Who is the Most Powerful?

Prompt: fade by in_the_blue. 100 Word Stories

Prompt: sending my regards by in_the_blue. 100 Word Stories

A single drabble, followed by a double-drabble to the second prompt. Hope you like.

Liana Mir

Liana Mir reads, writes, and wrangles the muses from her mundane home in the Colorado Rockies and, occasionally, from the other side of the Barrier.

Series Listing

Falhaer - 03. Kingdom

Of Many Colors

Land of the Five Cities - 03. Kingdom

Baker of Souls

Land of the Five Cities - 04. Rebel Council 02

The Commerce of Hearts

Land of the Five Cities - 04. Rebel Council 03

A Pretty Word

Story Within a Story - Esiran Desert Myth

Night Bride

Who is the Most Powerful?

The worthy artisan must work her magic just so.

Alya’s mother taught her to breathe the perfect letter, one worthy of admission into the artisan school. Artisan Benen has learned from years the meaning of fear.

Briganth - 03. Kingdom
Fantasy

Alya carefully creased speckless cream linen over the perfect white parchment of her letter—the way her mother taught her. Magic is a delicate proceeding. Just so Alya must crinkle the paper, drip her candle wax.

Stamps were for jurisprudence and magistration, embossings for merchants and spice-brewers.

Alya breathed and watched the wax etched beneath the touch of her soul into a fantastic swirling sigil. Each stitching of paper, each whisper into ink would prove herself worthy of artisan school.

She delicately placed her application on the courier’s bronze tray and breathed it stay until breath should set it loose.

Artisan Benen nodded away the bowing courier from her fat, comfortable, claw-footed chair. The school of the arts would return his trays on his next run; he need not stay to watch her receive them.

Letters—the lot. Entrance season brought downpours of carefully composed, perfectly creased letters with breathy sigils etched in wax. Benen had seen hundreds, and the joy of discovering new artisan talent faded over years.

Artisan breath could form and reform anything with substance. Unfortunately, ideas and potentialities had none. She could not breathe over the stack and simply know which held any worth.

“Desert Wind! Why could I not have been a power?” she demanded of her luxurious—empty—study. Such spurious prayers would not do, even from an artisan.

She caught up the first tray, breathed the letter loose from bronze, whispered the wax stamp loose, the parchment open, read the perfectly whisper-inked letters, then sighed her will over the sheet.

Benen stared at the letter, clenched tightly enough to wrinkle it. The paper did not wrinkle. The ink did not fade. Breath of unbinding had no effect.

Her hand shook at an artisan so powerful. Quickly, she breathed answer: “We regret to inform…”