SVS 13: THE STEPPING STONES, Adult Epic Fantasy

Title: THE STEPPING STONES

Genre: Adult Epic Fantasy

Word Count: 152,000

My Main Character would prefer to live in:

When the weather’s warm, there’s nothing Brenya loves more than a walk along the wide causeway ridge of the Tide Wall.  She especially likes to go barefoot when the rising water just barely tops the barrier, bathing the soles of her feet as the wavelets lap over its sun-warmed surface.  But ever since she touched the Stepping Stone, heat and cold alike feel oddly muted, easily endured.  And she doubts the strange invaders from beyond the Tide Wall share her inexplicable resilience.  If the winter cold helps break the siege, that would be worth a thousand days of sunshine.

Query:

Dear Empresses of Illumination and Precipitation,

Brenya often longs for the autonomy afforded the Peregrines, warriors who can cross hundreds of miles in an instant. But no woman has ever manifested the ability to travel between the monoliths called Stepping Stones. Even among men it’s a rare gift. So when Brenya dares to touch one of the Stones, she doesn’t expect to transport herself to the heart of the distant capital.

With that single step, Brenya breaks a precedent that became sacred dogma long ago. And the Lapizarium, the order that upholds that dogma, is prepared to kill her and even topple whole kingdoms to bury her transgression — or worse, forcibly strip her of the power and autonomy she’s always wanted.

With few willing to aid her, Brenya finds an unexpected advocate in Caen, commander of the Peregrines. She can’t fully fathom Caen’s motives for helping her, but suspects he has some deeper agenda. Playing pawn to his mysterious machinations could incite civil war, and would mean compromising her newfound freedom. If she stays true to herself, she risks losing that freedom entirely in her battle with the Lapizarium… a battle she has little hope of winning alone.

Brenya may be the first woman with the power of a Peregrine, but she’s determined not to be the last. Whatever the answer, and whatever her choice, she will have to fight for her right to exist and determine her own fate — and change the very nature of the Stepping Stones in the process.

First 250 words:

Brenya had never seen a cuttle-man before. Sibyl didn’t say so, but Brenya got the impression that she had encountered a cuttle-man or two in her youth. They were supposed to be more common in the south.

Waves lapped the shore, marking the border between Suhrlund and the kingdom of Feyland to the north. The far coastline of Feyland was invisible in the morning fog that lay over the strait. Brenya breathed in the sea-salt air, its familiar tang tempered by the dew of early spring.

They sighted the cuttle-man along the misty beach long before they spotted his peddler’s wares, unpacked from their water-proof oilskin wrappings and laid out all around him. He looked nothing like a man. Brenya was put in mind of an etching she’d seen of a nautilus, if the illustrator had replaced a number of the creature’s wavy arms with four legs like a mastodon’s — another creature Brenya had seen only in etchings. The cuttle-man towered up twelve feet or more to the top of his spiral shell, its smooth striped surface adorned with numerous hooks for securing his goods, its weight supported by his tree-trunk-thick legs.

Above the cuttle-man’s legs and below his shell, a collection of prehensile arms surrounded a mouth like an enormous bird’s beak. Brenya counted eight arms in all, and couldn’t imagine how he kept track of them all moving independently, stretching out across his wares, arranging things, each appendage longer than he was tall.