The sun was peering bleary-eyed over the eastern horizon as Howard stood waiting on pier number eleven in Westrim’s busy bargeport. Two days had passed in a blur, and with each moment he drifted farther and farther away from the life he had taken for granted.
Elise had kept him housebound the entire time. It [...]
Howard sat listlessly on the veranda, watching the stars wheel overhead. The evening rush of noise from the city had subsided to a quiet murmur. The slow pulse of the city beat on his senses from the east, while the rolling breakers of the sea ground at them from the west. The whispering of [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
