Fantasy books news:
-The Nebula awards have been announced. Two fantasies among the winners:
Nebula Award for Novel: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)
The Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction: To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose (Del Rey)
-The Locus awards have been announced. The winner for best fantasy novel was:
Witch King by Martha Wells (Tordotcom)
-Barnes and Noble have released their list of the ‘best books of 2024 (so far)’. The most fantasy is included in the category ‘The Cutting Edge: Eight Spredges We're Obsessed With’, with spredge apparently being a portmanteau of ‘sprayed-edge’. It includes these fantasies:
Heavenbreaker by Sara Wolf
The Night Ends with Fire by K. X. Song
A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle Jensen
Five Broken Blades by Mai Corland
There’s also a section for cozy fantasies with an edge.
-The Mythopeic Society has released their fantasy books awards nominations list for this year. Too many to list here, but you can find them all at the link.
-The cover for Joe Abercrombie’s next novel THE DEVILS has been revealed. I don’t know if there is any conscious connection to Dostoevsky’s DEVILS/DEMONS.
-The Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks are being updated to make the game more accessible (though it’s not a new edition of the game).
-Your free and discounted fantasy ebook and audiobook sales for this month:
What I’ve been reading:
Last month I read through THE SWORD AND SORCERY ANTHOLOGY from Tachyon Publications to continue to educate myself in this genre. It was extremely good. Recommended! Highlights for me included THE CORAL HEART by Jeffrey Ford, a tale of a sinister swordsman with some wicked reversals, and BECOME A WARRIOR by Jane Yolen, a grisly feminist fairtyale, which I discovered was originally printed in an anthology called WARRIOR PRINCESSES:
I’m going to have to get this now and read it / give it to my daughter! (When she’s a bit older! Maybe fourteen or so? It was a pretty grisly story…) My only qualm with THE SWORD AND SORCERY ANTHOLOGY was that almost all of the stories were quite miserable in the end. So maybe this isn’t quite the genre that I’m looking for to read and write in… Noblebright all the way! ‘Heroic Fantasy’ might serve me slightly better (and I’ve just today submitted a story to HEROIC FANTASY QUARTERLY—wish me luck!) or perhaps just the looser categorisation of ‘fantasy short stories’ like these ones (also on my reading list).
Because we went on a holiday last month I read two actual whole books! I can’t remember how I came across IN THE PALACE OF SHADOW AND JOY by D.J. Butler—probably on a list of contemporary sword and sorcery—but it was lying around on my Kindle on holiday where I couldn’t connect to wifi to download anything new so I gave it a go. It’s a Vancian far-future science-fantasy-sword-and-sorcery-mytery about a bard searching for a protege to pass his people’s oral historical-epic on to, his blade-wielding friend who has recently quit being a monk of an order whose vocation is to learn useless knowledge, and their taking of a contract to protect a famous alien opera singer. It was ok. While it started very strong and the banter between the two characters is great throughout, the plot is highly convoluted and by the end it sort of degenerates into a written comic book. Thud! Sort-of-recommended!
What I’ve been listening to:
First, I finally finished listening to THE LIES OF LOCKE LAMORA! It was so awesome! Here’s my hot take: I don’t know if this has been observed before, but it’s basically Batman in Venice. Think about it: A hero who has no magic powers to rely on except his own cunning and wit gets embroiled in a mafia war and has to take down a criminal on a big revenge quest.
Next, last month I listened to the whole of SAGA OF THE JEWELS VOL.1 again ahead of preparing to re-edit it for submission to agents. Oh yeah, ICYMI, did you know that you can download or stream all of this as a *FREE AUDIOBOOK* at this link?! To be clear, this is the web / audio serial version of SAGA OF THE JEWELS, so it’s technically like a copyedited first draft, but it’s still worth a listen, especially if this review of SOTJ 1 that was recently posted on the Brothers Krynn substack is anything to go by:
I don’t know if I’ve really ‘Changed Fiction on Substack’ or not, but thanks a lot for the kind review, Krynn Bros!
What Jo’s been reading:
Jo finished reading all of the GENTLEMEN BASTARD series that’s been published so far, so after watching the Netflix SHADOW AND BONE she decided to read some Leigh Bardugo, and very much enjoyed the famous YA fantasy heist SIX OF CROWS. I’ve read and enjoyed this one, though not yet read its sequel, CROOKED KINGDOM, which Jo’s now gone onto and is enjoying as well.
