#the wundersmiths

He’d never have been able to kill them. Not if he’d tried his hardest. 

   They’d all debated what to do. What was safest? What was easiest? What would keep them alive the longest, until the right time to expose the Elders came? 

   They’d even drawn straws for who was to be the Society’s scapegoat.

   When he blasted them into that realm, that realm with its slow time and safe liminal nature, he still had the piece of straw in his suit pocket. 

   Carefully Woven dead bodies lay on the cobbles, which were slick with Woven blood. Beyond, the walls of Nevermoor shivered. 

   “I will come back one day,” he murmured to the cobbles, and walked away to set up his short-lived, mock conquest. 

One of them died. Against all odds, one of them died. He didn’t even have a way to tell who it was, because the realm was under lock and key, both of which would dissolve as soon as he opened the gates. 

   He wouldn’t have known until he did find a Wundersmith. The children had been a ruse, although they had, regrettably, needed to be sacrificed — something to make enough Wundrous expenditure in the Wunder-poor ‘Wintersea Republic’ that any dead soul felt it strongly enough to drift towards. And it was a hard thing to out-Wunder Nevermoor — there was a reason the Divinities could be reached from there, after all. The killing had, despite being a little distasteful, gone a long way. 

   Ezra had no way to be sure how long it had taken the Wundersmith whose soul was now Morrigan Crow to reach him.