Fantasy Worldbuilding (Exercises in Style #32)
Sending this one to you by raven.
Both this exercise and the one running this weekend (which will be #34, since we did #33 in advance) fit under the general banner of “fantasy.” So did the Bangsian story, and so will others, but there are a lot of rewarding subcategories of fantasy to explore. This one takes us to an unfamiliar place, and alters me and Janice in a way that I hadn’t thought to try before—but it still has a lot of the cozy atmosphere of the original.
The Ripening Hour
The mirror fogged at the edges as it always did on Sundaymoon—that weekly sliver of time when the twin moons aligned long enough to hold a vision steady—and Taren pressed her palm to the glass until the image of her goddaughter swam into focus.
Alira was in her late teens now, studying at the Athenaeum of Woven Arts in the capital. She had her mother’s cheekbones and her father’s restless hands, and when she talked, those hands moved like birds flapping skyward. Taren remembered the five-year-old version of her, small enough to sit on one shelf in the apothecary, pulling corks from bottles she shouldn’t touch. Taren hadn’t quite made peace with how much time had passed since. She wasn’t sure she was supposed to.
“She thinks she invented enchantment,” Alira was saying, a little exasperated, a little amused. “‘Have you heard about this extraordinary new power? The whole world should feel what I feel!’ All I feel is a desire to say ‘Shh’!”
Taren laughed despite herself. “Which one is this?”
“Sorvaine. She’s bonded to a river spirit—barely six weeks ago—and will not stop telling us what it’s like. Every morning at breakfast. Every evening before lights-out.” Alira lowered her voice to an urgent whisper. “Godmother. I know things now that I did not ask to know. Things about river spirits’ intimate lives. I am not sure I can ever swim again.”
“Some things outside apprenticeships,” Taren said, “you’d rather not learn.”
“Exactly.”
Taren couldn’t solve this for her. What she could do was keep the mirror appointment every Sundaymoon—unless a messenger bird arrived saying she was ill, or traveling, or buried under examinations. That regularity was the thing. To be a fixed point. A lighthouse. Most young people adrift in their first year of real study could use a few more of those.
They talked until the moons shifted and the glass began to gray. Taren let the vision go, the way you release a moth from cupped hands.
An hour later, she was at the long table in back of the apothecary, the old puzzle-cloth spread before her, its embroidered riddles shimmering in lamplight. Across from her—through the smaller oval mirror enchanted just for him—sat her father, Baldric. His spectacles perched low on his nose, and a mug of something hot steamed by his elbow.
The puzzle-cloth was a family heirloom: a length of enchanted linen stitched with riddles that changed each week, the answers woven into place only when you named them aloud together. Her grandmother had used it with her mother, her mother with Baldric. Now Taren and Baldric used it. Someday, perhaps, Alira would want it too—though she hadn’t asked yet, and Taren wasn’t rushing her.
“‘That which sweetens the unripe,’” her father read, squinting. “Nine letters. Second one is ‘T.’“
“Ethennium,” Taren said immediately. “The compound. Alchemical. It accelerates the ripening of fruit—we use it in preservation cures.”
Baldric’s expression warmed with recognition. “I once sold a shipment of it. Years ago, when I was still running trade routes south of Thornwood. Three casks, and the merchant I sold to—a Brassen fellow, very serious—he’d lost half his cargo of winter pears to early frost. Thought he’d have nothing to sell at market. He cried, actually. When those pears came right.”
“I didn’t know that story.”
“Mm.” Baldric smiled into his mug. “There are a few left.”
They worked through several more—A boundary no map will show (VEIL), What remains when the song ends (ECHO)—and then Taren read aloud, “‘Speak this to stop speakers speaking.’ Three letters. First is ‘S.’“
From somewhere in the front of the shop, Taren’s consort, Johann, called out, “Sst!” It wasn’t an answer to the riddle but a warning to Taren’s newer familiars, Wren and Cobble, still kittens and still deeply unreasonable. The warning was in vain: the kittens charged forth. Wren hit the corner of the puzzle-cloth first. Cobble hit Wren. Together they rolled across the table in a chaos of claws and fur, scattering three answered riddles and sitting directly on top of Speak this to stop speakers speaking.
Taren grabbed for them. Wren escaped. Cobble latched onto a loose corner of the cloth and yanked with the full conviction of someone who had never been told “no” and didn’t intend to start believing in it now.
On her father’s side of the mirror, there was a commotion. Taren heard her brother Goswin’s voice—”There she is, the great mage herself!”—and then her mother appeared briefly, leaning into view to wave with both hands, and then Goswin’s youngest, a two-year-old named Lue, toddled into frame and seized Baldric’s walking staff from its place against the wall with the focused intent of someone who had been waiting for exactly this opportunity.
Cobble released the cloth. A scrap of embroidered linen drifted to the floor. Wren pounced on it at once, as though it had been insulting her for years and she finally had her chance.
The moment to explain “Shh”—the clue’s likely answer, which Taren had been about to mention, given what Alira had said not two hours ago—floated away like that scrap of cloth, like the moons past alignment, like her goddaughter’s childhood, like a great many things that came and went and were better released than chased.
She looked at her father across the small oval mirror. He was watching Rue carry his staff triumphantly across the room. He was smiling.
“We’ll get it next week,” Taren said.
“We always do,” said Baldric.
Later, when the mirrors were dark and Wren and Cobble had exhausted themselves into a heap near the cold hearth, Taren sat alone with the puzzle-cloth—mostly intact, slightly tooth-marked—and thought about what it meant to be a stable presence.
She was not the most powerful mage in the Athenaeum’s registry. She had not discovered any new principles, had not rewritten any ancient treaties, had not saved anything in a way that would make a good song. What she had done, for seventeen years, was keep the mirror appointment every Sundaymoon. She had picked up the puzzle-cloth every week. She had listened to what was offered and not demanded more.
Her mother used to say that the greatest spells were not the dramatic ones—not the ones that split the sky or turned the tide of a siege—but the ones you renewed quietly, week after week, against the ordinary entropy of the world. The ones that held things together not because they were grand, but because they were reliable.
Life was not a puzzle to be solved. It rearranged itself. It brought new clues. It scattered the old ones across the floor and sat on them, and you gathered what you could, and you left the rest, and next week, there would be more.
In the corner, Cobble twitched in her sleep, chasing something small and urgent through whatever a kitten dreams of. Johann emerged from the shop, inventory scrolls tucked under his arm, and his smile warmed Taren even from the far end of the room.
Taren blew out the lamp.