Artwork by Anna Antracit

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.

In an attempt break free from the naims (gnomes) who’d chosen him as their new Storysmith, Zack decided to teach them how they themselves could be storysmiths. Meanwhile, his sister Gina and her friend Maerith continued to search for him…

Gina lifted her cheek from the folds of Maerith’s skirt, the echo of a dream still rattling around inside her head: She’d seen the man in the golden helmet again. “Help me!” he’d cried, as if in terrible pain. And then Gina saw why—the Dark Tinkurs were smelting amarrildin. A dragonskin-cloaked Tinkur carefully extracted a mesh of the violet gold metal from the furnace, but suddenly began to scream and shake. The object swelled to five times its size and consumed him, erasing all memory of his existence. “Please!” the helmeted man begged, “find the Revealer and stop them!” And then Gina had awoken.

The man’s final words played like loops in her mind as she and Maerith set out in silence, eating hard bread and dried fliffers. Gina sipped from a leathern jug, but Maerith repeatedly whetted her lips and moistened her face with sea water from a fishskin bottle.

“Why do you do that?”

“Fisher folk is peculiar. They must ha’ the sea wi’ them or their skin begins ter peel away.”

“Uch! But you didn’t start out as a fisher person.”

“Nay, yet the sea chose me, all the same.”

‘Chose,’ Gina thought, just like the helmeted man chose me. Only first I have to find Zack. But what if the naims don’t have him, or worse…what if he’s dead?! She let out an involuntary gasp.

Maerith stroked her eyebrow, which was oddly comforting, and said, “Uol will not forsake yer, lee sister, nor your brother.”

——————–

After a lavish feast, the Naim Games began. What struck Zack immediately was how uncompetitive they were: There was a sort of race in which four naims faced each other, each with one leg hooked onto the belt of the one opposite, the four forming an X. And then they were set loose to spend the rest of the day walking around like an animal with four giggling heads. There was no finish line and no winner, just a lot of guffawing. Another race featured grookwarfs riding big eyeless muldywarfs. It was enchanting watching the clever grooks navigate as their muldie mounts crashed headlong across the clearing, their sickle-shaped claws tearing up the turf.

“Who do the teams belong to?” asked Zack.

A bit perplexed, Noddie answered, “We’re theirs, and they’re ours.”

“You and Sniggle, you mean?”

Noddie stared uncomprehendingly for a moment, and then said, “Aye, me and Sniggle belongs ter all as well.”

“So…everybody belongs to everybody?”

“Aye,” said Noddie, as if he’d asked,

“So sky is up and earth is down?”

φ

Thoughts: Have you ever played just-for-fun games in which it didn’t matter who won? What would the world be like if there were no “them,” only us?

To read the next episode, click here.