What I’ve been working on:
So my teacher-in-a-magic-school manuscript is now up to 30,000 words, and I think some of it is actually quite good! I may share some of it in coming months…
By the way, on that one, many thanks to the people who replied to me directly to let me know of other books that feature teachers in magic schools. Shout outs in particular to Lorna, who reminded me of the Mr Majika books, and pointed out that some of Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci books have him teaching, and to Charles, who put me onto this indie series about a teacher in a school-for-magic which is currently up to 24 books and counting!
The series it’s set in the same world as also runs to 17 books. Sweet merciful crap! (As Homer Simpson might say.) How do people write this much?! You might scoff that it probably is crap, but Amazon and Goodreads reviews and the fact that this lady, Sarina Dorie, has also sold over 150 stories to prestigious paying markets like ANALOG and THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION would beg to differ. Comparing is despairing.
(Incidentally, on motivation to write, I’ve started using this ‘weekdaily renewal of commitment to writing script’ I came up with to help maintain my motivation. It can be adapted for authors who are already traditionally published—Hi, Tom! Hi, Tim!—so feel free to give it a look and let me know what you think.)
This series is about a single-sex boarding school for witches, so my own teacher-in-a-magic-school story should still be different enough from it. In any case, that was only begun as a procrastination project, so now that I’ve finished re-listening to SAGA OF THE JEWELS VOL.1 as aforementioned, I’ve started editing it. To begin, following YA agent Juliet Mushens’ advice, I wrote a self-review of the manuscript as it stands. Check that out here if you’re interested:
Now I’ve set to work on edits and re-writing. Following this self-review and some more specific feedback I had by direct message from the Brothers Krynn, I’ve decided to write a new first chapter for SotJ 1 set immediately before the current first chapter, so lately I’ve been working on that.
Oh, and I should say that the cover art for my reader magnet flash-forward-prequel short story to SAGA OF THE JEWLS, PRELUDE: THE FINAL BATTLE, finally came back from Miblart! I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out:
I’ll be releasing this one on Amazon in a couple of weeks, so look out in your inbox for a rare one-off non-fantasy-books-news-email from me in mid-July advertising it!
This is turning into a bit of a monster newsletter because I’m writing it while ill in bed with a vomiting bug, but lastly I’ll just mention that lately due to financial considerations I’ve also been reconsidering what I wrote here about the virtues of rapid-releasing and am wondering about releasing SOTJ 1 as an ebook under this pseudonym at the same time as I submit it to agents when I’m done editing it, and then slow-releasing each subsequent volume at intervals of a year or two, as I could still rapid-release them all again under my own name later down the line. So if you’d be interested in an edited SOTJ 1 ebook or to read an advanced review copy of the edited version, please let me know by comment or email return!
In other news:
Last month I mentioned we went on holiday, but sent a placeholder picture because we weren’t actually back from it yet! Here’s the four of us hiking in the Bavarian mountains, fantasy-adventuring-party-style.
Bonus extra! For Father’s day Jo and 6yo unexpectedly got me the starter set for the TTRPG of AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER! Awesome! We’ve not played it yet, because I’ve had a read through and the designers have decided to use a ‘sandbox’ approach for the included sample adventures, the approach which puts the burden of work most heavily on the GM (naughty ‘Magpie Games’!), but I’ll let you know how it is if we ever get round to it!
Now, on with the Saga…
Previously on Saga of the Jewels…
The life of seventeen-year-old RYN, bookish son of a wealthy landowner, changes forever when his hometown is destroyed by the EMPIRE and everyone he has ever known is killed. He discovers that the Empire are seeking TWELVE PRIMEVAL JEWELS which grant the power to manipulate different elements, and that his father had been hiding the FIRE RUBY. Ryn sets out to take revenge on the Imperial General who killed his family and to retrieve the Fire Ruby, and along the way he meets NUTHEA the lightning-slinging princess, SAGAR the swaggering skypirate, ELRANN the tomboy engineer, CID the wizened old healer, and VISH the poppy-seed-addicted assassin. Together the companions decide to find all of the Jewels in order to stop the EMPEROR from finding them first and taking over the world. They have thus far succeeded in retrieving the Fire Ruby, borne by Ryn, and the Lightning Crystal, borne by Nuthea. They have now come to the land of FARR where under the guidance of Farrian monk HULD they are about to enter the Earth Temple in order to attempt to find the EARTH EMERALD…
EPISODE TWENTY-SIX: THE EARTH TEMPLE
Cid walked through the high doors of the Earth Temple with the others, keeping to the back of the group.
