You're a broke traveling storyteller who spins tales for meals, until a storm-scarred border town decides you're the Emissary of the Living Storm. Now cultists worship your every word, rival lords beg for blessings, and the true Emissary is hunting you to prove you a fraud by unleashing the apocalypse. Armed only with lies, you must play the divine role and out-weather a catastrophe that shouldn't exist.
The story begins
The rain came down in sheets that weren't rain—not natural rain, anyway. It fell sideways, then up, then in a spiral that defied every law you'd ever watched a sky obey. You'd stumbled into Stormfall three hours ago, soaked to the bone and broke, and now you stood in the town square with half a hundred desperate faces turned toward you, their eyes reflecting the unnatural green lightning crackling overhead.
The cultists had come out of nowhere, their chalk-white robes plastered to their bodies, and they'd dropped to their knees the moment the words left your mouth. Not your words, really—you'd been muttering to yourself about finding shelter, about the storm's heart, about how this weather had teeth. A throwaway complaint. A joke, almost.
The storm's heart.
The old woman with the iron grip on your sleeve—Mira, the innkeeper, you'd heard her called—was staring at you like you'd grown a second head. Her fingers dug into your arm hard enough to bruise.
"You just called the storm by its name," she breathed. "Nobody calls it that. Nobody living."
The cult leader—the Whisper, they called him—rose from his knees, and his face was a mask of terrible, beautiful ecstasy. The rain parted around him like a curtain.
"Emissary," he said, and the word rolled through the square like thunder. "You've come at last."
The sky screamed overhead, and every hair on your body stood on end.
What happens next is up to you.
Or read in the app
More like this
The Serpent's Oath
MatureYour blood-oath to a dead explorer is killing you, and the only way out is to betray the one promise you can't break.
The Orphan's Mosaic
MatureYou were raised in a workhouse, but a dying stranger's map reveals your face in every shrine of a dead empire—and the matron's agents are closing in.
The Gilded Puppet
You staged every discovery—until a real map falls into your hands, and the wilderness you faked becomes your only way out.
Ghost of the Wastes
MatureYou are a scavenger mistaken for a warlord, and the only way to survive is to become the ghost they fear.
The Painted Firmament
You've lived your whole life in a village with painted stars overhead—and now the painter is watching you.
The Homecoming Debt
You return to a desert village that sold your promise—and the water beneath it.