High above the kingdom of Adaria and far to the west lies The Great Cliff, a towering block rising out of the continent, one hundred leagues tall and ten thousand wide. No one knows how The Great Cliff was formed or how it arose. It is a truly vast geological wonder, only possible on a world flush with magic that has long since cast aside the governing laws of the cosmos. The cliff face is unexpectedly smooth, except for the random craters where meteors have struck it throughout the ages.
In one particularly large crater, a crack has formed, weathering over time to create a deep fissure in the rock. Nestled in this crack lives a tiny settlement of isolated humans whose ancestors’ traveling balloon was forced into the Great Cliff by ill luck and a massive storm.
At the far west of the settlement, working a tiny garden patch full of briarberries, stood eighteen-year-old Nell Windborn, stretching her back and sore limbs. Her sunbleached white hair and weatherbeaten brown skin matched her disposition: stunningly beautiful and full of grit.
“This useless patch better be worth it this year.”
She spat passionately on the rocky ground laden with dried husks that substituted for dirt. Her grandmother always encouraged her to spit on the garden, saying it helped keep the harsh west wind at bay. Nell did it because it felt good. It made her feel like she was snubbing the winds of Fate.
She leaned heavily on her stick as she tended the fluffer seeds caught by the wind trap. A good stick was hard to find and extremely expensive in the village. This one had been passed down through her family since Landing Day. Carrying the stick had become a matter of family pride. Sometimes she would take it into the village, swinging it carelessly in front of her, showing it off unabashedly. She always got a proper scolding and her ear pulled when her grandmother found out.
Nell was orphaned. Her mother had died during childbirth and her father had been killed by a crevasser attack when she was five. He had been gathering water from the moisture nets over The Crack when one of the monsters had jumped him. His corpse was speared straight through the heart and sucked dry of all blood when Herman Crier found him an hour later.
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The village lost someone at the net once every few years in that same fashion. Grandmother liked to say it was “father’s time,” and there was no getting out of water duty once it was your turn. But that year they lost three more people than usual, all full-grown men at that, and it put a proper fear in folks’ hearts.
So most ran their own moisture nets now. As a result, water was soon rationed, which meant the gardens suffered and there was less food to go around. Add to that the weekly raids by scrawgulls and unexplained gales that could push you right off the cliff, and it made for a pretty miserable life.
Folks were afraid. Folks were hungry. Folks were dying.
Nell, however, was mostly angry.
“Grow, you little bastard! Grow, Fate curse you!”
“Oi, Nell!” her grandmother shouted from the window in the circular building of stones that was their home. “Shut yer ‘ole or I’ll ‘ave to shuttit fore yoo!” she cursed, shaking her fist.
Nobody understood grandmother when she got very angry, which was just as well because it meant fewer folks got offended.
Nell turned her head into the fierce, unrelenting wind, looking out over the vast sky beyond the cliff face. Their village of Windfelld was so high that the sky overhead was not blue, but black. Far, far, far below was a distant carpet of fluffy white clouds.
Being embedded in the side of a giant cliff meant the sun set early in their crater, plunging it into the shadow of the Great Cliff as soon as midday was over. One of Nell’s favorite childhood games was to watch the shadow from the cliff behind her stretch forward on the clouds far below, visibly creeping toward the horizon. She would pick a cloud and guess how many breaths she had before the shadow reached it.
Nell stared upward as the black sky of the day slowly transformed into a gorgeous canvas of stars. Soon, bright rainbow-colored flares began to zip in odd directions, as the sylphs of the upper realms jetted to their destinations, sometimes curling playfully around each other in immense patterns, before speeding off to the horizon.
Damn, she hated loving this place.