#WorldOfOntyre 05

What is leadership?

This come up a lot in the Kovenlore series as Riparia and others grapple with their ability, or inability, to lead.

There are great leaders of the past who are mentioned (Riparia is a Queen Vernathia fangirl). In the recent past, there are failed leaders on both sides.

Failed leaders, it becomes obvious, are what allowed toxic leadership to rise to the top.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Fiction

Challenge #04874-M125: Educating a Royal Pain

#WorldOfOntyre 04

Managing my time often requires parceling out tasks and chores so I don’t lose entire days, like today I’ll food shop.

That’s what happens when there’s only me to spread around.

Handling every aspect of writing, editing, and publishing is only one half of the equation. I’m also my cook, errand runner, and maid.

Then again, extreme multi-tasking has become the norm in the US.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Fiction

The Mirage That Told the Truth

The Mirage That Told the Truth

A Story from Lumenvale

In Pyrrhia, the heat mirages at dusk showed you alternate versions of reality.

This was not metaphor. Not local superstition, not the embellished travel writing of Lumenvale scholars who had seen the desert’s edge but never its heart. The Pyrrhians documented it with the same careful empiricism they applied to everything in a landscape that refused to stay still — the mirages appeared at the hour when the day’s heat began releasing from the ruby sand, and what they showed was real in the specific way that parallel things were real: not the life you were living, but a life that had been possible, running alongside this one at the distance of a single different choice.

Yara had been a mirage-reader for thirty years.

Not the formal kind — she had no guild sanction, no certification from the Spice Council’s division of sensory arts. She had simply lived in the desert long enough that the mirages had become legible to her the way water was legible to someone who had fished the same river all their life. You learned what you were looking for because you had looked for so long that looking had become involuntary.

She was fifty-eight years old and had seen thousands of mirages.

She had seen alternate versions of herself making different marriages, living in different cities, following different trades. She had seen selves that were wealthier and selves that were harder and selves that looked back at her with a quality of settled contentment that she had spent thirty years trying to parse — whether it was actual happiness or simply the happiness of not knowing what the other options were.

She had never tried to hold a mirage. You couldn’t. The desert had taught her that early — the moment you moved toward one, the heat differential shifted and the image dissolved, always just past the point of grasp. You watched or you let it go. Those were the only choices.

The evening in question was not remarkable in any way she could have predicted.

A trading day, three customers, a respectable sum in the sealed gem-notes she kept in the leather satchel at her belt. She was walking the road back to the village of Ashkenar from the outer market, which was a two-hour walk she had made so many times that her feet knew it without her attention. The ruby sand caught the last of the sun and threw it back in the particular way it did at this hour — not blinding, but total, a warmth that was less a temperature than a quality of being surrounded.

The mirage appeared, as they always appeared, without announcement.

She almost walked through it. She had walked through enough of them over the years — the ones she had seen so many times that their content had become familiar, alternate selves she had already understood and stopped needing to examine. She registered its shape in her peripheral vision and was preparing to step to the side and continue walking when something made her stop.

It was not a version of herself she recognized.

Not one of the common alternates — the married one, the one who had stayed in Eshnar instead of coming south, the one who had taken the spice merchant’s offer at twenty-two and spent her life in trade. This was something she had seen only once before, briefly, years ago, so briefly she had not been certain of what she had seen.

She stood still. The mirage held.

It was evening, in the version the mirage was showing her. An Ashkenar evening, which she knew from the particular color of the terraced city’s lanterns at dusk — the way they lit the carved rock in layers of amber that descended to the desert floor. The courtyard of a house she recognized as her own house, modified by thirty years of small changes that the alternate version had apparently not made.

Her husband Corin was sitting in the courtyard. He had been dead for six years.

She had known, intellectually, that the mirages sometimes showed the alternate realities where people who had died were still living — the different paths where the illness had not come, where the timing had been different, where whatever random cruelty had made its decision had made it differently. She had known this and had spent six years looking away from the mirages quickly, before they could show her what she was afraid they would show her, because she had believed she could not bear it.

