The Way of the Wizard

Christie Yant is a software tester by day, a science fiction/fantasy writer by night. She is also an assistant editor with Lightspeed Magazine and the podtern for The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. This story is her first fiction publication. In addition to writing fiction, she has also narrated several stories for the Starship Sofa podcast, and reviews audiobooks for Audible.com. She lives on the central coast of California with her two amazing daughters and assorted four-legged nuisances. Her website is inkhaven.net.

Fiction often seems more real to us than reality, and many of us wish that we could climb right into a book and inhabit the world it describes, or that the characters could step right off the page and join us for a drink.

Our next tale is about two characters named Miles and Audra. “They were inspired by and loosely based on two real artists for whom I have a great deal of respect,” says Yant, “They each have a very unique and public persona and weave a twisted kind of artistic magic of their own.”

The book of fairy tales described in this story is also based on a real book. “It was given to me by my paternal grandmother and dates from the 1930s. It’s a book of fairy tales called Through Fairy Halls. I read it over and over as a child, and from it I learned that fairy tales exist all over the world, and are unique little realities unto themselves. That book is where I learned to love them, and it makes perfect sense to me that the stories between its covers are true, and that maybe one is missing.”