Source: paintable.cc

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.

Zack had been spirited away by naims (gnomes), and now his sister Gina, who’d accidentally gotten drunk on meeth, was about learn he was gone.

Gina wished two things when she awoke that morning. First, to know where she was. Wish granted. It only took a moment to recall the events of the previous night: their fall into Ismara, the watery rescue, her six trips to the meeth bowl. Second, she wished she were dead, because she had the worst headache in human history.

She also had the dry heaves, the thing that happens when there’s nothing left in your stomach and your body decides to throw itself up. It was late afternoon by the time she dragged herself off of her straw-filled mattress, pseudo-barfed, and stumbled down the stairs of the Screaming Spiffwit Inn.

At the bottom, she met the innkeeper’s daughter. While no more than ten, the girl had the longsuffering air of someone who regularly ministers to people less wise than themselves. She had a jug of water in one hand and a bucket in the other.

“Wa…er!” Gina belched.

The girl handed her the jug. “Slow now, an’ not too much.”

Gina chug-a-lugged the whole thing.

The girl handed her the bucket.

“Why the bu—?” Gina began, then hurled the newly-acquired contents of her stomach into it.

After she chewed some sort of seaweed, her headache and nausea began to subside. She was shocked to learn that her brother had disappeared during the night. Had he been kidnapped by the kindly fisher folk Maerith and Shelcor? And if so, why hadn’t they taken her? Gina felt an irrational twinge of jealousy.

The innkeeper told her they’d be back that evening; she had no choice but to wait. She ate some stale bread, chewed some more medicinal seaweed, and almost threw-up when she smelled a batch of meeth brewing in the kitchen. Why would anybody ever get drunk on purpose? she wondered.

Shortly after sundown, Maerith and Shelcor, along with other fisher-folk, dragged their seal-tailed sloop ashore. And then a peculiar spectacle began.

Until now, the spiffwits had stood like living statuary about the town. But as fisher folk emptied their nets of thousands of rock-like mollusks onto the beach, the strange little birds rushed forward, and began screaming and dancing on the shells! Gina burst out laughing. They sounded just like the shrieking pre-teen girls she’d seen at pop concerts when she was—well, when she was one of them. The shells cracked, revealing…

Fliffers, said the innkeeper’s daughter. “None but the fisher folk can harvest ‘em, an’ none but the spiffwits can open ‘em. ‘Tis the Balance.”

“The Balance,” Gina repeated.

φ

Thoughts: Sometimes we catch glimpses of a mystical Balance that’s bigger than us, and yet includes us whether we know it or not.

To read the next episode, click here.