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Read an Excerpt From Kill All Wizards by Jedediah Berry
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sword and sorcery
Read an Excerpt From Kill All Wizards by Jedediah Berry
Sword, sorcery, and a spot of tea.
By Jedediah Berry
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Published on May 27, 2026
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Kill All Wizards by Jedediah Berry, a sword and sorcery novella out from Tordotcom Publishing on June 16th.
We could think of nothing but the barbarian. He had come here, surely, to murder or marry someone, to exact revenge, or to say or do something very scandalous. We could hardly wait to see which it was. We hoped it would be all of them.The barbarian traveled far to consult the wizards of the empire. Instead of lending their aid, they ensorcelled him, exploited his strength, and stole his sword. They should not have done that.Now the barbarian plans to kill every wizard who wronged him, even if that means blending in with their vile society: dressing in finery, taking tea in exclusive clubs, and reserving the best box at the theater.Oh, he hates it all with the fiery passion of his savage heart—but not as much as he hates these wizards.
Chapter 1
The View From the Unnamable
There was a great tameness upon the land. Cats licked their paws, the trains ran on time, our bellies and our calendars were full.
In those days the barbarian was back and forth over the stony marches, sampling cigars at Scales & Co one day, plundering the tomb of some ancient demon-prince the next. Long before his taking of House Derby this was, Gotchimus the only name we knew him by. A delver, a drifter, an outlander in every land, he gazed over teacups as though from a dream of the old dream-haunted world, but he kept his pocket watch wound even in the meanest pits of the far wilds.
Most agreed that he was not handsome, but beautiful in the way that certain rare and deadly beasts are beautiful. His nose was misshapen, his cheekbones perhaps too strong, his jaw set with a sardonic crookedness that might have been mistaken for cruelty or caprice in someone of a more dissembling nature. But the brightness of his eyes, which were the gray of storm clouds at dawn, coupled with the stout openness of his bearing, made one feel not judged but somehow in on it with him, even if one struggled to say precisely what it was.
His manner of dress could not be faulted. We saw him most often in a worsted suit of oxblood and cream, perfectly tailored to his extraordinary dimensions. Later he adopted the sable eyepatch that both accentuated his strangeness and leant him an air of grave refinement.
His choice of lodgings was, alas, less discriminating. He had with him that peculiar tent of bone and hide, which he insisted on erecting each night in the river district. Among the drunks and criminals, in the oily flicker of trash fires, the barbarian slept and dreamed barbaric dreams—dark wings flapping and a cold light in the pines, black frothing streams, a yawp that echoes forever in mist-laden valleys. Girded by such visions as though by a sheltering pentacle, the barbarian slumbered undisturbed by his rough neighbors.
The trouble began when wizards started turning up dead. Some of those wizards we had loved, if not as friends, then as friends of friends whose gardens we had hoped to tour someday. With their deaths, the tameness was ruffled. Would-be sleuths made charts, took drugs, skulked about the harbor. Letters to the editor were penned, dispatched, and printed, then scissored and pasted into albums by those who had penned them. As for what the wizards thought, that was plain from the extra squads of Committee Lamentables stalking the streets, dowsing rods swishing in the glow of their light-knife smiles. Meanwhile, the witches of the High Godsward hid their souls in smooth stones and gave the stones to their granddaughters, saying, “Hide these under your pillows, dears, and try not to think on your dreams for a while.”
Gotchimus was suspected from the beginning, of course. If we seem quick to judge, only consider that his own friend and closest associate, a certain Mister Hecksley, felt obliged to raise the matter with him one fateful morning in mid-autumn, when the oaks of Charnel Square had adopted their first rusty blush. High above the square, on the top floor of the Unnamable, Gotchimus had just seated himself at their usual place when Hecksley tossed his copy of the newspaper onto the table.
“That’s the third this year,” Hecksley said. “And this one’s the most gruesome of the lot.”
