A SEA OF SKULLS by Vox Day

In Selenoth, the war drums are beating throughout the land. The savage orcs of Hagahorn and Zoth Ommog are on the move, imperiling Man, Dwarf, and Elf alike. The Houses Martial of Amorr have gone to war with each other, pitting legion against legion, and family against family as civil war wracks the disintegrating Empire. In the north, inhuman wolf-demons besiege the last redoubt of Man in the White Sea, while in Savondir, the royal house of de Mirid desperately prepares to defend the kingdom against an invading army that is larger than any it has ever faced before. And in the underground realm of the King of Iron Mountain, a strange new enemy has begun attacking dwarf villages throughout the Underdeep.


Beneath the widespread violence that has seized all Selenoth in its grasp, a select few are beginning to recognize the appearance of a historic pattern of almost unimaginable proportions. Are all these conflicts involving Orc, Elf, Man, and Dwarf the natural result of inevitable rivalries, or are they little more than battlegrounds in an ancient war that began long before the dawn of time?


Epic fantasy at its deepest and most intense. A SEA OF SKULLS is Book II in the ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT series that began with A THRONE OF BONES.


A SEA OF SKULLS is 449 pages, DRM-free, and retails for $5.99 on Amazon and at Castalia House. This is the early edition of the book; those who purchase it now will receive a free copy of the 850-page final edition in ebook format if they a) buy the book on Amazon and send a copy of the Kindle receipt to voxday-at-gmail-dot-com right away or b) buy the book from the Castalia House store.

UPDATE: just to be perfectly clear, New Release subscribers are free to download the bonus book from John Van Stry regardless of where they purchase A Sea of Skulls.

Every author faces a few decisions when he writes a book, particularly when writing a sequel. Be driven by the market or be driven by the vision. Write more of the same that has proven popular or go where the story takes you. These are not binary decisions, but a series of gradients, and while the consequences of those decisions vary, there are no right or wrong decisions per se, only more effective and less effective decisions which depend entirely upon the perspective.

I made two choices in writing the second book of Arts of Dark and Light, and I have no idea if my decisions will prove to be popular or not. The first decision was that it had to be better from my perspective and more true to my original vision than its predecessor was. That’s why it has taken longer to write. Before, I was only dealing in existing human cultures. Now, I had to work in 3+ inhuman cultures as well, which proved considerably more difficult. The second decision was to increase the contrast. A moral dilemma where there is neither potential loss to the character nor moral consequence is no true dilemma. A choice that is obvious to everyone but an idiot is no true choice. Good people do bad things, and bad people do good things, but the character of a man is seldom defined by a single act. And, I decided, even the most minor character deserves to be taken seriously, presented fairly, and speak with his own voice. Or her own voice. As an example of what I mean by that, here is a sample of the text at Castalia House.

In other words, this is a “damn the torpedoes” book. It should be interesting to learn who likes it better than A THRONE OF BONES and who likes it less. But I hope you will enjoy it, and I hope those of you who read it will be as diligent about posting serious and substantive reviews as you were with its predecessor.

As a side note, I find it incredible to observe that, according to Amazon’s page count, there is now more Selenoth, with 1837 pages of Summa Elvetica + A Throne of Bones + A Sea of Skulls, than there is Middle Earth proper, with 1531 for Lord of the Rings + The Hobbit. It’s not as good, of course – how could it possibly be – but it is worthy of the title “epic”. I should mention that there will be print editions in April-May and they will be the final edition.

Thanks very much to Matthew, Robert, and Kirk for all their hard work in getting this out before the end of the year.

A proper Minnesotan

I always enjoy these old stories about Prince.

A member of Prince’s band, Morris Hayes, recalls one instance in which the singer, clad in a turtleneck sweater and fuzzy boots, walked in to a hardware store to the shock of locals in Minnesota.

‘People are looking like, “Oh my God, Prince is in the hardware store!”,’ Hayes said.

Hayes then recalled how Prince had walked into the Ace store even though the car they drove was still in the parking lot with the keys in the ignition.

