The Well of Mimir

The Dark Sun inspired story When Kritha Met Misha is an old piece from around seven years ago that I recently realized I hadn’t put up on the Well yet. My friends at Dark Sun Brazil long ago honored me by making a version translated into Portuguese available as a PDF, but the English version has been offline until now.

The story Misha’s Rejection–found here on the Well–is the prequel to it, though written afterwards. There are a third (a prequel to the prequel) and fourth (a sequel) part to the story I’ve worked on but have not finished or posted.

From worlds far across the desert sands they met, the dark girl with pale skin burying something in the ground, burning feathers and sticks that held a stench about them like that of carrion baking under the hot sun, and sooty, gray-white smoke rising up from their ashes to swirl in the breeze like tiny, angry spirits with terrible, fanged faces.

Perched above her in the branches of a strong desert tree — his graying once-red feathers hidden amid the patchwork green leaves, a tattered ghost of age and all the conflicts visited upon him during his time beneath the olive sky and black sun — the bird-man watched quietly. Much more quietly than the noisy girl below kneeling in the white sand, chanting and breaking, cursing and burning and pleading like a child sacrificing to the long-dead spirits of the desert wastes.

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