Fantasy

The Sapwrights

By Gaymer

A thousand years ago a tree the size of a mountain fell across a river valley, and rather than leave, people moved inside it. The trunk was hollowed into a city called Hollowreach, and the tree never quite died. Its sap still runs, and sap cut and shaped while it is still warm keeps a kind of life: a chair that leans toward whoever it likes, a lamp that dims when you lie, a door that remembers who slammed it. You are a sapwright, one of the few who can hold a shaping long enough to make it stick, and you run a workshop in the old crown ring where the wood is finest and the sap is thinnest. Everyone in Hollowreach wants something from a sapwright, and you have been saying no for a season. This morning the sap has started running the wrong way — up instead of down — and the whole city is beginning to move with it. Floors are buckling, doors are locking themselves, and the ones who noticed first are already at your bench. Who you are: You are a sapwright of nine years' standing in the crown ring, with a workshop, a reputation, and a bench the whole city knows the address of. People come to you because you are careful and because you have never once let a shaping go wrong.

Loading world details...