Hecksley was a brisk, portly man with lustrous dark hair and eyes like unpolished sapphires. A thief by trade, he had in recent years stopped stealing things in order to spend more time profiting off what other people stole. “Well?” he demanded. “Anything to say for yourself?”
The barbarian regarded the article impassively. It concerned a wizard called the Head of Ven, a mechanician of the highest order. Though he usually kept to his floating tower workshop, dispatching cogsbodies of his own making to perform errands, the Head of Ven was sometimes seen abroad on market day, harnessed to a mobile platform of his own design, its steam-powered legs a wonder of spiderish poise. We had chuckled to see Ven, surely one of the most powerful members of the Fifth Committee, frowning as he tested with clockwork pincers the firmness of melons, the crustiness of bread loaves. He had been discovered dead in his own tower, smothered in a bucket of naphtha, the lid held shut with a heavy gear. Now, all across the city, the click and whir of the wizard’s automata had taken on a melancholy timbre—or did we only imagine them pining for their lost creator as they tossed feed to the birds?
“I had nothing to do with this,” Gotchimus said, folding the newspaper and returning it to Hecksley. “Someone else must have gotten to him first.”
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Kill All Wizards
Jedediah Berry
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Jedediah Berry
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“So! You admit that you would have done it yourself—had you, as you say, gotten to him first. Bold words, Gotch, with worrying implications. I’m not sure I should be seen dining with you. I’m not sure we should be talking at all.”
But the barbarian had stopped listening. He seemed—much to Hecksley’s puzzlement and chagrin—to be giving all his attention to the table between them. He ran both hands over its surface, then leaned forward with one ear close, as though to hear a whispered secret. “There is something wrong with this table,” he said.
“Stop trying to change the subject,” Hecksley said. “It’s the same table we had last week, and the week before that. It’s a good table, sturdy and uncreaking. One of the best in the house.”
Certainly it had the advantage of a very good view. The club called the Unnamable—we should explain for the benefit of nonmembers—was built inside an enormous skull at the south end of Charnel Square. The skull had belonged to some nameless god, but in the early days of the Sundering, Rosefrost Derby herself had parted it from its owner’s body with a crescent-headed bolt launched from a polybolos of her own design. Some of that god’s ribs still arched over the trees in the square, and whole rows of structures on Bonesea Boulevard used its femurs and tibiae as their foundations. Because the god had been nameless, the club housed in its skull resisted all attempts at naming. For the sake of convenience it was referred to as the Unnamable, but not even its most longstanding members could pretend that the word was fixed with any firmness.
Gotchimus and Hecksley were seated before the easternmost of the skull’s three eye sockets, under the cranial dome. From here, the beauty of morning in the capital could be appreciated fully. The knife grinders of Charnel Square were out in force, their calls like the dirge of some spectral choir. Meanwhile the majestic ghost tortoise of Bloodletters Pond traced her slow route along the paths beneath the oaks. Visible at the opposite end of Bonesea Boulevard were the high parklands upon which sprawled the countless wings, galleries, and turrets of Inwardly, the House on the Hill, shared home to our ruling families and their attendants. Farther north and a little to the west stood the Thousandfold Tower, the city’s highest spire and the Fifth Committee’s headquarters.
It was to this tower that Hecksley now gestured with his rolled-up newspaper. “The wizards look after their own,” he said. “Every one of their servants is out hunting for the killer. I can’t think of a worse set of enemies to make.”
“Then you lack imagination,” the barbarian said, finally turning his attention from the table.
“On the contrary, I possess enough for both of us. It is thanks to the efficacy of my imagination that I can picture the variety of tortures the Fifth Committee might subject us to, should we fall into their clutches. Gotch, for your sake as well as mine, you must lay low for a while.”
“Shouldn’t you be relieved that the Head of Ven is no more?” Gotchimus asked. “Or did I misunderstand some detail of your history with the man? Maybe you actually paid him for that pretty contraption at the end of your right arm?”
