Liner Notes for Guarded By The Wings Of An Angel

 

Liner Notes for Guarded By The Wings Of An Angel

Finally – finally – we have a full-scale Roman orgy! Drinks, drugs, dancers, occult rituals, gambling, and a dubiously legal gladiator fight. The lurid, perhaps even desperate entertainment of the noble class during a political crisis.

Of course Mischa Mankiller isn’t interested in that. Or rather she’s curious, but idly. For a woman known for her fury, for being out of control, she has to work herself up to fight. She has it under control in the demonstration fight. Is it not natural for her? It’s almost as though she needs provocation. That they’ve hung this name, this role on her, and it doesn’t fit very well.

Could it be that they’ve deliberately pushed a woman with a potential for violence into a persona that exaggerates it? That by acting, perfectly understandably, but outside gender norms, Mischa has been made into a monster?

Being a gladiator is a performance as much as a fighter. Her violent rage is real, and yet also performative, something she does as much as she is.

Anyway Lord Amazonus is backed by the angel cult and the angel cult have real powers, enough to sweep a garden clean of enemies. Inevitably there will be more magic in the concluding part. I’m sorry about that if you were hoping to keep this just fights in the arena. There’s an over-arching plot!

Of course said plot has developed, or perhaps twisted in my hands since I started writing these. This isn’t the cult that I intended when I began writing, and the fight at the end isn’t what I planned. The danger of serial fiction. Still, maybe I can go back and edit it together for a complete collection.