The ink smeared before Xandra could stop it: three days of painstaking coastline contours ruined in a single clumsy breath. “Damn it,” she muttered, tossing the ruined parchment aside. Poppy, her speckled quail, hopped onto the desk and pecked at the discarded map as if judging its flaws.
Across the workshop, her father’s voice floated over the clatter of compasses. “You’re sighing like a haunted teakettle, Xan. Bad day at the guild?” Aithon Crosswood didn’t look up from his drafting table, where he was etching a mountain range with surgical precision.
“Bad work week,” Xandra corrected, rubbing her ink-stained fingers. “Master Houdini said my maps have ‘the spatial awareness of a drunk seagull.’" She mimicked the old man’s rasp, earning a snort from her brother Eshram as he wandered in, arms laden with fresh parchment.
“Houdini’s just bitter because his favorite apprentice defected to the spice trade,” Eshram said, dumping the paper onto a wobbling stool. “Besides, your maps aren’t that bad. They’ve got… personality. Like when you drew the Bricked Canal as a literal noodle.”
Xandra flicked a quill at him. “It was stylized.”
Eshram dodged the quill with a grin, then leaned over her shoulder to examine the smeared coastline. “You know,” he mused, tracing the ruined ink with a flour-dusted finger, “if you squint, it kind of looks like a dragon mid-sneeze.” Xandra groaned, but Poppy gave an approving chirp, pecking at Eshram’s fingertip as if seconding the observation.
Their mother’s voice cut through the workshop’s clutter from the kitchen doorway. “If you three are done critiquing accidental art, dinner’s ready.” Mrs. Yumiko held a steaming lasagna pan with oven mitts shaped like grinning gargoyles, a gift from last year’s ill-fated pottery phase. “And Eshram, wash your hands. I saw you kneading dough barehanded earlier like a medieval peasant.”
The Crosswood dinner table was a familiar chaos of overlapping conversations and passing plates. Aithon, ever the diplomat, waited until Xandra had swallowed a mouthful of garlic bread before asking, “So. This ‘drunk seagull’ critique. Did Houdini at least specify which spatial principles you’re violating?”
Xandra stabbed a fork into her lasagna. “He said my coastlines ‘breathe wrong.’ Whatever that means.”
“Ah.” Her father nodded sagely. “Classic Houdini. Cryptic as a half-buried runestone.” He reached across the table to tap her latest discarded map, the one now doubling as a bread basket. “But he’s not entirely wrong. Most cartographers treat landmasses as static, but coastlines do shift. Tides, erosion…” His fingers wiggled in a slow, sinuous motion. “They breathe, just very slowly.”
Xandra paused mid-bite, fork hovering over her plate as her father’s words snagged in her mind like a loose thread. “Wait,” she said, frowning. “If coastlines breathe, then why do we map them like they’re frozen?”
Aithon’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “Because most people prefer their worlds tidy. Easier to navigate a lie than a living thing.” He tore off a chunk of garlic bread, scattering crumbs over the table. Poppy immediately launched herself into the debris, pecking with military precision.
Eshram leaned in, flour still dusting his sleeves. “You should see the archives at the guild,” he said around a mouthful of lasagna. “There’s a whole section of ‘corrected’ maps where apprentices tried to chart the tidal marshes near Blackwater Bay. Looks like a toddler’s finger-painting after a decade of storm surges.”
Mrs. Yumiko snorted, refilling their glasses with elderberry wine. “No wonder Houdini obsessed with your coastlines, Xan. He probably thinks you’re mocking him.”
The conversation veered into guild gossip, but Xandra barely heard it. Her fingers itched for charcoal to redraw the ruined coastline not as it should be but as it was: restless, shifting, and alive. Under the table, her knee bounced until Poppy pecked it in reprimand.
The thought clung to Xandra like cobwebs as she rinsed their dinner plates, water sluicing over ceramic while her mind redrew coastlines with tidal pulses. Behind her, Poppy pecked at a stray crumb near the hearth, her feathers fluffed against the evening chill creeping through the cottage’s old stone walls.
“Stop overthinking,” Eshram murmured, nudging her aside to stack the dried plates. He smelled of yeast and ink, his sleeves still dusted with flour from his bakery shift. “You’ve got that look like you’re trying to solve geometry in your sleep again.”
