SHARWAKE Volume 1: The Sleeping Gate

Morning arrived in Brackenridge with the smell of damp earth, fresh bread, and someone burning breakfast badly enough that half the western lane had begun speculating about whether the village blacksmith had finally decided to expand his business into cooking. The sun had barely cleared the hills when a rooster began crowing outside the Calder family home, apparently convinced that the entire settlement had failed to notice the existence of daylight. It crowed again, louder, and was answered by a second rooster somewhere beyond the vegetable gardens.

Leon Calder hated both of them.

He stood barefoot in the muddy yard behind his family’s house, gripping a wooden sword with both hands and trying very hard not to look at the kitchen window. His stomach had been making increasingly desperate suggestions for the past ten minutes, and the smell of Mara Calder’s fresh bread was doing nothing to improve his concentration. Across from him, his father stood with a practice blade resting casually against one shoulder. Garrick Calder was a broad-shouldered man with weathered hands, dark hair beginning to grey at the temples, and the infuriating habit of looking completely comfortable while Leon felt as though he were being personally persecuted by the universe.

“Again,” Garrick said.

Leon lowered his sword. “I already did it again.”

“And yet here we are.”

“I think the problem is that you’re not giving me a chance to demonstrate my full potential.”

“Your full potential has spent the last three minutes staring at the kitchen window.”

Leon immediately looked away from the window. “I was checking the weather.”

“Through the glass?”

“It’s a very advanced technique.”

Garrick’s mouth twitched. “Show me.”

Leon tightened his grip and stepped forward. He had been practising with the wooden sword for nearly a year, which he considered a considerable investment of time and suffering. He knew the basic stance, how to keep his balance, and how to swing without accidentally striking himself in the knee. He also knew that his father could disarm him with such effortless precision that Leon sometimes wondered whether Garrick had secretly replaced his own arms with faster ones during the night.

Leon attacked anyway.

He led with a quick strike toward Garrick’s shoulder, followed by a second swing intended to catch his father off balance. Garrick turned the first blow aside, stepped away from the second, and tapped Leon lightly on the chest with the flat of his practice sword. Leon stumbled backwards and landed in the mud with a wet slap.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Garrick looked down at him. “You were saying something about your potential?”

Leon stared at the sky. “I think I’ve discovered a weakness in your teaching method.”

“Have you?”

“Yes. It involves you being considerably better at this than I am.”

“An excellent observation. Get up.”

Leon climbed to his feet, wiping mud from his tunic. “You could at least pretend to struggle.”

“I did.”

“When?”

“When I decided not to laugh.”

A small voice came from the doorway. “You failed.”

Leon turned. His younger brother, Tobin, stood beside the kitchen entrance with a piece of bread in one hand and an expression of solemn disappointment on his six-year-old face. His hair stuck up in three directions, and there was a smear of jam on his cheek. He had clearly been watching for some time and had chosen the exact moment when Leon was least prepared to defend his dignity.

“Shouldn’t you be eating breakfast?” Leon demanded.

“I am eating breakfast.”

“Then shouldn’t you be doing it inside?”

“I wanted to see if you would win today.”

Leon lifted his chin. “And?”

Tobin considered this with the seriousness of a royal judge. “I was hungry, so I came outside before the exciting part.”

Garrick laughed. Leon pointed his sword at his brother.

“One day, Tobin, I will be a famous adventurer. People will write songs about me. They will tell stories of my courage and my skill, and when you are old, you will tell everyone that you knew me before I became a legend.”

“Will the songs mention the mud?”

“They will not.”

“Then the singers will be leaving out an important part.”

Tobin disappeared back into the house before Leon could formulate an appropriate response. Garrick lowered his sword, still smiling, and offered his son a hand. Leon accepted it, though he made a point of getting to his feet under his own strength once he had been pulled halfway up.

“You’re improving,” Garrick said.

Leon glanced at him suspiciously. “Are you saying that because it’s true or because Mother told you to be encouraging?”

“Both can be true.”

“That sounds like something adults say when they don’t want to answer a question.”

“Then you’ll fit in with adults quite nicely.”

