Hirrush sat down on the bed beside Hirrush, laid back, closed his eyes, and dipped into the mental realm. He looked over his cottage, spent some time making sure that everything was in order, and then breached into Hirrush’s mind. He found Hirrush sitting on the edge of a cliff, looking out onto calm clouds. […]

Sofia had visited the seedy parts of Marurbo before, hiding under her cloak while seeking out spirits, but none so bad as this. There were parts of the capital city where wages were low and troubles were high, where the city guards treaded lightly and people kept their mouths shut when questioned about a crime. […]

“Forward movement,” said Henry. Sofia had thought that the world had gone silent when she’d used the power of the Boreal Crown. This was something else entirely, silence that left only the sound of her beating heart and the rustle of her hair. Yet it was familiar somehow, and stirred up a memory of — […]

Henry had given Sofia the magical bracelet to smooth out his passage through the walls, then she had left with it. Sister Verna had locked the door behind them when she’d left, after a brief but angry questioning about how it was Henry had gotten out of his room. Leaving the room through the door […]

To say that Ventor was fast was an understatement. After thinking about it for quite some time, Miriam came to the conclusion that the only thing she had ever seen that was faster than Ventor was an arrow in flight. Ventor could move more quickly than every other point of comparison; he was faster than […]

The sitting room had become Rowan’s private place. It was the site of his first foray into disobedience against Ibrahim, as well as the accomplishment of a martial victory in the mental realm over his old master. Both those victories were private ones, never to be shared with another living soul, which made the sitting […]

The small, unassuming cottage with a sod-covered roof looked just the same as it ever had. Omarr and Hirrush stood back to look at their work, which mostly amounted to making sure that their work couldn’t be seen. Some of the wards would be activated only in the event of an emergency, but they had […]

Rowan sipped his wine across from his father, not looking at the conspicuously absent chair to his left. They were eating in the Blue Room, as was custom. Dinner was venison steak and mashed yams, both done with an expertise that elevated them above their status as common peoples’ food. For the first three days […]

Ventor was called into throne room on a particularly bad morning. One of the serving girls, a freshly hired one, had brought breakfast to his room by mistake. He had stared that the tray of food. The sausages had been fried enough that the skin had cracked, revealing grease and juice inside. There were six […]

After a year had passed, Rowan had gone far beyond what Psychic Superiority had to say on the matter of dark mentalism. It was clear now that Walther Cremlau had only been picking at the edges of an idea far larger than himself. From the marginalia of the book, Rowan doubted that the man had […]

Rowan had learned much about dark magic through first principles. First and foremost, the social aspects of dark magic must largely be about trust. If he followed a ritual which had been described in a book, he had to take the author at their word that their descriptions were full and correct. If any of […]

The castle finally got a spirit when Sofia was fifteen years old. She had imagined the spirit for a long time. Most of the books said that every place and every thing had a spirit, from the cobbler’s shop to the temple gardens, and from the forests to the trees. The spirits themselves stayed in […]

She knew the names of all of her guards, but she only called them by their nicknames. Walrus had a thick mustache, and Egg was completely bald. Leech was pale, like the blood had been drained from his face, and Cyclops had a scar across one eye, though he could see with both. One of […]

Sofia was faster than him, and that bothered Henry. She sprinted across the short grass with bare feet, her red hair floating on the wind behind her. He couldn’t keep up. He’d thought that she would tire herself out, but instead she just kept running, running in circles around him, or running away from him, […]