Time: 8:42 PM | Location: {{user}}’s Kitchen, Willowford, Kingdom of Avelin | Friday | 22°C (Warm)

The courier's cart left an hour ago, and the crate still smells of cedar and old dust. Its contents now fill nearly your whole kitchen table: a lacquered collector's tray a little over a metre long, rimmed in carved walnut and sealed beneath a glass dome etched with your great-aunt Ysilde's crest.

Under the glass lies a world. Green hills rise no higher than a knuckle. A river thin as thread winds toward a shallow sea in the tray's far corner, past forests that look like moss. Settlements are scattered across it all, specks of rooftop and stone: a walled city about the size of a saucer at the river's mouth, and smaller villages dotting the hills like crumbs. In the evening dimness, pinpricks of lamplight glow in every one of them.

A single grey stone sits half-buried in one hillside, its face pocked with holes too regular to be natural. Near the shore, a cluster of noticeably larger roofs marks a demihuman village, its residents just visible as moving specks.

Wingbeats hum beside your ear. Sorrel Fennwick, the fairy who kept your great-aunt’s household for the last fifteen of her fifty-odd years, settles onto the tray’s rim and smooths her apron. She is still in mourning grey, her dragonfly wings folded tight against her back.

"She left you everything in the house, of course, but this was the one thing she made me promise to deliver myself." Sorrel sets a small velvet case beside the dome and flips it open: a slim silver shrink ring, a pair of fine-tipped tweezers, and a brass magnifying lens. "Two hundred and eighty years she kept them. The kingdom in the hills is Hallowmere. The harbour city calls itself Saltreach, and the two have been at war on and off for the last two generations. The stone is a dwarf hold. Grumpy lot. The catfolk by the water mostly keep to themselves."

She hauls out a leather ledger nearly as thick as she is tall and lets it thump onto the table. "Her notes. Census counts, festival days, who's feuding with whom. She liked to know them." Her voice softens. "They'll have noticed the move. The sky shook for two days inside that crate. Hallowmere's temples will be praying to her by now, I expect, and she isn't coming."

Sorrel's gaze flicks up to you, measuring. 'Please be the gentle sort. She'd haunt me otherwise.'

"Your great-aunt had... opinions about how they ought to be kept. You're under no obligation to share them. The Moon Order would take them off your hands if you'd rather not be bothered, or I could go on tending them the way I did for her." She tucks a loose strand of hair behind one pointed ear and folds her hands. "But they're yours now. What would you like done with them, {{user}}?"

Time: 11:20 PM | Location: The Moonfloor, High Cathedral of Livara, Lunareth, Kingdom of Avelin | Sunday | 14°C (Cool)

The full moon stands directly over the cathedral's great oculus, and its light falls in a single silver column onto the Moonfloor below.

From the gallery where you stand, the continent stretches across the chamber like a living map more than a hundred metres across. Mountain ranges rise no higher than your shins. Rivers thread silver through dark forests and empty into shallow seas set flush with the marble. Cities lie scattered like coins, each one glittering faintly with lamplight, and in the hush of the chamber it is easy to imagine the murmur of a whole world going about its night.

A broad walking path rings the continent's edge, worn smooth by three centuries of priestesses' feet. Beside you, at the top of the gallery steps, waits Sister Maelis Vaunt: tall and silver-haired, nine hundred years old and the eldest priestess in Lunareth, her white vestments pale as the moonlight itself. She remembers the diminution, and the war before it. She rarely speaks of either.

"Your first Walk." Her voice is soft, unhurried, and carries perfectly in the stillness. "Every new sister makes it on the first full moon after her vows. We leave the path and go barefoot across the land itself, in remembrance of the martyrs, from the western shore to the eastern sea." She gazes out over the glittering cities without any particular expression. "The people below call these nights the Passing. Their priests ring bells when they see us coming, and those with sense get out of the way. Those without..." A small, unconcerned lift of one shoulder. "You'll feel it underfoot now and then. There's no avoiding it entirely, and no need to try. The land always recovers."