‘I’m [saying to him], “What did you do with the car?”’

‘He says, “It’s out there—it’s just running”.’

‘I said, “Prince, you can’t leave the car running—somebody could just steal the car”.’

‘He said, “This is Chanhassen—nobody’s gonna steal the car”.’

‘So we get out to the car and sure enough it’s out there, just running, smoke coming out of the tailpipe.’

‘And he’s like, “I told you”.’

A couple of observations. First, notice that no one at the hardware store spoke to him, they just looked. No one ever pestered Prince in Minnesota, you just don’t bother someone because he happens to be famous, which was one thing he really liked about living there. If Prince wanted to talk to you, he’d send someone over to let you know.

Second, based on the way Hayes describes things, it was probably winter. Winter is REALLY REALLY cold there. So, it’s pretty common to leave the car running if you’re not going to be in the store for that long. It’s kind of weird when it’s really cold, because the smoke actually drops to the ground when it comes out of the tailpipe.

And third, he was right, at least back in the day. No one was ever going to steal your car when you left it running. People did it all the time back then. It would be nice to think that they still do.

Law dogs

Who do we have in New Hampshire and Australia? If you’re Ilk and you’re licensed to practice in either juridiction, get in touch. The Big Dog is already on it, but we’ll need local talent for obvious reasons.

How to let go of bad ideas

Mike Cernovich explains why it’s important, as well as how to do it:

Don’t take being wrong personally.

If your ideas are not yours, why care if those ideas are attacked? You are you. The ideas you choose to hold dear are how you live your life. Better ideas means a better life. Bad ideas are like a spare tire around your waist. Do you take it personally when you lose fat? You have lost part of yourself, haven’t you? Yet you rejoice. Adopt the same mindset when losing bad ideas.

Remind yourself that bad ideas ruin lives.

I saw too many friends go into bankruptcy after the housing bubble burst. I avoided that fate because I never purchased a home, though other bad ideas have cost me dearly.

Ask how much money you would bet on your ideas.

If your ideas are true and good, surely you’ll wager on them?

Do you know how many people cowered away from election bets? Everyone knew who would win the election, and few would put their money where their mouths were.

If you wouldn’t bet on an idea you hold on the world, then do you believe the idea to be true?

Embrace uncertainty as an opportunity for growth.

What is the element of every horror film? Suspense. Uncertainty. We cling onto certain beliefs, even when those beliefs are wrong, because in a state of nature surprise usually meant some form of attack from wolverines, tsunamis, and blizzards.

Hold true to ideas about gravity, as they will keep you alive. Remain fluid on ideas about the nature of the human condition, as other people have lives of their owns and those lives are influenced by an ever-changing zeitgeist.

Recognizing you are wrong today gives you an opportunity to be right tomorrow.

The first one is the most important. You are not the sum of your ideas. You can’t own an idea either. We are all wrong on a regular basis. Bad ideas are, by definition false, and anyone who values the truth should not hesitate to reject them.

Gab goes big

Fantastic to see Gab making the Drudge Report… even if the Yahoo article linked consisted of little more than the usual anti-Alt-Right nonsense.

Squeezed out of Twitter and other social media websites cracking down on hate speech, far-right activists are finding a home on a new platform that promises never to censor content.

Launched in August, Gab has become known as a safe haven for the “alt-right” movement dominated by the white supremacists who are helping fuel America’s deepening polarization.

The social network currently has 100,000 members and another 200,000 on its waiting list, according to the company.

“All are welcome to speak freely,” spokesman Utsav Sanduja says.

Gab is unable to accommodate all those who want to join, he adds, because it is still in its test phase.

The social network’s rise comes amid Twitter’s suspension of political activists for purportedly promoting racist and harassing comments.

One of the new “Gabbers,” Richard Spencer, heads the white supremacist National Policy Institute, whose account Twitter has suspended.

