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The Wishing Map is a full-length fantasy that is being posted episodically at this site. To read the previous episode, click here. To read the entire novel, begin here.

On a mountain in a world called Ismara, Zack Dore had stumbled into the nest of an immense bird named Aviar. Convinced Zack was a “Gerdan” invader, the creature had decided to remove one of his limbs!

“Oh, God, please! I’m not…a gergun…I don’t even know…” Zack tried not to cry, sensing that the two-storey bird would respect him less if he did. For some reason, he wanted this creature’s respect almost as much as he wanted to live. Hot tears singed the corners of his eyes. “And I don’t know how I learned your language. I just did.”

“You can’t be that stupid!” the bird screeched. And then, to improve Zack’s memory, Aviar picked him up by the swimsuit and dangled him over the six totomur drop. “Never seen a manlet fall that far. Think you’d bounce?”

“No, no, please! I’m not from Gerd, I’m from Middleton, Ohio, and I don’t know how I got here. I just fell out of a Map, or through it or something, from another world.”

This last phrase caught Aviar off guard. He involuntarily jerked his claw–and Zack involuntarily exited his swimsuit.

Oddly, Zack’s principle thought as he plunged into the void was that he didn’t want to die naked. Death seemed imminent for at least the third time now, and he’d gained a sort of numbness to it; in fact, he was so tired of fear and freezing that he almost welcomed it.

He’d fallen several hundred feet when a shadow loomed up beneath him; he assumed it was a jagged outcropping upon which he would be dashed senseless before bouncing off and continuing his deathly descent. He began to unconsciously picture his summery-warm house in Middleton, and whispered the words:

“I wish I could go home.”

The huge shadow Zack had seen wasn’t a jagged outcropping, it was Aviar. He’d flown off the ledge and straight down much faster than a falling middle-schooler. It was his intention to catch the manlet on his back, bite off one of its legs, and then return it as a freshly de-limbed warning to its Gerdan village.

But his intentions were moot. The manlet was no longer there. There’d been a shimmer in the air just as the human was about to land on Aviar’s back. The bird had swung around and looked up. For a fraction of a vemtomil (less than a second) he saw two feet shooting upward at an impossible speed. And then nothing. Gone. Just like that.

Aviar was taken off guard, but not completely, for when the human had spoken about a “Map” and about being from “another world,” a memory had floated to the surface of his millennial mind. It brought both trepidation and hope to his ancient heart: if the manlet wasn’t Gerdan, and if this incident was what it appeared to be, then it had arrived:

“The Time of an End and a New Beginning.”

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Thoughts: Is it possible that what seem like random occurrences in your life are part of some greater plan?  Is it possible you were born “for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14)

To read the next episode, click here.