The Boy Who Sneezed Lightning
Rain fell on Veltharion the way grief falls on the grieving — not all at once, but in a slow, relentless weight that seeped into everything and refused to lift. It hammered the crooked rooftops of the Lowmarket district, turned the cobblestones into black mirrors, and dripped from the sagging awnings of shuttered stalls where merchants no longer bothered to call out their wares. Three years since Malakar's shadow first fell over the city, and still the clouds obeyed him, or so the old women whispered when they thought no one listened.
Wizardy-nint did not care about omens. He cared about the two coppers in his pocket and the empty growl of his stomach.
He stood atop an overturned crate in the flooded square, water lapping at the wood's edges, his patchwork coat soaked through and clinging to his thin shoulders. He was small for his age — whatever age that truly was, since even he wasn't entirely sure — with a shock of unruly black hair that seemed to defy the rain by curling even wetter, and eyes the peculiar amber-gold of candlelight through old glass. A dozen people had gathered beneath the eaves to watch him, mostly out of boredom, a few out of pity.
"Gather round, gather…
