“Ephemera” is a series of stories about Azrael, a Courier, or assassin.  Currently there are only two installments published.  Azrael became an assassin only because his father was assassinated.  He let them teach him everything they could while he waited to meet the man who killed his father. 

Azrael is a rather flat character for a “hero”.  He’s consumed by thoughts of revenge but somehow he spent 12 years among the Couriers, living a lie.  He’s either a very good actor or very arrogant.  The title of the stories are “How the Arrogant are Met” and “How the Arrogant are Rewarded”, so I think the latter is correct.  He thinks he’s the best but even he admits he’s making a lot of mistakes and he seems to get caught very easily.  Fortunately, he also seems to have a very high pain threshold and an amazing ability to work through injuries that would put most people in the hospital.

Then again, I’m not sure what kind of medical services would be available in this fantasy world.  They have knives, crossbows, blowpipes and poisons, but there hasn’t been any mention of guns or cannons.  There’s a kingdom, and Azrael’s father was a knight.  Most of the backstory has been about Azrael’s life and his quest for revenge.

So far, the prose is very dense.  It’s over-wrought and over-described.  There’s very little dialog–it’s mostly description.  There are even conversations that are described instead of being written as dialog.  Much of the text is description of Azrael’s internal state, or internal dialog.  The constant emotional turmoil is difficult to read for 7000 words.  Also, there’s no real climax in each installment–there’s lots of waiting and watching and fighting, but then the story just reaches a stopping point and ends. 

A note about the web site: it’s lovely to look at but the text is very hard to read for any length of time.  The background image is distracting and the white text seems to glow against it making it hard on the eyes.  I had to disable styles to read it.

So far, with two stories, “Ephemera” is a short series about a rogue assassin.  The main character is mostly a cypher, the other characters appear very briefly, there is little dialog, and there is too much emotional turmoil.  If you like stories with a lot of detailed description, that spend most of their time in the head of the main character, you might want to give it a try; otherwise, it’s a lot to wade through.

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As of this writing, "Ephemera" has two chapters, with a third scheduled for release in a few days.  I spent a couple of days reading over the current chapters, reading them both twice, and overall, I don’t regret spending my time doing so.  Overall, I found "Ephemera" to be interesting, but with some major flaws that might deter an audience from trying to pursue reading it.

The prose is really dense, unnecessarily so in places.  The Scribbler has a very solid grasp of the English language and a good vocabulary which is used to its fullest, but the pacing of the story suffers a little from her willingness to use the entirety of the vocabulary at her disposal.  She doesn’t misuse words or anything, but she’s so eager to put so many good words to use that they crowd each other out and can make it a little difficult to know exactly what’s going on.

Alternately, there are a few places where the story suffers from "telling" instead of "showing," which tends to leech some of the suspense from the narrative.  While I personally found the close third person format to be interesting, there were a few times where I wished that Azrael had been paying attention to things instead of glossing over them in his self-important haze.  Not that I took issue with the Scribbler’s portrayal of Azrael at all; it’s mentioned in the listing and in the titles of the chapters that he’s a pretty arrogant sort, so the way he tells things is very in character for him, but there are times where the story might have been better served if we’d taken a small step back and been able to observe things without his arrogance filter.

I do not believe that these flaws make "Ephemera" bad by any stretch of the imagination.  I think it has the makings of a really interesting fantasy romp, and I do very much intend to follow it to see where the Scribbler plans to take her assassin and how he plans on getting out of the mess his arrogance has gotten him into.  There’s a lot of intrigue and subterfuge going on, and I very much enjoy stories that deal with such things.  If you are the same, "Ephemera" may very well be worth your time.

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