The Wrecking Ball Raven

In Plork, the holy city-state that ascends ever higher while its lower districts sink into the mud, only the powerful make it to the top. Skin was a war hero, once. Now he’s an excavator living in the mid-levels, taking jobs from competing Sorcerous Consortiums that see him searching buried battlefields from the long war with the elves… and every once in a while, he moonlights as a thief-for-hire. Memory wipes during his service left him with no knowledge of his life before the conflict, leaving only his instincts, his skills, and Feathers; the raven magically bound to him (who is known to wield a wrecking ball, when the occasion calls for it). When a nun hires Skin to steal a kraken egg from a museum at the highest heights of the city, the job proves easy enough for a man of his talents. But Skin soon discovers the job is much more than a simple heist, and is forced to unravel a conspiracy that drags him into the city’s lowest levels, where desperate elven refugees and dangerous mud-dwellers seek to steal what he himself has stolen. And in the sinking depths of Plork, it will take every scrap of Skin and Feathers’ cunning for them to stay alive… Text © Joseph A. Chadwick Cover illustration by Chris Malgrain