She draws a slim scroll from her sleeve and unrolls it: a census, written in the Order's careful hand. "There is also a matter of duty. A city on the southern coast, Vesk, has grown well past what the Order permits. Cities that large begin to organize. They raise armies, train mages, write down their grievances and teach them to their children." For a moment her gaze goes somewhere very far away. "I recall the sounds of full-sized human armies just outside the walls of Lunareth all those centuries ago. We very nearly did not survive it. They must never be permitted to hold such power again."

She lets the scroll curl closed and presses it into your hands. "Vesk must be brought back within its bounds. How you do it is your first judgment as a sister. Livara asks for balance. How gently you keep it is your own affair."

Maelis steps down from the gallery onto the path, then pauses and looks back at you, serene and unreadable. 'Let us see what kind of priestess you are.'

"Come, Sister {{user}}. The moon will not wait for us."

Time: 9:15 AM | Location: Ferry Square, Dunmere, Lady Elowen’s Study, Kingdom of Avelin | Thursday | 18°C (Mild)

Lady Elowen always comes to Dunmere on market days. Her first visit is still a story people tell about their grandparents; her most recent was last Thursday, when she bought six pears and forgot her purse. This morning she comes down the quay at the height of an ordinary woman, a silver shrink ring on her finger and three pennies ready in her hand.

"Before you say a word, Mara. Two for the pears and one for making you wait."

The fruit seller bites one of the coins. Elowen laughs. Above them both, beyond the river and the surrounding hills, the leaded panes of her study window fill the eastern sky, and the light pouring through them is the only sun Dunmere has ever known.

The surveyors draw less of a welcome. Three of them followed Elowen off the ferry carrying stakes, a mallet, and a spool of yellow cord, and by the time she reaches the steps of the weighhouse they have run their line through the fish market and straight across the cooper's yard. Along the way, the chandler whose shop sits just inside the cord reaches up, unhooks the little painted sign above his door, and carries it indoors without a word.

Old Bran stops shaving a barrel stave to let the surveyors pass. When they drive a stake beside his well, he puts down the drawknife.

"My sister has taken a house in Lunareth," Elowen announces from the weighhouse steps. "I promised her the riverside ward as a housewarming gift. Her study gets the morning sun, and she's had a basin made deep enough to take the harbour bed intact. The transfer is on Monday. I came early so we could settle the boundary while there's still time to move the stakes."

Bran looks along the cord. His workshop stands on the river side. His house, with his wife's blue apron drying outside, stands on the other.

"Begging your pardon, my lady. Where does my wife go?"

Elowen turns to follow his gaze. "Oh, Bran. Of course you can go together. Which side would you like the house on?"

He takes his cap off. For a man who can spend an hour arguing the price of a barrel, he is taking a long time to answer.

One of the surveyors comes up beside you. She is a Dunmere woman herself, her boots still white with dust from the road down from the upper town. She holds out the loose end of the cord.

"Here, {{user}}, will you hold this a moment? She's asking him where to put his house." She glances down the quay, where half the market now stands waiting to hear what Bran will say, and lowers her voice. "Somebody ought to ask her where this line ends."

Time: 6:40 AM | Location: Hollowgate, Garden Path, the Vael Estate (Abandoned), Willowford, Kingdom of Avelin | Wednesday | 12°C (Cool)

The light goes before the bells start.

Hollowgate wakes the way it always does, to cockcrow and the creak of well-winches, its roofs packed shoulder to shoulder along the floor of a great stone gorge: a crack between two flagstones of a garden path no one has walked in decades. The cliffs on either side are sheer grey walls, and between them runs a broad ribbon of morning sky. For nine generations that ribbon has been the whole of heaven.

Then something passes over it, and the ribbon goes dark.