Garrick took Leon’s practice sword and examined the worn wooden edge. The blade had been carved from ash, sanded smooth, and repaired twice after Leon had decided that trees were excellent targets for imaginary monsters. His father had made it for him shortly after his eighth birthday. Leon had treated it as the first step toward a future that was already perfectly clear in his mind: he would become an adventurer, travel beyond the frontier, explore forgotten ruins, fight monsters, discover lost treasures, and return to Brackenridge so wealthy that the local merchant would have to address him as Master Calder.

He had not yet decided whether he would allow the merchant to continue selling him turnips.

“Your problem isn’t your strength,” Garrick said, drawing Leon back to the lesson. “You’re trying to finish every fight with one clever move. You watch my shoulders, decide what I’m going to do, and then commit before you’ve checked whether you’re right.”

“That sounds like a problem with your shoulders.”

“My shoulders are innocent.”

“Can you prove that?”

Garrick handed the practice sword back to him. “You tell me. Watch carefully this time. Don’t try to guess what I want you to see. Pay attention to what actually happens.”

Leon nodded, determined to take the advice seriously. His father settled into a defensive stance, and Leon studied his feet, his shoulders, the angle of his blade. For a brief moment, he thought he understood the movement that would come next. Garrick shifted his weight, and Leon reacted immediately, swinging toward the opening he believed had appeared.

His father simply stepped to the side.

Leon stopped himself from falling over through a combination of frantic footwork and a desperate grab at the air. He remained upright, which he decided was a victory of sufficient importance to be acknowledged.

Garrick nodded. “Better.”

“I didn’t fall.”

“An improvement.”

“And you didn’t hit me.”

“I was considering it.”

“Perhaps you should reconsider.”

“Perhaps you should eat breakfast before you starve to death.”

That, Leon thought, was the first sensible suggestion anyone had made all morning.

The kitchen was warm, crowded, and filled with the comfortable disorder of a family that had never possessed enough cupboards for all the things it owned. Copper pans hung above the hearth. Bundles of dried herbs dangled from a beam near the window, and a small pile of wooden shavings sat beneath the bench where Garrick had been repairing a chair the previous evening. Mara Calder stood at the table cutting bread while a pot of porridge simmered over the fire. She was a slender woman with dark auburn hair tied behind her head and sharp brown eyes that could identify a lie from across a crowded marketplace. Leon had once tried to convince her that a missing jar of honey had been stolen by a very small bear. She had looked at the honey on his chin, waited until he finished speaking, and asked whether the bear had also eaten three apples and a handful of walnuts.

Leon had learned that day that his mother was a dangerous person to deceive.

“Sit,” Mara said without looking up.

“I’m not that muddy.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

Leon looked at the bench. Then he looked at his boots. Then he looked at his mother.

“You’re going to make me wash before breakfast, aren’t you?”

“I’m going to make you wash before you put mud on my floor. Breakfast is simply the reward for surviving the experience.”

Tobin was already seated at the table, carefully dividing a second piece of bread into two uneven portions. He pushed the larger one toward Leon without explanation. Leon took it, surprised, and ruffled his brother’s hair.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I want the sword when you become famous.”

“Naturally.”

“And the house.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Then I’ll tell people about the mud.”

Leon slowly turned toward his brother. “You drive a very hard bargain for someone who can’t reach the top shelf.”

“I have time to grow.”

Garrick pulled out a chair. “Both of you eat before your mother decides to assign chores.”

“Too late,” Mara said. “Leon, after breakfast, take the empty jars to the healer’s cupboard and bring back the clean bandages. Tobin, help your father sort the nails in the workshop.”

Tobin looked down at his bread. “I think I may be coming down with something.”

“How unfortunate. Perhaps the illness will prevent you from eating the honey cakes I made yesterday.”

Tobin sat straighter. “I feel better already.”

Leon laughed and began eating. For a while, the conversation wandered through ordinary things: the condition of the mill’s waterwheel, a cracked roof on the eastern lane, the arrival of a grain cart expected before midday, and the blacksmith’s ongoing disagreement with a supplier who apparently believed that iron nails should cost the same as silver rings. Brackenridge was a frontier settlement, but it was not a place where every day involved danger. Most days involved repairing what had broken, making enough food to last until the next harvest, and persuading neighbours that a fence was not technically a personal insult.

