is a change of pace for me in quite a few respects. First and foremost, I don’t often write short pieces. When I write, I almost always tackle a piece with the intention that it’s going to be a novel—or a novella at the very least. So writing something that clocks in at just over seven thousand words was an interesting exercise of my craft, and something I hope to try again soon. Secondly, while it might not seem obvious at first glance, this story is set in the same universe as my novels Faerie Blood and Bone Walker. If you aren’t familiar with those novels yet, suffice to say that the Warders, a lineage of men and women gifted with protective magic, have a long history of guarding their chosen territories from supernatural threats. The price they pay for access to their power, though, is to be physically constrained to the territory they’re protecting. In the modern-day era of the novels, this usually means that a given Warder is magically restricted to a single city’s worth of territory.
