FIVE MINUTES AGO
You slip down silent temple hallways, clutching Kiira’s dagger in your fist. One wrong step, one stray sound, will reveal your presence. You know your failure is inevitable, but still you edge along the wall as quietly as you can. Aware of what awaits you, you proceed as if you are not.
There is no avoiding it: your story will end with you dead at the feet of a god. Your divinations have told you this. There is no ambiguity. The portents float at the edge of your vision, haunt your dreams, shake themselves free with each throwing of the bones.
Size / Zoom
In the soft brown of early morning, my brother’s penmanship was always sharp against the rising sky. Other scribes handled their quill-spears with more grace, perhaps. My brother looked as though he was warring with the horizon, the ribbons of ink rising like jagged smoke from the tip of his quill-spear. But what he wrote was clear.
Now he has gone.
They say that from the cities of the Brittle Terrain, a full day’s journey behind us and away from the horizon, it is difficult to see our writing at all, impossible to make out the names of God we scribe onto the sky’s parchment. Yet from where we work, at the edge of the eastern horizon, where the sky rises up from below in a continuous wave, the vertical columns of script do not begin to fade until they’ve reached the level of the lowest clouds. At that height, the curling loops and slanting lines of our worship finally blur to become a rising braid of ink. I try to imagine how it looks from the cities, the ink o
Size / Zoom
Loren’s brother-in-law fell sick six weeks after the last rack-and-pinion train departed for the base of the mountain and three weeks after winter closed over the mine like a frozen diamond pane. A layer of cloud hid the world far below, gray and silver in the winter-long night. Thunderheads drifted past, stately as tall ships under starshine, and you could watch them rise and collide and throb with lightning until your eyes froze over. Which took about eight seconds.
And in the stone hollow of a second-shift barracks within the mountain’s peak, Loren tried to do what he’d seen the old witch do. Start with the pulse, he thought. That’s simple enough.
Size / Zoom
Posters were going up all along Beetlebrass Street that morning. Some enterprising sergeant had put the city’s street children to work, paying them perhaps in haepennies to dash along its undulating cobblestones and paste writs of requisition across every storefront. Ustuus Creeg stopped to retrieve a loose one before the wind took it.
Save the last bite for Private Cly it read, referencing the bashful soldier shown accepting a slice of pie from a pretty girl. The dictate below was still legible, ordering a tenth of every household’s organic intake reserved for military seizure, and offering examples such as breadcrusts, fruit cores, soup bones, anything nutrient-rich.