thanh.nguyenhoang.1403@gmail.com
Stories
168
Chapters
1,512
Words
3.2 M
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Reading
11 d, 4 h
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I wake inside a city made entirely of scent. Stone smells afraid. Brass tastes angry. Every human pulse is a red door I could break. I crouch in the central square on four legs, enormous enough that my shadow covers the fountain. Samira’s soldiers form a ring but do not attack. They want the crowd to watch me become proof. Somewhere beneath the borrowed terror, Zahra is still counting exits. One: flee into the desert and carry the fear with me until it burns out. Two: kill Samira and confirm every…-
11.3 K • Completed
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We have four minutes, twelve shards, and one engineer attached to the machine by a brass arm. Tariq meets us at the core lift. He has recovered the stolen moonstone from caches across the palace, but the final shard remains in my pocket—the memory I entered the auction to save. “Installing it will erase what it carries,” he warns. Inside the crystal, eight-year-old Tariq teaches me to dance on hot sand. It is the last memory the machine did not take from him. If I surrender it, I save the living…
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11.3 K • Completed
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My father’s house disappeared on a Tuesday. Not burned. Not demolished. Disappeared. At sunrise I carried two bowls of oat broth from the village inn toward the narrow cottage where he had lived for forty-seven years. The lane ended at a wall of rain. Beyond it lay a loch that had never been there, dark water occupying the exact shape of our garden. I dropped both bowls. “Elspeth?” called Mairi the innkeeper. “Who are you feeding?” I pointed at the water. She looked at me with the careful…-
11.2 K • Completed
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The silver lichen ink bites into the vellum, glowing like split quicksilver under the candlelight. I drag the needle-point brush along the western ridge of the Moon Deed, severing the tax road from the Laird’s estate. Just a millimeter of silver. That is all it takes to hide a valley from the winter tithe. The stone floor drops. The tower screams. Mortar grinds against bedrock, a sound like a spine snapping in half. I slam into the drafting table, ribs bruising against the oak edge, and clutch the…
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11.2 K • Completed
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The silence in the tower is a physical weight, pressing against my eardrums. Caelan Mor’s hand is flat on the drafting table, mere inches from my own, caging me against the slanted oak. He smells of pine needles, wet earth, and a cold, predatory anger that makes the hairs on my arms stand up. "Fix it," he says again, the gravel in his voice scraping against the quiet. I stare at the silver ink on the vellum. It is no longer wet. It has settled into a dull, flat grey, baking itself into the…
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11.2 K • Completed
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The granite beneath my boot turns to ash. I drop my center of gravity instantly, driving my claws into the sheer face of the ridge. My other hand shoots out, catching Elspeth by the heavy wool of her coat just as the ledge she is standing on dissolves into thin air. I haul her upward. She slams against my chest, her breath punching out in a sharp gasp. I pin her against the rock wall with my forearm, locking us both to the only solid matter left on this longitude. Beneath us, a gorge is tearing itself…
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11.2 K • Completed
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The silver lines of the Moon Deed pulse weakly in the suffocating dark of the hollow oak. I trace the topography with the dry end of my needle-brush, calculating the sheer drop of the ravines that didn't exist an hour ago. "We move due north," Caelan says. He is leaning heavily against the curved wood, his breathing tight from the silver burn in his shoulder. "Through the Blackwood. It is the straightest line to the Observatory." "And it is exactly where the Iron-Maw will wait…
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11.2 K • Completed
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The silver pulse in my finger leads us off every map I know. It beats whenever Caelan’s heart does, drawing a thin line across the salt flats. We follow it through fog until a cottage appears where the Moon Deed insists there is only empty moor. Its stones are roofed with heather. Smoke climbs from a chimney though no one has lived here in eighty years. Caelan stops at the gate. “My mother’s house.” “Your mother lived at Dunmorrow Keep.” “She ruled there. She lived here.” The cottage…
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11.2 K • Completed
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The Iron-Maw attack before Caelan can explain. Silver chains punch through the cottage walls. Because the house is made of memory, each hook tears something from him: his mother’s voice vanishes from the kettle’s song; his childhood maps bleach white; the scent of peat becomes ash. We flee through the rear door into a forest that did not exist when we entered. Hunters ring the trees wearing iron muzzles and red-moon badges. Their captain unfurls a parchment copied from Caelan’s private…
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11.2 K • Completed
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Without the map, distance loses its manners. I walk for an hour and arrive three days north. I cross one stream six times. Mountains trade places whenever I blink. By the time I collapse beside a standing stone, my hands are half claw and moonlight shines through the veins of my wrists. I have spent my life selling exits. Now the world contains nothing else. At dawn, refugees find me: families from villages the broken Deed has pushed out of history. They carry doors without houses and keys to rooms that…
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11.2 K • Completed
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