Xandra flicked dishwater at him. “I’m not overthinking. I’m under thinking. There’s a difference.”
A chuckle came from the parlor where their father hunched over his drafting table, backlit by a lantern’s honeyed glow. “Dangerous habit, that,” Aithon said without looking up. “Under thinking leads to midnight epiphanies, and midnight epiphanies lead to my good parchment being sacrificed to ‘just one more sketch.’” His quill paused. “Speaking of, you’re using the rag paper in the cedar chest, yes? Not the laid?”
Eshram rolled his eyes. “She’s been stealing your lead paper since she was twelve, Dad.”
Xandra’s pillow muffled another frustrated groan as she rolled onto her side, watching Poppy’s tiny silhouette pace along the windowsill like a feathered sentry. The quail’s beady eyes kept darting toward the cobbled street below, where the gale carried wisps of something acrid: burnt cinnamon and wet stone. “Oh stop worrying,” Xandra muttered, tossing the pillow aside. “It’s just some festival performer rehearsing with—”
The window slammed open with a force that sent her sketchbooks fluttering. Cold air rushed in, tangled with a melody that made Xandra’s teeth ache. Notes stretched thin as spider silk, humming just below hearing. Poppy puffed up to twice her size, wings splayed in warning, but Xandra was already at the sill, fingers gripping the frame as she leaned into the unnatural wind.
Below, the red-hooded woman paused beneath a flickering streetlamp. Her candle’s flame burned motionless despite the gale, casting long shadows that didn’t quite match the shape of her shoulders.
The widow spiders skittering at her heels left faint, glistening trails like molten silver on cobblestones. Xandra’s breath hitched when the woman turned not her face, but the entire hood, which rotated backward with a soft click of vertebrae and stared directly up at her window.
Poppy’s panicked chirp snapped Xandra into motion. She yanked the window shut, but the latch wouldn’t catch; the wood groaned as if something pressed against it from outside. “Okay, fine, you were right—” Xandra began, only to whirl at the sound of tiny claws scrambling across floorboards. Poppy had vanished into the hallway. “Poppy? Poppy!”
The quail’s answering call came from outside, faint and defiant. Xandra cursed, grabbing her father’s abandoned oil cloak from the peg and shrugging it on as she slipped into the night.
The street was empty now save for the lingering scent of extinguished wax, but glinting spider trails led toward the abandoned tannery district. Xandra followed, her boots scraping against fresh silver threads that stuck to her soles like half-dried ink.
She found Poppy perched on a crumbling wall, feathers ruffled, watching the alley where the hooded woman had disappeared. “Your ridiculous bird,” Xandra hissed, scooping her up, only for Poppy to wriggle free and flutter toward the alley’s mouth. The quail paused midair, twisting to fix Xandra with a look that clearly said, “Well? Are you coming?”
The alley was narrower than it should be. Xandra had to turn sideways past a butcher’s boarded-up shop, her cloak snagging on rusted hooks. The spider trails glowed brighter here, pulsing in time with her heartbeat. At the third twist: impossible, because Ziscovia’s tannery district was flat. The cobblestones began sloping upward. Not a road. A path? One that hadn’t existed on any map she’d studied.
Poppy suddenly dive-bombed her shoulder, talons pricking through fabric. Xandra froze as a shadow detached itself from the wall ahead, tall and broad-shouldered, with a silver insignia glinting at his collar. “Evening, Miss Crosswood.” Major Crimestone’s voice was a gravelly baritone, his gloved hand gently intercepting Poppy mid-flight. “Your quail’s been leading me on quite the chase.”
Xandra’s pulse hammered. “Major. I didn’t realize Nightingale patrols covered... wherever the quarry is,” she gestured at the unnatural incline, the way the alley walls now curved like rib bones.
“They don’t.” Crimestone stroked Poppy’s head with surprising gentleness. “But we do monitor disturbances near the old thresholds. Your bird triggered three wards between here and Azure Lane.” He held Poppy out, his expression unreadable in the gloom. “Take her home. And Miss Crosswood?” His grip tightened fractionally on her wrist as she reached for Poppy. “Don’t follow candlelight that doesn’t cast shadows.”
