#14
The Crown's Wisdom
It was a library. It was a gallery. It was a museum. It was a temple. It was all these things and more, built by Dragons on the top of the Grass-Crested Crown, it is said (but then, why were its brick walls covered in gold until the palace seemed cast out of a single titanic ingot?). The city that was built around the Crown's Wisdom was only meant to sustain its glory and feed the record-keepers of the ages' beauties, and it has always been small, most of the land dedicated to crops and pasture. Though the people's numbers have dwindled, to this day a Dragon sits on its throne of bound tomes in an unbroken bloodline. But the weight of the lore contained within far outweighed the books themselves, and the soul of the palace has begun to sink into the ground. Now in the deepest basements ink runs endlessly from forgotten volumes, pooling into rivers that seep up into the earth. The golden walls of the palace are burnished and stained with black rivulets, the wells on which the town and palace depend give a water too thick and dark, the fields of wheat and barley give crops as plentiful as ever, only the color of ash.
None who dwell in the Crown's Wisdom have died in the last hundred years, though their skin is dry and taut, their flesh withered away, their bones unbreaking, their eyes unblinking. They wrap themselves in flowing robes and thick headscarfs when they trade with the neighboring people, and their language has grown strangely archaic, full of words and accents found only in old books. Though wise ones from the Scavenger Lands still come every year to court to purchase ancient art and precious volumes, they leave now with haunted eyes; and when they come back they are often accompanied by aspiring spirit-binders, who pay a great price to depart with one of the wise ink-beasts which sit at the foot of the Parchment-Queen. The Queen is not dead, all who have seen her agree; she is Exalted still, though she has not stood from her throne in fifty years, not slept in ten, not spoken aloud since last Calibration. Her will is no less felt, for it is at her bidding that cloth-swaddled librarians with their dark, liquid familiars wander all the Hundred Kingdoms in search of more books to add to her collection.
#15
The Laughing-Men
There was nothing, and then there was them. They came from far to the north to these wooded hills riding horses taller than had been seen before. They came and found the overgrown stones of a Dragon's outpost which was now haunted with ill-spirits. They came and they saw and they slew the ill-spirits with salted swords, laughing all the while, and then they wrote songs about their victory. They carved the earth around the hills and diverted the rivers to fill them, made keeps on the hills and walled villages below, and where had been ghosts were now a dozen fortified villages. They laughed all the time that they worked. The gods of hill and forest came to ask for tribute and extend their blessings, and they laughed in the gods' faces and cut down their forests and grew fields in their stead, and carved roads into the hills which they marked with white stone cairns.
The Laughing-Men respect no god but their own, carried from far north in wagon-shrines and now bound each one to a castle. The forests must die; they will make good barley-fields. The hills must die; they hold precious iron untouched since the days of the curse. The old kingdoms must die; their songs have grown dull with age. The Laughing-Men have no great blessings, no sword of legend, no Exalted ones; all they have is food and iron and songs to write. Their youth rides reckless into battle to claim the wealth of the old kingdoms, and no matter how many die, more grow out of the barley-fields, and to strike back is to face the conquest of castles as plentiful as pebbles on the road. And when their cities are painted with the cinder of their burned fields, the old kingdoms must come to Jehanne, La Belle Dame Sans Mercy, who rules all the keeps. They must kneel and plead to buy her endless bounty of oats, barley, turnips and common beans, even though it is her own pitiless hand which starved them. Jehanne has hair like snow and eyes like steel, and her smile is as constant as it is mirthless. She has never taken husband or wife, and there is only one thing she desires more than songs and treasure: the secret to bear a child without sharing her bed, before her vassals' hunger turns to her heirless throne.
#16
Those Who Dwell
Oh but to see the glory of Thousand Azure Springs, the city that had mastered the river, whose gleaming towers stood amidst a web of glittering canals! But the lore which kept the city standing was lost, and its great underground streams broke to the surface, and where was once a city is now a lake, pierced with slender, hollow rocks. Men of smooth skin left the city, but its ancient servants, long trod underfoot, claimed it for themselves. The Twin Reflections are two cities joined by the surface of the water. In the spires above dwell the condor-folk, whose wings allow them to survey vast distance and collect all kinds of precious knowledge, but whose brittle bones cannot stand war. In the chambers below lurk the pike-folk, whose mastery of the waterways give them unparalleled freedom to roam the Hundred Kingdoms but whose sunken dwellings allow for neither fire nor forge. By ancient compact the pikes dig black jade out of the riverbed, with which the condors craft weapons at the top of their smoke-shrouded spires. The pikes wield such weapons in defense of the city, and the condors grow fruits and beans from the vines choking their towers to feed all.
Of late the two cities have been torn; the pike-folk resent that they must fight while the condors safely produce. In their digging, they have found old and strange gods, gods made by mortal hand, bound to sunken chambers of copper and glass. Where they had a council of elders, the pike-folk have now anointed a Prince: the Blackmaw has replaced each of its hundred dagger-teeth with jade needles, and his skull and spine where sliced open to fuse a god-trapped-in-wire to his flesh in a casing of jade. It whispers now in his ear and gives him divine blessings; with his people's knowledge of the riverways the Blackmaw has begun a campaign of rampant piracy that is meant to lead to much more. The vulture-folk are seized with dread, for without the ancient contracts they have no guarantee of safety against those below. Their scouts roam far and wide, hoping to strike a new compact with an elemental prince, willing to pay with weapons of jade.
#17
The Swan Lake
There once was a young prince out hunting, who saw a flock of swans and followed them to the lakeshore; he watched as the beautiful birds took off their feathered skins and walked as beautiful maidens to swim in the waters. Cunning and foolish, he stole one of the skins; and the swan princess, unable to reclaim her wings, had to find him and swear anything he would want. He took her for wife, and brought her back to his father's castle.
The day that followed, twelve great swans swooped into his bedroom, cast off their skins, and twelve maidens stabbed him with dagger and sword, spitting curses known only in the tongues of bird, then made a bloodbath of his court. With the father's dying gasp, the swan-wife was swan-queen. To fill her bloodstained court she named as her retinue women with tails and hollow backs who can lift a calf in each arm, and men who turn into wild beasts at night. Her kingdom she called Respite for its iron law: any who bore wound from the laws that govern or fail to govern love, lust and wedlock in other places may find shelter in her court.
The kingdom that had been Respite had been built in the ruins of a land scarred forever by the Fae. It had little wealth, no great treasures, no precious lore, no peerless craftsmanship, and few people. All it had were fertile lands whose crops fed on Wyld-touched waters, unbroken contracts with the spirits of the land, and a lake whose depths were a shard of what-is-beyond. Now what it has is fifty years of the Swan-Queen's rule: Tamlin of White Feathers, Tamlin Ever-Young, Tamlin the Sorceress in Moonlit Robes, Tamlin and her Twelve Witch-Sisters. For two generations she has watched over mortals and lake-born intermingling, but now she keeps in her court a young prince whose eyes are haunted with the scar of a crime that masked itself as love, and the spurned lord of a neighboring kingdom promises war if she does not give up the boy. Though his armies are three times hers in numbers and her court begs her to bend her iron law, she never will. She is a swan, and her spite is boundless.