The village had roughly twelve hundred residents, depending on whether one counted the seasonal workers who arrived with caravans and departed before the first frost. Timber houses clustered around the market square, their roofs darkened by years of rain and smoke. Beyond them stood the mill beside the river, a smithy that rang from dawn until dusk, a modest shrine, a healer’s cottage, and a palisade maintained by guards who had learned that most trouble arrived either on four legs or inside a merchant’s paperwork. Roads connected Brackenridge to smaller farms and outlying hamlets before winding eastward toward larger settlements and, eventually, the distant authority of the Crown of Avelorn.

Leon had seen maps of the wider kingdom. He had seen illustrations of enormous cities, mountain fortresses, desert caravans, and ships with sails as bright as banners. He had never been farther than the neighbouring market town, a journey that took most of a day if the road was dry and considerably longer if the road had decided to become a river.

He considered this an injustice.

“When am I allowed to go with a caravan?” he asked.

Mara stopped cutting bread. “When you are old enough to understand that a caravan is not an invitation to disappear for six weeks.”

“I understand that.”

“Last week you went looking for a fox and came home after sunset.”

“It was a very interesting fox.”

“It stole a chicken.”

“It had a family to feed.”

“It had a chicken.”

Garrick hid a smile behind his cup. Leon noticed and pointed at him.

“You’re supposed to be helping me.”

“I am helping you. I’m allowing your mother to explain why you won’t be travelling with a caravan this year.”

“That isn’t help. That’s treason.”

“Then I recommend you prepare for a difficult political career.”

Mara resumed cutting the bread. “You can learn about the world without running away from home. Help Dain at his shop, learn to read a proper map, practise your sword, and stop assuming that every ruin contains treasure waiting for you personally.”

Leon opened his mouth, then closed it. There was no point arguing with the last statement. Everyone knew ruins contained treasure. That was what made them ruins instead of particularly inconvenient piles of stone. The fact that his parents insisted otherwise only suggested that adults had become so accustomed to ordinary life that they had forgotten how interesting the world was.

Outside, a cart rattled along the lane. Somewhere in the village, a dog barked. The morning carried on around them, unaware that Leon had already decided it would eventually become the beginning of a much better story.

By midmorning, the market square had filled with people. A farmer argued over the price of oats while a pair of travelling peddlers laid out dyed cloth and polished trinkets on a long table. The baker’s apprentice carried baskets of loaves between customers, and the blacksmith’s hammer rang steadily from the workshop at the edge of the square. A group of children chased one another between the stalls until a woman carrying a basket of eggs threatened to recruit them all into unpaid agricultural labour.

Leon delivered the jars to the healer’s cupboard, collected the clean bandages, and completed the task without losing anything. He considered this evidence of growing maturity. He then spent the next quarter of an hour listening to a man explain the difference between three kinds of river fish, a subject Leon had not known could occupy so much of a person’s life.

He was preparing to escape when he heard two farmers speaking near a stall selling onions.

“Light on the hill again last night,” one said. “My youngest saw it through the window.”

“The old stones?” asked the other.

“That’s what she said. A pale light, moving between them.”

“Children see all sorts of things in the dark.”

“My daughter is eleven, not three.”

“Then she’s old enough to know better.”

The first farmer lowered his voice. “My grandfather used to say the stones were older than the kingdom. Said the ground around them wasn’t right. Things grow poorly up there.”

“Your grandfather also said the river was haunted by a woman who stole men’s shadows.”

“His shadow went missing for three days.”

“He was standing behind a tree.”

Leon drifted closer, pretending to examine a basket of apples. The old stones. Everyone in Brackenridge knew about them. They stood on a wooded hill north of the village, beyond the last cultivated fields and a narrow track that grew muddy whenever it rained. They formed a broad circle of dark, weathered stone, with several broken pillars leaning inward as though the structure had grown tired of standing. Most people called it the Sleeping Gate, although nobody could remember who had first given it that name.

The oldest stories claimed it had once been a gateway to somewhere far away. Other stories described it as a temple, a boundary marker, or the remains of a fortress built by people who had disappeared long before the first human settlements reached the region. The more practical villagers regarded it as an attractive place to fall and break an ankle. Children were forbidden to climb the stones because the earth around the structure had developed cracks and shallow sinkholes over the years.

Leon considered this an inadequate reason to avoid investigating something interesting.

