Deserts of Time

Miithra stretched her arms. She’d been behind her desk for ten hours already, and with the amount of paperwork still piled in front of her, she’d probably end up falling asleep in her chair before she finished. Felinarians were not built to go more than six hours without sleeping, nor were their bodies suited to…

Listen well! This is a tale delivered to us from above, so do not let memory faulter and corrupt the retelling. In the realm high above, before the gods were born, there was only chaos, the elements, and the Mother of the First. She was a collector of a hoard of rocks, for that was…

Tam had never spent so long wandering the tunnels before. His feet were aching, and his tail was stiff. He wished he could crawl on all fours like the kobolds of old, or grow a pair of wings and fly down the tunnels. Instead he walked, dragging a clumsy nuisance of a tail behind him.…

Kobolds could go a long time between meals, their metabolism entering a state of emergency hibernation when food was scarce. Tam didn’t know if the same applied for Bow. Bow’s stomach was growling, and it seemed that every five paces they wanted to stop and take a rest. Tam might have given the kid those…

The kobold approached Tam and Bow with a hand raised in front of their eyes. Dimly lit by the flame at Bow’s finger, Tam could just make out the shape of their clothes and the colour of their scales. They wore a piece of cloth with a hole punched through the middle for their head,…

Screaming echoed down the tunnel.  Tam opened his eyes, but his darkvision was still shot. He couldn’t make out much from the screams, they were too distorted by the overlapping echoes to hear as anything but noise. He squinted, trying to bounce even a few spare motes of light back into his retinas, but it…

For a second, there was darkness and silence. The child turned around, reaching out and groping around in the dark. Next to them was a small bracelet that had a series of round stones threaded along it.  Tam pushed the trinket towards the sweeping hand, and the child immediately grabbed it and slipped it back…

Tam knelt before the idol of Kathonia, chanting in his mind a prayer. He prayed every day, sometimes for strength, sometimes for guidance, mostly just praying for a sign she was listening to him. He never heard a response. Nobody did. Shortly after Tam’s birth their goddess of burrows and children vanished into silence. Clerics…