Something's always holding you up. Otherwise you'd be on the floor.
Ottilie Tallis, to her grandson, on the front step, the winter he was five
The story
Two thousand years ago, somebody stood a hall of pillars in this valley and bound them, and the binding is still in the stone. A good pillar holds its note. A tired one goes flat, then slides. Every morning the Tallis family walks under the town and listens for the difference.
Wren Tallis is fifteen. On graduation day his father gives him the north half, and that evening Wren hears the courtyard arch begin to slide. He’s right, and it doesn’t help. The guild stamps UNLICENSED in his book in red, and the only mentor who’ll get stuck with him is Bram Cotter, who has never taken anyone and lives behind a door marked NOT MY PROBLEM.
Wren isn’t alone on that bench. Tova Sard can push harder than nearly anybody, three times, and then she’s a girl with a sling and some rocks. Holt Dunne’s graduation shield came out of the circle already dented. When they need a healer, they get Ivo Dray, who is very good, hasn’t got a cord, and nobody knows where he lives.
On a depot job nobody else wanted, Wren finds a stick in a trough nobody should have cut. The assessor calls it dead. Firewood, two coins. He buys it, and the hall laughs.
The ground keeps giving, and Wren, who has never once been sure, is going to have to choose anyway.
Firewood is Book One of The Long Dim, a coming-of-age progression fantasy with no system and no romance.
Two thousand years ago, the Abundance stood a hall of pillars in a valley and bound them, and the town of Harrowmouth was built on top. Their haulers still carry crates up and down the haul-road, day and night. The binding is still in the stone. Here and there, it is starting to slide.
The Long Dim follows four friends from Harrowmouth, Wren Tallis, Tova Sard, Holt Dunne and Ivo Dray, through one long story, told in turn by each of them. It begins the day they leave school, unlicensed, with a mentor who has never taken anyone. Magic here has limits: everyone can hold only so much and push only so hard, and when it’s spent, it’s spent.
The books are read in order. Firewood is Book One.
Content note
This novel contains danger and serious injury, the death of a townsperson, grief and loss, a parent’s death remembered, and peril to children. There is no romance and no sexual content, and the language is mild.
