and secured his reins to a nearby raisin bush.
Beneath the hill’s opposite slope, laying in front of a low cliff, was a cluster of leather tents, several of which had caught fire. Squinting through the haze of smoke, Wangari could make out the mutilated bodies of men strewn between the tents, giving off the putrid stench of death. There were living men scrambling throughout the campsite as well. Some poured water from vases onto the fires while others hauled their dead or wounded brethren into the tents that remained unscorched.
Seeing all the slain people made Wangari’s eyes water even more than the stinging smoke did. It was all too much like what had happened to her own village when she was a teenager.
Continue reading “The Skull of Stone”The Brood of Apep
33 BC
The head of a sandstone python reared high as a giraffe from the desert floor. Although centuries of wind and entropy had dulled the fangs in its open maw, the sculpture’s unblinking glare nonetheless sent a chill slithering up Amanirenas’s spine despite the balminess of early evening. If the old legends had spoken the truth, this idol represented the likeness of Apep, the giant serpent of chaos that lorded over the underworld and attacked the sun god Ra every night. And the earthen edifice that mounted the hill behind it was its shrine.
How could our ancestors have venerated such a monster? Amanirenas thought. Even allowing the ruined temple dated to the time when both the people of Kush and Kemet roamed the grasslands that had become the desert around them, she could not fathom that they worshiped the one being both cultures now considered the most malevolent in their whole pantheon. There had to have been a misunderstanding, or a meaning that her people and the Kemetians had forgotten over millennia. But what could it be?
Cleopatra, for her part, pouted her lip as she regarded the ruin behind the megalithic statue. “I was expecting something bigger, more magnificent.”
“Both our ancestors were nomads when they built this, remember?” Amanirenas said. “They only had so much time in their wandering lives to build it. What were you expecting, Cleo, something like your Khufu’s great pyramid?”
“Fair enough. I only hope the treasure turns out to be worth our trip.”
Continue reading “The Brood of Apep”Racing Into Trouble
54 BC
The sun burned white hot from its zenith in the sky, yet the cool wind brushing past Cleopatra provided refreshing opposition to its baking wrath, even if the wind did blow dust into her eyes. She flipped the reins that were tied around her waist to keep her two horses galloping at top speed even as they maneuvered between the boulders strewn over the barren plain. The strength of the animals pulling on the reins while she gripped them was all that kept her stable in her chariot despite its constant shaking and bouncing.
Her friend Amanirenas was quickly closing the distance between them from behind. The way the Kushite princess’s horses, both of which she had brought with her from her homeland far up the Nile, were gaining ground, it would only be moments before she wrested the lead from her Kemetian counterpart. Already she had drawn close enough that, even through the billowing clouds of dust, Cleopatra could make out the details of her gold, carnelian, and ivory jewelry, including the twin cobras that reared on her gold skullcap crown. It had to be conceded, what they said about the Kushites’ horses was true. They really were among the fastest in the world.
Continue reading “Racing Into Trouble”