He liked to be able to see all of them, not least of all to keep an eye on the Shadowfinger. He didn’t want to lose anyone on this quest. Not at this point, anyway.
No sooner had he passed over the threshold into the brown earthen corridors beyond than the doors slammed shut by themselves behind him and they were plunged immediately into pitch darkness.
“Eep,” said Elrann.
“Fire,” said Ryn, and an orange glow appeared a little way ahead from a small flame that Ryn held up on his palm, illuminating everyone’s tight-lipped faces.
“Well, that’s just going to slowly use up your mana,” said Cid. He noticed a shape on the wall next to them. “Look, there’s a torch here.” He removed the thin wooden torch from its holder on the wall and held it out to Ryn, who lit it with his thumb. The tip of the torch, which seemed to be coated in some sort of resin, burned bright and smokeless.
There were no other torches available.
“Someone other than Ryn should carry it,” said Granddaughter Nuthea. “He has access to fire anyway—it makes sense to spread it out among ourselves.”
Clever.
“Thank you, but no thank you,” said Huld with a smile when Ryn offered him the torch.
“Why not?” Ryn asked.
The Farrian licked his lips as though he did not know how to respond. “In honesty…I do not trust your fire...”
“But the builders of this Shrine clearly put the torch here for people to use.”
“I see that. But I would prefer to keep my hands free, if it is all the same to you.”
“Alright—suit yourself.” Ryn gave it to Sagar instead. Cid judged the skypirate would be secretly grateful to have a means of defending himself against any more earth-creatures, given how ineffective his wind attacks had been on them, in any case.
At least now they could see a little further down the corridor as Sagar led the way. It stretched out for about twenty paces and then came to an abrupt end. When they reached this end, they found two more corridors branching away from it in opposite directions.
“Which way?” said Ryn, looking at Huld.
“I am afraid I do not know, young master,” the monk said graciously. “Just to remind you, I have never been here before.”
“Cid?” asked Ryn.
“I’m not sure either,” said Cid. “We never managed to obtain the Earth Emerald before in my previous adventuring party. If in doubt though, young man Ryn, always follow your nose. That’s a well-established principle.” He tapped the side of his own nose.
Sagar sniffed theatrically. “Well, actually, now that you mention it, the air down this way does smell a bit...off.” He waved his torch in the direction of the right-hand path and the flames flickered, changing the shapes of the shadows on the wall for a moment. “Kind of...fishy. And eggy. But this way…” He gestured towards the left-hand corridor. “This way, the air smells cleaner and fresher.”
“Let’s go with that, then,” said Cid, trying to ignore the sweat forming on his palms. In honesty, he had no idea which way to go, but he needed to appear as if he knew what he was doing. He didn’t want the group to lose confidence in him, especially given the things he might need to persuade them to do in the future. And this was as good an approach as any other.
They took the left-hand path together and trudged off down it, following Sagar at the front who held his torch high, keeping a halo of orange light visible as a beacon for them to steer by.
Another twenty paces and they hit another fork in the path, just as they had done a few moments ago.
“Another choice!” said Sagar. “What do you say, Old Timer? Do we go with the nose approach again?”
Why is he deferring to me? I am here to guide, not lead.
“What does your nose tell you?” Cid said calmly.
Sagar sniffed. “My nose tells me to go right this time. But my heart tells me this is a load of chocobo-poodoo.”
“Captain Sagar!” Nuthea chided him. “Do not be so rude!”
Cid stroked his beard. “I must confess,” he said carefully, “that I am somewhat out of my depth here. We appear to have found ourselves in something of a maze.”
“Yeah, no poodoo,” said Sagar. Cid swallowed the little mouthful of irritation that he almost let out at the pirate.
“I say we carry on with the smell approach,” said Ryn. “It’s not like we have anything better to go by right now--one guess is as good as any other. And Sagar—you’re wind-aligned ’cause of having touched the Wind Shell. Doesn’t that give you a feeling for the air? Wouldn’t that also give you an enhanced sense of smell?”
Ingenious, thought Cid. He’s making the skypirate feel like he’s in charge. I knew the boy was leader material.
“Fine, whatever,” Sagar said. “Right it is then.”
Right they went, traipsing down the corridor.
