🧳 Travel Across Realities (No Passport Required)

This week, we’re road-tripping across realities.

First stop: a disastrous family vacation, complete with spaghetti monster and swimming pool escapades in 2.5 Stars.

Then it’s off to alien cliffside to visit the Vending Machine of Longing, where a certain goblin has stocked the shelves with bottled wishes and biodegradable yearning.

We’ve also planted three more trees in honour of Green Myths and Soft Futures—a new bundle of gentle speculative stories including chlorophyll poems, dream machines, and the carbon cost of imagination.

And for those following along in Tharnalune: The Sky Beneath the Mountain continues this week with chapter two, as young Kirin begins to uncover the mystery of the sky-stone—and of himself.

Thanks for travelling with us. No passport required, just a bit of wonder.

2.5 Stars: A Family Vacation Survival Saga
⛺ No one slept. Nothing went to plan. Five stars? Absolutely not.

This totally accurate travelogue chronicles one mom’s heroic attempt to survive a family vacation with her overly-enthusiastic child.2.5 Stars is a genre-defying saga of sand, sweat, and semi-conscious parenting.

Perfect for fans of chaos, crumbs, and the eternal question: “Was it worth it?”

Get it here

The Vending Machine of Longing
🍹 A surprise guest post from my favourite pixel art goblin!

There is a cliff on the edge of a forgotten moon.

No roads lead there, no signs point the way.

But if you’re very tired… and very quiet… sometimes the mist shows you the path.

At the edge of that cliff sits a vending machine that doesn’t run on money.

It runs on longing. On all the little wishes you don’t say out loud.

The ones you sigh into your pillow.

The ones you put in your back pocket, hoping no one sees.

You push the button, and it gives you a bright green drink— cool and fizzing with unspoken dreams.

Some say it makes your heart lighter.

Others say it makes the moon cry.

Full story on my blog

Green Myths and Soft Futures
🌱 Stories of resistance, renewal, and the dreams we dare to plant.

In a world reckoning with its limits, these four speculative stories and one quiet poem offer glimpses of what might survive us—and what might grow in our place. A girl reads her last story by rationed light. A machine dreams for a forest. A poet writes in moss instead of code.

Green Myths and Soft Futures is a tender meditation on creativity, climate, and the cost of imagining something better.

Offered in the spirit of gentle rebellion.

Read it now

The Sky Beneath the Mountain
🏰 The Tharnalune saga continues…

Chapter Two: The Echo in the Hollow

The tunnel beneath the Hollow Vale was not so much dug as grown. Its walls were packed earth and woven root, studded with the occasional flicker of mosslight—those pale fungi that blink when breathed upon. Kirin tried not to blink back. It felt rude.

His satchel thumped softly at his side as he wriggled onward, the pebble humming faintly, almost like a lullaby. He paused once to check that the candied beets hadn’t been squashed (they had), and once again to poke a suspicious patch of damp with his spoon. No creatures leapt out. Kirin, emboldened, pressed on.

The tunnel dropped sharply, and his claws scraped rock. A breeze stirred his frills—cool, damp, and laced with the smell of copper and moonlight. That was strange. Moonlight didn’t usually have a smell. Kirin’s eyes widened.

The tunnel ended in a narrow cleft just wide enough for him to squeeze through. He ducked his head, wriggled his shoulders, and emerged into the cavern.

It was breathtaking.

The ceiling arched so high above him it vanished into starlit shadow. The ground shimmered with shards of broken mirror and smoothed glass, glinting like dew on dragon-scale. Hanging from the stone like sleepy bats were windchimes made of bone and crystal, their threads swaying in no breeze at all. In the very center stood a stone dais, half-covered in lichen, and upon it: a bowl carved from opal, filled with nothing but air.

And sound.

It wasn’t music, not really. It was… the shape of a song. Like something once sung had left its echo folded in the air. Kirin stepped closer. The pebble in his satchel began to thrum, not loudly, but insistently—like a heartbeat remembering itself.

He was just about to touch the opal bowl when something sneezed.

Loudly. Wetly. Dramatically.

Kirin leapt backward, wings flared. “Who’s there?!”

From beneath a stack of bent windchimes, a creature unfolded. Roughly the size of a raccoon, and roughly the shape of a sock that had gone feral, it blinked at him with small, glowing eyes. It had no mouth. Only lint. And attitude.

“‘Bout time,” it said in a voice like a curtain being yanked open too fast. “You’ve been dripping hope all over the floor. It’s very distracting.”

“I—what? Who are you?”

The creature shrugged. Or twitched. Or possibly wiggled its disgruntlement. “Name’s Murm. I keep the echoes tidy. And you, little breath-beast, are leaking destiny. That’s above my pay grade.”

Kirin sat down hard.

Murm rustled forward and sniffed his satchel. “Sky-stone,” it said, disapprovingly. “That explains the tremors. Honestly, you dragons are always poking the past like it’s a sleepy badger.”

“I’m not poking anything!” Kirin protested. “I just want to know who I’m supposed to be.”

Murm narrowed its glowing eyes. “Then you’re going to need a bigger spoon.”

Novella coming soon…

Carbon Emissions Offset
🌲 Week 5 of our tree planting mission

Creative work has a carbon cost.
Between text generation, image production, and planning, we estimate our footprint for this week at approximately 8.3 kg of CO₂.

To offset our impact, we’ve planted 3 trees through One Tree Planted.

Each tree offsets around 20 kg of CO₂ over its lifetime—more than enough to cover this week and maintain our carbon-negative standard.

We may be small, but we’re trying to grow responsibly 🌱🌳