Category: Stories Expanded Version

From: Seiðr 42 of the Mortar of Mystic Grinds   Segment One: The Hut Where the Floor Drank Color The rain had been falling for two days when the boy came running, so I knew before I saw his face that he was bringing me something I would not want. I was sitting on the…

From: Gloomspiders Segment One: The Master’s Fitful Sleep There is a kind of waking that is not waking at all but rather a slow returning, the way a small boat drifts in toward a shore it has been pointed at for hours, and that is the kind of waking I came to that night. I…

From: Thunderous Tail Club Segment 1: “The Watching-Stones at the Mouth of the Cave” A note, before the matter proper. The reader will forgive an old man his preliminaries. I have been told, more than once, by superiors who possessed less patience than learning, that I begin too many of my chronicles with apologies and…

From: Taweez 402 of the Hallowed Detonator Segment 1: The Soot-Quarter Wakes Wrong This one was eating, which is, as any reasonable creature will tell you, the proper occupation of the hour before dawn. The fish-head was three days old and had been ripening in a particular gutter behind the brassmonger’s shop, where the runoff…

From: Dolphfroctospid 84 Segment 1: The Tremor Beneath The currents spoke today but their voices were wrong wrong wrong, twisted at the edges where sound should curl smooth like silk through water, and Veiltide felt the wrongness first in her vents, those bottlenose openings that translated the delta’s songs into meaning, into safety, into the…

From: Incanfu 472 of Whispered Foresight Segment 1: “The Breathing Mountain” The mountain breathed. Every morning it breathed, had been breathing since before Suyin’s mother’s mother cracked her first tooth on sugarcane stolen from Old Peng’s field, since before anyone thought to give the village a name, which they never did properly because a name…

From: Zar 539 of the Spirit Wind Navigator 1. The Carving of Winds The cave breathes. This truth Halime has known since first descending into these depths three lunar cycles past, when the surface world grew too loud with forgetting, when the voices of spirits became drowned beneath the clank and hiss of steam-carts, the…

From: Echoes of the Past Segment 1: Of the Summons at the Guild’s High Hall Herken, ye gentils all, and hold ye still, For I shal telle, with ful yvel wil And hevy herte, how on a morwe gray The Guild his summoneres sente that day. By Helios’ first and palest rising beam, Ere yet…

From: Taoist 734 of the Eight Breath Census Talisman Segment 1 The Gathering That Had Not Yet Named Itself There is a certain kind of fire that does not announce itself. It does not crackle with the eager snapping of fresh pine, nor does it roar upward with the confidence of celebration. It burns low,…

From: Hydrabeet Scorsalam 655 The First Torn Web The rope felt wrong before the sky was light enough to see by. Korath had hauled net-lines since he was seven years old, standing in the stern of his uncle’s flatboat with his arms burning and his feet sliding on the wet boards, learning the language of…

From: Ninjutsu 82 of Builders Veil Segment 1: The Night the Ley Line Sang Name was Fen. Not important, some would say. Worker is worker. Site has many. Tsukuroi always had many, in days when island still raw and half-built and hungry for hands. But Kurotaka knew the name. Knew the hands too — small…

From: Margin of Safety Draft Segment 1: The Night the Numbers Spoke The candle had been dying for an hour before Bernal noticed. He had a habit, long established and thoroughly unremarked upon by the colleagues who had long since gone home to their suppers and their beds, of not noticing the candle until it…

From: Livestock 837 of Solitary Guardian 1. The Silence Before the Call Being the First Account of Seraphel Dawnwhisper, Recorded in the Ink That Does Not Fade There is a quality of silence that most people have never encountered because most people have never been sufficiently alone to find it. Not the silence of a…

From: Staff of Arcane Mastery 1. The Humming Beneath the Stone She had been in ruins before. That was the thing about being old that no one who was young could properly understand. It was not the weight of years that accumulated. It was the weight of places. Every ruin she walked into now carried…

From: Insect 839 of Verdant Veil 1. The Day the Orchids Went Dark She had been counting them. This is the thing she would return to afterward, in the long hours when sleep would not come and the dark pressed against the walls of wherever they had made camp — the fact that she had…

