A walk in the woods is never simple. Step through the fog, into the unknown. Evade the army behind you. Get lost.

Escape and Transform: books2read.com/u/3nJLZx

#LowFantasy #ShortStory #Ebook

BRECK: Dead Delivery: Chapter One

BRECK: Dead Delivery

Chapter One — The Only Power Worth Having

Prompt: What superpower do you wish you had, and why? Tags: dailyprompt | Breck | Crestfall | Dead Delivery | Lumenvale

The road into Crestfall ran downhill for the last half-mile, and Breck always thought that told you something about a town before you ever set foot in it. Places built on rises watched the horizon. Places built in hollows watched each other.

He came in from the north at midday, when the light was flat and colorless and the rain had stopped but hadn’t committed to staying stopped. The courier satchel rode his left hip, its strap diagonal across his chest. Before he’d crested the last ridge he’d moved the faded cord bracelet from his pack to the strap — he’d been doing that for years without deciding to, the way a man will reach for a habit without naming it — and now it rested against the worn leather, pale as old straw, too small to be anything anyone would look twice at.

He looked twice at everything else.

Crestfall was a river town, one of a dozen that had grown up along the Calwick’s eastern fork during the years when the trade routes were safe and merchants moved freely and magistrates were mostly honest. It had the bones of a prosperous place — good stone buildings along the main road, a proper granary, a covered market square that could shelter fifty stalls in the rain. The bones were fine. It was the flesh that bothered him.

The market square had eleven stalls where there should have been thirty. The inn’s signboard hung on one chain, the other rusted through, the board itself turned sideways and no one had straightened it. A boy of maybe twelve sat on the step of a cooperage with his elbows on his knees and watched Breck come down the road with the particular still-faced attention of a child who had learned that strangers were worth tracking before you relaxed around them.

Breck noted it. Kept walking.

He had a sealed document for the magistrate’s office — tax records from a landowner in the northern valley, routine work, the kind of job that paid badly and moved fast. He’d been told to deliver, collect a reply document, and be back on the north road before dark. Clean work. No complications.

The inn was called The River’s Rest. He went in because he needed water for his flask and because you learned more in three minutes inside a tavern than in an hour on the road outside one.

The common room held perhaps a dozen people at midday, which was thin for a market town on a Thursday. A fire burned low in the far hearth. The smell was wood smoke and old tallow candles and something underneath that — a flatness, like air that had been breathed too many times without a window opened.

A traveling entertainer had set himself up near the fire, the kind of hedge-mage who moved from town to town doing parlor work — small conjurings, coin tricks dressed in cantrip light, the sort of man who had enough real gift to be impressive and not enough to be dangerous. He was making a small flame dance between his fingers, blue at the base and orange at the tip, and the handful of children near him were watching with their mouths open.

Breck got water from the bar. Leaned against the wall. Watched.

“Here’s the question,” the hedge-mage said, letting the flame spiral upward into a brief column before snuffing it against his palm. He spread his hands wide, showman’s instincts covering the wince. “If you could have one power — any power, the kind the old stories talk about — what would it be? Anyone.”

A boy near the front said flight, immediately, with the certainty of a child who had thought about this often. A woman in the back called out healing. A merchant near the window, not looking up from his ale, said the power to know when a man was lying to him, and got a tired laugh from the table beside him.

The mage went around the room. Strength. Fire. Sight through walls. The answers came quick and easy, the kind of question people had been sitting on their whole lives without anyone asking.

He turned, eventually, to Breck.

Breck was quiet for a moment. The mage held the silence, professional enough to know when waiting served him better than prompting.

“I’d want to always be on time,” Breck said.

The mage blinked. It wasn’t the answer the room expected. A few people glanced over — at the size of him, at the courier satchel, at the flatness in his voice that made it hard to tell if he was joking.

“On time,” the mage repeated.

“For things that matter.” He took a pull from his flask. “Strength fades. Fire goes out. Half the powers in the old stories come with a price nobody mentions until it’s too late.” He set the flask down on the bar. “But if you could always arrive before something went wrong — before instead of after — that would be worth something.”

The mage held his gaze for a moment, then moved on to someone else. The room shifted back to its murmuring. The children turned back to the flame tricks.

Breck pushed off the wall and paid for his water.

The magistrate’s office was on the north end of the square, a solid stone building with the town seal carved above the door and fresh mortar between two courses of stone near the corner — recent work, more money spent here than anywhere else in Crestfall. He noted that too.

A clerk took his delivery without looking at him, which was normal, and told him the reply document wouldn’t be ready until tomorrow morning, which was not in the contract. Breck said nothing. He took the temporary billet the clerk offered — a room at the inn, town’s expense, standard courier accommodation — and walked back out into the flat gray afternoon.

He stood in the square for a moment. The boy from the cooperage step was still watching him from across the market. The eleven stalls had not become thirty. A woman at the nearest one was packing her goods away with the focused efficiency of someone who had learned to be gone before a certain hour.

It wasn’t his business. He had a room for the night and a document to collect in the morning and a road north waiting for him. Clean work. No complications.

He looked at the bracelet on his satchel strap. Pale. Small. Saying nothing.

He adjusted the strap across his chest, picked a direction, and started walking. Not toward the inn.

Toward whatever it was that had made this town so quiet.

☕ 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

Fantasy with Friends: Low or High Fantasy?

