I thought I'd share the "beginnings" (air quotes intended) of the new Morstan/Karbegla book, not-so-tentatively titled Called from the Ashes. No real spoilers, since most of this is just stuff I wrote to orient myself and probably won't end up in the actual book.

 “What is that?”

 Of course it was obvious to all of us standing there on the beach what the thing was, even though I’d guess the majority of us had never seen a ship in real life. But it was something straight out of history books. Even before the war it would have been out of place. Ancient. The main body of it – the hull – wasn’t made of steel, or fiberglass. It was made of wood, actual beams and planks cut from actual trees. And it had wooden masts with canvas sails.

 “Can that possibly be safe?”

 “I guess we’re going to find out.”

 ~ Now let us go back a bit, in time and space. ~

 Sometimes it’s hard to find the “real” beginning of a story. All you can do is pick it up somewhere and hope for the best. Probably the real beginning of our story, at least in some people’s opinion, would be the beginning of the war. But the war wasn’t a fixed thing, with a beginning or an end. A war started. It paused for a while, then it started up again – possibly for the same reasons, but possibly not. It spread; it ebbed and flowed; it mutated.

 All of this is just a fancy way of saying that we don’t really know how it all started, or why. We only know what happened to us. That’s the story we want to tell. The only story we can tell.

 The ship didn’t come in til later. And it was a long hard road to get there.

[back-story shit – put in where possible]

 When Calli’s baby was born, about three months after the rebel soldiers had left the school, she only had Kit and me to help her. Book learning, no matter how much or how long you study, isn’t the same as practical experience. Still, we were as prepared as we could be. At least I didn’t get sick to my stomach again, the way I had the first time I’d dealt with a real patient. I did have the shakes for a while afterward, but then, so did Calli.

 None of us really knew what to expect from the baby either. Peter – Calli named him after her father – had been more or less created in a lab at the research center where Calli and her sister Rachel had been imprisoned for a while the year before. There was nothing so new or different about that; scientists and doctors had been experimenting with assisted reproduction for decades before this. The difference was that both of Peter’s parents were deavorrin, people who appeared ordinary but had special abilities. Calli and Rachel could create fire out of thin air, and make use of it too. Peter’s father, Shane, was unusually tall and strong, and had the ability to read people’s minds. Besides all that, Shane himself had been created in the lab.

 Though deavorrin seemed to be more common lately, there was no way to predict whether a child would have special abilities, even if their parents did, or what those abilities would be. Worse yet, most of the experiments done at the deavorrin research center had been failures. Calli and Rachel had been forced to fight the results of those experiments: weird half-human, half-animal creatures. Small wonder that all of us were more than a little concerned about Peter even before he was born.

As far as any of us could tell, though, he was an ordinary, healthy baby. Maybe he was bigger than average, but considering his dad, that wasn’t so unexpected. I suppose the thing we noticed most about him was that he hardly ever cried. It wasn’t that he was happy all the time; like any baby, he got upset when he was hungry, or tired, or needed his diaper changed. But instead of crying, he tended to simply go completely still, and stare at whoever was taking care of him at the time. Then it was our job to figure out what was bothering him.

 Not surprisingly, it was Shane who first learned the secret of Peter’s behavior. “He doesn’t understand why we can’t all read his mind,” he announced one day, while bringing the baby to Calli for a feeding. “I think he feels like crying is a waste of energy when he can just tell me what he wants another way.”

 “Then either the rest of us have to learn to hear him, or he needs to learn to talk,” I said. “Whichever one is easier.”

 By summertime, we had started letting other people join our community at the school. The war was still dragging on, though there continued to be no clear sides to the conflict. The federal government might still have been intact, or it might not; nobody we met seemed to know. The fighting mainly seemed to be between anybody who could gather an army and anybody else who had something the first group wanted, or threatened something the first group had. People who just wanted to be left alone to live their lives, like us, got stuck in the middle. A lot of them became refugees, traveling the countryside in search of safety. And inevitably, some of them found their way to the gates of the school.

 We had some rules, of course. Any food, livestock, or weapons people brought in were added to the community stores. If anyone refused to contribute, we let them take their property back on the road. Anybody who came in thinking they could take over was also shown the door. Word must have spread about us, because more than once we were forced to fight off an attempted invasion. But our community grew and we trained the newcomers to fight, and after a while we were mostly left alone.

 It took months for the school to be completely safe. But at leat when Dani’s daughter was born that summer, Dani had a trained midwife to help her, as well as the one-and-a-half medics who had delivered Peter.

 Peter and [Toni] weren’t the only babies born at the school that year.

[end of back-story shit]