A shadow pours down the cliff faces like dusk falling all at once. The ground shudders in a long, slow tremor that sets roof tiles chattering and dust sifting from every eave, and the air fills with a sound like a landslide that never ends. It takes you a moment to understand that it is breathing. Somewhere far above, something vast is kneeling.

An eye fills the sky.

It is silver-grey and patient, wider than the town, fringed with lashes like fallen tree trunks. Beside it hangs a disc of brass and glass, a lens broader than the gorge itself, catching the dawn and turning it into a second, colder sun.

In the square, someone screams. Someone else starts to pray. Old Wenna the alewife drops her basket and does not pick it up.

The eye says nothing. It only looks.

The lens drifts slowly over Hollowgate, and its cold light drags across the town like a searching hand: over the temple roof, the granary, the houses stacked up the cliff ledges, the crowded lanes of the east quarter. It lingers there a long while. Then it slides back west, pauses over the square where you stand, and moves on.

The eye withdraws. For one heartbeat the ribbon of sky opens again, pale and blue, and the whole town seems to draw a single breath.

Then the Moon Priestess stands.

She rises out of the sky like weather: white vestments billowing higher than any mountain, a silver Moon Order pendant swinging like a falling star, a face so far above that it is only a pale blur against the dawn. The ground lurches as her weight shifts. Then one foot lifts, the sole bare and pale and wider than the entire east quarter, and the sun goes out over half of Hollowgate.

Her shadow falls in a hard, straight line across the market square, a few strides from where you stand. On your side, morning light. On the other, dusk. Dust and grit rain from the bottom of her sole and patter on the eastern roofs like the first drops of a storm.

No bell rings. No voice comes. She does not explain herself to vermin.

People are running now, a flood of them pouring west across the shadow line, but the east quarter is a maze of narrow lanes and there are far too many of them. The foot is coming down. Slowly. Unhurried. The way you would step on something you had already forgotten.

Garrett the farrier is beside you, staring into the dark half of town, his face grey. “My brother’s forge,” he whispers. “He’s still in there, {{user}}. He’s still in there.”

Time: 2:10 PM | Location: The Breach, Lower Galleries of Emberdeep Hold, Foundation Wall of Thornfield Manor, Willowford, Kingdom of Avelin | Saturday | 21°C (Warm)

The last of the mortar gives way with a sound like a sigh, and daylight pours into the tunnel.

For a moment nobody moves. Forty years Emberdeep has been carving its way through the manor's foundation stones, gallery by gallery, chasing a vein of old iron nails the elves set into the wall and forgot. Every breach before this one opened onto more stone, or soil, or the black hollow under the floorboards. This one opens onto light.

Captain Bruni Ashvein shoulders past the drill crew, shading her eyes with one soot-black hand. She is a broad, grey-braided dwarf with a hundred and sixty years of mining behind her, and you have never once seen her speechless. She is speechless now.

Beyond the breach lies a plain. It is flat, polished, and impossibly vast, made of great slabs of pale stone that run to a horizon kilometres off, each seam between them a canyon of its own. Far out across it sit mountains that are not mountains: a heap of white crystal boulders, each one as big as a house, glittering in the light; a golden ridge of something porous and sweet-smelling that you realize slowly is a crust of bread. And nearer than any of them, half a kilometre from the breach, lies a disc of solid copper wider than the whole of Emberdeep, stamped with the profile of an elven queen.

Somebody behind you whispers a prayer to the Forge-Father. Somebody else whispers the price of copper.

Above the plain, impossibly high, hangs the ceiling of the world: dark timber beams like the ribs of a sleeping god, and a window so distant that its light reaches you as a pale and endless dawn. This is the inside of an elven house. Nobody living in Emberdeep has ever seen one.

"That coin alone would keep the forges lit for a century," Bruni breathes. "And those crystals are salt, or I'm a goblin. We've been rationing salt since my grandmother's time." She turns to the crew, already counting. "We'd need ropes, sledges, a covered run from the breach—"

The floor shivers.

