The Tower at the Edge of the World

By Victoria Goddard

A young man without a name lives in a tower at the edge of the world.

 

He is content with the orderly rituals and freedom to study wild magic that is his lot--or he was content, until one day he spies something in a bird's nest outside the tower window.

 

He's never left the tower before, but curiosity can be stronger even than enchantments ... 

A standalone novella set before the Fall of the Empire of Astandalas, in the quiet beginnings before the coming of the Red Company.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria Goddard
• Release date: Sep 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781988908458

Victoria Goddard

Victoria Goddard is a fantasy novelist, gardener, and occasional academic. She has a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto, has walked down the length of England, and  is currently a writer, cheesemonger, and gardener in the Canadian Maritimes. Along with cheese, books, and flowers she also loves dogs, tea, and languages.

Book preview

1

In a tower at the edge of the world a young man found, one day, three items of interest: a golden key, an aphorism, and a spell.

He wasn’t looking for them. He’d been living in the tower for a while by that point, and had settled into the rituals and routines of what he assumed would be the rest of a long and very quiet life. The intervals between rituals were taken up with playing the harp, reading poetry, or studying the most abstruse realms of theoretical magic.

The situation of the tower was at the easternmost edge of a long narrow island that broke the water’s plummet into the Abyss on the eastern side of the world.

(He was not certain which world it was, but guessed from the island and the sea that it was Colhélhé, though it might also have been some far reach of Voonra or Ysthar or even Alinor; he knew from the books in the tower and the magic that he was still within the bounds of the Empire, but only barely.)

From the upper windows he could see long low grassy dunes, extending north and south until they dissolved into the blue distance.

Westward lay the rest of the world, and the Empire of Astandalas of which he was perhaps both loneliest outpost and most loyal son, and what he thought of as the peopled lands. All he could see of them was the short sides of the long dunes and, in the middle distance, the long silver line of the sea.

East of the tower was the Abyss.

During the day grey and white clouds boiled ceaselessly there, broken only by the bravest and most audacious kingfishers and gulls seeking only they knew what treasures under the mist and the spray and the spume.

During the night the stars went all the way down, and nothing stirred but their slow wheeling progress across three-quarters of the celestial globe.

It was after his morning bath and before breakfast that the young man had paused to look out the window. From the bathing room he could see the swallows who nested on the eaves of the tower’s windows and in a row along the waterspout gargoyles. While he was looking out at the swallows, he happened to follow one’s flight down with his gaze, and saw a glint of gold on the gargoyle’s neck.

Despite a lifetime of discouragement, he was a curious young man. He was entirely unaccustomed to physical exertion, however, and at first he couldn’t think how he might possibly get at the gold thing to see what it was.

The gold thing glinted, though that side of the tower was in shadow, for it was located to the east of the Sun.

(One morning he had awoken to see that the mists had not risen, and the Sun come running in the shape of a giant tossing a fiery sphere before he let out a wild holler and leaped into the sky to run his course. The young man was very surprised but not quite shocked to see this, for he had very little experience of the peopled lands and had spent much time reading ancient epics about the Sun and the Moon and the