The Rune-Carver of the Thousand Hearth

Mara carries her mistakes on her body: a missing fingertip, a silver web of scars across both forearms, a ring bleached around each iris by rune-burn. Exiled from the Thousand Hearth and spat out by a portal onto a backwater world called Aeloria, where even the water tastes wrong, she has walked for three days or four with little but the chisels in her apron pockets. Then, at the crest of a hill, she finds a place rune-carvers only hear of in guild halls and the margins of old journals: the Wayfarer's Rest, an inn that travels between worlds, a sanctuary for the displaced.

Its green door opens before she can knock. A small black cat with one gold eye and one blue, whose shadow moves in a direction the light doesn't allow, leads her inside. The fire in the common room could roast an ox, and every table is empty. The doors along the hallway are carved with runes older and softer than any she knows, as if they were grown rather than cut. They are warm under her fingertip, dormant and unfinished.

In the kitchen, a three-foot cook with skin like embers and a crest of flames for hair ladles her a bowl of stew. Pip, who is the cook and apparently also the everything, explains that the cat both is and isn't a cat. The one who carved the inn's runes is long gone. She didn't leave, exactly. She stopped. And now a rune-carver has walked in off the road.