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    Over All the Earth: The Tales of the Chants
    Over All the Earth: The Tales of the Chants
    Over All the Earth: The Tales of the Chants
    Ebook68 pages59 minutes

    Over All the Earth: The Tales of the Chants

    By Alexandra Rowland

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    About this ebook

    High in the mountains, there is a ravine.
    Across the ravine, a bridge.
    And deep at the bottom of the ravine, a god.

    Eisl has lived on the ledge between the ravine and the cliffs since he was born. He has only ever crossed the bridge once—the terror of the god dwelling far beneath it is too much for him to bear. But when a wandering storyteller, named Ylfing and called Chant, arrives in the village, Eisl's longing to see the world of his stories with his own eyes becomes too powerful to resist.

    But the ravine, the bridge, and the god are all still there, and if Eisl wishes to free himself and cross over to the other side, he must first face his greatest fear.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAlexandra Rowland
    Release dateMar 1, 2022
    ISBN9798201212827
    Over All the Earth: The Tales of the Chants
    Author

    Alexandra Rowland

    Alexandra Rowland is the author of A Taste of Gold and Iron, Running Close to the Wind, A Conspiracy of Truths, A Choir of Lies and Some by Virtue Fall, as well as a Hugo Award-nominated podcaster (all sternly supervised by their feline quality control manager). They hold a degree in world literature, mythology and folklore from Truman State University.

    Read more from Alexandra Rowland

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      Book preview

      Over All the Earth - Alexandra Rowland

      Over All the Earth

      A Tale of the Chants

      Alexandra Rowland

      Copyright © 2022 by Alexandra Rowland

      All rights reserved.

      No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

      Contents

      Over All the Earth

      Also By Alexandra Rowland

      About the Author

      Over All the Earth

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      Just as summer was turning golden and easing into autumn, a stranger came to the village—that event alone was enough for Eisl’s curiosity to be stirred for a number of reasons, and all of them had to do with the bridge.

      Eisl’s village was way up in the mountains, tucked on a broad ledge between craggy cliffs on one side and the great ravine on the other side. The ledge, which the villagers just called the Ledge, bore little more than a band of forest and a few tiny farms, mostly kitchen gardens—the soil was thin and rocky, and the peaks and crags soaring high above blocked out too much light. Goatherding and mining were the primary occupations—Eisl had tried both, and hated both, and begrudgingly decided he hated the goats slightly less than the mines.

      He would have left if he could. He could have been a carter and taken the ore and cheese down to the market town; that wouldn’t have been so bad. Even if he’d been tasked with taking the goats down to the butcher, that wouldn’t have been so bad.

      But he could not leave, and that too was because of the bridge.

      It was a bridge of ropes and vines and planks, and it was the only way to get in or out of the village without climbing down the face of the ravine and following the river... Eisl had heard that there were two waterfalls that way, which also would have to be scaled if one wished to take that path. Eisl was afraid of heights. Eisl had never left his village on his own two feet, though he longed to see the market again—he had one faint memory of it from childhood—toddlerhood, really.

      It had been so huge and so bright and so colorful, without all the deep green trees and almost perpetual misty cloud-haze and the looming peaks above to choke out the sky and sun. The ever-present distant roar of the river at the bottom of the ravine had been absent too—that was the most astounding thing, even in memory. Even with the chatter and human bustle of the market, it had seemed so astonishingly silent.

      But regardless of how alluring the memory of the market town was, how wistfully Eisl thought of occupying himself with some industry besides mining or goatherding, he just could not bring himself to cross the bridge, nor to climb down the side of the ravine wall either.

      The bridge was so terrifying, in fact, that he was by turns fascinated with and infuriated by people who did cross it, including the rare stranger who trekked up from the market town—but they were never really strangers. They always knew someone in the village or had business there with the mine. They were strangers in that it was profoundly strange to see someone that Eisl did not know personally and that he had not seen every single day since he’d been born.

      This stranger, though. This was a new stranger—a properly strange stranger.

      Eisl had herded the goats up the slope towards the grazing meadow, an area of the Ledge that had been cleared for pastures and a few fields, as it was the only place on the ledge that got sun for more than two or three hours a day. The bridge was a distant thread across the mist-choked ravine. Generally he avoided looking at it, but as he was sitting there with the goats, something caught his eye.

      He saw the stranger on the bridge.

      He knew immediately that it was a stranger, even so far away. They had stopped in the middle of the bridge, facing up the ravine. Eisl couldn’t tell what they were doing, but it stopped his heart dead in his chest even to imagine lingering in the middle of the bridge like that.

      There was... something in the ravine, it was said. A god, perhaps, or a spirit. Something or someone that had soaked into the land. Twice a year, at the spring and autumn equinoxes, the villagers made offerings to the god of the ravine—sweet honey cakes, and goat cheese, and bits of ore from the mine. Sometimes pretty things bought in the market town, too, because they thought that might be extra lucky. Eisl had not made offerings in... years and years. He avoided the bridge and the edge of the ravine whenever possible—even thirty feet from the edge was far too close for comfort.

      The stranger stood there for nearly ten minutes—by which point, someone from the village passing nearby had noticed and was standing at the head of the bridge and gesturing emphatically for the stranger to finish crossing.

      At length, they did, and they and the villager were hidden by the pines.

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      In the evening, Eisl brought the goats down from the pasture—safer than leaving them on the slope, where there could be wolves or landslides or sudden gales or any manner of disaster—and went looking for the stranger. It was not yet sunset, and the sky above was still light enough to distinguish it from

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