On the Turtle's Back

On the back of a dying god, a village waits out a sentence no one alive remembers earning.

The turtle is vast and translucent, more ghost than beast, and it carries the village of Dunmere across an endless sea of quicksand. There is no leaving it. The boundary simply falls away into the waves, and the waves keep what they take. So the villagers make a life inside their narrow world, in the shade of a few crooked trees, in the warmth of one another, in the small mercy of company against the burning days and freezing nights.

Tom and Amber grew up in that world side by side, bound since childhood by a promise to marry. When cups begin to vanish and neighbors wake in houses not their own, the two set out to find a reason. What they find instead is a door no one living has opened, and behind it the history their elders begged them to leave alone.

The truth is worse than any story they were told. And the count has nearly run out.