Stormhaven Glimpses are short pieces delving briefly into the lives of characters in the world of N’Ume. Any resemblance to real persons is not entirely coincidental, but is tangential rather than direct. These brief stories are offered as moments glimpsed in a mirror, strange and yet recognisable, but not portraits.
They have arrived.
After months of river and sea, charts and stars, arguments with wind and tide, the family rides at last along the sandy shores of Durdessa. The horses know the water and do not shy from it. Foam curls around their hooves; salt darkens their legs. Beyond them the coast curves away, bright and unfamiliar, yet spoken of all their lives.
Javir is fifteen now. He has grown taller over the half year since they left Unity, he is as tall as his father now, and taller than most men, and will grow taller still. He rides quietly, watching the horizon as if it might yet instruct him. This journey has felt like the beginning of his adulthood, and though he embraces it he is also a little sad at the passing of childhood as he watches his sister play.
Maya laughs and urges her horse closer to the waves. She is eleven and impatient with stillness. She imagines that the sea itself is listening, that it might answer if she learns the right way to ask. Durdessa, she hopes, will teach her new magics — older ones, truer ones — though for now she is content simply to run, to ride, to swim.
Eliza watches them both with a smile that carries relief as much as joy. The long journey is over. The promised initiation lies ahead. For this moment, it is enough to feel the sun on her skin and the water at her ankles, and to let the land of her ancestors accept them without demand.
Daius rides a little apart, as cartographers often do. His eyes trace the curve of the shore, the angle of the light, the meeting of sand and sea. Even here, at journey’s end, he is already at work. Yet when he turns back to watch his family racing the tide, the lines soften. Some things, he knows, cannot be mapped.
They will ride back inland soon. There will be learning, and ceremony, and the warmth of belonging.
But today, Durdessa gives them this: horses and water, laughter and salt, and the quiet knowledge that, though they will eventually return to the Arten Commonwealth, this too is their home — they belong here.