Whispers

THE COMMERCE OF HEARTS
Liana Mir

Summary: Ah, have mercy on us, powers, we who deal in the commerce of hearts. Fantasy flash fiction of Breath

The woman who enters my shop is young in body, but she is not young. I have seen battle; I know the scarred.

Her eyes are pale, wounded, weary. She moves as though every muscle in her body aches and glances away from the delicately carved stone bottles nestled among swaths of fine fabrics. Instead, her gaze lingers on the circular glass slabs set beside with gently calligraphed names: vredé, inul, hoshult. Selflessness, duty, peace. Fingers glimmer out to touch, then rapidly withdraw.

“You have been to a collector before?” I ask the needless question, needless as I am Mavren, a collector, and recognize the faces of those I have laid waste.

Her gaze flits upward, shuddering past the old uniform of an Enforcer, that remnant of my former life as the hands and will of the King, then onto my face. There it stays.

She strides forward abruptly in a rustle of coarse cloth and sets her small bag of yet coarser weave beside the one tilted stool I retain, where she proceeds to sit. Her eyelids drift shut. “Leave the duty, she says.

Ah, have mercy on us, powers, we who deal in the commerce of hearts.

Her clothes, almost more slender than she, betray her humble means, Her figure declares her motherhood, and her eyes are the eyes of the heartless, lacking much of the spark of humanity. We are much alike in that.

My palm closes neatly over the skin above her heart. With my flesh, I feel the sharpness of her intake of breath, but with my soul, I feel the acrid potency of her love. She has children who need food and clothing and shelter in these hard days. She has a husband whose work does not bring enough to give it to them. I hunt through the welter of emotion, its vibrancy, and little wonder she is wounded. She has sold her fear, resentment, joy, gratitude, wonder—everything. Everything but duty, love, and the pain they cause her.

I could take the duty. It would fetch a handsome price, enough to keep her a few months before she swept the path to a Collector again. I leave it, yea powers, I leave it.

Love. Pure, undiluted, potent love. It warms my soul and fills me, then I step away and breathe it out into a bottle, stopper it with a black clay infused with implacable.

The mother’s eyes open and are cold, but she has a duty to her family and will care for them. She chose well.

I pay her enough to provide for a family of five for more than a year, long enough to bring new work or much enough to educate the  children to care for themselves. She nods her head and walks past the shelves of hearts, unheeding and uncaring when hers joins them.

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Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.

This is the post I have been waiting for. Marie Brennan, in a guest post on Jim Hine’s journal, encapsulated beautifully so many of the things I have wrestled with about my own fiction recently. My good friend, Rabia, asked me to write a post for her a while back that ended up being about flash fiction, but it was supposed to be about writing myth.

This is that post she asked for.

I am seriously considering (drafting) a Kickstarter project to help pay to get digital (and printed) editions of Soul (Breath), Radiance (Radiant Lands), and Gone Hunting (Vardin) to be gorgeous, properly covered, and properly copywritten.

And then, I actually come up with a cover I think I like. But will my audience like it?

Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.

The Peninsula

• “Crossing the Barrier” is on submission. I haven’t heard back about the art yet, so everything’s still pending.

• Summerlight, “Prelude to Dance,” just got an edit and an update. On the PDF. I’ve decided when making major updates that unless I think the original needs serious help, I won’t be editing the blog posts, simply because it’s harder and there are more of them. In short, I moved the second part to the front to simplify.

I have not posted a new update on Summerlight yet because it’s a structural book and I just saw the big picture last week, which means I’ve been spending this week sketching out the ending and some key points throughout. I do hope to settle back soon into a chronological groove with the writing, but I won’t be posting anything until the next part is written and betaed.

• I have a few other shorts on the back burner and a couple of I’m-not-sure-how-longs. I’m not focusing on drafting them at this time. I figure the novel is quite suffiicient to keep me.

The Mirror

So this universe has given me its overall arc a whole lot better than any other storyworld to date. It has a pretty complex history and power system, with the powers themselves being rooted in another dimension and with a rather different set of possiblities being accepted and/or used at different times in history.

What makes this storyworld so particularly interesting to me is that it’s the first time where I have a clearly fantasy premise rooted in an intensely “Christian” worldview. By “Christian,” I mean that this is a rather secular empire that uses the Bible and its carefully manufactured interpretation thereof to control a worldwide populace, as well as several outlying space colonies.

• Several shorts are in progress, though I’m not completely happy with any of them yet, thus the slow work. Getting the voice right is tricky. We have “Eye of the Mirror,” “The Silver,” and Sacred Mirror, all of which are tentative titles.

Breath

• I’m certainly learning quite a bit about worldbuilding with this one. This is a world that did not arrive fully formed and refused to shape itself. Nope. It’s making me do all the heavy lifting (which is kind of fun, if I’m being honest). I’m developing a Series Bible for it and counting this as writing time because I will be putting in a PDF format and keeping it for personal use.

• I have four stories completely drafted, on paper or on the computer: “Baker of Souls,” “A Pretty Word,” ”Lost Heart,” and “The Great Cat and His Soul.” I’m planning on rewriting the first three with my updated worldbuilding information and better character building on the first and the third. The fourth will be heading over to my beta once it’s typed.

• I have a fistful of stories I want to write in this universe: about the Fell, a girl who brought the destruction of the Old King’s regime; about Shinet, the soulless, and her reluctant comrade, Covall; about the immortal empress; about the Mavren, the Collector and former enforcer; about the old doctor out in the hills with the water estate. We’ll see.

The Alliance

• This is a world from a long time ago and a different pen name, but an unplaceable drabble has inspired me to continue it. The drabble was “City of Glass,” and the next piece will be entitled the same. It’s a short series of drabbles set in the Alliance universe and can now be downloaded in PDF.

Unrelated Side Note

Apparently, I have an inordinate love for names beginning with the letter K.

Writing anything new? Any new world sparking your interest?

Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.