The Ten Kingdoms of Ismara

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 it from the start, click here.

First, Gina and her brother had been sent to Ismara to retrieve a lost object. And now the mysterious Rhema had given her a sword with which to smite her “true enemy.” What next?

As they stepped onto the road to Kellansend, Gina looked up at the paint-splatter of evening stars and said, “Will we ever get home?”

“We’ve been in bed for forty-five minutes,” Zack replied.

“What?”

“If we were home, I mean. The time difference. It would have been like forty-five minutes ago that we said good night to Momandad.”

“Holy…” Gina felt the sword-harness pull with her movement. She’d finally gotten used to it, which was good because it was unremovable. She’d tried. Fourteen times. Each time she slipped the leather suspenders off her shoulders and undid the front buckle the suspenders would simply slide back into place, as though she’d been trying to remove her shoulders themselves.

Two spiffwits, sleepy from gorging on fliffers, were just settling into naps on either side of the Inn’s entrance as Gina and Zack tiptoed past. It felt like the night they’d first arrived, with villagers talking over steamy chowder, and fisher folk feasting on sea greens and freckled cheese.

Gina spotted Maerith and Shelcor at a seaside window. She was about to call to them, when someone started pushing at her back. “Zack, cool it!” But her brother was thirty feet away, pouring himself a mugful of meeth. Gina whirled around; no one was there. She felt another shove from behind and was about to turn again when a broad hand gripped her shoulder.

“It would be easier if yer walked frontways,” said Shelcor with a grin.

“Lee sister!” cried Maerith, throwing her arms around Gina.

Zack joined them, meeth in hand. Shelcor instructed the innkeeper to add Zack and Gina’s bill to his.

“No, you’ve already done so much for us,” Gina began.

“Yer are family,” said Maerith.

The moment they’d arrived, Gina had felt herself—literally—pulled toward the ocean, so she sat as near as possible to the window.

“Have yer a special fondness for the sea?” Shelcor asked.

“Not exactly…”

“It does!” said Zack, pulling Gina’s sword from its sheath and dropping it onto the table. It slid toward the window as if drawn by an invisible magnet.

Gina glared at her brother.

Zack glared back. “What? We gotta trust someone.”

Gina twisted her mouth. He was right. If not Maerith and Shelcor, who? She leaned in and whispered, “We came to find the Revealer. It’s the first of The Thirteen Objects.”

Maerith nodded.

“So, now all the world’s in your hands.”

To read the next episode, click here.

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Thoughts: Knowledge, resources, allies—all are essential for a quest. But if you can choose only one, choose allies.