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Submitted to Contest #336
Licorice is more flexible than other confections, which makes it stronger under pressure. That was why the first court had been built from it.Between the first castings of the realm and the final dissolving of the First Confectioner, licorice had proven itself again and again. Where other substances demanded balance to survive, licorice endured imbalance and remembered it. The Sugarborn said that every structure made from it carried the echo of what it had resisted. That echo was strong. It was also a warning.Amareth, the first court’s confe...
Submitted to Contest #335
Korax first noticed the man because Apollo refused to step forward.The horse did not rear or shy. He simply stopped on the mountain pass, one forehoof lifted, ears angled toward the Shattered Marches forward and below, where life grew thin and the Orc Realm never quite settled.Korax followed Apollo’s gaze.The man stood between two mountain spruces, hands visible, posture calm in the way of someone who had never been surprised by danger. He wore a coat too light for the cold. No breath showed when he exhaled.Korax did not draw his sword.“Move...
Korax first heard the rule years ago, when he was young.Don’t go into the Ghostwood after dark. If a stranger there speaks to you, keep your mouth shut, keep your eyes down, and run the fast way home.He filed it away with the other border cautions parents used to keep children alive in hard times.When a rider reached Meadowvale Castle and asked for Sir Korax by name, Korax was already in the courtyard with Apollo’s reins looped over a gloved hand. Frost clung to the rider’s beard. His eyes avoided the carved saints and banners, as if looking...
Submitted to Contest #334
I smelled the wet wood, thick mud, and old hay. I smelled the rain, which had its own taste of stone being ground down. I smelled the wrongness under all of it. Korax’s hands were cold through my mane. He patted the place where my neck meets my shoulder, the way he does when he wants me to believe he is calm.“I know,” he murmured. “Every bone in me says ‘bad idea’ too.”He said it to me like I was only a horse, like I could only understand tone. He forgot, as he always forgot when the road pressed him thin, that I understand the world the way...
Archive: Library Catalog EntryRealm: AitherionInstitution: The Enchanted LibraryWritten by: Lyr-Ves, Curator of the Seventh VaultRecord: Self-Inscribing Codices, Daily Batch 44No courier. No portal flare. No warning chime from the threshold wards. At the third bell, ten codices appeared on the intake table as if they had always been there, and the room had just then agreed to notice them. The table’s lacquer frosted in a perfect rectangle around each codex, and the frost did not melt. Each one was dry. Each one smelled faintly of the place i...
Submitted to Contest #333
I had just finished preparing dinner for myself, as usual. The knife was rinsed and drying on the rack. The pan cooled on the back burner, a thin sheen of oil catching the light. Steam clung to the kitchen windows in pale crescents.My house always felt bigger than it actually was, like a toddler who wanted desperately to be a big kid. Defiant. Delusional. Confident. Not too much unlike myself.Though I was in my thirties, I still moved through rooms as if I needed permission. As if someone might appear in a doorway and tell me I was doing it ...
Korax and Greybeard had been traveling north of the Ghostwood, following one of the old ridge paths that only rangers and worse things remembered. The land rose unevenly there, stone thrusting through soil like knuckles, forcing pine and spruce to grow crooked. Wind carried the scent of new snow and old resin, and the cold had a bite that didn’t hurt at first, only once it had worked its way beneath skin. It was the sort of place Greybeard favored for instruction.Apollo moved, carrying Korax with steady confidence, the black stallion placing...
Submitted to Contest #332
The first thing Korax noticed was that the ice over Frostlake didn’t quite reflect the sky.Snow lay piled in drifts along the shore, but the lake itself was a broad, black sheet, smooth as glass, with thick veins of cloudy white frozen in its depths. The mountains loomed around it, their shoulders buried in winter. Above, the sky was a pale, hard blue that begrudgingly promised a clear day.Apollo snorted, his breath steaming as Korax guided the black stallion down the last rocky slope toward the makeshift camp. Halfway down the slope, the wi...
Submitted to Contest #331
Korax woke to the sound of falling snow.It was a soft, constant hush against the tent canvas, a high-mountain whisper that had wormed its way into his dreams and dragged him up from them. The fire outside had burned down to embers; Apollo’s occasional snort sounded louder than the crackle of flame.He pushed himself up and ducked out into the cold night.The camp was a small island of life in a sea of white and dark. Three tents with his men sleeping in uneven heaps with cloaks pulled over their heads, chasing scraps of warmth. One low fire wi...
Snow hammered the walls of Hearthwatch Fort hard enough to fill the arrow slits.Korax sat close to the long central fire, palms stretched toward the heat, watching sparks rise into the rafters. The hall smelled of smoke, wet wool, and a faint tang of orcish tallow from the other side of the hearth. Humans and orcs both hunched over bowls, shoulders formed in the same exhausted curve, their respective armor stacked against the far wall in untidy rows.Outside, the winter wind howled. Inside, someone was telling a story.“—and then Sir Edric spu...
Submitted to Contest #330
We could have ignored the lantern, and kept riding.It swung outside the Blackthorn Inn, creaking softly in the rain. The glass panes glowed a warm, inviting yellow that looked almost obscene against the bruised-purple sky. Beneath it was a painted sign, a thorny branch with a black bird, swaying on rusted hooks.Apollo, the midnight-black stallion, stamped and tossed his head, flanks twitching.“I know,” Sir Korax murmured, patting his neck. “Every bone in me says ‘bad idea’ too.”The road behind them was a smear of mud between dark trees. The ...
The letter Sir Korax received from Duke Wellington that afternoon was as short and blunt as the man himself:Bram is past service. See to it.No condolences. No sentiment. Not even the courtesy of a signature.Just: See to it.Korax stared at the words a moment longer than they deserved, then folded the scrap of parchment with care and slipped it into his pocket. The stone corridors of the keep were cool and dim as he made his way down to the stables, boots echoing on old flagstones that had heard too many orders like this one.The stables smelle...
“Sir Knight, if I jump, do I land in our world or somewhere else now?”Korax tightened his grip on Apollo’s reins and looked up.The old watchtower loomed above the trees, a broken tooth of stone rooted in the hill. High on its crumbling lip, a thin figure stood outlined against a washed-out sky, arms spread a little for balance, hair whipped flat by the wind. A boy. No more than twelve.“Not the kind of greeting I usually hope for,” Korax muttered.He swung down from the high saddle. Apollo tossed his head, dark mane rippling.“Stay,” Korax told...
The second time Korax the Human Knight met Grath the Orc Warchief, the orc didn’t even bother reaching for his axe.He sat on a burned siege tower halfway sunk into the mud of the Shattered Marches, elbows on his knees, staring at the empty battlefield as if watching a play that had already bored him. The air above the ruins hung with a thin veil of ash, the kind that never quite settled, a pale dust drifting in slow spirals, catching in lashes and beards, softening the jagged edges of rusted steel. Corpses had long since been taken by crows ...
Submitted to Contest #329
I was the night-shift cleaner at St. Andrews Hospital. Every night when I cleaned, I made my way to the seventh floor, to the never-used, practically abandoned Room 714… the room where my younger brother died, years ago. Room 714 had been empty for months, but every night, after about midnight, when I went in to sweep, clean, and mop, the window was fogged up on the inside.Some nights, I heard a soft tapping from behind the glass. Like it was trying to tell me to come look. Any time I wiped away the fog and looked outside, there was only the...
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