Entry #007 - The Merchant's Corridor I started weekly lessons at the Skelderheim library. It feels like sitting down in a good class for the first time. You show up with a vague idea of what you want to learn, and then someone who actually knows the subject hands you the right starting point. You leave with your head full, and you realize how much you did not know five minutes earlier. The Librarian agreed to teach me. He does not waste time. He shows up when he says he will, brings the right books, and speaks in plain terms. Continue reading
A YA Portal Fantasy Book Series for All Ages
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After hours at Dockside, the yard lights are off and the tide is dropping, but Finch keeps a burner going on the dock. He feeds Charles, Anna, and Todd mackerel fresh off the pier with vegetables Anna grabbed from Pier Street Market, and he talks the way he rarely does when the shop is open. Finch starts in Vietnam, with a woman named Thuy and a memory that still catches on the way out. Then the story turns hard: a busted op, over half his unit gone, the rest scattered, and Finch alone with a satchel and the kind of Continue reading
Ira Finch 
Business is work, risk, and numbers learning to live on a page together. That is what I am trying to teach the three of them. Most people think profit and loss belongs to merchants and shipowners. They picture crates in a warehouse, fees at the dock, wages in calloused hands. That is part of it. A ledger can tell me whether my warehouse in Skelderheim is carrying its own weight or quietly sinking under the cost of rope, wages, and lamp oil. Without that, I would only be guessing, the same way a fisherman who never counts his fuel or Continue reading
Myles Pibbles 
Pens at home never asked much from me. You pick one up, you scribble, the ink forgives you. In Skelderheim, the librarian puts a quill in my hand and suddenly every tremor in my fingers, every shortcut in my thinking, shows on the page. Izrah stands guard over a table of parchment and ink like it’s a battlefield, and the librarian tells me to start with my own name, then the other name this city has given me. This entry is about learning to write in a world where words are treated like permanent records instead of notes in a Continue reading
Anna 
Finch once signed me onto a fishing boat for three days of hard work and “deck rate” pay. At the time it felt like a one-off job: cutting bait, hauling traps, trying not to lose my breakfast over the rail while Ray watched to see if I was worth the space on his deck. I thought I was just learning how to stand steady on a moving boat and coil rope the way Finch liked it. This journal entry is me looking back at that trip from the far side of the portal, realizing how much of Skelderheim’s Dock Ward Continue reading
Todd 
I kept trying to write this one like one of Anna’s field reports and it kept breaking on me. Meals don’t fit into “conditions, actions, results.” They just happen, and then months later you still remember the chipped bowls at Mel’s, the tavern stew in the Market Ward, the buns at Klebbers, and who was across the table when you ate them. This entry is me tracking the bowls and cups that stuck: chowder in East Bay when the observatory stopped being my private project, stew in Skelderheim when my body finally believed that world could feed us, coffee in Continue reading
It’s been a long day. It started when we stepped through the portal back in East Bay. None of us had any idea what we were walking in to, only that we had run out of reasons not to go. The hum of the generator was the last familiar sound. I did not realize how much it lived in the walls of the annex until it vanished. One second it was there under the floor and behind my ribs, the way it had been for every test. The next second it was gone, cut off clean. There was a thin Continue reading
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