The Hanging City by Charlie N. Holmberg EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors:Charlie N. Holmberg
- Language: English
- Genre: Fairy Tales
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
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Six Years Later
The Empyrean Bridge is the most wondrous thing I’ve ever seen.
Despite my dry throat and empty waterskins, the blisters on my feet,
and the sunburn stiffening my arms and shoulders, I marvel at it. It has not
been used in a hundred years or more, not since the drought hit and wiped out
Eterellis, the great human city far west of it. The bridge spans a canyon that
cuts the world in two, a dark, jagged line stretching farther north and farther
south than I can ever hope to see. Its workmanship is impeccable, more
brilliant and beautiful than any other architecture I have ever beheld, beyond
what I had pictured since hearing of its existence. The stories don’t do it
justice. Its many arches gleam white as sun-bleached sand. It’s longer than
any township, including my hometown of Lucarpo, the largest east of the
canyon, 150 miles almost due east, if I’ve read the stars correctly. I know
Lucarpo is the largest, because I’ve been to every human outcropping worth a
mark on a map. I’ve visited them all, slept in their peoples’ homes, worked in
their dying fields, and run from their borders. Often because my father’s men,
or rumor of them, arrived. Other times, because others saw the darkness
within me and hated me for it. I once wielded it like a vile sword against one
of their own, who was equally as vile.
That, I do not regret. But I do miss Terysos more than any other
township. Terysos is the reason I’ve sacrificed everything to travel here, to a
place of rumor that might not even exist, all on the word of a wayward bard.
All on the hope that the South Star shines not as a grave marker for Eterellis,
but as a guide, leading me to a place I might belong. Shining as a punctuation
of the reading that a kind Cosmodian once gave me by my father’s
woodshed, planting the first seed of hope in the gloom of my soul.
If the bard’s tale is true, then this is the one place my father will never
look for me. If false, I will die here, overtaken by thirst. There is no other
refuge.
Thick parapets gleam copper in the bright daylight across the bridge’s
full length, clear to the other lip of the canyon. The bridge spans the canyon’s
narrowest point, as far as I know, but surely it will take me half a day to cross
it. I think back on the stories of Paca the woodworker and wonder how he got
all the way to the end of this monstrosity without killing the trolls who
stopped him.
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