Armed with a sword, a shield, and far too little training, Horace doubts eir ability to defend the market-goers. But eir last stand is interrupted by a mysterious elven figure who can dissipate the Fragments with a single, strange sentence: your story is my story.
From the moment it is uttered, Horace knows the sentences holds true for em, too—and when the elf collapses in the middle of the market, e carries them to safety, to recover away from the panicked crowd and inevitable questions from eir fellow guards. It could cost em eir apprenticeship—eir last chance to find eir place in eir home city—but Horace cannot resist the pull of this mystery elf and the call of a new friend.
Aliyah has but one desire: to leave Trenaze's safe boundaries and find the forest that haunts their dreams. After an afternoon of board games in their quiet, sharp-witted company, Horace is ready to follow, confronting Fragments and other dangers of the road to understand what happened that day, hear Aliyah's laugh again and finally feel like e belongs.
Claudie Arseneault is an easily-enthused aromantic and asexual writer with a never-ending cycle of obsessions but an enduring love for all things cephalopod and fantasy (together or not!). She writes stories that centre platonic relationships and loves large casts and single-city settings, the most notable of which are the City of Spires series (2017-2023) and Baker Thief (2018).
In addition to her own fiction, Claudie has co-edited Common Bonds (2021), an anthology of aromantic speculative short stories. She is a founding member of The Kraken Collective, an alliance of self-publishing SFF authors, and the creator of the Aromantic and Asexual Characters Database.