The Bleeding Stone

Ferrin Brannen has never heard the word metal. No one in Goodbeam has. His family has an old trinket they regard as nearly mystical, unaware it is simply bronze—unaware that such a category of material even exists.

Ferrin plans to finish his studies at Ridgewood Hall and become an honest millwright, like his grandfather. But when the old man dies, grief for the one person who shaped his entire world cracks Ferrin open with strange dreams.

One dream is impossible: he is his grandfather, pulling the seven-year-old version of himself from the river, his boyhood self coughing up water stained red by spring melt passing over strange stones upstream. Awake, he goes to the mill and finds the same knife marks he saw in the dream—marks he had made with the old man and long forgotten.

The dreams are real. Not visions of the future, but memories of the past: a thousand years’ worth, seen through the eyes and minds of folk across Orn. And the Examiners who marred his grandfather’s funeral have been waiting for them.

They serve Ferrin a writ: he must abandon his degree, reach the Order’s mountain in two days’ time, and never speak of the dreams again. If he does not comply, they tell him, he will learn the difference between departure and retrieval.

Within the Order’s unforgiving machinery, Ferrin rises in rank through the historical value of his dreams and learns his grandfather spent decades hiding the same affliction, undetected.

Ferrin’s search for the truth about his grandfather reveals that one of the last great halls of Orn still does not know what creates dreamers.

But Ferrin does.