Serial · ongoing
The Moon Glass
Trapped inside a cracked ancient mirror at the bottom of Alder Creek, a man’s disembodied consciousness drifts in silent darkness, able only to observe the world above and drink in moonlight that stirs faint, unknown power within the glass. When farm boy Duncan Hale fishes the mirror from the mud and brings it home to his family, who have worked this valley’s land for generations, the relic reveals its true nature after dark: pale moonlight gathers above its surface, unlocking the lost Lunar Wheel — an ancient art of cultivation that draws strength from the moon itself. To the Hale family, led by hardened ex-soldier Elias and his four sons, the mirror holds both great promise and deadly danger. As the soul within the glass slowly reveals its secrets, long-buried grudges and hidden powers begin to surface in the quiet valley, threatening to either lift the Hales to new heights or destroy them entirely.
Chapter 1: The Mirror in the Creek
He dreamed a long dream. In it he planted grain in a field that went on past where the far edge should have been. There was blade-light in t…
Chapter 2: Hale Ground
Elias Hale woke in the dark before day and lay still, looking up at the split in his own roof. He had left it three days. It was no wider th…
Chapter 3: Two Fish
Two Fish The hill up from the Broadwater was the steep part, and Duncan took it at a trot, because the fish were heavy and heavy was the who…
Chapter 4: Moon Dog
Duncan put his hand out for it, and then stopped with his hand still out, because the moon had moved. It had been over Alder Mountain since…
Chapter 5: The Second Row
The melons ran down the slope behind the Hale house in nine rows, and Sidney Hale lay on his belly between the first row and the second with…
Chapter 6: The Box in the Beam
The Box in the Beam The iron had the night in it. Duncan knew that without touching it; the door had stood open half the evening and the col…
Chapter 7: It Points North
Elias let the dust settle before he went on. "There's a second thing," he said. He took a packet out of the box and unwound the oiled cloth…
Chapter 8: The Reeds at the Village Mouth
The Reeds at the Village Mouth Sidney Hale came up the lane with the heel of his hand pressed into one eye, the way a man does when he has b…
Chapter 9: Moonmere
The Aldgate road was the short way and Gareth would not take it. He had stood at the last gate with his brother and counted what was on that…
Chapter 10: The Tenant
The wheat on the rise was four days from cutting and the wheat in the low field ran a week behind it, and Ned Carter sat on the ditch bank w…
Chapter 11: Three Years
Three Years The talk stayed in the yard behind him. He went along the front of the house, past the shut doors and the two new rooms at the g…
Chapter 12: Six Seeds
The Rite of the Woven Pearl came up out of the metal of him as the name had come: whole, unasked for, and longer than the Lunar Wheel by a g…
Chapter 13: Three Inches of Light
Smoke went up off the roofs of Alder Creek in thin straight lines that morning, and the mist lay low in the bottoms where the creek ran cold…
Chapter 14: The White Seed
Nothing about that morning was like any other morning, and nobody had to tell me so. I had no ears. What I had in their place was a sense th…