For Emily desires a gift more precious than charms, and more valuable than silver. **Įmily has a secret she dare not tell her husband, one she won’t even confide to the shades of her parents.

I leave this record of the spirit hoping it is never read. The third seal would be Chloe’s.Ī short story of wishes and charms, from the Lands of the Sweet Waters.Īnother Side of Destiny. In the darkness of the sleeping city, a squire defends a second. It’s written that a demon takes three seals before it returns below the Abyss. I leave this record of the spirit, so the Temple and the city will know how the demon came to the City of the Sun. The life she tells us of is of secrets within secrets, and those secrets are deadly. It’s a much larger, and amazingly intact, account of the intense life of a new page – the lowest rank of the city’s Temple. Its starts the Charm Counter Charm Sequence. The fourth tale, yet to be named, is rather different. His path intertwines with that of Alia, a sister of the seal. His tale would probably not have been recorded – too slight in the bigger scheme of things – except that he becomes a pawn in the games of others.

It’s of a man who wants to see the truth behind masks. The third, and shortest, tale, Clay for Ellen, takes place a generation later. In the second, Another Side of Destiny we meet two other people of the City of the Sun, no sword-wielding squires these, but a couple trying to find their path between fate and destiny. The first, Squire Chloe’s Demon tells how Chloe battled against a darkness that came for her. That’s how I hope the first three tales from the lands of the sweet waters will seem to you: small glimpses into the darkness of time. When we look back at that incredible civilization, we see mostly blackness, but it’s a dark illuminated by the occasional shooting star of a moment of someone’s life, recorded in clay. Incredibly, some survive the centuries: a few by sheer luck, some by being the victim of fire, which bakes their clay into a hardness that survives the millennia. Many of these records crumble to dust, others are lost forever, and still more are dissolved away by the waters that lie beneath the sands. Everything thought important was inscribed on clay tablets: accounts, taxes, the movements of the planets, and jewel-like accounts of moments in people’s lives, written down – so they said – by magical means. Imagine a civilization that had no use for papyrus or paper. Tales from the Lands of the Sweet Waters.

Another Side of Destiny by Harper Peace