Scribbler of Words
B.E.
Lennox
About the Author
B.E. Lennox writes fantasy born from ancient questions and science fiction that peers nervously into the near future. She is powered by Appalachian fog, the particular chaos of silly dogs, and a deep suspicion that the mountains know things they aren’t telling.
She lives in Western North Carolina with her wife, her daughter, and whatever story is currently refusing to behave.
The Ascension
An Epic Fantasy Novel by B.E. Lennox
Alba has spent nineteen years learning to disappear. White hair marks her out before she opens her mouth, and so she keeps mostly to the trees, to the hunt, to the quiet company of a father who taught her to be useful and not much else. She knows her place. She’s made her peace with it.
Then something in the forest wakes, and her peace is the first thing it takes.
The power that finds her is nothing she was prepared for. It has no edges she can feel, no bottom she can find, and it doesn’t ask permission. A goddess older than the empire’s roads lays a claim on her, the forest presses its full weight into her skull, and the girl who was good at going unnoticed suddenly cannot stop being seen. She doesn’t know what she is now. She isn’t sure she has the language for it. What she does know: the life she had before is gone, and the road is all that’s left.
She doesn’t plan to travel it with anyone. Two brothers change that — a soldier who carries more grief than he admits, and a scholar full of potential. They are strangers. The forest has other opinions.
What follows is the story of three people discovering who they are when no one who knows them is watching — and what they owe each other when the answer turns out to be more complicated than they’d hoped.
KEZIA
A Novella by B.E. Lennox
Kezia Andar is twenty-six years old, grey-eyed, and sitting in a cell eight paces wide.
Her crime, according to the Magistrate’s Council, is seditious conspiracy. The truth is both simpler and more dangerous than that. Raised in the lower ward by a mother worn down past pretty and into tired, Kezia refused the quiet that was expected of her. She refused to be small. She wrote pamphlets in plain language about what people already knew in their bodies but hadn’t found words for, and when they read them, something shifted. Three thousand copies passed hand to hand through the lower ward and the docks. The guild workers carried her words in their coat pockets.
Then someone talked. They came for her.
The novella unfolds across nine chapters and an epilogue, told in rotating close third-person through three voices that circle the same cold point.
Sergeant Hale is the prison guard who carries the keys. A former soldier, twenty-three years on the block, he tells himself he has compassion. He’d mustered out after the campaigns expecting to want quiet. Working at the prison made sense. But there was a village, years back — an order given, a man who wept — and that memory keeps rising at the worst possible times. His hands are steady. They have always been steady. Now that might not be enough.
Father Dominic is the priest sent to sit with the condemned. Thirty-two years ordained, he arrives expecting this to be the same as before. It isn’t. Kezia does not want confession. She wants honesty, and she asks questions that crack something open he’d been mortaring shut for years.
Kezia writes a letter in her cell that has no recipient. I am not sorry, she begins — then crosses it out, starts again. She is her mother’s daughter in the hands and her father’s ghost in the eyes and everything else she built from what was available, which was not much. She’d found work young, lost it when the wrong man became a problem, found more. She taught herself the law well enough to know she was being cheated.
As the days narrow, the three voices converge toward the same morning. Each carries a private weight. None of them will set it down in the way you hope they might.
I’ll always be Kezia as long as any hope remains.
