D Dave Draper

Creations

The Secret Sentinels of Gal Dabara

by Dave Draper  ©  2016 ·  · 5603 words

IT WAS IN THE SECOND SPRING of Gal Dabara’s mid-winter summers that the Demons came.

Why they chose this season to fly in, lord only knows.

Straight over the steamy marshes they did hover and glide, looking for objects that remained as mysterious as their movements. Their strange silvery bodies glinted in bursts of iridescence as they bobbed about, leathery wings shimmering peculiarly in the haze.

We watched spellbound, breath bated, from our place of cover beneath the huge spread of split-leaved rainforest philodendrons that Flynn said had been introduced here by an earlier expedition from Earth . . .

read

Ahoy There

The Mists of Mayacatán

by dave draper  ©  2008 · 2469 words

THE SQUALL WAS OVER by the time Delaney arrived at Mayacatán.

At first it looked just like any other island.

This is partly because a calm sea is fairly flat and all land on shoreward approach looks relatively uniform – unless, of course, it is monstrously rugged and mountainous or has other glaringly unusual or unique features.

There were mountains in the interior of Mayacatán, but they were set well back on the horizon – all blue and misty, fading almost into the azure sky, with pale wispy cloud cover drifting around their peaks and softening them . . .

read