At long last, I'm delighted to present the continuation of "Tale of the Tinker and the Tinker's Tale." The following story is a CC0-licensed contribution to my "open-source fiction" project Wanderverse — but this time I'm not the one who wrote it!

The author is Matthew Sweet, who longtime subscribers may recall from his short story "Stateless." Matthew curates a wide-ranging newsletter called The Magnificent Seven, where he shares plentiful bounty for the curious.

Header art: Roman statue dating to the first century, copy of an earlier Greek work.

"What does Elkatron want with me?" the tinker gasped. "I have never seen the sea."

Again a smile. "Neither have I," said Elkatron through her deputy. The stag-man stamped his left hoof, the ground heaved open, and the tinker fell through.

  • The tinker landed hard on even harder ground, successive joints — toes, ankles, knees, hips — giving way to the momentum of his fall.
  • Groaning, the tinker rolled over and looked up. The stag-man's antlers spanned the width of the hole just above him. Within the silhouette of the stag-man's face, the tinker read a look of concern. The tinker began to form syllables and lever himself upright, towards the still-open hole. The stag-man's buck ears twitched and the day-lit hole shrunk to a pinprick, closing with a polite pop.
  • Sat on sodden earth, the tinker released his pent-up syllables, thinking of the loaded cart and lonely pony stranded above — how far above, he didn't know. He glanced around.
  • The tinker was in a tunnel. Left lay darkness, scored by a discordant murmur of howling and sucking. Right lay light. A dying, flickering light given by a mad array of slender candles, its numerous ovals cut and frayed by the slim, rectangular shadows of the light-givers themselves. All around was earth. Old, mustful, enveloping.
  • From the darkness to the tinker's left came a soft whistle. A light and hopeful chime contrary to the needy, sinister wail the tinker first noticed.
  • The tinker asked the darkness, "Who's there?"
  • His visitor emerged from the non-light, landing like a leaf settling after being fussed by the wind. The tinker could've mistaken the visitor for a nosegay. He recalled the cute bouquets he'd assembled to charm the farmer's wives of settlements he passed through. Then the tinker noticed the scrunched face, the button eyes, the delicate, twiggy limbs. A fairy.
Illustration by Okro, also CC0. Full-size file here.
  • The visitor paused for some moments. The tinker's heart beat fast, he drew quick breaths, he felt hot. The visitor swept towards him and — before the tinker could recoil and bring his arms around his retreating head — flit past, wings brushing his damp cheek.
  • He tracked the fairy's continued flight. It was spinning, looping, diving, arcing towards the tinker and into the candlelit tunnel, again and again, joy of flight giving way to impatience.
  • One way, a dark void; the other, light and the companionship of a fairy. It was not an easy choice. If the tinker were a warrior — or even a cut-purse, anyone whose prowess was more physical than social — he'd have chanced the darkness. The tinker was no warrior, nor a cut-purse, though a minority conflated his mercantile nature with thievery. He stood and headed into the light, following the exuberant weave of the fairy's flight.
  • The candlelit passage was short. It bent once and opened into a cavern. Dying candles were replaced by sturdy torches wedged into half-suitable cracks in the wall. The fairy floated to the center of the space, alighting on the arm of a throne. A throne of gnarled roots, grasping up from the earth below and down from the unseen world above, molded around a woman exuding a fossilized intensity and despairing aura that threatened to stop the tinker's heart.
  • The tinker was commanded to approach. And then he was compelled. He knelt now at the foot of the throne, trembling, too stricken to un-blur and focus his vision on anything around him. The fairy hovered now just beyond the tip of his nose. The tinker saw the bright pupils of the fairy's button eyes, saw the shy grin hidden in the scrunched face and learned — through no such worldly thing as word or voice — the fairy's name: Plumule.
  • Plumule soothed the tinker with her fey movements and encouraged him to hear the request of the throne sitter, Elkatron. The tinker watched Plumule flit and shuffle minutely, unable to cease her motions for even a split second. The tinker nodded and Plumule soared up, leaving the tinker's gaze with no option but to take in the throne, the body, the face, to meet the eyes of Elkatron.
  • Elkatron's eyes didn't see him. Elkatron's eyes didn't indicate a direction of attention or focus upon the external world. Elkatron's eyes could see nothing for they were portals unto a realm of unending sorrow.
  • The tinker himself had known sorrow — knew it, carried it with him as he put one foot in front of the other. His sorrow was but a drop compared to Elkatron's ocean, yet both were water.