Briana and Krysta at Pages Unbound are hosting a fantasy discussion meme this year called Fantasy with Friends. Since fantasy is my favorite genre, I thought it would be fun to take part. This week, their question is:

Do you prefer low or high fantasy? Or both?

As a longtime fantasy reader I have certainly read both, but high fantasy will always hold my heart. I love being swept away on an epic adventure through a world that may or may not resemble anything I recognize at all. Part of the fun of fantasy is getting to explore a completely new and unique world.

Low fantasy does sometimes find a spot in my reading life. It often feels simpler and easier on my brain, so I like using it, as well as a couple of other genres, as something of a palate cleanser. I love the way high fantasy makes me think fast just to keep up, but sometimes it gets a little heavy book after book after book. Sometimes life just gets too messy and heavy. So I turn to low fantasy for the simplicity I find in the worlds. There are fewer rules to remember, and so much more is familiar so it’s easy to put them aside until they pop back up instead of having to store that information in a spot in my mind. I think it also allows readers to really focus on things like character development, the emotions, and the plot because the world building isn’t so massive.

But my favorite thing about fantasy is the world building. To me, any story can be nested in fantasy. A romance, a mystery, an adventure, academia. Anything. Fantasy, to me, is all about the world and the unexplained. It’s the strange worlds, the strange creatures, the magic, the weird. While low fantasy can certainly have all of that, I just happen to have a greater appreciation for those authors who build worlds from the ground up. I’ve been writing fantasy worlds since I was 10 (technically 8, but that was co-written), so I understand what a massive undertaking it is and just how much work goes into creating a working world. So that’s a big part of the reason why I love high fantasy.

I also just love the idea of stepping into the unknown. I love discovering something new, and high fantasy usually gives me that more than low fantasy. I love the feeling of feeling completely lost in a new world, because, very often, as I keep going, it suddenly starts to make sense and that’s just the most incredible feeling to me. I think that’s why I loved The Mask of Mirrors by M.A. Carrick so much. It was sometimes overwhelming, but, halfway through, things just started clicking, and nothing can take that excitement and sheer joy from me. It’s what makes high fantasy so incredible to me.

Then there’s just the sense of being swept off my feet into an extraordinary adventure, whether it takes me out into the wider world or confines me to a specific location. I find there’s something exciting about maybe finding a familiar story nested in a unique world or finding the adventure of a lifetime in a place I never thought could exist. I love how things can be bent and broken and somehow make sense. I do not like when things bend and break for the sake of the story, but, when it just works, it feels like magic all on its own.

And, at nearly 40 years old, I still find myself waiting to come into my powers or finding a portal that will take me elsewhere, so I consider high fantasy to be an acceptable way of doing what I’ve always dreamed of.

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Only 2 days left for this #SPFBO bundle! Get 25 books from 25 authors participating in this year's SPFBO for only $25!!
Includes #FantasyBooks from sub-genres like: #LowFantasy #HighFantasy #UrbanFantasy #EpicFantasy #DarkFantasy #SwordAndSorcery #Romantasy & #Horror
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Looking for something to read? I've joined up with a bunch of other authors from this year's #SPFBO to offer our books as a bundle.
Get 25 books from 25 authors for $25!!
Includes #FantasyBooks from sub-genres like: #LowFantasy #HighFantasy #UrbanFantasy #EpicFantasy #DarkFantasy #SwordAndSorcery #Romantasy & #Horror

https://itch.io/b/3592/spfbo-2026
Only available until the end of the month!

@bookstodon @fantasy
#IndieBooks #IndieAuthors #Bookstodon #SelfPromo #BookSale #SFFBookClub #SFFBooks #books

Zum heutigen #BücherSonntag habe ich mal wieder die #Printausgabe meines #DSA Fan-Romans durchgeblättert. 🥰 Ich bin immer noch unglaublich stolz drauf und nach wie vor traurig, dass ich keine Möglichkeit zur Lizenzierung bekommen habe. Aber immerhin meine Gruppe und ich haben unser persönliches Stück #Aventurien in Schriftform. Der #Roman ist die grobe Grundlage für mein aktuelles Projekt #Eterna . #Cover und #Kapitelzierde sind von mir gezeichnet.

#Fantasy #Lowfantasy #penandpaper

#PhantastikPrompts 3. Wäre es möglich, eine Geschichte von dir in einem ganz anderen Subgenre der #Phantastik zu schreiben? Zum Beispiel #ScienceFiction statt #Fantasy ?

Lustigerweise ist das quasi genau das, was ich gerade mache: Die Geschichte gibt es fertig als #LowFantasy , basierend auf einer PnP-Kampagne meiner Gruppe. Nun schreibe ich sie in #UrbanFantasy mit einer Prise #Cyberpunk um. Natürlich muss ich einiges anpassen, aber im Prinzip geht es. 😁

#schreiben #bookstodon #bookwyrm

Wie sattelfest bist du bei #Fantasygenres? Ich muss zugeben, dass ich da manchmal auch nicht weiß, wo da die Grenzen sind. In diesem Blogbeitrag habe ich mich daher nochmal mit den Genres beschäftigt und eine nicht ganz ernst gemeinte Kategorisierung angestellt. Viel Spaß beim Lesen ;).

https://phantastopia.de/fantasy-genres-erklaert/

#buchblog #fantasy #fantasylesen #darkfantasy #grimdarkfantasy #romantasy #highfantasy #lowfantasy #urbanfantasy #phantastik #bookstodon #blog #literatur