The contraption to which the barbarian referred was a hand of living brass. How Hecksley lost the original was a story he refused to tell, but he had boasted on several occasions of stealing its mechanical replacement from the Head of Ven’s floating workshop.
“I have been very patient with you,” Hecksley said, “and you’ve always trusted my advice. On sartorial matters, on questions of etiquette and protocol. I like to think you consider me a faithful guide, and perhaps even your friend. So when I tell you—” But here the thief paused, for their waiter Beauchamp had arrived with tea and a platter heaped with food. “Ah,” said Hecksley, “I hope you don’t mind that I’ve taken the liberty of ordering for both of us.”
Beauchamp, like Hecksley’s hand, was a creation of the Head of Ven. Several such cogsbodies were employed by the club, all to work on the third floor, which was frequented by those—like Gotchimus and Hecksley—who did not care to have their conversations overheard by anyone who might repeat them. (These mechanicals, though attentive, were one of Ven’s early designs, and they lacked the gift of speech.) Limbs whirring, Beauchamp set down plates of eggs, sausage, pies, hot rolls, and berries floating in apple jelly.
“Thank you, Beauchamp,” Hecksley said. “And I am sorry about—you know, your maker.” He shook his mechanical hand as though to demonstrate his own connection to the unfortunate matter, but Beauchamp only turned and walked away.
“They’re all a bit prickly today,” Hecksley told Gotchimus. “Can’t blame them, I suppose. Especially if they think you had something to do with it.”
Gotchimus said nothing to this as he filled his plate with food, avoiding the meats because he refused to eat the flesh of any animal he did not kill himself. The thief did not know whether this was due to pride, conviction, or some tradition of his people. Sensing, perhaps, that Hecksley was about to ask, Gotchimus took a velvet purse from his jacket and emptied its contents onto the table between them.
Gemstones, a great mound of them, liquid puddles of light caged in faultless geometries. Trying to remain composed, Hecksley folded one of his mechanical fingers into the palm of his hand and a jeweler’s loupe emerged to take its place.
“This might be the finest assortment you’ve ever brought me,” he admitted, examining a particularly large and luminescent opal. “I’m not sure I can pay you for all of them today.”
“I think you can,” the barbarian said.
“You believe I am outrageously rich,” Hecksley said, “and in this you are not mistaken. But I am also very cautious. You think I come to breakfast with this much coin on my person?”
“I don’t wish to be paid with money,” the barbarian said. “All I want is information.”
Hecksley set the opal down. “I have that in great store, but some of it is costly indeed. What do you want to know?”
“There’s a wizard.”
“A wizard,” the thief said darkly. “The last time I helped you find a wizard—”
“This one wears his gray hair cropped short, and plain robes like the habit of a humble monk. But he possesses extraordinary power, and a voice like dark velvet, and his eyes are bright green.”
Hecksley looked ill at ease. “No, not another word,” he said.
“His specialty is peculiar,” Gotchimus went on. “He isn’t focused on any one element or sphere of arcane study. He claims to walk the inbetween places.”
“Stop, stop, stop,” Hecksley said.
“I have sought rumors of this man here in town and beyond the stony marches. I consulted the scribes of Duskend Alley and the oracles of Bottle and Gloam, challenged riddling demons, scoured the library of the Manse of the Five Winds. My adventures have won me riches, but not what I seek. I need to know who he is, and I need to know how to find him.”
Hecksley looked ready to storm off, but a glance at the jewels calmed him enough to say, “Why, pray tell, would you go looking for the man you describe?”
“He and I have unfinished business, as I’ve heard it put.” Gotchimus gestured to the patch over his left eye. “It’s to do with this.”
Hecksley went quiet. Months had passed since the barbarian first donned the eyepatch, and Hecksley did not believe, as some did, that it served as mere accessory. He knew Gotchimus well enough to guess that the man had suffered some true and calamitous injury. But his curiosity had gone frustrated, for every time he tried to steer the conversation to the matter of the eyepatch, the barbarian either changed the subject or stared into the distance until Hecksley was forced to change it for him.
