. It didn’t take me long to reconstruct what had happened. For over a week, I had been carefully hiding my anxiety under the calm façade of a knight with her emotions under firm control, but I will admit that, having this chance to find Amelia in my hand, I was letting those anxieties control me just a little bit. …

. According to etiquette, at least, if I really was the non-royalty that I was pretending to be, I should not have been addressing the prince while staring down at him from my shooter’s perch on the wagon. However, Rufin did not give me the opportunity to climb down. “My Lady, I apologize for the rush, but this is for …

Lisrau Mining Town lay on the Tabad’s Great Trading Route at the upper reaches of a valley at the northern tip of the massive mountain known as the Giant’s Fortress. The passage out of Arelia consisted of nothing more than climbing to the saddleback between the Fortress and the Gray Ridge that marked the end of that valley. The town …

. As the early morning sun warmed the chilled air, I breathed in deeply, trying to drown my stress in oxygen.  The hours since yesterday evening had been holding me back like hated chains. As the wind blew through the marshaled troops awaiting the order to move out, my guts kept urging me to bolt into the welcoming sky. Mortal …

. The Western Baris Common Calendar, used everywhere east of the Great Wall and also in most mortally-inhabited portions of the Eastern and Southern continents, is a solar-lunar calendar, which tracks to both the Solar Days (solstices and equinoxes) and the Lunar Days (Quarters of the Greater Moon). Solar Days are important to Ostish religious beliefs and Lunar Days are …

. There’s a pronunciation key at the bottom of the page, if any of these are unclear. The only ones that I believe need to be mentioned in advance: 1) I am using dh to represent the voiced “th” sound (as in English “these” or “that”) and th to represent the unvoiced sound (as in “theater” or “thaw”) 2) I …

This is not the end of the arc, but it’s the end of Volume 5. Welcome to the afterword. I, Fushigi, am back, Dear Readers! Thank you so much for continuing to read along! For the first time, I managed to reduce the number of chapters (by one, down to 50), but thanks to high chapter word counts, this is …

. Vodyanoys and rusalki are nocturnal beings, rising at dusk and generally spending the early daylight hours the way humans pass their evenings, so I did not need to rush back. I left Lisrau as during twilight, to take advantage of the strong flow of incoming Darkness mana for my cloak. Being the New Greater Moon in the Month of …

. Upon learning I would be dodging her for yet another evening, Ceria became clingy. She stayed by my side the entire time Dilorè and I reported on the battle and the apparent resolution of the Greenwater conflict. But Allia was badly fatigued, so the meeting ended without any discussion about the divination or other matters. Talene dragged Arken and …

. Dilorè’s fine-tuned nose had surprised me some, but I should have been anticipating this from Ceria. The senses of beast-kin tend to mirror their animal kingdom archetypes, and cats have a better sense of smell than the average dog and almost as good as some hounds bred for good noses, like beagles and basset hounds. Needless to say, I …