(He also voted for Sixes' cover at The Qwillery's July 2014 Debut Author Challenge Cover Wars - and if you were inclined to do likewise, I'd be much obliged!)
In the meantime, here is phase two of the Map of Ages - in which our heroic cartographer, Gillis, has begun transforming my pitiful scribbles into something with order and shape.
And as the town begins to take shape, so too do Sil's intentions...
Sil turned over, closing his eyes to stave off a claustrophobia that had nothing to do with the cramped quarters, and listened to the deep, regular rhythm of Elim's breathing below.
Easy enough for him to snuff the light and pass out. Easy enough for the whole lot of them to spend their lives picking paddocks and pulling weeds and pounding fence-posts, hoarding their pennies and steeping their offspring in bootless piety and backbreaking labor in anticipation of the day when they themselves would be planted with the turnips.
That was all these rustics wanted – that was everything they understood – and any free-thinking soul who lived too long amidst their squalid contentment was going to drown in it like a fish in stagnant water.
Not Sil. Not like this. He belonged back east, back home, where beef came in a tin and fish didn't, where y'all was unheard-of and your grace wasn't, where people bleached their hair and powdered their faces and only hid their talents to avoid embarrassing those poor low-bred souls who hadn't any of their own. It had been twelve long years, but if Sil pressed one ear to the musty pillow and covered the other, just so, he could almost make Elim's faint snoring into the sound of cold salt waves crashing against vast stone walls, and hear sea-birds in the rasping of the crickets.
That world had a place ready and waiting for him – all he had to do was get there.
For that he needed money, enough to pay Calvert's stupid asking-prices and buy a one-way stage ticket with the remainder.
And at the end of the day, it didn't really matter where he got it.
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