Lydia Kang

It started with a wall.

It encircled Yuna’s home and was built of good, thick redstone, three horses high. Father had it created when he first immigrated to Silendar’s hilly lands when he himself was a young man, bursting with ambition and secrets.

Yuna patrolled the inner perimeter of the wall in the early evenings, hauling a basket containing a pot of mortar, chisels of varying sizes, a hammer, and a trowel. Her dark eyes narrowed as she searched for cracks. She was careful to stay on the meticulously kept paths. Stray but a little, and a careless hand might brush nettles that could fell an ox with a single scratch. On the east end of their property, asps lived within carefully managed glass domes; by the center pond, jewel-bright frogs lurked. Yuna smiled fondly at them, for a touch of their skin could render an olyphaunt unconscious. Soon she would tend to the scorpion birds, thumb-sized wasps, dagger spiders, fire scorpions, and acid-spitting ants.

Even later, she would tend to Father, who worked tirelessly in his room, where he concocted one poisonous potion after another. These were sold to the most powerful leaders in Silendar. (Swords were for commoners; poisons were a far tidier method of obtaining status and inheritances.)

But first, there was this wall.

Yuna pushed her black braid over her shoulder, crouching to investigate sunlight shining through a crack in the wall. The mortar was crumbling. It needed patching, so she tapped her hammer against a small chisel, tap, tap, tap, to break up the old mortar. Suddenly, instead of the mortar crumbling, the stone it held shattered.

Ugh. Now she would have to replace the whole stone! From beyond the wall, the sound of ringing hammers on anvils broke the stillness of early evening. There was a particularly large smithy fifty yards away—a sprawling compound, her father had told her, though she’d never seen it herself. At a particularly loud clang, a patch of biting hemlock spewed their fang-like seeds, as they were wont to do with loud noises. Biting hemlock always flourished near forges.

Yuna knelt closer to clear out rubble. The broken redstone crumbled in her hand. She pulled more chunks out, reaching in over and over again, when suddenly her hand grasped something that was decidedly not stone.

Something softer.

Something warm.

“Oh!” she squealed, snatching her arm back. She peered through the hole in the wall.