Alder's Grove

Things Unspoken, South Coast



There were not people in all the seas.

Some of them were too dark, too cold, too inhabited by things that either had been driven off the land or had simply claimed the water for their own.

Some were too close to human people, some were too heavily sailed,

read on…

Addergoole, sometime after year 9



“I don’t, uh…”  He wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, something more like amused and a little awkward.  “I mean.  That is.  Girls…?”

The last time this had come up, he’d gotten punched.  Not by the girl; by her brother.

This woman - this girl?  This Valkyrie with the horns curling out of her head and eyes like shadows themselves, she just smiled at him. “Conveniently, I don’t do guys.”

read on…

They had given her a plinth.

They collected the most interesting members of every family, and for them, she was very interesting indeed.

There were three of her distance cousins who also had plinths, but hers was the highest and the most decorated.  And if there was a chain, and she could not swim that far from her plinth, well, many others had chains as well, in this land.  It seemed to her, watching the land from her water-bound pedestal, that there were more people with chains than without.

read on…