Category: Stories Expanded Version

From: Acceptance of the Storm 299 THE MORNING THE SHELL SPOKE The dream, as always, ended before it explained itself. Ysolde had long since stopped expecting otherwise. Dreams were not scholars. They did not organize their arguments, cite their sources, or arrive at conclusions in any order a waking mind could follow. They simply came,…

From: ExtraHidden 317 of Melodious Companionship Segment 1: The Lute Surfaces The music hall had come down on a Tuesday. Orvyn knew this because the baker two doors east had told him so, unprompted, while he was setting up his survey markers in the early grey of the morning. She had said it the way…

From: Baba Yaga 137 of Affinity   The Weight of Wanting The forest does not call to her. That is the thing she cannot explain to anyone who asks, and no one asks anymore because she has stopped giving them the opportunity. It does not call. It does not beckon. It simply exists at the…

From: Shamanism 119 of the Fault Readers Bindings The First Tremor Beneath the Cook-Fire The broth had been good that morning. Ash-Tongue remembered this afterward, the way you remember the last ordinary thing before an ordinary day stops being ordinary. The broth had been good. She had made it herself, the way she always made…

From: Targeted Illusion 37 of Welcoming Acceptance Segment 1 The Grove That Remembered Itself The road into Ylleria had been losing itself for the better part of two hours. Thessaly Vorne noticed this the way she noticed most things — not immediately, not with alarm, but with a growing accumulation of evidence that eventually reached…

From: Whisperwine Reduction 316 SEGMENT 1: THE HALL OF UNMET EYES The candles had been burning for three hours and not one of them had guttered. Vorrath noticed this the way he noticed everything at his own table — not with surprise, not with pleasure, but with the quiet registration of a detail that confirmed…

From: Sentient Essence Weaver 8104 of the Whispering Zephyr Segment 1 The Hands That Remember Heat The forge had been cold for four years, three months, and some number of days that Karek-Amun had stopped counting because counting had begun to feel like a form of self-injury he could not justify continuing. He stood in…

From: Dream 861 of Autonomy Segment 1 — Thresh Unmade-Child The Weight of What You Could Have Done Instead The morning had been unremarkable in the way that mornings in the Hollow Reefs tend to be unremarkable — which is to say that it was full of small extraordinary things that everyone present had agreed,…

From: Dreamweaver 17 of Restless Visions The Night the Stars Forgot to Move The candle had burned to its last quarter inch before Eolande finally stopped pretending he intended to read. The book lay open across his knee, the same page it had been on for the better part of two hours, the words sitting…

From: Cephalopoda Insecta Osteichthyes Amphibia 442 The Weight of the Shift That Never Ends The red-sun was going down the way it always went down over Pepsis-Gigas — slow, and without apology, dragging its light across the tops of the glass-reeds like a man pulling a blanket off a bed he has no intention of…

From: Morphic Oozes Segment 1 — The Ledger Before the Labyrinth The candle had burned down to its last quarter inch. Thessaly Vorne noted this the way she noted everything: without sentiment, without delay, and with the immediate practical implication filed before the observation had fully resolved. She had three more candles in the left…

From: Aquaflow Acupuncture Bracelet Segment 1 THE GEM THAT REMEMBERED DROWNING There is a particular quality to silence at the bottom of things. Not the silence of absence — that is merely quiet, and quiet is a shallow creature that lives near the surface where light still meddles with the water and fish dart through…

From: Vexaron Segment 1: The Forge That Would Not Choose The forge had burned before his father’s father drew first breath and it would burn after the last of them was dust and the name Defiant Spears was a thing that only water remembered. Growlak knew this the way he knew the weight of his…

From: Targeted Illusion 42 of Abandonment   The Last Night the Workbench Was Warm There is a form that must be completed, Othor knew, when a work of significant arcane construction reaches its terminal phase. The form in question was not a physical document, though the Order had certainly produced one — Form 7-Gamma, Notification…

From: Mantaxolotlopus 73 Segment 1: The Delta Remembers Before the Names There is a memory that does not belong to me. I know this because when it arrives, it arrives without language. It comes before thought has learned to shape itself into words, before the part of me that was once a cartographer on a…

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…