Books / Fiction / The Deep That Listens
The Dimming Canopy · Book Two
The Deep That Listens
The ground beneath Thessaria has begun to stir. Root-Fathers are dying, a remote listening post has gone silent, and the dragon Threnvald and the man bound to him must learn to work together again, by asking rather than taking, before something far older than the war decides what it wants.
The opening
Dovra woke before the birds did, which was the only way to wake at the Farrow Post if she wanted the ground quiet enough to hear anything in it.
Three rotations at Farrow, and the ground had never once surprised her.
A goat, currently regarding her with the flat contempt goats reserved for anyone who had not yet fed them. Dovra fed the goat.
By evening she had eaten, banked the fire, and settled with her ledger to copy the day's marks into the fair record she would carry back at the end of the rotation, a chore she found close to meditative by now, the neat repetition of it, line after line of the ground saying nothing had changed.
She was two lines into it when the ground said something had changed.
I love you in the way the bank loves the river, which is to say, whatever the river does.The Deep That Listens
Watchful is a different animal from afraid, whatever it looks like from the outside.The Deep That Listens
A river cannot refuse its slope.The Deep That Listens
