The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel by Chris Willrich

And so the boy’s tutors had saved it for last.
    Wearily he studied, plodding his way toward that treasure at the end of his bookshelf, and felt as though his youth were seeping hour by hour through a small, unscabbed wound.
    Thus the boy was thoroughly distracted when a teenaged girl appeared at his window. She was pleasingly slender, and yet rich roundness was visible through clothing sewn a trifle tight. She caught his eye, and as if these two youths shared a secret joke, she giggled, running one hand in a two-second, seemingly eternal journey along the curve of her hip. She moved on, and he saw no more of her the rest of the day. Yet she was there the following day, and the day after that, again passing wordlessly by the window, again miming the caresses he himself longed to give. This was an enchanting mystery, because few people, let alone flirtatious teenage girls, were allowed to intrude upon the boy’s solitude. Wrenched with desire, he at last confided with his father, hoping to learn she was a daughter of his household staff or else a village maid with friends at the manor.
    The master architect was concerned. He had no idea who the girl could be. He kept watch, but when the boy was accompanied, the girl was always absent.
    One night a storm arose while the boy slept in the hovel, his face planted in the Summer and Winter Annals . He woke with a start, and his foot brushed something covered in fur.
    Terrified, he gave the thing a savage kick.
    At that moment lightning split the air and the hovel as well.
    The boy fell, dazzle and thunder filling his mind.
    When he recovered, he searched the hovel’s ruin for his classics, but none was left but The Classic of Cardinal Directions . He found as well the corpse of a huge fox. Thereafter his love was never seen.
    His father was pleased on two counts. Not only was his son safe, but he knew of a saying, “Monsters are safest under the feet of the worthy.” If one of the diabolical foxfolk would seek shelter from the heavens beside the boy, it might mean that Heaven found him particularly favored.
    And the Master Architect recalled how the boy’s mother had possessed in late pregnancy auspicious stretch marks upon her belly—marks that resembled two coiling dragons.

    “Um, so you think the monster is one of the foxfolk?” Flybait said, looking awkward at talk of bellies and curvaceous young women. Next-One-A-Boy had no idea why her own presence might amplify his discomfort. She was plain as a rag, after all. If the boy stared at her, it just proved he was an idiot.
    “I think,” she said, “that this crack diverts the land’s chi from whatever purpose the master architect had in mind. I am guessing chi flows into the Walls all along their length. But here the chi leaks, and all that leftover energy takes form from the people’s fears.”
    “I think,” he said, “you should not be called Next-One-A-Boy. I think you should be called Spooky Girl.”
    “I am as my parents named me,” she snapped.
    “Crazy . . . what’s that?”
    Something was stirring out on the water. Moonlight and shadow and echoes and whispers converged within the great crack in the Wall, and a thing took shape from them, swirling and rippling. Cold wind blew in their faces, and with it came a rasp of vast laughter, ripe with the odor of decay.
    “The Nian!” Flybait called, leaping to his feet.
    “Maybe,” Next-One-A-Boy said, rising and shaking. “Focus now, and help me.”
    “I am too busy wetting myself.”
    The thing was a beast of darkness and moonbeams and curdled cloud, crackling with blue lightning, in the shape of a storm-grey lion with flashing eyes and floating hair. It would have been charming at bedroll size, intimidating at man size, terrifying at horse size. It was big as a house. It pawed the water, standing eerily atop it, snorting smoke like the bonfires of all forbidden history books. It roared, and in its roar were the cries of generations of the uprooted