Image by Nabila Art

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.

In search of an elusive Beast, and prodded by a pushy sword, Gina and her brother Zack had boarded a coach bound for eastern Frenga. Jarred awake by recurring prophetic dreams, they’d ceased to sleep.

Zack’s threadbare senses were bleeding together. Every color he smelled, every cow’s moo he tasted, tugged at his sanity. It was even worse for Gina. Her brain turned everything she saw into a waking nightmare: tree limbs stabbed at her eyes, worms crawled into her ears. Both began to think sleep, even sleep filled with heartless monsters and soulless Dark Tinkurs, would be better than this. And then they saw the Inn.

Fashioned from rosy pines, blue-gray boulders, and handsome ironworks, the Inn at the Eastern Ridge was on the edge of Forest Cítuclar, overlooking the fortress of D’nair a mile below. Gina stood cliffside, gazing down at it, desperate to crowd out the images in her mind.

“Are you there, Rhema?” she shouted, but the Queen of the Fae didn’t answer. “Please take this away. I can’t do it! I’m sorry, OK? Why isn’t that enough for you? I can’t kill this stupid Questing Beast or save this stupid world, or any other stupid world because I’m just a stupid little girl! Why don’t you get that?”

Looking down at D’nair, she remembered the insane chieftain with the sixteen eyes. He was from D’nair. And there was something else: B’frona had accused her of wanting to take the little dragon she’d named Puff to D’nair. Puff! Every cell in her body longed to curl up in that big luxurious bed in the Dragon Manse with his protective tail draped across her, drifting in dreamless sleep. “Oh, Puff!” she sighed. And then she heard a sound that made her heart freeze.

It was the most hideous noise she’d ever heard, clearly not human. Her spine turned to ice, the blood drained from her legs, her knees began to buckle. But somehow she had the presence to reach for her broadsword. Part of her was actually glad. At least now it would be over. She whirled around, assuming a wide-legged side-stance, exposing minimum body surface just as her trainer Buigor had taught her. And there before her stood…

Buigor and her brother.

“Zack? You freaking little monkey-faced—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! It wasn’t my idea. It was Buigor’s.”

“You think it’s funny to sneak up on me and–”

“Buigor said you needed testing! He said it was the only way to know.”

The big swordsman re-created the sound he’d made a moment ago.

Gina stormed between them, punching each in the stomach as she went.

“Did you see that?” Buigor pantomimed.

“She’s ready!” 

φ

Thoughts: Waiting for the thing you dread is nearly always worse than the thing itself.

To read the next episode, click here.