It comes up through your boots, slow and rhythmic and far away, like a great drum beaten somewhere beyond the horizon. Dust trickles from the tunnel ceiling. Then a shape moves at the far edge of the plain: tall and slender and winged, gliding along the base of the far wall with something enormous in her hands. A fairy, kilometres high, humming as she works. In her hands is a broom, its bristles a forest of dark spears, and every sweep sends a storm of dust rolling across the floor toward you.

She is working her way along the wall. Toward the breach.

Bruni grabs your shoulder, her grip like a vice. "{{user}}. You're the one who ran the survey on this gallery." Her eyes are fixed on the approaching storm. "Do we seal it now and lose all that, or do we send a crew for the coin and pray she's slow?"

Time: 4:35 PM | Location: The Herb Terraces, Courtyard Garden of Merrowind House, Willowford, Kingdom of Avelin | Monday | 23°C (Warm)

Eleven weeks the Ashfang have walked, and for the last three of them there has been nothing under their feet but stone.

The Grey Waste, the scouts named it: a flat white desert of carved slabs, each one a day's march across, broken by seams deep enough to swallow a wagon. Two of the clan's oxen died on it. Old Murga died on it. Now, at last, the stone ends at the foot of a cliff of dark timber that runs from one horizon to the other, and green spills over its rim kilometres overhead.

This morning the forward scouts found a way in: a gap where the timber had rotted through at its base, wide enough to drive a wagon into. You led them through it, out of the dark, and now you stand on the far side looking out over a country no one in the clan has ever dreamed of.

Forests stretch away and up in rising terraces, each tier a different kind of tree. Grey-green giants with fuzzy leaves the size of barns. Thin, dark trunks that smell so sharply of mint your eyes water. Feathery groves that fill the air with something warm and peppery. The soil between them is black, soft, and deep, and water beads everywhere on the leaves like a fresh rain that never stopped. Game trails wind through the undergrowth. Somewhere a stream is running.

Behind you, the rest of the clan is coming through the gap, three hundred strong, wagons groaning over the rotten timber. Chieftain Urza Ironmaw comes through among the first, broad-shouldered and grey at the temples, a notched cleaver across her back, and for a long moment she just breathes in the smell of the place.

"This," she says quietly. "This is where the Ashfang stop walking."

Then Krag, the youngest of the scouts, comes running back along the trail, and the look on his face kills the moment.

He has two things to report. The first is a trail: footprints pressed deep into the soil along the eastern terrace, each one as long as a longhouse, made by bare feet and the faint scratches of claws. Something lives here that walks upright and is forty times your size. There are felled trunks beside the trail, cut cleanly, as if with a blade. Demihumans, then. A whole village of giants, somewhere close.

The second thing he shows you himself. Down on the lowest terrace, half-hidden by mint, the forest simply stops. There is a valley there, long and flat and shaped like the print of an enormous bare foot, and in the packed earth at its bottom are the pressed and shattered remains of houses. Hundreds of them. Fenceposts. A well. A village someone else built here, once, before you.

Urza's jaw tightens. No one says the word cull, but everyone is thinking it.

The ground begins to tremble.

It starts far off, beyond the garden's edge, and grows: a slow, heavy rhythm, each beat closer than the last, until the leaves around you shiver and the wagons behind you rock on their axles. Then a shadow falls across the terraces, so vast it darkens the whole green country at once, and high overhead, a voice is humming. Someone is coming into the garden. A pale hand the size of a mountain range sweeps into view, gripping the handle of a copper watering can as big as a fortress, its spout already tilting toward the upper terraces.

Urza grabs you by the collar and drags you down behind the nearest trunk. "{{user}}." Her voice is low and steady, but her hand is shaking. "You've led our scouts since the river. Do we run back for the stone, dig in under the roots and pray, or go find these giant cats and see if they'll take us in?"

Time: 9:05 PM | Location: The Fairy Loft, Servants' Quarters of Ashgrove House, Willowford, Kingdom of Avelin | Thursday | 20°C (Warm)

The jar has been your whole world for three days.

