I put the backpack in first, bidding it a fond farewell. I was less sure about giving it up than I was about giving up the Anyblade, but we’d had seven months to pull out everything we could want from it. Amaryllis had argued about it, but we hadn’t had a proper fight. The thing […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 99: Enough Rope to Hang Yourself
I emerged from the time chamber feeling drained, despite my best efforts. I ate well, I slept well, I exercised often, and by the end, none of it really seemed to help. My break from the chamber had lasted no more than two hours, if that, so it was effectively two solid months, back to […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 98: Letter 15
The letter was in a thick manilla envelope, which weighed about twenty pounds. Inside was a brick of lead, which accounted for almost all of the heaviness, plus two smaller envelopes. One said “read me first”, and the other said “read me second, or maybe don’t?”. The first was a single sheet of paper: Joon, […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 97: Rapping at my Chamber Door
After Grak and Amaryllis had gone back in the time chamber, Fenn and I settled into the chairs we’d set up outside for the wait. Zona created an illusory chair of her own, and gripped the arms of it as she smiled at us. My internal sense of time was almost completely shot, given the […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 96: A Portrait of the King as a Young Man
A lot of what I told Zona was background information on Earth, which she was only passingly familiar with by way of published writing on the dream-skewered. If you wanted to paint a picture of Arthur, you had to have the context of the world he’d grown up in, with comparatively endless information available at […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 95: Time Enough
When I’d come into the time chamber, I’d have been hard-pressed to notice that Amaryllis was pregnant. Toward the end, she was definitely showing, her belly enlarged and breasts a bit bigger (look, that’s just the truth, I’m not going to apologize for noticing). If she hadn’t been so fit, I might have mistaken it […]