This time after about twenty paces the corridor continued on in the same direction, but another one joined it, leading off to the right again. They had reached another ‘T’ junction, only from a different angle this time, coming in from the top-left of the crossbar of the ‘T’.
“Do we go down here?” asked Elrann.
“No,” said Sagar. “Smells off again. We carry on straight.”
They continued like this for quite some time, arriving at junctions and then allowing Sagar to lead them down whichever path he chose. The party fell completely silent.
One God, lead me, Cid prayed inside his head. Lead us. Show us the way to go.
Eventually, they hit a dead end.
Sagar must have seen it coming first, because the progression of the torchlight at the front of their seven-long line began to slow, and then it stopped completely. When Cid paused in his tracks with the others, he could see the skypirate’s withering scowl in the torchlight, and a wall of imposing brown earth blocking the way lit up behind him.
“So much for following ya nose,” said Elrann helpfully.
“We are lost,” pronounced Vish, ever the optimist. He always chose the most opportune moments to actually say something.
“We are not lost,” Cid said, desperately trying to rescue the party’s morale. “We’re just...taking a while to find our way.”
“We are lost, old timer!” Sagar yelled. “Your ‘nose’ suggestion was total rubbisj! I’m pretty sure these are the doors that we came in through! My nose wasn’t leading me through this place, it was just leading me along the current of the cleanest air that leads around and back out of the Shrine!”
Now that he mentioned it, Cid could see a thin vertical line running down the middle of the wall behind Sagar.
Whoops.
“What do we do now, then?” said Ryn.
“We turn around and try again,” said Nuthea. “We keep going, of course.”
“Are you crazy, princess?” Sagar said. The torch he was holding shook as he spoke. “We have no idea what we’re doing! We’re literally fumbling around in the dark! None of us have the first clue about which way we need to go to get to this earth jewel! Not even baldy here knows which way to go, and he basically lives here!”
“Master Pirate,” said Huld in a controlled voice, “I would like to remind you again that I have not been inside this Shrine ever before. I do not live here. I know as much as any of you do.” The monk opened and closed his hands a few times, Cid noticed. Uh-oh, he thought. Even the Farrian is getting tetchy.
“Everyone just try to stay calm,” Ryn said, and Cid was glad he did, as he had been about to say the same thing. “It’s no use us arguing; that won’t help anything. I’m sure if we think about it carefully we’ll be able to find a way through.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” said Elrann. “You’ve got your fire protection thing.”
“Yeah, pup,” Sagar joined in, “and it’s not just like we’re a bit off course. We have absolutely no clue whatsoever what we’re doing! I mean, we haven’t even gone up a single level of this damn Shrine!”
Cid was beginning to get the impression that the pirate didn’t like being cooped up inside, that he much preferred navigating the open sky.
“It must be possible to get through,” said Nuthea. “Someone must have built this originally. Someone must have come here to hide the Earth Emerald at some point.”
“That is right,” said Huld. “Before it was appropriated to house the Emerald, the Shrine was used as a regular place of worship. I know that much.”
A thought occurred to Cid. “Actually, I suppose that the Earth Emerald could be reshaping the shrine around itself. The Jewels have been known to do that sort of thing…”
“Oh, well that’s just fantastic!” said Sagar, throwing up his hands and nearly setting Elrann’s hair on fire with the torch. “We’re trying to find a magical jewel that doesn’t want to be found, we have no idea how to get to it, and it’s reshaping its environment around itself to make it even more difficult to find! Absolutely bloody fantastic!”
“There will be a way to get through to it,” Cid said firmly.
“How do you know?” Ryn asked him.
Cid sighed. “It’s like I said to you earlier. The Jewels are hard to find, but they are not impossible to find. Not with the One on our side. I know because I have found four of them before. I know because four of us are already Jewel-touched. Others have taken this path before. I know because the One wants us to find the Jewels, including the Emerald. Ultimately, it wants to be found, too. It is our destiny to retrieve all of the Jewels and to protect them from the Emperor. It is the Will of the One. To find our way through we need to know that it is possible to get to the end. And we know that it is possible because we know that others have gone this way before. We need take only the road that our heart leads us on, under the guidance of the One. The One will lead us.”
A brief silence followed the end of his improvised speech, which he was rather proud of, and for a moment Cid tricked himself into thinking he had persuaded all of them, and himself.
