Footprints Along the Path: Misfortune and Magic

By Kari Kilgore

Drifting Through Noise When She Needs Peace

Goresi reflects on her path to becoming an Honored Mage.
Considering all the magical steps that delivered her so far.
Facing one last challenge with a mind and heart full of chatter and nonsense.
And no time left for practice and patience.
Will a visit to her own past help Goresi discover the way?

 

Also available in the collection Fantastic Side Trips: Side Characters Take Center Stage

 

An excerpt from Footprints Along the Path:

Discovering Her Own Way Forward

 

A prickly aroma of delicately sweet magic alerted Goresi before someone spoke.

"How did you do that?"

She turned to see a short, slender girl with a head full of thick brown hair floating in the breeze. The girl's robe was an intense, rich orange. Only a couple of matching footprint shapes marked the ground around her.

Her pale blue eyes were wide, but thank all the powers that be, her expression was more curious and admiring than upset.

"I just...well, I figured out how to change the color is all."

Goresi knew her cheeks were flaming red, but she wasn't sure why or what to do about it.

She hadn't meant to show off or make anyone else feel bad. She was much too familiar with that kind of teasing behavior from her own family to want to pass it along to a stranger.

A stranger who grinned and mouthed a silent wow as she took a few steps closer.

Steps that didn't show up on the ground at all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spiral Publishing, Ltd
• Release date: Oct 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201171155

Kari Kilgore

Kari Kilgore started her first published novel Until Death in Transylvania, Romania, and finished it in Room 217 at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King got the idea for The Shining. That’s just one example of how real world inspiration drives her fiction. Kari’s first published novel Until Death was included on the Preliminary Ballot for the Bram Stoker Award for Outstanding Achievement in a First Novel in 2016. It was also a finalist for the Golden Stake Award at the Vampire Arts Festival in 2018. Recent professional short story sales include three to Fiction River anthology magazine, with the first due out in the September issue. Kari also has two stories in a holiday-themed anthology project with Kristine Kathryn Rusch due out over the holidays in 2019. Kari writes fantasy, science fiction, horror, and contemporary fiction, and she’s happiest when she surprises herself. She lives at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the woods with her husband Jason Adams, various house critters, and wildlife they’re better off not knowing more about. Kari’s novels, novellas, and short stories are available at www.spiralpublishing.net, which also publishes books by Frank Kilgore and Jason Adams. For more information about Kari, upcoming publications, her travels and adventures, and random cool things that catch her attention, visit www.karikilgore.com.

Book preview

Footprints Along the Path

For friends we make through healthy competition,

and by offering help

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE PATH

A MISFORTUNE AND MAGIC STORY

KARI KILGORE

SPIRAL PUBLISHING, LTD.

CHAPTER 1

The small, stone Reflection Chamber normally felt comforting to Apprentice Goresi Awinish.

Barely four of her strides across in each direction, with only one window facing the red, orange, and purple of an autumn sunset. The rippled glass cast wavery light across the pale gray walls. A long, thin cushion covered with coarse brown fabric provided the only protection from the smooth blue stone of the floor.

Goresi had long ago figured out the trick of kneeling on the end of the cushion, then folding the rest behind her and over her heels, making a surprisingly comfortable prop for her backside. Not the height of luxury, perhaps, but infinitely better than trying to arrange herself any other way.

That pose left her pale-yellow apprentice robe in a half-circle around her, the soft wool drifting itself into tiny ridges and valleys. A temporary garment the color of her immature magic, the robe didn’t have any of the elaborate embroidery that signified a full mage.

Those patterns in colorful and often metallic thread transformed a simple garment into both a symbol and an actual object of power.

Like all unmarried women across the vast continent of Hanferthen,