Chapter 5 of Rowley's Ride is available to read on #RoyalRoad: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/102509/the-book-of-newts

Edwina's guitar is finished, despite Plasmie's every attempt to kill her, but before they finish, the new law banning mythril guitars is passed.

They press on, regardless, but the first time Edwina plays Myth Guitar, the song reaches a hundred miles in every direction, even into orbit...

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BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Five What Can’t Be Felt Twice

What Can’t Be Felt Twice

BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Five

What Can’t Be Felt Twice

This is Chapter 5 of BRECK: Stone’s Rest, Book Three of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye. New chapters post daily.

The Story So Far

The Council of Roots granted Breck standing to investigate — not trust, Daveron made clear, but the same thing Lumenvale had already run out of. Bren’s reading confirmed something was spreading through the deep stone faster than the mining itself. Jenna is taking Breck to Thunderstep’s own earth-speaker, the one person who can show him what a Council hearing only let him hear secondhand.

Chapter Five: What Can’t Be Felt Twice

This chapter asks what people get wrong about reliving a first experience — and what it costs the people who carry a mountain’s pain that the wonder of that first contact only ever happens once.

The path Jenna took him down ran the opposite direction from every corridor Breck had walked since arriving — not up toward the crown and the light, but down, through passages cut narrower and older the deeper they went, the warm honeyed stone of the guest terraces giving way to something darker and colder and, the further they descended, faintly alive in a way that had nothing to do with the bioluminescence. He could feel it now without needing Jenna to tell him what he was feeling. A low pressure, somewhere behind his sternum, that hadn’t been there an hour ago.

“You’ll feel that more before we’re done,” Jenna said, reading something in his face. “Mira’s chamber sits close to the deep stone. Closer than anywhere you’ve been since you arrived.”

The chamber, when they reached it, was a hollow worn smooth by long use rather than carved by design — a low, round space lit by veins of light so faint and so deep a red they barely qualified as light at all, centered on a still pool of something that wasn’t quite water, dark and slow-moving and warm enough that steam curled off its surface in the cold air. A woman knelt at its edge, older than Jenna by twenty years at least, her hands stained a permanent dark grey-brown from what Breck guessed was decades of exactly this contact, her robes plain and undyed where Jenna’s moved like water. She didn’t rise when they entered. She simply turned her head, unhurried, the way a person turns who has long since stopped being surprised by anything that walks into her chamber.

“This is Mira,” Jenna said. “Earth-speaker. Thunderstep’s voice, as much as anyone living can claim to be.”

“Daveron’s voice too, on the days he’ll listen,” Mira said, with the dry economy of someone who’d made the same joke enough times that it had stopped being entirely a joke. She studied Breck a long moment, the way Jenna had at the threshold station, except where Jenna’s attention had felt like cataloguing, Mira’s felt like something closer to diagnosis. “You felt Thunderstep’s greeting on the climb up.”

“Yes.”

“That was a kindness. A door held open gently for a guest. What I’m about to show you isn’t a kindness. I want you understanding that before you kneel.”

“I didn’t come here for kindness.”

“No,” she agreed. “Caine’s letters never do.” She gestured at the stone beside the pool, and Breck knelt where she pointed, the cold of it seeping through his trousers immediately, and waited while she finished whatever preparation she was making in silence — pressing her palms flat against the chamber floor, eyes closed, lips moving without sound.

“Can I ask you something first,” Breck said, while she worked, “before whatever this is starts.”

She didn’t open her eyes. “You can ask.”

“What was it like. The first time. Before you knew what it would cost you to keep doing it.”

That got her eyes open. She looked at him with something that wasn’t quite surprise — more the look of a woman who’d been asked a hundred questions by a hundred outsiders and had not, in a long while, been asked that particular one.

“I was eight,” she said, after a moment. “My mother brought me to this same pool, though it was a different mountain then, one I haven’t walked with in thirty years. I remember every part of it. The warmth of the stone before I even touched the water. The way Grandmother Sael’s voice felt — not loud, not frightening, just larger than anything I’d ever stood inside of, the way the sky feels larger than a room the first time you understand what sky actually is.” She looked down at her own stained hands, turning them over once, the way a person looks at an old scar to confirm it’s still there. “I have done this thousands of times since. I have never once felt it that way again. Not because the gift faded. Because I know now what’s underneath it. The first time, I only felt how vast she was. Every time after, I feel how much she’s carrying, and I can’t unfeel the second thing to get back to only feeling the first. There isn’t a version of this where I get that morning back.”