The kitchen smelled of burnt lasagna crust and elderberry wine gone vinegary; Mrs. Yumiko scrubbed at the pan with vigor usually reserved for exorcisms. Behind her, Eshram balanced three empty bottles on his forehead while practicing his fire-dance footwork, bare feet whispering across the hearthstones. “Your left foot sweeps,” their mother instructed without turning, “like you’re kicking aside embers, not stomping on a spider—”
A thud from the parlor interrupted her. Aithon had rolled off the couch again, his snores undisturbed even as his elbow knocked over a vase of dried thistles. “Oh my gods,” Yumiko muttered, tossing her rag aside.
Together, she and Eshram hoisted her husband onto the rug by the fireplace where he wouldn’t break anything vital. “Your ancestors,” she informed Aithon’s unconscious form while arranging him into a semblance of dignity, “were terrible drinkers. It’s hereditary. Like your nose.”
Eshram snorted, dusting flour off his sleeves. “Should we tell him about the door again? He always forgets when he’s soused.”
Yumiko flicked his ear. “Not until the festival. Tradition says—”
Three sharp knocks rattled the front door.
Eshram froze, a wooden spoon dripping sauce onto the floor. Nobody visited this late unless the guild sent runners, and guild runners didn’t knock like they were trying to splinter oak.
Yumiko’s hand went to the cleaver stuck in the counter. “Go slowly.”
The door swung open before Eshram reached it, revealing Kastro, Captain Surtr’s lieutenant, drenched in alley muck with a lantern swinging wildly in his grip. Behind him, Xandra clutched Poppy like a feathered shield, her father’s oil cloak streaked with silver threads that shimmered unnaturally under the porch light.
Kastro’s voice was a rasp. “Good evening, Lady Crosswood, Eshram, sir. I found them tailing an old woman’s candle near the abandoned tannery.” He held up a gloved hand when Yumiko lunged forward; the leather was eaten through in places, revealing furious red welts. “Spider trails. Not the normal kind.”
Eshram grabbed Xandra’s wrist, hauling her inside as she hissed. Her sleeve was scorched where silver threads had burned through fabric. “Your absolute turnip!” he growled, shaking her. “You followed what!?”
“I followed Poppy,” Xandra snapped back, though her voice wavered as Yumiko pried the quail from her arms. Poppy’s feathers were duller now, speckles muted as if drained.
Yumiko’s knuckles whitened around the cleaver still in her other hand. “Kastro.” Her voice could’ve frozen the Ziscovian canals. “Tell Surtr we’ll handle our own.”
The lieutenant hesitated, glancing at the stairs where Aithon’s snores had taken on a rhythmic, almost melodic quality. The captain said to remind you—
“The door’s still chained,” Yumiko interrupted. “And my husband’s still drunk. Traditions hold.” She slammed the door in Kastro’s face before he could protest.
Silence pooled in the kitchen. Then...
Xandra stomped up the stairs with all the dignity of a wet cat, Poppy fluttering indignantly in her arms. Behind her, she could hear Eshram muttering something about “ungrateful turnips” before his bedroom door clicked shut. The oil lamp in the hallway flickered as she passed, casting long shadows that twitched like spider legs.
Her bedroom smelled of charcoal and crushed lavender, the remnants of yesterday’s failed attempts at mapmaking strewn across the floor. She kicked aside a half-finished sketch of Saltwater Bay, now suspiciously resembling a sneezing dragon, and collapsed onto the bed. Poppy cuddled on its own puffy blanket, now nestling into the crook of her elbow with an exhausted chirp.
The quail’s feathers still carried the faint metallic tang of those unnatural silver threads. Xandra rubbed at her scorched sleeve absentmindedly, the fabric crumbling like burnt parchment under her fingers.
The journal was where she’d left it, wedged between her mattress and the wall, its leather cover embossed with the Crosswood crest. She’d stolen the design from her father’s old guild satchel, painstakingly tooling the pattern herself during last winter’s endless snowstorms. Flipping past sketches of tide charts and Poppy’s various misadventures, her fingers froze on the final page.
The handwriting wasn’t hers.
‘Stay away. From Echo.’
ns216.73.216.69da2
and then Add to home screen.