  • The tinker rose from his kneeling stance and stepped closer to Elkatron, once, twice, three times, his own eyes locked on Elkatron's in the hope of unloading even an atom from the weight of the world she bore upon her shoulders.
  • By Elkatron's side, the tinker knelt. From his window into that realm of sorrow the tinker watched something approach. Closer it came, direct on its course. It reached the portalway and passed through. The tinker caught the tear upon Elkatron's cheek with the back of his index finger like it were a ladybug mistaking his digit for the continued stem of a flower.
  • This tear, unlike others the tinker had caught, didn't dissipate. It retained its sphere-like shape. He looked down at its wholeness, how it caught the flickering light of the torches around him. He glanced at Plumule, her previous incessant motion replaced with an equivalent stillness.
  • He turned back to Elkatron, looking for herself amidst her sorrow, not finding it, and realizing that no mortal awareness ever could. The tinker drew his hand with the extended finger which Elkatron's tear rested upon upwards. He continued to raise it, slow and delicate, and brought the now-luminous tear to meet the tip of his tongue.
  • The world around the tinker split apart, first at the seams — fraying along the visual vertices all around him — and then even those separated entities began to tear and decompose into something less and something more than their constituent parts.
  • The tinker lay awhile, adrift in a dimensionless space, void of any single sense but overcome, awed, by the experience of being. Sooner or later, wholes began to emerge and reform.
    • A snoozing pixie woken by a mournful hoot
    • An owl council discussing the fell choice facing them
    • A house nestled in a ley-line meadow
    • A peacock feather and an ancient queen
    • Candies, beads, napkin-wrapped arcana
    • Holy crones and wizened wizards weaving passion, wefting risk
    • A black boulder and a request
    • Two felines of the night
    • A priest and a farmer
    • Land and livestock
    • A gold-haloed heartbreak
  • Despite his disembodiment, the tinker struggled and tried to escape. His altruism vanished, his impotence in the face of his own sorrow bid him run from the magnificence of Elkatron's. But there was nowhere to run. The tinker was deep, sinking, in the dark, drowning again and again and again, the weight of a galactic ocean swirling all about him and everywhere within.
    • The intoxication of bounty and boon
    • The insanity of delivering twins
    • The derangement of delivering triplets
    • One man and two boys, laden with road fare, ripe with determination
    • One man and two boys, slain without thought
    • A village well and bitter dreams
    • Fever and death, fever and death, fever and death
    • A mother, alone
    • A woman, once surrounded by love and joy
    • A grandmother, doted and doting on
    • A mother, living as six bodies decay in the earth
  • The tinker capitulated. If he had knees and he were on solid ground he would've sunk to them, defeated and despairing. More experiences roiled over him, through him, torturing him like a baby's swaddle made of purest flame.
    • The open road
    • Old towns and new
    • Villages and cities
    • Six decaying corpses
    • Six lives unfolding
    • Fey loop-de-loops around a cruel throne
    • Tears of joy, tears of despair
    • The open road
    • Old towns and new
    • Villages and cities
    • Six decaying corpses
    • Six artifacts
    • A tunnel, left dark and right light
    • Fey loop-de-loops around a vacant throne
    • Tears of joy and of despair
    • A living labyrinth
    • The open road...
  • The tinker's eyes opened, feeling Plumule's tiny feet on his nose before recognising the button eyes peering at him with intent. The tinker sat and Plumule kicked off into the air. He looked around. The flickering light of the torchlit cavern illuminating Elkatron and her omnipotent despair, little else.
  • Placing his hand on the floor to aid his climb to standing, the tinker gasped. He looked at his finger — where he had caught Elkatron's liquid sorrow his skin had blackened, inked in the shape of a perfect teardrop and now raw to touch.
  • He gazed a moment at Elkatron. She didn't see him. How could she? He sought Plumule, found her, received a solemn nod and a crafty smile. There was an audible pop, a subtle whoosh of air, and the tinker felt himself grabbed by the scruff of his coat and yanked rudely upwards, out of the cavern and dumped back on the road where he first met the stag-man.
  • Disorientated — and now, annoyed at being ground-bound again — the tinker's angry eyes sought the stag-man. All they found was a hefty rump and spring-like, hoof-footed legs propelling the object of the tinker's anger effortlessly into the thick forestry.
  • The tinker's anger abandoned him and he remained sat on the ground, feeling the cool damp of the forest road leech into his body. He thought of Elkatron, somewhere below him. He thought of her lost sons, of her missed husband. And he thought of the long task given him — one thing for each of them.

To be continued... soon.