Finished the first draft of a novella I've been working on for the past week. I'll be tweaking things and trying to lengthen it a bit more. But here's some collages for the characters and animals of this fantasy world.
The draft title which is likely to be changed is (The Knight and The Apothecary). It's a high/low fantasy, adventure, light romance.
🎶The oh hellos- Dear Wormwood
Here's some snippets of the first chapter.
The heavy oak doors of the Mire-edge guildhall groaned against the morning damp, shuddering violently as Ezrin stepped through the frame. Even in a room filled with hardened sellswords, his entrance cut the ambient noise in half.
He was a towering, seven-foot draconid, his ruby-dark scales dull with dust and crisscrossed by a lattice of thick, pale scars. A pair of sweeping horns, nicked from ancient parries, framed a snout that permanently looked as if it were smelling something foul. His heavy leather armor tapped with a slow, deliberate rhythm, the cold scent of wet iron and old leather rolling off him to instantly clash with the guildhall’s musk of spilled ale, roasting cockatrice thighs, and unwashed sweat.
Ezrin didn't scan the room. He didn't have to. His vertical, emerald slits of eyes locked onto the request board, tracking a path straight to the counter.
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The morning sun had barely crested the eastern ridges, but Althea was already up, moving through the quiet rooms of her cottage with a silent, practiced grace.
The air inside the sanctuary was thick and comforting, a rich tapestry of crushed lavender, earthy roots, and the sweet, sleep-inducing scent of chamomile. Bundles of drying rosemary and mint hung from the exposed oak rafters, swaying gently as she passed. To anyone else, the reclusive cottage was a lonely outpost on the dangerous edge-town border. To Althea, it was a perfectly insulated safe space where the chaotic, loud world couldn't reach her.
She pulled a thick woolen shawl tighter around her shoulders and stepped out the back door into the crisp morning mist, carrying a wooden bucket of crushed grain.
Her first stop was the cockatrice coop. The small, two-foot-tall bird-like reptiles were already clucking impatiently behind the wattle fence.
Althea unlatched the wooden hatch and scattered the grain, smiling faintly as the colorful, scaled birds pecked frantically at her feet. She reached into the nesting boxes, carefully collecting three exceptionally large, heavy eggs. Their thick, protein-dense whites were precious; later today, she would use them to clarify a batch of bitter forest roots, binding the impurities to strip away their natural toxicity.