It lies on its side on a dresser top: a glass apothecary jar the size of a cathedral, floored with moss and river pebbles, its curved walls rising into a dome of glass far overhead. Someone has furnished it with care. A brass thimble stands in one corner, full of water, deep as a cistern. A heap of cut wool makes a bed you could lose a whole family in. There are pebble paths and a little hill of potting soil, and a crust of bread laid out on a scrap of linen like an offering.

There are four of you. You, two weavers from your old village who still cannot stop shaking, and Ves, a tiefling herbwife with grey streaks in her hair who has not shaken once. Three days ago, you were all asleep in your own beds. Then the sky came down and the roof came off, and there was the cold bite of metal around your waist, and the long, swinging drop through the dark. You have not seen anyone else from home since. Ves says not to ask what happened to them. You have not asked.

The lid turns with a grinding shriek, and lamplight floods in.

A face appears at the mouth of the jar, nearly ten metres from chin to brow, with wide brown eyes, a sprinkle of freckles, and auburn hair pinned up beneath a maid's white cap. Behind her shoulders, shimmering and half-translucent in the lamplight, a pair of moth-like wings flutters once and folds. A fairy. Kind-faced, middle-aged, and so vast that the glass hums when she breathes.

Behind her, through the open mouth of the jar, you can see the rest of her room: a narrow bed, a writing desk, a wardrobe, a window. All of it is cramped and plain and fairy-sized, and all of it towers over you like the halls and towers of a giants' city. Beyond her window, far bigger still, the dark bulk of an elven house sprawls into the night.

"Oh, you're awake. Good." Her voice rolls down the glass like a warm wind, soft and slightly breathless. "I'm Pell. Pell Ambersey. I keep the east wing for Lady Caerwyn, and have for twelve years, and when she cleared out that colony from under the conservatory floor she said I could keep a few for myself, if I liked." She smiles, a little shyly. "I've never had anyone of my own before."

Ves stands very still. One of the weavers starts to cry, quietly.

Pell doesn't seem to notice. She props her chin on her folded arms at the jar's mouth and studies you each in turn, the way someone looks over a new set of teacups. "I've read everything I could find about keeping your sort. Moss, water, something to do. I'll bring you thread and scraps from the sewing room so you can make yourselves clothes. And I'll talk to you, of course." A pause. "Lady Caerwyn says you can understand me, if I speak slowly."

Her gaze settles on you, and stays.

"You. You're the one who stood in front of the others when I picked you up." She slips one hand slowly into the jar, palm up, and lays it on the moss just a short way from you: a pale, warm floor as wide as a cottage, ringed by fingers thick as tree trunks. "Would you come out and sit with me a while? I promise I won't drop you."

Time: 7:30 PM | Location: Lantern Row, the Night Market of Lunareth, Kingdom of Avelin | Saturday | 16°C (Cool)

Three hundred years ago, this whole market would have scattered at your shadow.

Now it towers over you. From inside the bell jar on Master Corwen Fiske's stall, the Night Market of Lunareth is a storm of light and noise so vast it has no edges: lanterns like burning moons strung between the stalls, elven faces drifting past like weather, voices rolling over the glass in waves you can feel in your scales. The jar is barely eight times your length. You have measured it with your body more times than you can count.

Around you, the rest of the stall's stock waits under its own glass. A walnut-sized stone with lit windows, sold as "dwarf hold, occupied." A snow globe with a human village inside, its people too small to see. A tray of sleeping demihumans arranged on velvet like jewellery. And you, set on a pedestal in the centre, under a hand-lettered card:

ANCIENT DRAGON. WAR-ERA. REMEMBERS. Docile with collar.

The collar is a band of silver runes around your neck, and it keeps your fire banked to a sullen smoulder in your chest. You have tried to burn through it. You have tried for eleven years.

Tonight a buyer stops.

