The Last Living Memory
A Vashenric Fairytales Serial
THE LAST LIVING MEMORY is a creative reply to the Bowie-fueled magic of LABYRINTH, infused with an 80s-neon-and-synth soundtrack and coated in posh blues and sacred golds. A lyrical, speculative ode to love and sacrifice.
When her activist sister is arrested by a cult-like, anti-tech faction, Senator Oreli Rashelind forsakes position, wealth, and security to get her back. A meeting with a hacker in the gritty Basal Ward of Aunolen City seals the deal, and soon, accompanied by the hacker and his droid, Rashelind sets off to save the only person she's ever truly had in a world built from dreams. She leaves behind a potential lover and her responsibility to a city threatened by the very people who took her sister.
Rashelind's journey sees her pursued across the treacherous Molderlands, encountering a world her privilege taught her to eschew. Secrets, truths, and dark intentions come to light in places long abandoned by the government she once served. Reckoning with loss on all fronts, and confronting a value system that all but destroyed her, Rashelind must reach her sister, and decide whether she'll live up to the promises she's made, before her world falls down.
THE LAST LIVING MEMORY dances intentionally on the border between fairytale and cyberpunk dystopia. In addition to the inspiration it takes from dark fantasies like Henson's LABYRINTH and Bakshi's WIZARDS, this story bears notes of science fantasy classical and modern, from Anne McCaffrey's CRYSTAL SINGER series and Philip K. Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? to James S. A. Corey's LEVIATHAN WAKES and Tamsyn Muir's GIDEON THE NINTH. Finally, its structural and thematic tones echo, in small ways, Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL... It is, fundamentally, a story about a person who must learn how to rebuild herself out of her grief, if it's the last thing she does.
New installments every Friday. Launching February 14, 2025.