Sera The inn’s door swung open with a stubborn groan, and I caught the first inhale of the air inside: bread, spiced sugar, and wood smoke. Two pomegranate trees and a black-plum grew straight up through the floor, roots splitting the flagstones like a magician’s trick. The trunks were thick, gnarled, and glossy as old…
Eryx The carriage ran smooth as glass over Demeter’s roads. I had my face near the window tracking every inch of the territory as we clipped through it. They called it Olympus, but I saw no gods here. Just row after row of commoner houses, their stone walls webbed with cracks. Between the houses, fruit…
Renat I spent the morning walking the through stores, my hands tucked deep in the pockets of a leather jacket, head down against the wind. Russian groceries, butcher shops, import delis all over Brooklyn. A jar of pickled herring here, a liter of kvass there, and, at every stop I got sweets. Maggie hadn’t eaten…
Sera We waited until the last round of drinks and the last story before slipping away. Nobody commented, but I caught the way Hughar’s eyes tracked us across the clearing, his mouth set in a line that said he’d give us exactly thirty seconds before cracking a joke Dan would cringe over. I didn’t look…
Maggie I hugged my knees to my chest and counted the knots in the hardwood floor. My ears strained to hear every molecule of sound on the other side, every whisper of floorboard, every crack of the logs shifting in the stove out in the main room. My stomach, meanwhile, was set to alarms-only mode.…
Sera The road gave way to pine needles and moss the color of ink just as the sky lost its last fingerhold on daylight. Everything in the Olympian woods grew bigger than its human equivalent, with silver pines so thick I would never be able to get my arms around one. Their branches stitched so…
The carriage never rattled. Good. My runes still held. The original carriage had been a loud, stinky disaster, so I had modified it until travelers could forget they were even moving. Through the crystalline windowpanes, the landscape staged a play. Every mile was a lesson in how far geology could be warped by thousands of…
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