“I think,” Hecksley said at last, “that if we are to continue this conversation, I will need to have the whole story. What do you say, Gotch? These fine gemstones plus a proper explanation, in exchange for the information you seek. Surely that is not too much to ask of a friend?”
Gotchimus crossed his arms over his chest and frowned. The barbarian had never haggled with him before, never protested the fees Hecksley charged for fencing his plunder. Now the thief wondered if he had gone too far, presumed too much. But the words were out of his mouth, and there was no stealing them back.
“Your proposal is a lopsided one,” Gotchimus said. “To explain what happened to my eye, I must tell you all I’ve been doing with my time here in the capital. And if I am to trust you with that story, I’ll need a true tale of your own. I want to hear the story of your hand.” After a moment, he added, “Not too much to ask of a friend, I think.”
The thief slowly flexed his clockwork digits, looking at them as though for the first time, and in his eyes was a mixture of grief and fear and something else—revulsion, or maybe wonder. “Very well,” he said, suddenly subdued. But a moment later, when he called for Beauchamp, his voice was strong and clear. “Another pot of tea, my good man. Better make it one of those large ones.”
Outside, a crew of cogsbodies were scrubbing clean the statue of General Alban Moog astride his charger. Out on Bonesea Boulevard, a little crowd had gathered to watch a troupe of juggler-priests recite the hundred precepts of the gyring divinities. Farther off, an airship buzzed toward the dock atop the Thousandfold Tower, its envelope fluorescing in the morning sun.
Beauchamp refilled both their cups and left the pot. And so it was that the barbarian and the thief, with an autumn breeze frisking at the threshold of a dead god’s eye socket, settled in to tell the tales of how each had lost a part of himself.
“Well,” Hecksley said, “you first.”
Chapter 2
Death and the Wild God
Picture the barbarian in the springtime of the year, sullen in the limestone lobby of the Thousandfold Tower. This vast chamber was designed, it seemed, for maximum inhospitality—not a chair in sight, the air musty and chill, and the razor-sharp smiles of Lamentables glinting at every door.
At this time the barbarian still had both his eyes, but no finely tailored suit graced his frame. He wore a wrinkled tunic of green and ochre, and breeches the color of dry mud. Clutched in one ink-stained hand was the paperwork he had labored over all the previous day. He appeared, if not nervous, then certainly apprehensive and out of place. No doubt he would have preferred standing at the mouth of some beast’s cave than here among the citizens and dignitaries waiting to be recognized by the Gracious Assessor.
The colossal figure ensconced at the tower’s base was either a wizard’s creation or a monster bound to her station by sorcery. She was cobalt blue and mostly torso, and her very long arms were six in number. While conversing with her supplicants, the Gracious Assessor maintained an expression of benevolent serenity but never stopped moving her hands, retrieving documents from the pneumatic tubes that hung around her like so many stalactites. She seemed to perceive the contents of these documents without looking at them, sorting, stamping, folding, sealing, then sending them off again, all with a smooth and untroubled grace.
Gotchimus had come before the Gracious Assessor twice before, both times with the same aim: to secure a meeting with a member of the Fifth Committee, any member, but preferably one of the wizards who sat on the board. His previous applications had all been rejected. Those documents are in the archives now, and a brief review reveals why they met with failure. The outlander could not supply even the most basic pieces of information required. Names and relevant titles? Why, he had only the one name, and what an outlandish one it was—better suited to a demon or godling than a mortal man. Though familiar now to all who dwell in our city and to many others beyond, at the time we heard only the vulgarity of those syllables, the first like a child’s declaration of victory in some primitive game—Gotch!—the last mussed and grubby, like something dragged through a mire, and between the two a solitary, impertinent i, so barely there it might be skipped altogether.
He had no family name to pin him down, to give him context. And as for his permanent address, his means of employment? The man slept in a tent by the river. He was, at best, a sort of freelancer. No accounts, no clear point of origin, no possessions but the crude sundries he had stuffed into the aforementioned tent, and an overlarge sword (checked with the attendant at the tower’s entrance). In other words, a barbarian through and through—though the Gracious Assessor, when she greeted him, chose a kinder word.
