Recent content by Nina

Can't get posts out of my mind and onto the paper when my mind decided that it wants to be a rainy locked room whose only purpose is obsessively playing Atelier. My apologies.

Nina’s head snapped to the side, eyes frantically searching the coast. Had their ship already left?! The young man’s laughter at first unnerved her, then made the girl look smaller as she hid between her shoulders, followed by a sheepish chuckle. All throughout, Suds simply stared at him. They...

“I’m Nina. I…I dabble a bit in runes. I…” Just like that, she was reminded of how out of place she was in this world. The book dust in the air felt dry on her lips as she admitted: “I haven’t been to a library before.” Lost. She was lost. Was he her guide? Even the language felt alien here...

“What else could I do?” The girl said, with forced mirth. She looked at the ground, cheeks burning. Did it count as a failure if you’d doubted success from the start? Never before had Nina waded so deeply into the magic. There was a reason. And yet she’d dismissed her fears, because there was...

“I heard Iris has been recovering well.” The words finally broke out. They’d been held back for hours. “Ahmm.” The ill-boding mutter at the girl’s side, she felt it more than heard it. They kept walking. “The surgery was a success. So the doctor said. He said it’s the first one of its kind...

It felt like her consciousness skipped a beat. One moment she was here her breath brushing the back of Duresh’s neck the next as if her feet had found a gap where they expected solid ground ‘here’ was different. Moments passed. Someone called her name but, fighting to resurface through...

“Oh, really?” Was what Nina said in the end. Her voice tasted metallic, with just a bit of sting – ‘ironic’, as one would have it. Her interlocutor was strange. Strange, as one would expect a denizen of this book-infested half-light world to be. She wasn’t sure how much he actually knew and...

A smile flashed on the travelling painter’s face, pink gums and white serrated teeth like a young child’s. A bucket of water, dunked on the Fire Giant! Maybe from floor-washing, to add insult to injury. It would have been nice if it’d been that simple. Or…maybe…? Her features turned serious...

Her shoulders slumped a bit, until her forehead touched the dusty velvet cover. He was right – she was lost. One hand moved at first, then the other, she climbed down, graceful as a spider. Colorful socks patched around the heels fist entered the bubble of light around Severin, followed by the...

Nina’s shoulders twitched. Startled, her fingers let go and the bookcase started tilting away from her, until a moment later she grasped a shelf’s edge again and flattened herself against it. Her heart was a drum pressing against the spines of the books. ‘They found me,’ she thought. In that...

One hand in front of the other, holding on to the rope as if balancing onto the side of a cliff, Nina walked into the dream once more. Through the land without shadows she stepped, at first, and then the war camp grew around her once more, with the scaled wolf flags fluttering around her. Then...

“I feel a bit bad ‘bout it,” Nina said. She watched the three men trying to outrun the clouds of dust at their heels. Her hazelnut-like eyes narrowed in a wince. There was a reason she hadn’t brought Grishka to the battlefield. Carelessness was a gamble. She shook her head, breaking away from...

It was like sinking deeper in a dream. Step by careful step, holding onto the railing with both hands, Nina walked down the grand staircase into the half-light below, the rustle of her steps the only sound. She walked past a stone dragon statue and poked its dusty fire frozen in stone. There...

Books filled every nook and cranny as far as the eye could see. Holding on to the railing, Nina gazed five levels down, to the torch-lit mysteries of the First Level, and two levels above, to the immense clear-glass star-shaped mosaic set alight by sunset. The mosaic was technically the ground...

Nina had known there would be trouble when Duresh disappeared. The shaman gave off enough antsy vibes that she felt her shoulders itch. Yet she’d expected to glib her way out, gesturing wildly for the few seconds that her fellow traveler would take to return- When moments stretched into...