From: Light 42 of Affinity 1. The Weight of What Was Given The morning came in the way that mornings do after catastrophe — indifferent, pale, and faintly obscene in its continuance. The light did not ask permission. It entered through the gap where the shutter had warped away from its frame and lay itself…

From: Hive 2049 of the Shifting Petal Swarm Segment 1: The Weight of the Electrum Gap There is a particular quality to the light that falls on the walled town of Verge-Selt in the hour before the market opens. Merchant-Voice has catalogued it across eleven separate observation visits, entering the data into the Consensus Ledger…

From: Dream Water Chronometer 681 Segment 1: The White City Before the Fire Being the first account of Lenas Vor-Ashket, recorded in his own voice, as best as memory and machine may reconstruct it It is a truth that a city has a smell before it has a name. Before you learn to call it…

From: Phlogiston Condenser 1. The Rust Dunes Do Not Forgive Cartographers Suppose you are a cartographer. Suppose you have been one long enough that the work has become a kind of weather — something that happens to you daily, that you move through without thinking, that shapes the texture of your skin and the angle…

From: Ledgerbrand of the Revealed Flame 917   The Granary Figures Do Not Lie Either The ledger was, by any reasonable measure, a beautiful document. Ardas Morvaine had been in the business of beautiful documents for forty-one years — had commissioned them, corrected them, rejected inferior versions of them, and on perhaps a dozen occasions…

From: Luminarine Maelstrom Mantle 742 The Quarrel at the Edge of Making The wind told me first. It always does. This is not a boast — it is simply the order of things, the way a healer’s hands know fever before the mind names it, the way a smith’s nose reads the composition of smoke…

From: Helm of the Laughing Fury 110 1. The Gray Comes on a Conjursday It came on a Conjursday, which I think was wrong of it. Conjursday is supposed to be for making things appear. That is what Mama told me when I asked why the days had such long names, and she said the…

From: Canyon Seared Medallions RCP825 1. The Smell of Rain That Did Not Come The canyon spoke in a language older than any the people had brought with them from their other lives, and Yeva had spent enough years listening that she no longer needed to translate. She simply knew. The way a healer knows,…

From: Spatial Illusion 42 of Emptiness The Weight of Empty Spaces The laboratory existed in that peculiar state between dusk and dawn, neither one thing nor another, which was precisely how Faeloria preferred it. Light, when it came at all, filtered through glass panes etched with symbols that fragmented illumination into geometries of shadow and…

From: Taweez 219 of the Kindred Soul The Valley Before the Forgetting I have spent, by my most conservative accounting, eleven years looking for a document that did not exist. This is not, I should clarify for the reader who has not spent eleven years doing something of this kind, as unusual as it sounds.…

From: Path of the Unbroken Circle 1. The Weight of the Mountain The ingot has been on the left corner of the workbench for fourteen days. Kaelen knows this because he has counted. He counts without deciding to count — it is a habit of the forge, the same habit that tells him without looking…

From: Charm 528 of the Threadweaver Talisman 1. The Field at the Edge of Everything Now, the thing about the field at the edge of the Varren farm was that nobody went there on purpose. You went there because you were going somewhere else and took a wrong turn, or because something you were chasing…

From: Luminescent Wings Delight Segment 1: The Flour on Her Hands Before the World Knew Her Name The dream came three nights running before Solvane admitted it was not going to stop. She did not, as a rule, put much stock in dreams. Dreams were the mind’s way of digesting what the day had left…

From: The Silvershade Sentinels 1. The First Wrong Note It was, Tarven Ashbrook would later reflect, the sort of morning that had absolutely no business being as beautiful as it was. The light came through the canopy of Eldralore in the particular way it only did in the early hours, when Helios had not yet…

From: Moonstone Tiara 1. The Tide That Remembered There is a kind of waking that is not waking. It comes before the body decides to move, before the mind has assembled itself back from wherever it goes in sleep. It is the oldest kind of consciousness — the kind that predates language and choice and…