“Visitor,” she said, “I am happy for this opportunity to assist you. Why are you here?”
Gotchimus took a steadying breath and said, “Like last time, and the time before, I have come to request an audience with the Fifth Committee, to discuss a pressing matter.” He held out his paperwork, and one of the six big hands swept forward to accept it.
The Assessor spread the pages out on the desk before her. “Your application to remain present on Committee grounds for the purposes of filing an application has been completed satisfactorily,” she said.
Gotchimus grunted. His first conversation with the Assessor, about a week before, had been very brief, because he had not even known such a form existed.
“However,” the Assessor went on, “you have brought only two copies of your request to converse in a language other than one of the ceremonial tongues, and three copies are required.”
He patted his chest and sides. Finally he found it: a folded sheaf tucked into his belt, completed aboard the tram that morning. The Assessor’s expression remained placid, but Gotchimus sensed the slightest air of impatience as she collected the errant pages.
“It seems everything is in order,” the Gracious Assessor said.
“Then—”
“However”—she raised one of her six hands—“your request for an extension to your original application for admittance into a Committee meeting room was, alas, made using an expired version of the form.” She retrieved an updated page from one of her file cabinets and presented it with great solemnity.
Gotchimus used all his will to keep himself from crushing the paper in his hands. “I’ll need less than a minute to copy the information over,” he said.
The Gracious Assessor smiled. “But that would require an application for permission to complete a form on Committee grounds. Which itself, of course, cannot be completed on Committee grounds. And besides, as you can see, there are other people waiting to be assisted.”
Indeed, those in line behind the barbarian had already begun to grumble. The Assessor gestured with one hand for him to depart, and with another for the next supplicant to approach her desk.
Gotchimus turned and strode toward the exit, though he had no intention of exiting. He had tried doing this the proper way, the civilized way, but it was clear to him now that the Fifth Committee could always find another excuse to rebuff him. So he would take a different tack—and if he had to stain his hands with blood rather than ink, so be it. He would retrieve his sword from the attendant. Yes, every door and stairway leading deeper into the tower was guarded by Lamentables. Well, let those sorcerous fiends try to stop him.
He had nearly reached the coat room when the voice of the Gracious Assessor rang out through the hall. “Visitor, wait!”
The barbarian froze. Could that monstrous blue being behind her desk have read his mind? He turned and saw that she was waving a sheet of paper high in the air. “This just came in,” she said. “It pertains to your case.”
Having determined to draw his blade, Gotchimus did not like to leave it sheathed, but everyone in the lobby, including the Lamentables, was now staring at him. He had lost the element of surprise, and perhaps a fraction of his rage. He drew a deep breath and returned to the desk.
The Assessor stamped the new document, dropped it through a slot in her desk, and pronounced, “Your request for an audience with the Fifth Committee has been approved.” She gestured with all six of her hands to a door at her left.
At first the barbarian could only stand there, stunned, waiting for some addendum, some exception or countermand. But the Assessor’s smile broadened, and the black-robed creature guarding the door opened it and stepped aside.
Everyone waiting in line seemed stunned as well, as though none of them had seen a door from the lobby opened before (and maybe they had not). So Gotchimus, ignoring their whispers, adjusted his tunic and passed through.
The last thing he remembered of that visit to the Thousandfold Tower was a quiet chiming sound, as of a tiny silver bell being struck in the distance.
* * *
He woke in a wild glen. He did not know whether hours or days had passed, nor whether he had been drugged, magicked, or knocked on the head. A stream burbled beyond a bank of ferns, and spindles of sunlight pierced the dim nave of the defile. Alder, elder, hawthorn, elm: the trees had a gnarled and ancient look about them, and a host of noisy jackdaws sat perched among their limbs. Planted in the earth just a few paces away was his sword.
