“Silence, Before the Horn”
In the end, we all chose sleep. Skuld was the first to go; they say she went to Svalbard, to the glaciers that never melt, and locked in ice she dreams the centuries away.
Who says role-playing games only result in bad fiction? This story was very directly sparked by, of all things, a superheroes role-playing game a friend of mine started up, though explaining how I got from that to this story is complicated. “Silence, Before the Horn” is a little-bitty flash story in the first issue of Jabberwocky, edited by Sean Wallace, and I am fond of it all out of proportion to its size.
I don’t recall whether I had particular music on while writing this story. A part of me wants to say “The Dream of Macsen” by Faith and the Muse, but I’m not positive.
It has reprinted in my collection A Breviary of Fire.
Praise
For me, this was probably one of the more memorable stories in this issue. The language is appropriately well-crafted for a magazine that mixes fiction and poetry. I also liked how Brennan combined the two mythologies seamlessly. It was like they were connected all along, and she merely pointed it out.
Cover Gallery
cover art for Jabberwocky #1
