The Adventure of the Demonic Ox
core novella 2025 World of the Five Gods
Record
| First published | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novella |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.35 (2,642 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 133 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781645243434 |
| Internal chronology | 16 |
Synopsis
Learned Penric hears of a suspected demonic possession afflicting an ox at his brother-in-law's bridge-building worksite and decides to treat the report as a useful opportunity rather than a mere nuisance. He brings along his adopted daughter and student sorceress, Otta, intending to use the case to tutor her in one of their essential Temple duties: identifying and safely restraining wild chaos demons before they can harm the people or animals hosting them. What starts as an instructional outing for Penric and Otta becomes more demanding than expected once their search leads them into difficult mountain terrain in pursuit of the elemental. The novella follows mentor and student as a routine lesson in demon-handling turns into an unexpectedly perilous expedition, testing Otta's growing skills under real pressure.
Where it sits
- Universe: World of the Five Gods
- Series: Penric & Desdemona core; position 14 of 16 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Lois McMaster Bujold
Notes
- From the series record (Penric & Desdemona): 16 novellas (2015-2026); publication order diverges from the author's own stated internal chronological order (recorded via internal chronology). Set roughly 150 years after The Hallowed Hunt and roughly 100 years before the Chalion novels. Classified Core Canon (not Expanded) because the novellas are marketed/sold as their own numbered series, are narratively load-bearing rather than side content, and the Hugo voting body treated them as full constituent parts of the universe when awarding the 2018 Hugo Best Series to the whole World of the Five Gods.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series Penric & Desdemona: position 14 of 16: previous Penric and the Bandit (2024) · next Testimony of Mute Things (2025)
- Internal chronology, within World of the Five Gods: position 16 of 19: previous Penric and the Bandit (2024) · next Darksight Dare (2026)
Sources
← World of the Five Gods dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.