Category: Stories Expanded Version

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…

From: Clawed Boots 1. The Boot That Remembered the Forest The archive had been buried for longer than anyone had thought to measure. Thessaly knew this not from the depth of the collapse, not from the age of the stone that pressed down in patient, geological certainty above her head, but from the smell. She…

From: Sormorn Segment 1: The Night the Language Wept First Being the account of Vaelindra Nocthmere, recorded in the manner she would record it, which is to say incompletely, which is to say honestly Rain coming, then. Had been coming for three days — the kind of rain that announces itself through the joints before…

From: Abacatia Revitalizing Tea of Serenity Segment 1 — The Garden at the Edge of Evening There is a particular quality to the light in the valley at this hour that Aeliana has never found the words for, and she has been trying for thirty-one years. It is not gold. Gold is too aggressive a…

From: Celestial Map Scrolls 1. Title: The Scroll That Breathed The archive smelled, as all archives of its particular quality smelled, of slow defeat. Not the romantic decay of ancient libraries in stories told by people who had never worked in one — not the warm cedar and candlewax of scholarly imagination. This was the…

From: Radiant Cloak Segment 1: The Cloak That Was Not a Cloak Here is the thing about the Kelemus lowlands that nobody tells you before you go: the smell arrives first. Not the smell of stone, though there is plenty of that. Not the smell of old water finding new channels through rock that has…

From: Rune of Nimble Evasion Segment 1: What the Ground Remembers There is a kind of knowing that lives in the soles of the feet. Not in the mind, where knowing tends to be loud and argumentative and convinced of its own importance. Not in the heart, where knowing becomes feeling and feeling becomes story…

From: Serpent’s Scent Pouch The Weight of a Hollow Quill The tree had no business being there. Ssilvar knew this before he was close enough to see it clearly. He knew it the way he knew weather before weather arrived, the way he knew the difference between a silence that was empty and a silence…

From: Thunderbolt Blowgun 33 Segment 1: The Last Quiet Before the Pact The ice shelf extended thirty feet beyond the last tent, and Ossken had been sitting on it for what he estimated was two hours, though time had a way of becoming unreliable when the sky looked like this. There were no stars. There…

From: Seeker of Lost Knowledge Chapter VII: Whispers of the Unbound Segment 1 — “The Weight of a Rumor” Being the account of Thessaly Vorne, scholar of the Third Meridian, recorded in her own hand and submitted to the Codex without amendment The candle had burned to its last quarter-inch before Thessaly noticed it. This…

From: Frostfire Bomb   THE VINE THAT REMEMBERS COLD The collection belonged to a man named Osteri Pulcht, which was itself a kind of joke the world had made at someone’s expense. Pulcht was the sort of collector who acquired things without understanding them, which made him, paradoxically, one of the more valuable kinds of…

From: Nectar Scoop Lantern 719 Before the First Fruit The stylus moves before the mind decides to move it. That is how it has always been with the spirals. The hand knows when a new one is needed before the reasoning part of Ossivane Thuul has finished arguing that he has already recorded enough, that…

From: Arracha Regenerative Salve The Jar That Would Not Stay Buried The cellar smelled the way all old cellars smell — damp stone, old wood, the particular sourness of things that have been sealed away from air for longer than anyone planned. Breck had been in a hundred cellars like it. Port cities collected them…

From: Lamentia Segment 1: The Weight of Unbroken Joy From the Ash-Bound Chronicle of Unfinished Griefs, Entry the First, Catalogued by Sorrath of the Yearnari, in the period before Lamentia had a name, when the world was still wrong in the way that a bone set incorrectly is wrong — functional, bearable, and quietly ruinous.…