New Midnight Rising chapter launches Monday night

Titled Enter the Griffons—yes, it’s a shameless double-entendre—it’s going to easily be the longest chapter yet in the story, checking in at a very healthy 14,000 words and crammed full of more M-rated action than you can shake a stick or a griffon spear at. It’s already well-over my usual clopfic chapter length, and yet I keep adding to it. You’ll also see some references to Firefly and Feathered Hearts along the way, even aside from FH’s favorite birdie boi being present. Even Firefly herself will be present in a certain sense.

I’d hoped to launch it today, but I want to give prereaders more time to check it, including a brand new one working his way through the story. In the meantime, fans of Feathered Hearts will be happy to hear that I’ll be working on the next C&C chapter today, which is already 2000 words long. And perhaps in homage to Midnight Rising, I’m considering adding in another R-rated section to it involving Gilda and the Ibex she tries so hard to hate.

All that said, I do want to warn folks again that there will be underage griffons involved in this coming chapter. They’re not the focus, but they are there and will get a few sentences and even an odd paragraph of description sprinkled throughout. Like I said a couple blogs ago, the justification is that a) there are cubs present with their parents at the Hall of Heroes, b) Midnight’s magical influences wouldn’t exclude them and c) for as much as she loves breaking boundaries (quite literally in the case of the interdimensional rifts!), Midnight herself wouldn’t care and might even encourage it. For the record, the griffons themselves would at least mildly care under normal circumstances, but only insofar as whether cubs can properly fight mating rounds. You’ll see all this outlined in the chapter as well.

If enough folks ask, either in the comments of this blog post or the new chapter itself, I will make a separate version of the chapter without any underage action out on google docs and provide a link. But for the time being, you’re advised that the coming chapter has it. The purpose and the following chapter (other than letting me have a lot of fun writing it) is, again, to ultimately set something up for Nightmare Night, which I’ll be working on writing a new chapter for in the run-up to Halloween. For now, I’ll say that Midnight makes two important observations of the griffons in the coming chapter that she’ll be using later.