Had he been ejected? Returned to a habitat the Fifth Committee considered more suitable to one of his mien and manner of dress?
He had no time to ponder these questions, for something was loping toward him down the glen. It was shaped like a man but stood some twelve feet tall, its hide knobby and furrowed like thick bark. It had suffered many wounds, deep cuts delivered perhaps by axe or hatchet. Some of those wounds were patched with mud, moss, and lichen, while others oozed a sticky, sap-like ichor. Early summer flowers grew from everywhere on the thing’s body, and a cloud of bees supped from the blossoms. Its shining black eyes, set deep in its massive, craggy head, regarded the barbarian with unmistakable rage.
Gotchimus knew that he faced a god. That the god was a thing of the forest—or the forest a thing of the god. He rose slowly to his feet and held up both hands. His voice was hoarse, and only with effort could he imbue it with some of the gravity he sought. “I have no quarrel with you, ancient one,” he said. “My entrance into your domain was not of my choosing, and I shall quit it willingly.”
For answer, the god opened its cavernous mouth and roared. Gotchimus flinched at the noise, not because it was loud—though it was loud enough to dislodge leaves from nearby trees—but because it was so full of pain. The jackdaws took flight and circled overhead, lending a screeching accompaniment to the god’s tortured song.
Hands still raised, Gotchimus said, “I hear you, seigneur, and I would offer sacrifice suitable to—”
But the god wanted no more words, no sacrifice less than the life of the man who had spoken them. It charged, flexing its knotted, thorn-tipped fingers. Its grasping hands would rend his flesh with ease, tear bones from their sockets and snap them like so many twigs. But Gotchimus waited until the god was nearly upon him before he dove away. Then, with one smooth motion, he rolled, pulled his sword from the earth, and swung.
His blade met the god’s right leg with a heavy thunk. It left only a shallow notch in the hard flesh, but the god stumbled, for the barbarian’s stroke was well-aimed. It turned, eyes gleaming with fresh hatred.
Gotchimus let the sword dangle from one hand and raised the other beseechingly. He did not want this fight, for he suspected that the wizards had left him his sword so that he might stand against the god, and he was not accustomed to doing violence at any bidding but his own.
Nor could he retreat, however. Only fools tried to run from immortal things, even one so wounded and diminished, for it was widely known that nothing made a god more terrible than the scent of mortal fear. So when the divinity approached again, Gotchimus braced himself. This time it stopped just beyond his reach and roared once more, though the tenor of that roar had changed from one of rage to one of exhortation. But to whom would a god call for aid?
A moment later, Gotchimus had his answer, for down came the jackdaws, an inky blue-black mass of fury. They dove at his arms and face, lacerating his skin with their claws, piercing his ears with their shrieking cries. The barbarian wheeled and waved his sword wildly, too distracted to notice the god readying another swing. It struck him across the chest and sent him flying.
He landed hard amidst the rocks beside the stream, the impact jolting the air from his lungs. Then the wild god’s bees were upon him.
The bees were not so loud as the jackdaws, but theirs was the greater weapon, and Gotchimus felt his body pricked with a hundred points of fire. He flung himself into the water to escape the stings and was swept downstream, gasping and groaning, fighting for breath—until a pair of thorny hands yanked him from the current.
The god threw him to the earth. Gotchimus, fighting to remain conscious, saw the glittering eyes of fox and badger, wolf and boar and stoat all watching from the underbrush. This was the deity’s own kingdom, the beasts all dukes and duchesses in their liege’s court. A man might fight a god and win—the family Derby and its allies had proven as much in the long days and nights of the Sundering—but could one man fight a forest? Could he stand against the trackless wilds entire?
The god’s reserves kept to their fastnesses, for their lord wished to claim the killing blow. It slashed with its talons, roared with a voice that was the cataract’s crash, the tempest’s howl. Gotchimus rolled but the god’s claws found their mark, adding their searing castigation to his agonies. Again and again they slashed, rending his flesh, spattering the rocks with his blood.
