22d • ✍️ Daily Write
The Gift of Minds (this took me hella long to do)
Posting an older excerpt today.
This is a snippet from a longer project I’ve been working on on-and-off for… honestly, about 14 years at this point. This particular scene is one I went full perfectionist on — I worked on it for months, revisiting and refining it way more than I normally would. Sometimes you get the itch, you know?
This is NOT the kind of thing I advocate trying to aim for every day. If we all did this all the time, nothing would ever get shared. I’m posting it more as a contrast: an example of what my writing looks like when I really slow down and give something a long runway.
I’m still proud of this one, and I come back to it every now and then. It was also the first time I seriously used song as a narrative tool, so I put a lot of care into making that aspect work, almost in a LOTR style.
I’ve attached the excerpt below. There’s also a very light lore primer, since this was written for fans of a specific setting (Warhammer/Warhammer 40k) and jumping in completely cold might be a bit weird otherwise.
As always: rough drafts, half-formed scenes, and messy experiments are very much the point here — this is just one snapshot from the other end of the spectrum.
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Very Light Lore Primer (optional, skimmable)
- Itza – An ancient temple-city of the lizardmen; a major center of their power and thought.
- Slann – Immensely old, psychic frog-priests who rule the lizardmen. Think philosopher-kings whose debates can literally reshape reality.
- Saurus / Skink / Kroxigor – Different castes of lizardmen: Saurus are warriors (8 foot tall t-rex men), skinks are human-sized attendants/scribes, kroxigors are giant crocodile men
- Ayacmanik – A parasitic, body-snatching hive-mind species. Highly dangerous, highly intelligent, and the subject of intense debate over whether they should be destroyed… or given true sapience.
- Isendral – An Eldar (basically: space elf). An ancient, god-adjacent being involved in the creation of entire species.
- Eldar – Long-lived, highly advanced “space elves” who shape worlds more through art, song, and intuition than machinery.
- What’s actually happening in this scene: The opening “battle” isn’t literal. It’s a psychic debate among the Slann, where competing ideas manifest as enormous symbolic creatures and fight it out. The outcome of that clash determines a real, world-shaping decision: whether the Ayacmanik will be awakened as a thinking species.
That’s all you need to know to read the excerpt. If something still feels strange, that’s intentional - you’re watching god-level beings argue about the fate of a species.
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The Gift of Minds (this took me hella long to do)
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