Every village has rules nobody remembers the reason for. Underbeck has
three: pay the goatherd, hold the Tallowing on time, and keep the door
poor.
For sixty years that was easy, because the goatherd was Cobb Hallow, and Cobb
Hallow never asked for much — a wage, a byre, and no questions about why a man
would spend his whole life watching goats that never seemed to go anywhere.
Then Cobb died. And the village council, being a village council, did what
councils do best: they looked at a line item that no longer had a name attached
to it, and they crossed it out.
The minutes record the vote as "carried unanimously and in terror" — but that
part comes later.
The Goats Were Load-Bearing is an upcoming darkly comic
fantasy — book one of The Underbeck Accounts — about what happens when
a town discovers that its most boring traditions were the only thing standing
between it and something very old, very patient, and very much still under the
byre. It has a dwarf you should not throw, a druid who insists the wolf was
"just a dog", four halflings with a growing list of Rules (Rule One was codified
the hard way), and a distant Magister whose letters are far too helpful.
It is a story about curses, candles that go out by themselves, and the
eternal truth that every saving in the budget is somebody's load-bearing goat.
You get to pick the cover
The book is in its final stretch, and three cover candidates are on the
table: an ember-lit door, three slow knocks, and a founders' ledger with one
line scratched out. This is where you come in — it takes one tap:
👉 Vote for your
favourite cover here — one vote per visitor, three seconds of your
time, and a real say in what ends up on the shelf.
The English edition launches first, with Danish and more languages to
follow. Watch this space.
