Month: August 2020

(Two printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.)

FROM HIS GALLEYWAGON AT THE edge of epicurean Pormaris’ busy South Market, Prosatio Silban could see the dockside funeral pyres at their greedy task.

It wasn’t the best location, but the result of being last through the gate of the City of Gourmands that morning with all the good spots already taken. And it wasn’t so much the spectacle which bothered Prosatio Silban as the lack of custom; mourners were a notoriously unhungry lot. Here it was approaching dinner, and he had not sold so much as a bowl of beans. Such is life, he thought, opening the galleywagon door to a light salt breeze. Life’s only constancies are death and hunger, and like most extremes they make a poor mix. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Elegiac Escort”

(Six printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.)

PARTLY, IT HAD TO DO with the eyebrows.

In order to pass as a mercenary cook within the Three Cities and Thousand Villages of the Uulian Commonwell, and without the need for too many probing questions, Prosatio Silban employed artificial eyebrows made from grey mouse-fur. They were tedious to affix each morning and challenging to remove each night, but in their absence, his customers might ask something like:

“Why don’t you have any eyebrows?”

“Were you injured in some culinary mishap?”

“I thought only Sacreants were hairless…?” Continue reading “Face Value (A Prosatio Silban Tale)”

(Four printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction. Enjoy.)

IT WAS A COMMON ENOUGH skillet: two-thirds of a cubit across, three finger-breadths deep, of simple cast iron with a carved maplewood handle. The dreams, however, were anything but common; mad reels of dissolute frivolity, the raw taste of cheap spirits, a seething anger, an unfulfilled lust.

Prosatio Silban had bought the skillet in stony-hearted Tirinbar, the northernmost of the Three Cities of the Uulian Commonwell, situated at a mountain’s foot on the northern shore of the Inland Deep, and one of the beefy cook’s least favorite locations due to the unfriendly materialism of its population and their policy of enslaving the Exilic Lands’ indigenes. Continue reading “Caveat Bibitor (A Prosatio Silban Tale)”

(Ten-and-a-half printed pages; the longest Prosatio Silban tale so far, and though it’s the third I’ve written, it’s actually the first one in narrative order. If you’re new to these, here are the (much shorter) preface and introduction. Enjoy.)

IT IS MUSIC. AND IT is Time. But mostly, it is Love.

Harpsong and drumbeat whirl through the broad moons-lit hollow like a flight of bright starlings air-dancing over a rain-pocked lake.

In a hollow atop a vast cliff squat two robe-wrapped figures: intent, eyes closed, one plucking, one pounding. Nearby lies a third, hands chest-clasped, contemplating the two moons gently contending overhead for celestial supremacy. The trio is edging across the tenuous bridge connecting youth to manhood, when the character which shapes the face has been poured but not yet hardened. Continue reading “Passing Notes (A Prosatio Silban Tale)”