The Metaphorager.

(With much, much help from the indefatigable Ann Clark; five printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.)

WAKING UP TO A BABY’S cry can be a normal thing for some people – but when the cry comes from just outside your front door, it bespeaks something strange afoot.

Prosatio Silban rubbed his eyes and sat up in the sleeping berth in the rear of his cozy galleywagon. The cries were coming from his portable home’s other end, where a double door separated him from the world of unwanted intrusion. Shrugging into a green silk robe, he padded across the galleywagon’s ornate rug and opened the door’s top half. Nothing but morning sunlight greeted him, so he opened the lower half as well.

There on the driver’s bench lay a worn wicker basket. In the basket, tucked into a soft blue woolen blanket, lay a small but full-lunged baby. O Blessed All-Mother, he thought. What have You set before me now?

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(Five printed pages, and a sequel of sorts. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.)

IT WAS THE MOST IMPROBABLE of places to meet someone from his past, but Prosatio Silban was accustomed to the improbable – in fact, one might even say he preferred it.

Riverwood was the northernmost border-settlement within the lands surrounding epicurean Pormaris, that most decadent of the Three Cities (and Thousand Villages) of the Uulian Commonwell. Nestled between tall, round Sentinel Hill to the west, and the thick-wooded Greenlanes to the north and east (and separated from that forest by the tranquil and iridescent Crooked River), the village was a destination not only for Uulian seekers-after-mystery but also, occasionally, to the Treeborn: furtive Greenlanes indigenes who traded in woodcraft and herbaceous treasures, culled from the very foliage that (rumoredly) gave them life.

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(Story idea by the redoubtable Ann Clark; two-and-a-half printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.)

IF SOMEONE YOU LOVE BEGINS to act strangely, you could do one of two things: ignore the situation and try to carry on regardless, or engage as best you can.

That was the problem Prosatio Silban was puzzling over. His dray-beast, a shapeshifting buopoth named Onward, was usually enthusiastic about pulling the cook’s galleywagon. But this morning, his head hung between his forelegs; he didn’t at all meet the cook’s concerned gaze; and instead of his usual merry rattling hoot, his only vocalizations were soft sad sighs.

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