Category: The Book of the New Moon Door

The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Four

The House

The Book of the New Moon Door cover image: A book with yellowing, wrinkled pages lies open on an old wooden desk, with a sprig of lavender lying in the center.

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“Did you see that?”

Lucian is already frantically scribbling in his book, a rough approximation of the young woman taking form under his pen. He balances the lantern on the top of his case and rummages in his satchel, producing a glass thermometer wrapped in a handkerchief. 

“Was that the ghost?” asks Berend. With one last look around the stable, and no movement apparent in the body of the horse, he shuts both doors and places the wooden plank across the metal brackets on the outside. 

“Not sure.” Lucian gives the thermometer a shake and frowns at it in the dim lamplight before wrapping it back up and returning it to his bag. “I’ll have to take a few more readings. What did you find in there?”

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Three

Belisia

The Book of the New Moon Door cover image: A book with yellowing, wrinkled pages lies open on an old wooden desk, with a sprig of lavender lying in the center.

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To place the box in which Mikhail’s corpse currently resides into the temple’s extensive graveyard, Berend will have to pay one hundred silver pennies. 

He is informed of this by Father Reeves, the priest in charge of funerary services, a tall man with a shaved head and an aquiline nose. He is paternally comforting and coldly distant, often at the same time, and it’s an unsettling effect. Long brown fingers make notes with a quill in a yellowing ledger. 

We all end up as numbers. Berend hands over the money. It’s most of what he has. He’ll need more if he’s going to continue sleeping in a bed until his next job. 

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Two

Warder

The Book of the New Moon Door cover image: A book with yellowing, wrinkled pages lies open on an old wooden desk, with a sprig of lavender lying in the center.

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Isabel sits at the small table across from Brother Risoven, her tea growing cold and a piece of bloody-colored fungus lying on a scrap of paper beside it. It’s stained the paper a wet reddish brown, and it’s shriveled a bit, but otherwise it hasn’t changed noticeably from when she pulled it off the side of a shack in the Shell District last night. In the thin early morning light from the high, narrow windows of the chapel’s living quarters, it looks rather like a severed finger, dark and twisted from putrefaction. 

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter One

Mikhail

The Book of the New Moon Door cover image: A book with yellowing, wrinkled pages lies open on an old wooden desk, with a sprig of lavender lying in the center.

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The gods weep when a Son of Galaser dies.

Berend would know. It rained for five days straight after the battle on Braenach Hill, when nine Sons out of every ten were slaughtered in the grass, seven years ago. He stood in the mud, afterward, water pouring down on his bandaged head, and listened to the announcement that he and the handful of others still standing would be out of work, as part of the terms of their employer’s surrender. 

Not many walked off that hill. Even fewer are still around. 

And now one of them is lying in six pieces on an embalming table. 

Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter One” →