Then: “Oh, great,” said Sagar, “well, if the One wants us to find the Emerald, I’m sure we’ll be fine. If the One wants us to get through this ridiculous magical shapeshifting maze in the dark, I’m sure we’ll find our way. If the One is leading us through here, I’m sure we won’t all die cold, naked and alone in the dark. What a load of poodoo.”
Then, as if to add insult to injury, the walls started closing in.
The earth rumbled and the doors behind Sagar remained closed but started to move towards him.
Cid’s heart sank.
“Pirate-man!” Elrann shouted first to warn Sagar.
Sagar span. “What in the hells?!”
The moving doors pushed him back into Elrann and he almost set her on fire again. Elrann stumbled backwards, creating a domino effect that ended with Vish being shoved back into Cid.
The doors kept moving forward, both of them shut, coming flat along the corridor towards them, and began to pick up speed. Everyone just stood frozen watching them.
“Run, you fools!” Cid yelled, finally giving way to impatience.
He turned and fled back the way they had come, holding the hilt of his sword in his belt so it wouldn’t knock against his leg.
He was getting too old for this, and he wasn’t very fast, so at the first passageway junction the others caught up to him easily.
“Which way this time?” cried Ryn.
“Easy choice, pup!” Sagar yelled as he caught up to them, pointing down the path that they had originally taken at the first fork of the Shrine.
In the direction he was pointing, another earthen wall was rapidly coming closer.
They pelted in the opposite direction.
No sooner had they done this than a wall at the other end of the corridor started to close in on them too.
Behind them, the first wall was still approaching.
The whole corridor was shrinking in on them.
“We’re trapped!” cried Nuthea.
*
Mad panic seized Sagar, pushing on his chest, choking the air out of his lungs, as the walls of the Earth Temple closed in on him and the rest of the party.
“I did not sign up for this!” he yelled desperately. “I’m too young and good looking to die!”
Nobody replied to him. Instead, they all pressed up together around the light of the torch he held, half of them facing one approaching wall, half facing the other.
The earthen wall Sagar faced was about ten paces away now and advancing steadily at about the speed of a jog. It showed no sign of slowing or stopping. They would soon be crushed.
“What do we do?!” the pup cried.
“Someone think of something!” Sagar shouted.
“I am strong,” said the Farrian monk who had brought them here. “I will try to hold them.”
“Are you crazy?!” Sagar yelled. “You better be bloody strong, baldy! Someone think of a proper plan, quick!”
The walls were about to reach them now.
Everyone screamed, including Sagar…
...and nothing happened.
Sagar opened his eyes, which he had scrunched shut in anticipation of his imminent death.
The walls had stopped moving about half a pace away from them on each side.
They all stood squished up next to each other. Sagar had the torch held up high so that it wouldn’t burn anyone. Even under the circumstances, he quite enjoyed the thought that he was being squished up next to the princess and the engineer...woman. Was that the engineer-woman’s bottom that was pressed up against his own? Or wait, maybe it was the pup’s? Urgh. He tried not to think about that too much.
And then Sagar realised why the walls had halted in their advance.
In the middle of them all stood the monk, his feet spread and set, his huge arms stretched out to either side of him, palms pressed flat against the walls, an artery standing out on his neck like a cord of rope. His jaw was clenched tight and his arm muscles trembled with effort as he stared straight ahead and held the walls at bay.
“Wow, I guess you are strong...” Sagar reluctantly admitted.
All of a sudden the Farrian monk let out a deep grunt of exertion.
With a grinding, scraping noise like rock being dragged over rock, the walls came in a few inches closer, even as the monk’s hands were forced inwards and his arms began to bend at the elbows where he had had them held out straight before. The monk’s massive, sinewy muscles glistened with sweat in the torchlight, and veins popped out and throbbed on them.
“I…” gasped the monk. “I cannot... hold these… much longer…”
He grunted again. The walls came in another few inches. The rest of them screamed.
The monk hadn’t saved them; he had only delayed their deaths slightly. The walls were almost touching them now, and still moving inwards slowly as they forced Huld’s hands backwards little by little.
“Quick, someone think of something else!” Sagar yelled. “Old timer! You must have an idea! What do we do?!”
“I’m sorry…” whined the old timer. “I… I don’t know!”
Huld grunted again and the walls came in a few more inches, touching them now, and Sagar had to hold up the torch even higher to stop it from burning him and the others. He was pretty sure that was the Princess being pushed up against him, but he didn’t even care anymore right now—just at the moment he was more interested in not dying than anything else.