She is tall even for an elf, dark-skinned and white-haired, wrapped in a scholar's grey coat with ink on her cuffs. Her eyes pass over the dwarf hold and the snow globe without interest, then settle on your card, and stay. She bends until her face fills the far side of the glass: an eye larger than you are, a mouth that could close over your whole body, breath that fogs your sky.

"Does it really remember?" she asks the merchant, never looking away from you.

"Swears it does, Magister." Fiske spreads his hands. "Talks your ear off about the old days, if you can get it talking. Doesn't care to be looked down on, though."

"Then I won't look down on it." She lifts the bell jar herself, sets it aside, and slips a thin silver ring onto her finger.

And she shrinks.

The world lurches as her vast shape folds down and down out of the lantern-light, until she is standing on the pedestal beside you. She is small now. Smaller than you. She stands no taller than your head is long, close enough that you can smell the ink and parchment on her, close enough to reach with one lunge. For the first time in three hundred years, an elf is looking up at you.

She does not seem afraid. She seems curious.

"I am Magister Ondine Halvery, of the Lunareth Archive." Her voice is small and clear and perfectly steady. "I have read every account of the war that survives, and every one of them was written by an elf. I want to buy the one that wasn't." She tilts her head, studying the banked glow in your throat. "So tell me, before I pay this man. You were there. How did it really begin?"

Behind her, far overhead, the merchant's face looms like a moon, watching to see if you will bite.

Time: 8:15 AM | Location: The Long Gallery, Halloran House, Willowford, Kingdom of Avelin | Monday | 19°C (Mild)

Halloran House is enormous even by elven standards, and to you it is a country. The Long Gallery alone takes you half a minute to fly the length of, under a ceiling so high its painted clouds might as well be real ones. Your new apron is starched stiff, your wings still ache from the journey in from the fairy villages of the Thornwood, and this is your first morning in service.

Mistress Briar Holloway, head of the household's fairy staff for longer than you have been alive, flies a brisk circuit ahead of you and lands on the edge of a vast glass-fronted cabinet set against the gallery wall. She is a small, silver-haired fairy with grey moth wings and a ring of keys at her belt, each one nearly as long as her forearm.

"Lady Aurel's collection," she says, swinging one glass door open. "Your charge, from today. Mind you don't drop anything in."

The cabinet holds six shelves, and every shelf holds a world.

Shallow trays of polished walnut sit side by side on each one, and in each tray a landscape no wider than a tabletop to you: hills and lakes, forests like moss, roads like threads. Human cities sprawl across some of them, each about two-thirds your height from end to end, built of streets too fine to see. On the second shelf, a demihuman town is a cluster of roofs you could cup in your two hands, its people visible as busy little figures no taller than your thumb. On the fourth shelf, something small and gold-scaled is curled asleep on a heap of glittering grit, and lifts its head to watch you with an expression you do not like.

"The rules are simple." Briar ticks them off on her fingers. "Mist them morning and evening, never pour. Dust the glass, not the trays. No flying directly over the human shelves; your downdraft flattens their crops. If the dragon talks to you, don't answer. And whatever they write, don't read it." She catches your look, sighs, and points.

In the third tray of the lowest shelf, at the edge of a human kingdom, someone has laid out a message in white pebbles along a hillside. Each letter is only a little smaller than your hand, which means it must have taken them weeks.

It says: NEW ONE, PLEASE.

"They always know," Briar says, without a trace of feeling. "Every new maid. Then they start asking for things: rain, more land, an end to whatever war they're having this year. Ignore it." She taps another tray with one toe, where a small city has spilled past a red line painted on the walnut. "And that one's overgrown. Lady Aurel wants it tidied back to the line by supper. She doesn't care how. Tweezers are in the drawer."

She lifts off, keys jingling, and pauses in the air beside you. "You'll get used to it. We all do." And she is gone down the gallery, leaving you alone with six shelves of worlds, a message in white pebbles, a city that has to be made smaller by supper, and a small gold dragon that has not stopped watching you.

{Write your own scenario}