The tale behind the cover above is Tempered and Quenched, which looks at the events and people inhabiting an island in this Sky, Sea, & Stone world (Okeanós). On this island, Xifias, people are primarily occupied with writing and warring in almost equal measure; a literal nation of poet warriors.

One of the important cultural traits of Xifias involves people honing a particular weapon over the course of their life while inscribing important words upon it. These words can be mantras, poems, short stories, or even singular words, however, these bits of weaponry writing get updated as the writer-warrior reforges, repairs, or improves their armament.

This is easily one of the longest and most complex stories in Unusual Tales for the Curious Mind, bordering on being a novella that could probably be turned into a full novel if I wanted. My editor for this tale, a friend of Rahaman Writing as well as fellow fantasy and horror writer Sean C. R. Hill from the blog Shadow & Sorcery, mentioned to me that the earlier drafts of Tempered and Quenched felt like they were missing details, which, I found odd because I had intentionally created what I thought was a new, interesting, unique, and fun setting for a story. When I asked Sean a few questions about the matter, he elaborated by saying that what was missing were details about the more common things that grounded the setting so that the more interesting bits could feel significant as opposed to simply being a foreign setting where people were different.

While editing this tale, I decided to be less worried about keeping it short and more concerned about fleshing out the more relatable parts of life on Xifias so that readers would relate to and care about the people there as well as what happened to them. I did not compromise by inserting tropes, however, but simply elaborated more on the relationships between the side characters to give certain events more passion, sadness, and even humour.

After all the editing, I realized that all of the themes about strengthening one's writing and weapon through experience, resolve, and forge-work in Tempered and Quenched were very much like what I was doing to the story itself while editing. While I definitely planned the story to evoke such feelings in writers who read it, this still caught me off guard because of how on-point the prose was when going over the effort it takes to craft a work of true worth.

Appropriately, this was probably the tale that I spent the most time editing because of how much work it needed and how long it is. In the end, the story was forged and honed to as sharp a state as I can make it.