He rose and stumbled backward, still swinging his sword—but these were desperate strikes, and when his blade connected, it left only nicks in the god’s steely hide. No wonder its previous combatants—whoever they were—had effected no greater wounds. If he could land a second blow in the same spot, he thought, he might breach cambium, but he was losing blood from a hundred slashes, and his skin burned with the fire of a hundred stings. A dark fog clouded the edges of his vision.
He retreated farther, but now the beasts of the forest were at his heels—a boar slashing with his tusks, snarling wolves warning him back into the fray, the jackdaws descending to harry him again. He lurched toward the stream, circling his enemy, seeking a fresh angle of attack. But how to cut deep enough when your foe’s skin is an armor cured by centuries of suffering and hate?
Then he saw it: a broken spear shaft in the god’s side, protruding from a wound crusted over with lichen and coagulated sap. The barbarian had within him blood and strength enough for one final gambit. So with a bellow to rival the god’s own, he charged and leapt, grabbing hold of the spear to propel himself higher.
Too late, the god understood what was happening. It cried out to its vassals, and from the tangled wood they came, beak and talon, claw and fang, snarl and screech and howl. But Gotchimus was level with the burl of the wild god’s head, within striking distance of the one place upon which he had discerned no evidence of prior wounds—the one place, he thought, where a single blow might do the work of twenty. The barbarian swung his gleaming blade and—
But here we should pause. Already we have described in perhaps too much detail the injuries suffered by Gotchimus at the razoring hands of that god and its fearsome minions. Do we carry on in similar fashion, here at the crescendo, and risk further valorizing the grim deeds that accompanied so much of the barbarian’s career, if career it may be called? If we are to tell the tale of this man in its entirety—those parts he related to his companion at their table high above Charnel Square, as well as the episodes that followed—then this pen must turn at times to a rare sharpness.
We could state those details plainly and move on, as our more respectable periodicals might treat with an unfortunate accident upon the tramline. Or should we paint the fuller picture, down to the swift arc of the warrior’s blade? And describe how, in that dark and wooded glen, it caught a ray of sunlight and seemed transformed into a filament of flame? Should the sound of the blade cleaving gnarled flesh be likened to the thwack of the woodcutter’s axe? Or do we work harm by extolling the virtues of such a cut? And, having already proceeded thus far, do we go on to trace the flight of that hoary head as it sailed from the body and landed among the rocks by the stream, angled as though to stare at its own reflection?
Were it practical, we might instruct the artisans who print and bind these pages to set certain passages in a different color of ink. A deep red for the gorier portions would be appropriate, if a bit lurid. But only consider, in addition to the costs associated with such a scheme, the likelihood of unintended consequences. You, trusted reader, would no doubt use these signals responsibly, adjusting your experience of the text to better suit your refined sensibilities. But some other person, some unscrupulous scoundrel, might misuse, nay, abuse our classifications by reading only those passages identified as gruesome and grim. Is this a habit we wish to cultivate? This a variety of reader we care to attract to our pages? No—let that degenerate pick his way through the full spectrum of prose contained herein, that we might reform his twisted imagination, or at least plant seeds to grow into a more varied, more nourishing garden.
And for now, if only for the sake of completeness, let us record that the head of the god was indeed sliced clean off, that its blood drenched the barbarian as he clung to its side like a child to a favored climbing tree; that the great hands of the monster reached to the place where its head ought to have been and, finding nothing, spasmed with a kind of panic we have all felt at one time or another—upon misplacing our best pen, or perhaps the invitation to Lady Black’s solstice ball.
God and barbarian fell together and lay side by side, the latter waiting for the feral congregation to work their clawed revenges upon his person. Before his eyes closed, he saw the beasts gathering close—but not around him. They circled their fallen sovereign, heads all hung in mourning. And so he mourned with them, for he had gazed upon one of the rare old powers of the earth, and with his own hands ended it.
Excerpted from Kill All Wizards, copyright © 2026 by Jedediah Berry.
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