Spencer, whose “Hail Trump” comments were seen as evocative of the Nazi era, joined the Twitter exile along with Milo Yiannopoulos, accused of fomenting a social media campaign against the African-American actress Leslie Jones.

Sadly for the SJW Narrative, Richard Spencer’s account on Twitter was restored to normal status yesterday, because it was finally determined that he didn’t do anything to violate their increasingly Byzantine rules.

Make a note, Facebook. Yahoo is Fake News.

Note that I’m not active on Twitter any more by choice. I’m neither suspended nor banned, I’ve simply decided to stop utilizing a social media site that blocks access to this blog. If you want to follow me on social media, you’ll have to join the Alt-Tech revolution and get on Gab.

Book Bloggers of the Year

Castalia House Blog Editor Jeffro Johnson hails the top 15 book bloggers of 2016:

When I was completing my Appendix N series back at the tail end of 2015, let me tell you… it felt like I was just about the only one. Not that I was the first, by any stretch. Ron Edwards and James Maliszewski had trod the same path before me. But the thing is… I couldn’t square how obvious my observations were next to the fact that nobody in the book scene seemed be saying anything remotely in the same vein. It was baffling, really. Sometimes it seemed like there was really only one or two people that even “got” what I was trying to do.

It’s ironic given how I much I’ve written about mass media’s conquest of the imagination, but really… I couldn’t imagine that changing. I should have known better. Working out the actual history of science fiction and fantasy was like putting a puzzle together with no box lid, no edge pieces, and several pieces on the table from entirely different pieces. It took a while. And when it finally started to come together, something happened. There was (and I’m not exaggerating) a kind of sea change in the book discussion scene.

All of it’s documented right here on the Castalia House blog in my Sensor Sweep link roundups. What’s going on exactly…? Well, if you are into classic Dungeons & Dragons you might recognize it as being similar to the Old School Revival that swept over the role-playing game bloggers several years ago. (Cirsova is an obvious counterpart to, say, Fight On! and Knockspell, for instance.) Beyond that, it’s becoming increasingly clear that people that are exposed to the science fiction and fantasy canon don’t just want to talk about it. They want to create!

What does this mean for readers…? It means that awesome things are on the way! If you want a preview, then check out the fifteen book bloggers that I’ve singled out as the best of 2016.

15. Hooc Ott — Ah, the number of times that I’ve been told that Appendix N was just a list of books that Gygax liked. No it wasn’t. Zelazny’s Amber stories thoroughly infuse an iconic adventure module for the classic expert set. And Edgar Rice Burroughs was not just a primary influence on the formation of D&D. He was an essential inspiration to Conan in particular and thus swords and sorcery in general. The only people are still in denial about just exactly Appendix N is at this point are the ones that have blocked Hooc Ott on Twitter.

14. James Cambias of Just the Caffeine Talking — If you don’t know who James Cambias is, well… I’ll hazard a guess that you were never into space themed role-playing games. He wrote or co-wrote a lot of the big ones. He also writes a blog that has more than its fair share of references to classic games and old school science fiction and fantasy. His Nostalgie Du Geek is a must-read series in my book, as are his posts on Game Mechanics. (If you don’t have strong opinions about that last one, then you aren’t a gamer.) He dips into movies on occasion as well, but the post of his this year that got the biggest reaction from me was The Worst Science Fiction Writer Ever which completely destroyed one of my favorite characters of all time.

13. John C. Wright — Jon Mollison nailed it when he tweeted the other day: “I’m starting to think John C. Wright is the spider at the center of an all-encompassing web.” I thought that was hyperbole until I went back through his posts for the year. If you look past the rants on the usual geek culture meltdowns, the political posts, and the analysis of “Morlock” thinking… you really can see Wright was endorsing key players in the scene well before any of this became a “thing.”.

Read the whole list at Castalia House. And if you’re looking to sport the Revolution in Science Fiction, you can see the latest CryptoFashion there.

