My tag for things set in the same universe as "Sleeping with Ghosts" is "Nothing Goes Right for Yordan Korvechi," which is about as accurate a tag as you're likely to find on the internet. This is not because he is an assassin; holy assassins are regarded as slightly creepy necessary evils in his world, rather like traveling dentists with switchblades. Neither is it because he's a priest, although that certainly means more people are looking to him to fix what goes wrong than would otherwise be the case. By and large he leads an unremarkable life, albeit one where he kills quite a lot of people.

No, I'm forced to believe that Yordan was simply born unlucky. In a world where cold iron wards off the creatures that prowl the forests, a world where soullessness has practical as well as theological consequences, it's odd that "luck" isn't a more prominent concept. Chance, now, chance is a thing; people roll the bones to wager away their wages there as often as they do here. Chance might mean it's your throat cut and not another's, in the cities where death is still infrequent enough to be novel. But luck, the idea that there is some guiding force in the universe that has reached down its hand with the express purpose of fucking up your day, is relatively unknown. There are gods of profit and gods of death, gods of the harvest and gods of the archive, but Lady Fortuna does not rank among them.

Make no mistake, though, Yordan Korvechi is not a lucky man. In "Sleeping with Ghosts," he sets out to commit a murder and instead finds himself solving one--and finding to his vast irritation that, for all his attempted professionalism, he is not ultimately the culprit. When next we join our plucky young priest, he will be attempting to take a seaside holiday with his boyfriend to recover from the death of a friend. Bragava is the perfect resort town for a man with grief to sort through: quiet, slow, and (most importantly) far, far away from anyone he knows.

Unfortunately, the sleepy city by the sea has roused itself from a long slumber and begun to boil with revolutionary sentiment, and Yordan doesn't even have a potholder to his name.

He was definitely planning to get laid more on this vacation.

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Tune in periodically for more updates on how nothing goes right for Yordan Korvechi!



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