"Fragments of Korangar" by Natasha Minks

The Castle of Four Towers


The Castle of Four Towers, sitting for many crumbling ages in the land of Korangar, had no moat. Instead, it sat in deepest forest, surrounded, as far as the eye could see—which wasn’t very far—and much farther than that, by giant, twisty trees, some with raised, gnarled roots, and some with branches that tangled like knots around other trees, and all with bark that was sharp, and musty, and seem to absorb all the light. There were pathways through the Tangled Maze, as the forest blockade was known, but where they might be or who had trespassed there and lived to spread the tale, none could say.

In each of the four great towers from which the Castle took its name lived a wizard. No one was for sure whether they ran the Castle or were its prisoners, but it was they whom everyone in Castle Country blamed for everything. When the crops failed, it was the Four Wizards fault. When the animals were birthed healthily, it was the Four Wizards fault. When it rained frogs and raindrops jumped from ponds to hop croakily along the ground, it was the Four Wizards fault.

Sometimes the accusations were even correct.

But there was someone else who lived in the Castle, someone whom nobody knew about at all, not even in legend. It is with her that the story really begins.

Every cause has an effect, they say, but what is less well known is that not every effect has a cause. The Princess who lived in the Castle of Four Towers was one of these causeless effects, an accident of the love affair between Predictability and the Way Things Really Work, and at the moment, it did not concern her in the least.

Her current problem was geography, which was always a tricky subject at best in Castle Country, and her dilemma was compounded by the glare of her geography tutor, a glare frigid enough to make the dead shiver in their graves and roll over reaching for a blanket. Which is, of course, exactly what it was used for. Except on Mondays, when he taught the Princess geography, and annoyed the both of them into a tired, ill-mannered afternoon mood.



Life


Everything lived, in Korangar. This was a commonly known fact, to a certain extent, but there were some lives only scholars or wizards or the very wise knew of—and a few that were only the shadow of a rumor, tacked on, as it were, to weightier legends.

The Dawn was one of these.

She was one of the oldest, but far from the strangest.



More about The Castle of Four Towers


The Four Wizards of Korangar were the subject of many strange legends and eldritch rumor. Some say they are four brothers, locked in their separate towers until the Castle crumbles for misusing magic in an unforgivably horrid and evil manner.

Some say they are all quite mad, from when their magical experiments led them down paths and to places no mortal man was ever meant to see, and locked away to protect the outside world from themselves.

Other stories, the darker, more whispered stories, speak of the Nameless, of the Hunger, which they say was at the root and heart of magic in the old days, in the beginning; these stories claim that the Four, while possibly quite mad, are fulfilling the true function of a wizard—keeping the magic from happening, so the Nameless Hunger does not eat away the land and destroy everything in the world.

But about the Princess of the Castle there were no stories at all.



The Mushroom of Truth


The Mushroom of Truth was an odd legend, but then, in Korangar, “odd” could only be measured relatively. With such unexpectedness and unique happenings cropping up every minute, any instrument made to measure oddity directly would most likely be reduced to vapor within minutes—or never manage to be made at all, which had been the case so far.

But however odd it was, it was also, more or less, true.



The Dark City


The city was dirty. Dark, oily. Moonlight wouldn’t touch the place, choosing instead the lesser evil of getting lost in the roiling clouds that charged and skidded across the starless sky.

That was the thing about this place. The part that really got to you. Besides the stink, and the glowering in habitants, more than the dreadful weight of the shadows, and worse than the murky sunlight that filtered down from the cloud-crowded sky during the day—there were never any stars.

But no one would say anything. No one looked at the sky here.



Lost


The land is lost, and needs a king. Or a queen. Someone. People are dying, and the night is turning fetid.

Somewhere, a castle is burning. Brightly, with light and with flame, and it is not consumed. The Queen’s Life is in the castle.

But who can find the Castle?



The Sleeping


Up and down, went the hills. Up and down. Like green waves frozen, the curves and dips, the mountains and valleys, were silent and still in the blue, pre-dawn light.

The giants were asleep.

You could just see the curve of her head, and the long spill of gnarly green trees suggested the elegant twists of long, braided hair. Two ridges, where her two legs curved at the knee, curved around the Rift of Avdan. Her feet seemed buried into the earth, as if it were a pair of slippers, and her arms cradled her head, causing the rising and falling of the land up to the rounded peak of the mountain, the crown of her forehead.

She slept, and her breathing was one with the land, so as not to disturb the fragile creatures who walked so precariously in the Green Land, unawares…

I am aware, thought the watcher from the window.

But the sun was rising in its usual dazzling, flashy displays of molten gold, and all the mystery, all the life, was sucked from the view once more.

There were no giants in the earth. There never had been. Merely the echo of their form, lovingly carved from the willing soil and rock, when the world had been remade in the Long Ago, to honor the fallen dead.

The watcher shook her head, and turned from the view. There were no giants in the earth, no matter how long she might look or how much she might pray.

Even in a world of fantasy, the watcher knew, the longing for more, for the unimaginable imagined, ached still.