Category: WorldBuilding

From: Druze 483 of Awful Dread The Weight Before the World Had Words Before there was a name for what I was, there was the turning. Not wind. Not yet. Wind is a thing that moves between places, a thing that has a from and a toward, a thing that knows the difference between here…

From: Empathic Embrace The Valley Remembers Blood The valley had a name once. Khera had heard it spoken by the old ones who came before the fighting, the ones with the root-deep patience of people who had lived long enough in one place to name things carefully. They called it Verath, which meant, depending on…

From: Crown of Moonlit Tempest 1774 Segment 1: THE COLOR OF SMOKE OVER KETH VAAL There is a color that fire makes when it has been burning long enough to forget what it was burning. Not orange. Not the clean gold of a forge properly fed. This is older than that, darker at the edges,…

From: Menu 9 Philosophers Stone Soup The Ink That Preceded Memory — being an account drawn from the personal record of Carenthis, Keeper of the Old Text, as transcribed from the sigil-memory of the Skull Cap, date unverifiable by conventional means — There is a library in the second sub-level of the Archontic Vault of…

From: Voidblade Segment 1 The Parchment That Should Not Have Survived The dust in this place had a texture that was almost deliberate, which was the first thing that was wrong. Not wrong in the way of structural instability, though there was that also — the left-hand wall of the antechamber had come away from…

From: Spines 842 of the Auditors Bristle I. The Ledger Before the World I had supposed, in the final tally of my breathing years, that death would present itself as a closing of accounts — a ruled line drawn beneath the last entry, a summation, a balance carried forward into whatever silent archive awaits the…

From: Tengrism 842 of the Gale Step Rapier   1. The Morning Before the Sky Broke The morning the sky broke was a morning like every other morning, which is the whole point, and I need you to understand that before I tell you about any of the rest of it, because if you do…

From: Tengrism 741 of the Wind Thread Duelist 1. The Duel at Dawn’s Edge The grass was wet. It was always wet at this hour. Kirral stood where the grass met the stones and waited. The sky had not yet decided what color it would be. Gray, perhaps. Or that pale thing that came before…

From: Animal Spirit 47 of the Fox Hunter Segment 1: The Last Light Before Dark The sun dropped below the canopy. Kereth stopped walking. He had stopped three times in the last hour. Each time he told himself he knew where he stood. Each time he lied. The forest had been his territory for fifteen…

From: Coglings Segment 1: The Dust Settles Wrong The light comes in wrong through the fractured skylights, slanting at angles that make Vrisk’s compound vision ache, each of the 1,847 pairs of eyes registering the discontinuity differently, so that the workshop appears to shimmer and pulse with contradictions—here brightness, there shadow, everywhere the slow dance…

From: Echoing Blade 67 Segment 1: The Mountain’s Birth Song The mountain did not give up its secrets easily. Kael had been climbing for three days. His water was gone. His rations were nearly finished. The wind cut through his cloak like it had a personal grudge against warmth. But the song kept pulling him…

From: Symphony Automata 1. The Weight of Starlight He woke in darkness and the darkness was singing. Not singing as mortals understood the word. Not melody shaped by throat and tongue and the crude mechanics of breath. This was the sound of spheres turning in their prescribed courses. The mathematics of eternity given voice. He…

From: Kahuna 555 of the Unbroken Testimony Segment 1: The Weight of Dust The dawn came the same as it always had, indifferent to ownership, indifferent to papers signed and sealed and stamped with the weight of law that was not law but theft dressed in the clothing of respectability, and he stood there in…

From: Radiant Wingguards 1. The Descent of Stars The firmament did shatter like unto glass most precious, and through that rending did I fall—nay, not fall, for such crude terminology doth ill befit the majesty of celestial transit—I descended, yea, with purpose most divine did I pierce the veil between the eternal realm and this…

From: Serenity Breeze recipe 1. The Weight Before Dawn The night did not begin as nights usually did, with the slow loosening of the world and the soft surrender of thought. Instead, it gathered weight. It pressed down, gently at first, like a hand resting too long on the shoulder, familiar enough to be ignored…