Shaman

With so many different types of devices and so many different operating systems and reader software options out there, it's hard to find any format that will work for absolutely anyone. This should come pretty close! This is the html version of Shaman, which you should be able to read on any browser. No active content, no ads, no scripting, just html (with a css file for the formatting, which is standard these days). You can read it chapter by chapter, using the navigation at the top and bottom, or load the whole thing at once, your choice. (Quick tip: web browsers typically have a zoom function that you can access in various ways: usually there's a menu option somewhere, but there are also some standard keyboard commands, and it may be possible to hold the CTRL key and use your mouse wheel. Sorry Mac folks, I don't know the equivalent. You can use this to adjust the font size to whatever's comfortable for you to read at.)

Plus, it's free. If you like it enough to leave me a tip and can afford to, thank you. Even more valuable to me is feedback: drop me an email and tell me you read it (I promise never to share your address with anyone, and I do reply), or leave me a review at the place of your choice. I have other work completed and in progress; if offering them to read online directly is successful, I'll continue to do so. They're also available in other ways via their respective pages at Prysmcat Books, and one option is always a free pdf.

Telling your friends would be great. The best possible advertising, after all, is word of mouth. I write because I love doing it, but it's always wonderful to have people visit the worlds I create. Writing for my own amusement is a lot less work than editing and polishing it to share with others, after all.

Want to save this for off-line reading? Go for it. It's set up so links will work locally. If you save the full version, remember to save it complete so you get the css file. If you want the chapter-by-chapter version, here's a zip file, right click and "Save Target As..." or "Save Link As..." or whatever your system's version is, then you can extract it (can I make this any easier?).

But please don't post it elsewhere online, or claim it's yours, or make money from it, or otherwise abuse it. Seriously. I'm taking a chance by putting this online in a format this simple. If you think it's good enough to share, then direct people here. Someone acting badly is only going to make me a lot less inclined in the future to make my work as accessible as possible, spoiling things for everyone. This is NOT public domain content simply because it's online. I spent hundreds of hours creating it, and many thousands before that learning the skills to do so. Please don't make me regret this.

I hope you enjoy reading!


Description

A fantasy novel about priorities and self and home

Generations ago, human explorers found a continent inhabited by an utterly alien culture of shapeshifting weyres and the shyani, humanoids who prefer dusk and dawn. A truce of sorts was eventually reached: humans claimed the rich lowlands, and the shyani and weyres retain the highlands. Along the border, practicality often rules, but on either side, old grudges linger in some hearts.

As a student physician, Corin tried to take his own life, unable to bear the countless tiny wounds inflicted over twenty-one years of lying to himself in order to be, or pretend to be, socially acceptable. At the last improbable instant, intervention came, in the form of a spirit fox, who led him away from the existence he’d known in the lowlands and into the highlands. There, a puma weyre rescued him, and a shyani shaman helped him find his true self and offered a rebirth, a life with no more lies, and an important role to fill.

Now a shaman and healer in her own right, Vixen who was once Corin learns that the one human who mattered to her in her previous life, then a fellow University student, has come into possession of an old shyani book, and the more fanatical shyani and weyres will stop at nothing to reclaim it and punish Jared. Even though it means going back into the lowlands and facing Jared as a woman, she can’t bear to just look the other way. This should be a short visit, just long enough to see the book into the proper hands and make sure Jared will not be killed for having it, and then she can return to the shyani community that has accepted her as their shaman. And, of course, her feline best friend Dayr insists on coming with her.

But Jared is now a Lord, with considerable wealth and power, and his response to her presence isn’t one she expected. After years living with the shyani, she sees everything around her from a new perspective, and that makes it difficult to keep to the plan of making as few waves as possible. As an honoured guest in a highborn house, with only Jared aware that she has ever been anyone else, Vixen finds herself questioning where she belongs: with Dayr and the shyani, who accept her gender without question but have to make allowances for her differences, or with humans, in the culture she grew up in even though her past would mean a major scandal?

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