Fire and Dust

A non-canonical short story from the Dustsong Cycle

A Note from the Author

Now that the novella Dustsong: Len the Wanderer is a couple months old, and the “Watchers” story had its exclusive Havok Publishing debut, I thought it would be fun to kick off the holiday season with something different from our normal weekly snippets.

This is my first fiction submission for publication (of my adult life), and the first Vaporous Realms story I ever tried to get published. The story world wasn’t yet called the Vaporous Realms, and the characters had different (more difficult) names. But if you’ve read Len’s story in its novella or serialized versions, you’ll recognize the main characters in “Fire and Dust.”

It’s non-canonical—that is, the novella, not this story, is now the official version of Dustsong Cycle characters and events. But I hope you will enjoy this 6,000-word jaunt back into the genesis of Len, Kaelii, and Egwae as fictional creations.