Category: issue 5

The poets over-romanticize the stars. They name them for your gods; proclaim them grand and omniscient. You mortals always elevate what you cannot understand, casting the distant and mysterious as beings worthy of fear or desire. Think: things that go bump in the night, or the blacksmith’s apprentice who smells of cloves and fire and won’t look twice your way.

The clank of a metal-shod staff heralded the arrival of Melnock the wizard to the library of Babyl-no-Ktan.

The maps aren’t always right anymore. After the ocean took little nibbles out of the coastlines and then big gobbling bites, mapmakers were still trying, storms or no storms. But then there were bombs too, and any new maps stayed in the hands of their makers.

It was said that in the ancient days, heroes walked the earth, as common on the ground as worms after the rain. Of course, the last bit about worms was said only by Jinye’s grandmother, a weathered crag of a woman who considered herself the authority on ages past.