The rest of the interview had been a blur for Howard. He had left the testing room from a side door that brought him to the street on the far side of the test center. Well, at least he had been right about one thing during his talk with Susan this morning. The bark of [...]
The din in the aptitude test center’s waiting yard was deafening. Stepping down from the family carriage, Howard entered a sea of hundreds of bodies. Youths from surrounding villages without permanent test centers of their own flooded the city twice per seasonturn. Here, they vied against the young men and women of Westrim for admission [...]
Several glasses and a pile of gold coins later, Howard sauntered back to the family homestead with what he felt was an admirably steady step. Of course the edges of his vision were disturbingly blurred, but he’d felt worse. Like all the most affluent merchants in Westrim, his family’s estate was nestled in its own [...]
The Journeyman’s Jug was never dull. That was why Howard liked it so much. As the name suggested, it was always packed with apprentices and recent journeymen grads from the two guild schools in Westrim. The Merchant’s Guild Academy was right around the corner on Landfall Lane. So naturally, Westrim’s wealthiest merchant sons and daughters [...]
Howard leaned hard on the tiller, reveling in the spray of sea foam across the smooth almond colored skin of his bare arms. The little sailcraft obligingly skimmed along the curling crests of blue-green waves. She was light as air, sleek as an otter, fast as the sea, expensive as pure sin, and Howard’s very [...]
Voices of the Deep Thirty ‘turns after the unification of the Fertile Plains under the Doormaker Council, the western provinces still resent the intrusion of the powerful mages from the east. In Westrim, a city effectively ruled by the Merchant’s Guild, use of magecraft is taxed to prevent unfair trade advantages, and to keep the [...]
The Cave of Tears was deep beneath the T’kulpa, Simon soon discovered. Fantastic and irregular shapes grew from the floor and roof of the natural cavern, sinuous sculptures reaching out from the living stone. Nodes of crystal studded the walls as they had in the passage above. They glowed with a soft warm light that [...]
The tribesman insisted on crossing the White Sea at night. “To be caught on the White Sea by the sun is certain death. Do not forget this warning.” They rested at the T’kulpa until a few hours after sunset. Simon took no chances. He had Gunther send a drone to the Citadel. The message tube [...]
The westward Migration skirted north of a towering line of dunes that were visible long before the weary travelers neared them. By mid day the dunes to the south resembled mountain foothills. By early afternoon they were an unscalable ridge of rock. Countless seasonturns of wind driven sand had sculpted eerie shapes in the bluff. [...]
They split the caravan at the Star Seekers’ winter Gathering. The argument had gone long into the night, but Simon had known how it must end. In exchange for the chance to move on to Guardian Village, the Guildmasters had agreed to abide the arbitration of the Council on the allocation of any apprentices Simon [...]