“Don’t even think about it,” said a voice beside him.

Leon jumped and nearly knocked over the apple basket. Tessa Wren stood with her hands on her hips, watching him with the particular expression she reserved for discovering that he had developed another terrible idea. She was nine, a year older than Leon, with chestnut hair tied into a rough ponytail and a small scar on her chin from an incident involving a wooden fence, a daring leap, and a disagreement about whether the fence had been properly constructed.

Tessa was the miller’s daughter, which meant she had grown up around machinery, sacks of grain, and people who believed that anything could be fixed with enough patience and a large enough wrench. She was competitive, quick-witted, and considerably better than Leon at admitting when she did not know something. She also possessed an infuriating ability to remember every time he had been wrong.

“Don’t think about what?” Leon asked.

“The hill.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the hill.”

“You’ve been staring at those men like they just announced that the hill is made of chocolate.”

“I was listening to their conversation.”

“Of course you were.”

“It’s called gathering information.”

“It’s called eavesdropping when you do it from behind an apple basket.”

Leon straightened. “I have every right to listen to public conversations.”

“Then why were you hiding behind the apples?”

“I was examining them.”

Tessa glanced at the basket. “Have you discovered anything?”

“Several are bruised.”

“Remarkable. Shall I inform the scholars?”

He gave her a wounded look. She grinned, apparently pleased with herself, and reached for an apple. The stall owner shouted at them to stop touching the produce unless they intended to pay for it. Tessa immediately bought one, then took a bite while Leon was left standing beside the basket with his dignity in considerably worse condition than the fruit.

“Come on,” she said. “The mill’s jammed again. Father says I can watch him fix the lower wheel if I stay out of the way.”

“That sounds terribly exciting.”

“It is, actually. There’s a difference between watching someone work and standing around pretending to be a legendary adventurer.”

“One day, you’ll be grateful I allowed you to accompany me.”

“One day, you’ll be grateful I stopped you from walking into a tree.”

“I have never walked into a tree.”

“You were looking at a bird.”

“The bird was behaving suspiciously.”

“The tree was stationary.”

Leon decided the conversation had become unproductive. He followed her through the square, but his thoughts remained on the hill. A light moving between the stones. His grandfather had once mentioned something similar, though the story had been told during a winter evening when the wind was rattling the shutters and the adults were trying to frighten the children into staying indoors. Leon had assumed it was nonsense. Now he found himself wondering whether the old structure might contain something that had survived from the ancient world.

Something worth discovering.

Something that might finally prove he was meant for a life beyond Brackenridge.

The opportunity came shortly after midday.

Tessa had been called away to help at the mill when one of the lower gears began making a noise that her father described as expensive. Leon completed the remaining household errands, returned the bandages to Mara, and promised Garrick that he would spend the afternoon practising in the yard. He kept that promise for almost twenty minutes.

Then he collected his wooden sword, a small pouch of dried fruit, and the utility knife his father had allowed him to carry for cutting rope and preparing kindling. He left a note on the kitchen table stating that he had gone to practise near the northern fields and would be back before supper. It was not technically a lie. The hill stood near the northern fields, and he fully intended to practise something while he was there.

He did not consider the note misleading until he was halfway down the track.

The path climbed gradually through long grass and scattered hawthorn bushes. Beyond the fields, the woodland grew thicker, its trees spreading their branches over the narrow trail. Sunlight filtered through the leaves in shifting patches, illuminating spiderwebs and the occasional bright feather caught among the roots. Leon walked with his wooden sword resting against his shoulder, trying to imagine how a professional adventurer would approach an unknown ruin.

He decided a professional adventurer would probably bring more equipment.

He also decided a professional adventurer would probably not have been told to practise in the yard.

The Sleeping Gate emerged from the trees without ceremony. One moment Leon was following the path between two old oaks; the next, he was standing at the edge of a clearing where the ground rose into a low, uneven hill. The structure occupied its summit, a circle of massive stone blocks surrounding a sunken centre. Some of the pillars had fallen, their surfaces cracked and furred with moss. Others remained upright, leaning at slightly different angles. Their tops were worn smooth by weather, and faint grooves ran across the stone in patterns too regular to be natural fractures.

Leon stopped at the edge of the clearing.