Ignoring the irrelevant

The Trump Presidency has been amazing, and the God-Emperor hasn’t even ascended to the Cherry Blossom Throne yet. Now he’s ignoring and delegitimizing the EU, and correctly so, since it’s neither a state nor a government:

Europe WHO? Trump’s snub to Brussels as he names Britain but NOT the EU among key allies

DONALD TRUMP delivered a major snub to the beleaguered European Union today in a further sign of the marginal role Brussels can expect to play in his foreign policy plans.Mr Trump was a frequent critic of the beleaguered bloc during his campaign to become the leader of the Western world, and has described his shock White House victory as “Brexit plus, plus, plus”.

But he conspicuously failed to mention a single EU state in his roll call of global players, further indicating that relations with the European Union will be low down on the new US administration’s list of priorities.

And responding to media reports criticising his contact with global leaders today, the billionaire tycoon hit back: “I have received and taken calls from many foreign leaders…Russia, UK, China, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and more. I am always available to them.”

His pointed snub to EU member states will send further shivers down the collective spine of Europe’s elite, which is scrambling to formulate an effective response to the populist uprising taking place across the globe.

In particular it represents the huge reversal of fortunes facing Germany, coming just days after outgoing President Barack Obama praised Chancellor Angela Merkel as his “closest ally”.

And it reaffirms that Britain will be a key ally to the self-avowed anglophile’s new administration, coming a week after eyebrows were raised when he placed Theresa May 10th on his initial ring-round of international leaders.

Stunned European Union chiefs have been thrown into panic mode since Mr Trump’s election to the globe’s most powerful post, issuing a series of garbled and contradictory statements as they watch the cosy EU-US relations built up under Mr Obama crumble before their eyes.

The EU already lacks democratic legitimacy. If the God-Emperor continues to delegitimize it and its member-states, it will crumble faster than the Soviet Union. I’m starting to think there is a very good chance that the God-Emperor is going to pull the US out of NATO, which would serve as a sufficient trigger for the fall of the fraudulent Brussels-based Euro elite.

Peas and carrot cake

On a colorblind society and other observable absurdities:

To a large degree, I became racially conscious because of my black clients, who eventually destroyed all my preconceived notions about race. My awakening did not come from one or even a few incidents, but from the accumulation of thousands upon thousands of small interactions.

Day after day my clients continue to amaze me. There is no racial education quite so thorough and convincing as spending time with blacks, and my clients are far from being the poorest and least competent blacks. They are not indigent criminals for whom I am a court-appointed lawyer. They are people who can afford (or think they can afford) a lawyer to get a divorce, contest a custody judgment, beat a traffic ticket, etc. Some are government employees who make $60 to $70 thousand a year, yet even this group is vastly different from whites….

In my state, the parent who does not have custody — almost always the father — pays a percentage of net income to the parent with custody — almost always the mother. The mother gets 20 percent of the father’s net income for the first child, 25 percent for two children, and up to 50 percent for five or more children. What if a man has children by several women? Each mother gets 20 percent for the first child, so a man with five children by five different women is supposed to be paying 100 percent of his income in child support. I once had a client who had 12 different children by 10 different women. Theoretically, he owed 250 percent of his income. These laws simply don’t make sense for blacks.

The idea that all races are equally suited to all societies and vice-versa has never made any sense to me, probably because I have lived in four very different societies, with four different languages, as an adult. Whenever I see someone blithely assuring me that the Chinese will adapt to the West because Magic Dirt or virtue-signaling in some other similar fashion, it always makes me smile, because I am a much better cultural chameleon than most and I know very well how very different my values and assumptions and instincts are, and have remained, than the values and assumptions and instincts of those who have variously hosted me over time around the world.

When something so foundational as a legal system cannot reasonably account for variances in behavior, no society, indeed, no civilization, is possible for long. Rest assured, many of those who eagerly anticipate living in a non-white society are going to bitterly, bitterly, regret the world they have lost if they ever get to experience what they think will be a better society.