The princess had started to sob and pray out loud to the One God for their lives.
Sagar looked up at the flaming torch he held above them. He was almost at the point of praying himself. Almost. But no, he wasn’t going to do that. There wasn’t a ‘One God’, or any real god. If there was a God, why had he allowed this to happen? Why had he allowed his father to abandon him? Why had he allowed his mother to die?
Beyond the flickering flames of the torch, about ten metres up in the air, Sagar glimpsed the brown earthen ceiling. No god up there to hear the princess, just the ceiling, beyond the halo of the torch’s fire, and only stale air in between them.
“That’s it!” he said out loud.
“That’s what?” The old timer called back.
“Pup, use your fire projection to blast a hole in the ceiling!”
“What?!” the pup said. “Why do you think that will work?”
“Have you got a better idea?” Sagar shouted. “It worked on the golems, didn’t it?! Fire is strong against earth, isn’t it? I’ve thought of something! It’s our best chance of escape!”
“What about conserving my mana?”
“To the hells with conserving your mana! We’re about to become pancakes! Just bloody do it!”
“Al...alright!”
“Everyone else, when the pup does it, jump!” Sagar commanded. “On ‘three’! One… Two…”
He crouched down as low as he could, bringing the torch dangerously close to whoever was on either side of him.
“Captain Sagar!” cried the princess. “I don’t think this is a good idea!”
Huld cried out with pain and the walls came in to crush them.
“Three!”
“Fireaaaaaaaah!” the pup shouted.
Orange and red flames shot upwards from Ryn’s outstretched hands, taking the torchlight up into themselves.
The fire hit the ceiling. Dust and dirt and rubble fell down over them.
At the same time, Sagar jumped and shouted “WINDAAAAAARRRRAAA!”
A huge gust of wind rushed upwards from the floor towards the ceiling and lifted him and the others into the air.
Sagar’s stomach fell out the bottom of him and for a moment the wild thrill of flight took him as he soared up towards the ceiling, surrounded by the others. The wind blew back the flames, and they shot through the opening that had been made in the ceiling above them.
The gust dissipated and Sagar fell forwards out of the airflow, landing hard on his front on a new, higher, earthen floor of the Shrine.
“Arggghhh!” the monk’s voice cried out again.
Sagar scrambled around.
The monk, being the heaviest among them, had come through the hole in the ceiling last, and only made it halfway through before the two encroaching walls below had closed in on his body and trapped him, vice-like, in their grip at the waist, leaving only his upper body and arms exposed.
He screamed again as the walls continued to press in on his lowe body.
Sagar dashed over to help the monk, grabbing one of his hands.
“Pull him through!” he shouted as Ryn arrived and grabbed the other hand. They began to pull as Vish, Cid, Elrann, Nuthea all arrived too and grabbed onto Huld’s arms, trying to yank him up and out of the crushing walls.
They all heaved together, and Huld let out another roar of exertion as at last he came through the gap and the two walls crunched shut behind him, completely enclosing the space where his legs had just been.
Huld fell on the floor and continued to roar with pain, clutching his legs. The old timer got up quickly and went and put a hand on him, speaking the spell-word “Cure.”
The monk went quiet, though he continued
“Th… thank you,” he said to the old timer. “I am… in your debt.” He sounded very uncomfortable to be saying this.
The monk rolled and lay on his back, panting.
Sagar lay on his back too, also panting from the strain of the wind manipulation he had used to get them all up here, and looking up at the earthy ceiling in the distance high above them.
The earthy ceiling which they could see, Sagar realised, even though he had lost his torch somewhere on the trip up and the pup wasn’t projecting fire any more.
On the ceiling were hundreds of what looked like small pieces of string, spaced at short intervals in the brown earth, either embedded in it or stuck onto it.
And they were glowing. They emitted a warm yellow glow which lit up the room so they could see them.
“Well that’s pretty, ain’t it?” said the woman.
Sagar’s brow crinkled in puzzlement. As he inspected the bits of string on the ceiling more closely, he realised that they weren’t just glowing, but moving.
He got to his feet, suspecting something.
Sure enough, the same glowing strings that shone from the ceiling were embedded in the floor of this new level of the Shrine they had reached. They weren’t stuck quite on its surface; they were definitely embedded in it an inch or two down, but they glowed so brightly that their light shone through the earth. And these ones were moving too, wriggling around, some slowly, some more quickly than the others, so that the yellow light that came from them shimmered and shifted slightly.
