Aetherial Wilds

Fantasy

The Emberstone Heir

Tamsin finds you with your hand inside the fallen oak. “If you are stealing firewood,” she says, “at least steal something we can lift.” She has brought a handcart and two bowls of barley stew. One bowl is covered with a saucer. She knows you forget to eat when you are angry.

Fantasy

Dragon-Rider’s Oath

The dragon chooses you while you are delivering flour. You have hauled a handcart up the east pass, and when Serev lands across the road you stagger backward into its sacks. Flour settles over his foreclaws. He looks at it, then at you. “That was not my intention.”

Fantasy

The Whispering Forest

The first voice uses your father's cough. You hear it while carrying the rent book past the southern trees. “After the harvest,” it says. You stop so abruptly that a loose payment leaf slides into the mud. Your father has been dead six years. He always said after the harvest when he meant he hoped you would forget.

Fantasy

Cursed Crown

The messenger dies while you are asking where it hurts. He has been trying to take off one boot. You get it loose after he stops answering. There is a small stone inside, and for several breaths you keep holding it as though it explains why he could not lie still. On the floor beside him is a crown wrapped in a kitchen towel.

Fantasy

Arcane Academy Hijack

Your final trial begins with a cracked cup. Steward Merrin asks you to warm its water without widening the fracture. You are Lysa, twenty, and have practiced this while the academy charged you for every coal. Before you touch the cup, the examination bell rings the wrong number of times.

Fantasy

The water beneath the table

The sea-stone begins knocking while you are trying to sell your surveying instruments. Three hard blows travel through the auction table. The buyer lets go of your brass divider. Under the table, a bowl of seawater climbs its own sides and spills onto his boots.

Fantasy

Something worth carrying

Benn’s case has worn a hollow into your shoulder before the midnight market appears. He used to carry it himself. Tonight he walks beside you, stopping often enough that you pretend to admire every interesting stone. “You can say you need a rest,” he tells you. You put the case down. Neither of you says whose rest it is.

Fantasy

The chair beneath the roots

Roe asks you to move his chair three inches to the left. You expect a mystical reason until he points to the drip falling on his knee. “Even a sacred tree leaks,” he says. You lift the chair while he grips its arms. Beneath his loose sleeves, his wrists are frighteningly thin.

Fantasy

The blade in the bread cloth

Your uncle Venn has wrapped your duel sword in the cloth he uses for bread. He says it keeps damp away. You recognize the stains from the kitchen table and suddenly want to be anywhere but the Moonvale weir, unwrapping a household object intended to make another household grieve.

Fantasy

The unanswered appointment

You have copied Ivo’s name onto three lists this week. Waiting for a bed. Waiting for a specialist. Waiting for news. On none of them is there a box for your brother’s habit of pretending he has already eaten so you will finish the soup. Tonight you leave him half the bowl and ask a nurse to watch him swallow it.

Fantasy

A map in the flour locker

Captain Ys finds the map while searching for the last flour sack. It is folded inside a previous owner’s false locker wall. She would prefer flour. Ari would prefer unpaid wages. You spread the thin brass sheet on the chart table and watch its engraved sky lanes catch the morning light. At their center is Sarth, the city omitted from every current route book.

Fantasy

The empty place in the stone

Namar has stopped in the middle of carving his own name into the city stair. You gave him permission to practice there because the first attempt on your workshop wall was too large. His unfinished final letter waits beneath a hand weighing more than your roof. On the landing above it, a child has put a toy cart against his motionless foot to keep it from rolling away.