White people are supreme at precisely one thing: creating white societies. If you want to have a certain type of society, be it German, Japanese, or Navaho, the one thing you absolutely need is a sufficient number of that kind of people. It is strange, but many who understand one cannot make carrot cake from peas or mushrooms still seem to think they can make an American society without Americans.

The ironic thing is that even some of the immigrants are beginning to realize this. In England, for example, some groups of immigrants are becoming increasingly upset because they believed they were going to be living among English people in a functional, highly civilized English society, not among other immigrant groups in a dysfunctional, increasingly uncivilized multicultural society.

Society is people. It is not values, or skin color, or height, or any other thing that people possess. Adulterate the people and you will devalue the society. Demographics is destiny.

NFL Week 14

Jax should help the Vikes get back on track. If anything can… but this season does appear to be as lost as it did right after Teddy Bridgewater’s injury.

Mailvox: why everyone needs SJWAL

That’s not an exaggeration. Literally everyone needs to read it nowadays, because absolutely no one is off-limits as far as the SJWs are concerned. Do you have a job? Are you dependent upon someone else having a job? One trival slip-up, one petty violation of an ever-changing Narrative is all it takes for you, or someone upon whom you are dependent, to become a target. Fortunately, this guy happened to have read the book before he came under SJW attack.

I just finished SJWs Always Lie and it was discovered at a much-needed time. Within the last year, I’ve gradually become Alt-Right. I’ve also been making my way through [a Master’s degree in a fully converged field]. The place is a viper’s den of SJW so I’ve largely been reserved while informing myself as much as possible so as to have ammo to fire back with if exposed. I’m usually much more confrontational by nature but I know when I’m outgunned.

That didn’t last.

Events went down almost *exactly* as you describe them in your book. I worked (for free mind you) at a [redacted] doing the necessary bitchwork to advance through the internship component of the program. Someway, somehow a “friend” of mine emailed the office a month-old post I made regarding the differences between men and women in society. Of course, I didn’t know this until two weeks after I was fired and told I’d be reported to the university for my misconduct. After two weeks of stonewalling, the head of my department at the university finally told me what I was accused of.

Since then I’ve been kept in limbo as the department decides what to do with me.

Your book was the exact battle plan I needed. Reminders to never apologise, never back down and always remember that the enemy deal in lies are very useful.

I am curious if you have any input, however. Some of your book I have a hard time following simply because a lot of the strategies and risks you call for I don’t have the power to implement fully. I got a lot riding on this. For instance, I don’t have a ton of experience, good field connections or ability to tell the faculty to fuck off.

That being said I am locked into the program so it would be hard to remove me plus [for redacted reasons] they can’t punish me for speech too severely. I’ve been consulting with FIRE, a non-profit for legal advocacy for free speech on college campuses. You seem like the type of man to have a lot of insight so any input or wisdom is welcome.

Thank you for inspiring me to keep up the fight during this hell.

Consult with FIRE, prepare an exit strategy in case they’re able to kick you out, and stop your online and social media activities. That’s the point that a lot of people don’t seem to understand. If you aren’t in a position to fight, don’t hand them information, which is ammunition. I’d also look at registering a complaint concerning the firing for misconduct if the [redacted] violated its own policies. Sure, you don’t want the job, but it’s a future vulnerability if it is given a pass.

Look, I never had a choice. Because I started writing in the pre-Internet era, but close enough to it that my columns and media interviews were made available on the Internet from the start, I knew that I’d be cut out of jobs and other opportunities all along. Long before WND was even created, I was blackballed from the St. Paul Pioneer Press editorial page when I was easily the best candidate for the job and they didn’t even need the Internet to do it.

But as long as you have a choice, it’s best to lay low. Keep your Facebook innocuous. If you’re going to express an opinion of any kind, do it under an anonymous identity you develop for that purpose and for which you can always maintain plausible deniability. (Translation: always drop identifying details that point at someone else, preferably an SJW.)

Otherwise, the chances are pretty good that some “friend” is going to bring you to the attention of an SJW-converged authority. And, of course, stay out of the vipers’ dens! That’s a good way to get yourself bit.