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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.

After Zack and his sister returned to the world of Ismara, a group of naims (gnomes) hailed him as their new Storysmith and took him to their vast forest city. It was glorious, but also a trap. Zack needed to get back to his sister.

He knew they would never simply let him go. They adored him too much. He’d have to find a way to escape. But how? And when?

The next day, he’d been told, the Naim Games would begin. A sort of naimish Olympics, the Games were held whenever a new Storysmith was revealed. They could, and often did, go on for weeks! So Zack decided he’d snatch a woodwain early the next morning before the Games began, and coax a strong stag into pulling him back to Kellansend.

During a starlit supper in the boughs, he inquired about the “decorative dagger” he claimed his aunt had lost. No naim had ever seen such an object, but after the feast they took him to the woodworks so he could see their tools. Every hundred feet or so each rainbowwood tree held a cache of woodworking instruments, saws and gouges, gimlets and awls, mallets and chisels of every shape and size. But there were other tools too: bludgeons, maces, pikes, lances, double-bladed broadswords, and razor-sharp knives that were anything but “decorative.”

“What are those for?”

“Ter protect ourselves,” said Cobber the master woodworker.

“From who?”

“You!” Cobber joked. “After all, yer are the first human ever ter see ‘em.”

“See what?”

“The Naimian Woodworks!”

“But the weapons—what are they for?”

“Ah…it’s been a long time, Master Zaggyzim…

“‘Never again shall naim take arm against naim!’ Rhema the Queen ‘a the Fae herself commanded it.” Cobber quickly changed the subject. On these ledges, he explained, naim carpenters cut, shaped, and prepared the precious rainbowwood planks. All human efforts at harvesting rainbowwood had failed because the external layers—bark, cambium, sapwood—didn’t contain stories. So only the naims, who were allowed by the trees themselves to dwell within, could obtain the true heartwood.

Now that he knew this, Zack wondered, would they ever let him go? To avoid any appearance of partisanship, he slept that night on a carpenter’s shelf half-way between the nether borough of the Root Naims and cloud-piercing district of the Crown-Naims. “Slept” is a relative term. The shelf was soft, lined in grook-down and pinestraw, but it was barely four feet wide, and the forest floor…

Was fifty storys below!

φ

Thoughts: Have you ever been let in on a secret that messily, even dangerously, entangled you in the lives of others?

To read the next episode, click here.