She had been wrong about that. She could bear it. She was bearing it now.

He was sitting in the courtyard with the quality of stillness he had always had in the evenings — the particular ease of a man who had worked hard all day and had arrived, without drama, at the hour of not working. The lanterns were lit. The sky above the terraced city was deepening toward the particular purple that came after Pyrrhia’s sunsets, when the last heat released from the sand and the air went briefly, surprisingly cool.

There were two cups on the low table beside him. He was waiting for someone.

In the mirage, the door from the house opened. The version of herself that walked out was her own age, or near enough — the years had worked on that face the same way they had worked on hers, the same lines at the eyes and the same grey coming through at the temples. She was carrying something, a basket, something from the kitchen. She set it on the table and sat down across from him and he looked up and said something she couldn’t hear.

She smiled. The alternate Yara. The one who had not had to learn to be alone.

Yara stood in the road and watched them.

The mirage did not show anything extraordinary. That was the thing about it that undid her — she had half-expected, half-feared, that a mirage of what she had lost would show her some peak moment, some height of joy that would feel like an accusation. It showed her nothing of the kind. It showed her an evening. An ordinary evening of two people in a courtyard with cups and a basket and the purple sky above the terraced city, not speaking of anything important, not doing anything that would merit recording, simply present in the same space with the ease of people who had been doing this for many years and expected to keep doing it.

That was the moment. Not a great moment. Not a moment that had known itself to be significant while it was occurring. Just an evening in a courtyard — the kind of evening that accumulated into a life and that you did not understand the value of until the accumulation stopped.

She did not move toward the mirage. She had learned not to do that. She stood in the road and she let herself look, fully and without turning away, for the first time in six years.

The mirage held for a long time. Longer than they usually held. The desert had its own intentions about such things, and she had learned not to question them.

When it dissolved, it went slowly — not the sudden blink-out of the common mirages but a gradual fading, the way the light went at the end of a Pyrrhian evening, so incremental that you could not identify the moment it was gone, only note afterward that it was.

She stood in the road for a while.

Then she picked up her satchel and walked the rest of the way to Ashkenar, arriving at her own courtyard — her actual courtyard, with one cup and no basket and the purple sky overhead, which was the same sky regardless — and she lit the lanterns and sat down and stayed there until the desert had gone fully dark.

She did not look for the moment. She had already found it.

She was carrying it now.

☕ Enjoyed this story? Writing Lumenvale is how I pay my bills. If these stories are worth something to you, a $1 Ko-fi keeps the forge burning — and tells me this world is worth continuing. 👉 Buy Chadwick a coffee

← Previous Story: The Weight of a Mark

#WorldOfOntyre 03

I broke away from my Book-4 read-thru yesterday (briefly) when inspiration struck me. Not another story, but new notes to aid me when I work on Book-7.

When I draft, I draft, but when I edit, I’ll indulge inspiration if it aids other projects. It also provides a break and adds a little variety to my time.

Drafting is intense, but with other aspects of writing I’m deliberate.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Fiction

The Old Ways: Chapter 17–The Crossing

https://gregcmillerauthor.blog/2026/05/02/the-old-ways-chapter-17-the-crossing/

#WorldOfOntyre 02

Thanks to my rotational system, it’s been six months since I performed the targeted edit on Book-4. Now, reading through it, it’s a stirring experience for me.

Yes, I love the story, but it’s more than that.

It’s witnessing the result of all my efforts, noting all the problem areas that used to exist. It’s that moment when I say, “Yes, this is it, this is what I wanted.”

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Fiction

Challenge #04871-M122: Clutch Clowder

#WorldOfOntyre 01

As they day wore on yesterday, I felt increasingly better. I began a read-thru of Book-4 to verify it’s ready for the final spellcheck and publishing.

The book has a way of sneaking up on me. There’s an ominousness to it, the characters trying to save a nation weary, the antagonists growing evermore bold and deadly.

The middle book, it’s pivotal, but also pivots the story.

Be everwell.

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AmWritingFantasy #Fantasy #FantasyFiction #Fiction