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.

Freshly-saved from drowning, and in search of an elusive Questing Beast, Gina and her brother Zack had boarded an eastbound coach.

It had only been four days, Gina suddenly realized, since their return to Ismara, less than an hour-and-a-half in their own world. But if they stayed long enough, Momandad would find their beds empty and frantically call 911. And meanwhile, if the double moon disappeared, they would never be able to return home at all!

The coach was uniquely Frengan, with its six ironwood wheels and twin tea-kettle cabins. It stood high off the ground and was enameled with gauzy pastels of majestic dragons and virtuous knights. And, as if to complete the picture, it was pulled by four muscular stallions who, if they were human, could have posed for romance novel covers.

The countryside changed as they rode east. At first there were marshy plains peppered with placid herons; then sandy cliff faces fringed with wheaty “hair;” and finally stands of parchment-barked trees full of taxi-yellow finches whose collective eeps could be heard for miles.

The dirt road was deeply rutted, and the massive leather straps on which the two cabins rested, transferred every lurch and thud to the passengers inside. Gina worked vigilantly to keep her Frengan history book steady.

Zack listened as his sister read aloud, but after the first hour grew incurably twitchy. So when the coach stopped to pick up two women and a platypus-like merchant (a Knowing Beast), he climbed up top and sat down beside a swordsman who’d been hired to protect the passengers. “I’m Zack.”

The scar-covered swordsman opened his mouth, displaying a meaty stub where his tongue used to be, and then turned his head from side to side, showing the melted variegated lumps of flesh that had rendered him deaf as well.

“Whoa!” Zack reacted.

The man grinned and pantomimed running someone through, as if to say, “It’s OK, I got even.”

From her history book, Gina learned about the two major epochs of the pre-Ismaran era: Frenga had originally been occupied by independent tribes made up of Humans, Low Faeries, and Knowing Beasts.  Then Holosian hordes swarmed over the land, beginning the Thousand Year Reign of the Droiklefs (“Masters of Everything”).

Finally, in the year 10,506, local chieftains and warlords broke the back of the Holosian Empire. But they continued to war against each other for the next four hundred years. One people, however, the Zshinian Prophets, dwelt in perpetual harmony, and under their guidance The Ten Kingdoms of Is’mara (“Way of Peace”) were established. But one day, in a time of great testing, it was prophesied, “Two Strangers” would come and either destroy or save the Ten Kingdoms. “And those two strangers,” Zack and Gina had been told,

“Are you.”

φ

Thoughts: Ultimately, it’s what we are that matters. And what we are comes down to whose we are.

To read the next episode, click here.