The Price Paid -- do we have a category for Victorian Sword & Sorcery?
an excerpt

And at this point I would like to point out that I really really really would like to have someone plant a bomb or other ordinance under the train track because this is quite enough nattering already! Enough about the bloody librarian; we all know he’s going to get a sword through his gizzard or, if he’s bad enough, I’m going to maim him horribly and make him live through the pillaging of his precious library. AGH. If somebody else arches an eyebrow or sighs melancholically or what not I am going to personally sever their livers and feed them to maddened one-eyed thracian goats.
Ahem.
And at this very moment the train slowed to a screeching halt. “What gives?” Berian demanded. Rave sighed. “I think the author is having a raving fit and is throwing ordinance under the train. We really should have see this coming.”
“How?” Berian howled as he fought for purchase. “How was I to know that the thrice bedamned bat was going to throw a hissy fit some 6500 words in to the piece?”
Rav clambered up, using her sword for purchase. “Closer to 6800 something or other, although this manic passage will probably up the numbers somewhat. She seems hell-bent on getting up to 10,000 words if it kills her or hairlips somebody. She wouldn’t mind hairlipping the entire presidential campaign at this point. They yap as badly as we do and with much less point.”
Berian grimaced. “Not to mention she’s gotten hooked into some television show and would really rather be rotting her brain with that than shoving words onto a screen. But that’s how these things go. Can’t get a dedicated author to save our souls from perdition.”
“We don’t have souls!” Rav screamed over the commotion caused by the sudden derailment. “We’re just figments of the old bat’s imagination, and pretty one dimensional ones at that. I mean, here I am sharpening a sword over the course of a journey that has got to have taken two or three weeks, and that’s bloody poor company. The god’s damned steward thinks I’m after his liver and I can’t say as I blame him. And you are wondering just who in the hell wants to kill you so badly. Christo jezus almighty, you’ve lived with the cretins for the last 18 years. Who do you THINK is going to want to kill you?!?”
The train cabin turned a dizzying somersault and lay on its side. Rather amazingly nobody was seriously injured. Or at least, nobody seriously involved in this narrative was hurt. We may have lost one or two conductors on the way. but what’s a conductor or two between friends? Rav and Berian, ungrateful gits, have just pulled themselves out of the interior of the freshly trashed train coach with both body and sword still held together. Which is a good thing, or at least I’m trying to believe it is. Off in the distance they see...what? city skyline? town lights? the burning bonfire of somebody’s homestead gone up in sulphorous dragon fire? I’ll figure something out. In the meantime, they can go stare at the skyline full of stars while the rest of the train combusts spectacularly behind them.