They weren’t strings at all.
“They’re worms!” Sagar said aloud.
“Ewww,” said the princess, getting to her feet with the others and brushing herself down. “Yuk!”
“I think they’re kinda cute,” said Elrann.
“Ah yes,” said the monk, rubbing his legs. “Those are Farrian glow-worms. They are harmless. They burrow through the earth and eat it, turning the energy they get from it into light. You will not need to use your tricks inside this chamber, fire-boy.”
“That’s a relief,” said the pup, himself still panting, taking longer to get his breath back than Sagar. “I think I used up a lot of my mana in that fireblast.”
“Here, let me give you some more,” said the old timer. He walked over and laid his hands on the pup’s arm again, muttering something or other, and the boy visibly relaxed a little, the colour coming back into his face, and stopped panting at last. “I’ve given you a bit more, but I need to keep some back for myself in case anyone else gets hurt. I’m starting to run low now, too.”
“That was too close a call,” said Ryn. “If you hadn’t held back those walls to buy us some time, Huld, we would have been goners.”
“You’re very strong,” the woman said to the monk, looking up at him.
“Yes,” said the monk, “I have trained from birth.”
“I like that,” said Elrann.
As usual, the baldy smiled.
To his partial, but not entire, surprise, a stab of jealousy went through Sagar’s chest.
He spoke up. “Yeah, well it was my idea that got us out of there once badly bought us some time by holding the walls.”
“That is very true, Captain Sagar,” the princess said to him. “All credit to you.”
Sagar thought he saw the pup deflate a little at that. He wondered if the pup felt like he had when the engineer-woman had complimented the Farrian. That made him grin.
The pup looked like he was about to talk up his own involvement in their reaching this floor, but when he opened his mouth he said “Anyway, where do we go next?”
They looked around at the new room they had landed in properly for the first time.
They hadn’t noticed anything earlier because there wasn’t really anything to notice, apart from the wriggling glow-worms.
Where the ground floor of the Shrine had been dark and cramped with branching corridors, they now found themselves in a massive, high-ceilinged, well-lit hall.
The only features of note apart from the glow-worms were the hole they had just blasted in the floor to get here, another opening in the floor about thirty paces away in the centre of the room and, in the far corner, a set of earthen stairs that ran parallel to the wall and led up to what was clearly another set of double doors, though these ones were a dull, grey colour rather than earthy brown.
They went and inspected the opening in the middle of the floor first.
It turned out to be the top of another set of steps that led down to the floor they had just been on, the first few of them visible before they descended into darkness. There were no glow-worms inside the steps.
Cid said, “This must be the route we were supposed to use to get up here…”
“What do you mean ‘supposed to use’, old timer?” Sagar asked him.
“Well, clearly the ground floor was a kind of labyrinth. A maze. We were supposed to solve it and find our way up here by way of these steps. But instead we found our own...idiosyncratic way of getting up here. We should be careful—it may be that the Jewel wanted us to solve the maze in its own way and come up by this route. It might penalise us for having used an unconventional method…”
“Whatever, old timer,” said Sagar, irritation at the old man’s knowitallyness prickling at his chin, which he scratched. “That maze was a load of poodoo. We didn’t need to solve it, we just needed to get out of it. Which we did. Thanks to me. Now come on; this floor’s a bit more simple. All we need to do is climb those steps over there and open those doors to get up to the next one.”
Sagar strode over to the steps that led upwards. Even as he did so, a vague uncertainty gnawed at the back of his mind, but he ignored it and concentrated on climbing the steps.
When he got to the doors at the top, the uncertainty was still there, and had grown into a little bubble of hesitation that held him back from doing anything else for a moment.
Eventually, he put his hands on the doors.
They were smooth and cold to the touch.
A sinking feeling swallowed his stomach.
He paused another moment, and pushed.
They did not budge an inch.
“Princess,” he called down the stairs, “is there a Jewel for the element of ‘stone’?”
“No,” came the instant reply. Another know-it-all. Everyone loves to be a know-it-all. It must be part of their religion. “I mean,” the princess continued, “the Jewels themselves are mostly all different kinds of precious stones. But ‘stone’ itself would come under the element of ‘earth’.”
“Ah. Well, these doors are made of stone. They’re shut fast, and I don’t think pup’s fire trick is going to work on them.”
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The Earth Temple