“That sounds like grief.”

“It is grief. A small one, set against everything else I carry, but it’s mine, and I’ve made peace with owning it.” She studied him a moment longer. “Is that an answer to whatever you were actually asking, courier, or only the shape of one?”

“It’s an answer,” Breck said, and meant it. He didn’t say the rest — that he’d spent the walk down wondering whether there was anything in his own life he’d wish to feel again with that same unguarded first edge, before he understood what it would cost to keep choosing it, and that the only honest answer he had was the bracelet, and a girl in a Karithian valley, and a version of himself who hadn’t yet learned what late looked like. He didn’t think Mira needed that traded back to her. She’d given him something true without asking for true in return, and he understood enough about the shape of this conversation to know that mattered more than reciprocity would have.

“There’s a second part to it I should tell you before we begin,” Mira said, turning back toward the pool. “It isn’t only the old who feel that second thing now. It used to be that every child confirmed by ten, the bond clean and strong and unmistakable, the way mine was. Bren is sixteen and it nearly didn’t take. Three children born this past cycle haven’t bonded at all, and two of them should have by now.” Her voice didn’t rise, but something underneath it had gone very flat and very careful, the way a person’s voice goes when they’re describing a wound they’ve decided not to flinch in front of a stranger. “The mining isn’t only hurting the mountains’ bodies, Breck. It’s thinning what passes between us and them. There may be children born in the next handful of years who never get a first time at all. Not a dimmer one. None.”

She didn’t wait for him to find a response to that. She reached out and took his hand, pressed it flat against the warm stone beside the pool, and told him to breathe slow and not fight whatever arrived.

What arrived wasn’t like Thunderstep’s greeting on the climb. There was no welcome in it, no weight pressed gently into him the way a hand rests on a shoulder. It came in all at once, vast and wordless and wrong — a grinding ache low in something that had no business having joints, deep stone fractured and weeping some mineral equivalent of blood that Breck felt rather than saw, the slow suffocating panic of breath that couldn’t fully draw. He understood, distantly, that this was Thunderstep’s pain and not only Thunderstep’s — that underneath it, fainter, like voices carried on wind from very far away, ran threads of the same wrongness from other directions entirely, other peaks he’d never stood on, all of it bleeding together into a single low continuous note of harm being done faster than it could be answered.

And under all of it, sharper than the rest, unmistakable even to someone who’d never felt anything like this before in his life, ran one thread that didn’t sound like the others. Not a grinding ache. A silence, spreading, where sound should have been. Something going quiet that was never meant to go quiet yet.

He came back to himself on his hands and knees on the cold chamber floor, Jenna’s hand steady on his back, his own breath loud and ragged in his ears.

“That last one,” he managed. “The quiet one.”

“Frostpeak,” Mira said, and there was nothing dry left in her voice at all. “You felt that even through Thunderstep, from this far. That shouldn’t be possible. It shouldn’t be possible, and you felt it anyway.” She looked at him with something that might have been the first real flicker of hope he’d seen on anyone’s face since the Council, and might equally have been simple exhaustion finding a new direction to point itself in. “We need to go to her. Soon. Whatever you came here to investigate, courier, you no longer have the luxury of investigating it slowly.”

BRECK: Stone’s Rest is a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye — Book Three of the BRECK series, crossing from Lumenvale into Nomados. Chapter 5 of 20. New chapters post daily.

✦ Enjoyed this chapter? “What Can’t Be Felt Twice” continues Book Three of the BRECK series — noble dark fantasy, an earth-speaker’s grief for a first communion she can never feel again, and a silence spreading where a mountain’s voice should be. Browse the full series, follow for daily chapters, or share this with a reader who’s still chasing the first time they fell in love with a story.

Exhibition Highlight from Paintings of Book Covers by Neil Shawcross

ArtisAnn Gallery, 70 Bloomfield Avenue, Belfast, BT5 5AE

Wed – Sat: 11am to 5.30pm

https://artisann.org/collections/eminent-authors

#art #book #novels #fiction #fineart #painting #belfast #fineart

Neil Shawcross is well known for his love of books, with a long running series of paintings based on the covers of the iconic penguin books. This exhibition features a selection of these works from across the years.

There are people alive today
only because something lost interest halfway through.

#horror #dark #story #horrorbook #fiction