Photo by Marco Bekk

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.

Two hours after her first sword practice, Gina crawled, every muscle moaning, into the coach’s empty front cabin and buried herself in her book of Frengan history. Her mood began to lighten when she read about Farnottien the Fair, a newlywed whose husband had died in the Third Holosian Rebellion. Fifteen-year-old Farnottien had single-handedly defeated an entire garrison of Holosian soldiers (using all of the brutal sword cuts Buigor had shown Gina), and then, as if that weren’t enough, had found a dragon’s egg and become the first dragonmeer!

Gina also read about P’leusa the Perceptive, a chieftain of old D’nair who’d had fourteen extra eyes implanted in his head, giving him a total of sixteen, thus fulfilling his fantasy of becoming “twice as wise as a spider” (spiders were said to be wiser than humans because they could see everything from eight perspectives), and then he’d died from infection.

They stayed in an actual inn that night. It was smaller and plainer than the one at Doviclé te Siell, but had palatable food—morels and rowan root steamed in herbed butter, served with pine nuts and currants—and actual feather-stuffed mattresses! But comfortable mattresses weren’t enough to stave off night-stalking visions:

For the first few hours Gina’s semi-conscious mind repeated the sword moves Buigor had shown her: hack, slice, parry, verbé, spin, thrust, windmill, scissor, parry, manchétte, hack, slice, parry, verbé, spin, thrust, parry…  Then, when she’d finally reached something resembling sleep, her nightmarish vision returned. Only this time she wasn’t on the ground, she was in the sky, and all around her were cloaked figures, shooting upward–and she was one of them! In their hands were instruments of Dark Tinkur magic into which they cooed as though they were ugly metallic babies. Where were they going? She looked up at the gleaming double moon.

And then she knew.

Zack dreamed too. He was a cobbled-together monster again, but he wasn’t in the Ten Kingdoms of Ismara anymore. All around him were Dark Tinkurs wielding strange violet-gold instruments, pointing them at people, hissing incantations into them: Shaeg daeskooladden toosz! Molszghad felsmun maughenfka! And as they did, violet fire enveloped the people, not just their bodies but their very existences, every memory anyone had ever had of them.

Zack saw the landscape embraced by flame too: gingerbread Victorians with dappled chimneys, creamy stucco apartment buildings, and in the distance, a beautiful crescent of cedar-dotted hills burned a sickening purple.

And then he knew. 

This was their home.

This was Middleton!

Thoughts: The most dangerous enemy you’ll ever face is the you you might become.

To read the next episode, click here.

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