Wishes and Whispers and Sibilant Hisses

By Sonya Lano

When loneliness is all she's known, what will she risk for the promise of love?

Bound to a life of unending isolation, a young woman squanders her days in a castle overgrown with ivy and abandonment.
Her mother slumbers, unwaking, on a canopied bed, a queen's imperial body breathing without a soul.
The king bends over her like a crooked twig, mourning, weeping constant tears that become a stream which flows down to the village.
The young woman, consigned to this solitude, roves the echoing chambers of the castle, with their rat-gnawed carpets and unslept-in beds. She seeks joy in dancing through the orchard, the herb garden, humming off-key, her fingers stained with blueberries, her melancholy smiles redcurrant-bright.
Until he arrives.
A stranger clad in dark attire and unknown intent.
He turns her father's tears to blood and hunts the young woman down.
He corners her in the orchard, ensorceling her in place, and asks: "What will you sacrifice to save him?"
But as she ventures into his offer and dares to meet his desires with her own, the question really becomes: what will she do to save herself?
And how much will she risk for something that might become love?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sonya Lano
• Release date: Nov 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223424055

Sonya Lano

Born in Texas but somehow having escaped without the accent, Sonya Lano currently lives in Prague, Czech Republic with two cats and a bunch of dust balls, hairballs, fur balls, spiders, story manuscripts, dreams, chocolate, books, and whatever else is hanging around her flat. Her full-time day job testing software pays the bills while her nights are (mostly) filled with living in other worlds.

Book preview

Welcome, Mortal Wayfarers

Step away from your mortal toil;

Come escape from the mortal coil,

And enter this eldritch realm...

Description

When loneliness is all she's known, what will she risk for the promise of love?

Bound to a life of unending isolation, a young woman squanders her days in a castle overgrown with ivy and abandonment.

Her mother slumbers, unwaking, on a canopied bed, a queen's imperial body breathing without a soul.

The king bends over her like a crooked twig, mourning, weeping constant tears that become a stream which flows down to the village.

The young woman, consigned to this solitude, roves the echoing chambers of the castle, with their rat-gnawed carpets and unslept-in beds. She seeks joy in dancing through the orchard, the herb garden, humming off-key, her fingers stained with blueberries, her melancholy smiles redcurrant-bright.

Until he arrives.

A stranger clad in dark attire and unknown intent.

He turns her father's tears to blood and hunts the young woman down.

He corners her in the orchard, ensorceling her in place, and asks: What will you sacrifice to save him?

But as she ventures into his offer and dares to meet his desires with her own, the question really becomes: what will she do to save herself?

And how much will she risk for something that might become love?

Table of Contents

Welcome, Mortal Wayfarers

Description

Table of Contents

The Lush Decay of Her Bedchamber

Between One Scream and the Next

Eyelashes Ensnared in Slumber

The Girl Who Knew How to Slink

Lips Moistened with Pulp

Is Not Every Child Wicked?

Like Spice and Heat

Flushed Cheeks and Brass Appendages

Dreams Strewn Behind Her

The Icy Bite of Chains

A Castle Overgrown with Wart-Leaf

Suck Marrow-Dry

Wake Up, Wicked Poppet

They Bristled with Weaponry

No Maggot Would Feast

She must have Dreamed Again

A Thousand Windows to the World

No Innocent Would Dare

Not for a Skipped Heartbeat

Chipped Teacups and Raggedy Dolls

All of Her as White as Snow

In Lieu of Petals, Spiders...

Fight and Forfeit, Skirmish and Succumb

The String of His Captive Heart

Softly, People Creep

We Meet Again, Mortal Wayfarer

Then Keep Me

The Rain-Dark Sky Painted Her

The Lush Decay of Her Bedchamber

She pens her tale in the lush decay of her bedchamber.

Confined deep in the goblin realm, she has no idea whether her words will ever reach the world above... the world where she once lived and breathed and loved.

She still lives and breathes and loves—or she supposes she must love him, for she married him, here, in this realm of puppet creatures and fractured teacups and barred doors.

The nimbus of light from the candle near her hand encircles her wakefulness, just as it encases his slumber, for he sleeps.

In the middle of their canopied bed, his body pallid from lack of sun, he stretches out in a haphazard sprawl. The sheets entwine with his limbs like angry lovers, and his tangled hair tangles in his sleep-softened mouth.

Earlier, other things had been tangled there: her mouth with his, her hands in his hair, her fingers entwined with his, as he’d pressed her into the sheets, and her heart—

Well, that made the worst tangle of all.

She turns away, her breathing unsteady, and hunkers over her empty page—before he can wake and muddle her mind with kisses and touches and those lovely, lovely whispered supplications for forgiveness.

Between One Scream and the Next

The boy was only seven years old, sweating, sickly, his skin as sallow as earthworms bellying through soil.

He was a captive, but he did not think himself a captive (you lose all concept of freedom when you have no hidey-hole to take refuge in), and he was quite willing to obey his current keeper.

His goblin master was crooning behind him, in a voice so charming and hypnotic, its cadence melodic, that it gripped the boy in thrall: Take her soul, waif...

With his eyes half-shut, the boy swayed and wandered—or, rather, his seeking magic wandered—kingdoms away, to where an anxious king paced in an ermine-ruffed tunic, and a queen strained fretfully in the travail of childbirth.

Struggling and weak, the boy wrested wide his weighted eyes. The tarnished mirror mounted on the wall in front of him reflected his wan features: onyx lashes framing irises of dirty black, a contrast to his unusual hair, which shone as clear as diamonds mined from covetous rock.

Take her, the master crooned again, his fervid breath warming the boy’s neck like root vegetables rotting in soil.

Ever subservient, the boy twisted his magic across the realms and into the bedroom of the queen.

His power pulsed against the throes of her violent labor. He felt how she perspired and panted, how her fingers clawed at the sheets, how affliction wrung her out like a blood-soaked rag. She labored inside her skin and bone, a feeble vessel heaved through waves and waves of torturous pain.

His master’s crooning gripped the boy as spellbound as a snake: Give her freedom from agony.

Mesmerized, the boy magically grasped the queen’s soul that was endeavoring to leap free.

She shivered like a lamb—and the boy quivered, too, from fever, depletion—but he must finish this—at last—

Between one scream and the next, he purloined her soul.

Eyelashes Ensnared in Slumber

No one in the kingdom understood it.

Scarcely had the queen given birth than she’d subsided into the sweet nothing of slumber.

Though her heart yet beat and her lungs yet expanded with air (and no physician diagnosed anything amiss), she would not wake.

Days passed, weeks, then months, and her pale eyelashes remained ensnared in slumber.

The grief-stricken king hunched always at her bedside, by her still-breathing body—in vain, for her human husk was quite emptied of soul, despite how it swelled full again and again of belabored breaths.

The king was counting those breaths as he wept.

Oh, how he wept!

And nothing else.

His beard grew past his knees, his ermine ruff grew matted with tears, and his hair turned white as snow.

Servants muttered behind their hands. The disgrace of this King Weepy! The newborn princess still had no name. And the king refused to rule.

The servants eventually left; how could they stay when their only pay was his salt and sorrow?

With no one left around her, the parentless princess grew up into a wild urchin. Like a bird with unclipped wings, she flitted about, vivaciously alive, her songs off-key, her laughter off-wit. Her physical appearance favored her mother’s, her skin a peachy flush, her eyes an animated shade of lapis lazuli between copper lashes; only her hair matched her father’s, being snowy white.

Of course,