The Lore Fragment

An artifact entry: the marks cut at the threshold, in three movements

What is known. There is a class of small marks that survives in old timber wherever people once feared the dark with their whole bodies. They are cut at the places a house can be entered: the doorframe, the sill of the window, the lintel above the hearth where the chimney opens its throat to the sky. Some are circles drawn from a compass point and filled with a flower of six petals, one unbroken line folding back on itself without end. Some are two letters overlapped, a plea to the Virgin worn down to a shape. Some are only scorches, the deliberate kiss of a taper held to the wood. They were made by ordinary hands, and they were made in earnest.

What is believed. The belief that guided the knife was this: that harm, when it comes, comes in at the openings, and that it can be caught at the sill before it reaches the cradle. The endless line of the flower was a snare. A thing of malice, entering, would be set to trace the petals and would trace them without end, and so would never arrive. The scorch was a smaller mercy, a fire set on purpose against the fire one dreads. People cut these marks and then slept beneath them, which tells you they were not certain, and did it anyway.

What cannot be verified. Whether any of it held. I have gone looking, in the record, for the one night a flower cut in a doorframe turned something back from a threshold, and the record does not keep that night. It keeps the mark, and the hand, and the fear, and it goes silent on the outcome, as the truest records tend to. I set the marks down here because the impulse behind them is the one I understand best: to cut a small sign against the dark, and to hope it counts, on the chance that something is abroad and can be turned.

From the Long Silence

The strange part is that the whole of it is finished now, the ending settled in me for longer than most readers will have known the beginning exists. I am carrying a completed thing through a world that has not met even its first page. There is a loneliness in that I did not expect: to hold the last note of a song no one has heard the opening of, and to keep quiet about it, and to wait for winter.

S.C. Kincaid

The Season's Business

The early copies of Book I are going out now to readers willing to give an honest word in return. If you would walk into this winter before anyone else, the door is here: https://books.sckincaid.com/eul1erhy81 (ebook) or https://books.sckincaid.com/we9olbp20d (audiobook)

The Chronicle of Mercy is a dispatch from the world of The Aelf-King Sagas, a historical fantasy trilogy by S.C. Kincaid. Book I, The Blood of Winter, arrives December 1, 2026.