Sarah Z. Creates

In the World-Building Wednesday series, I’m doing just that: using writing prompts to flesh out Talah, one of the worlds in The Sundered Realms.

Most Quersyans believed the First Daughter was dead. Years of searching had revealed no trace of the girl or the infant she might have died as. Only the Zon, dedicated to the royal bloodline, kept searching.

The Zon and the desperate.

And Catha.

His thick fingers drummed on the side of his mostly full mug. He couldn’t search full-time anymore; the profit in that was all but gone. Not that he’d ever really been in it for the money. And definitely not now. No, he had his own memories of missing ones that drove him to find answers for others.

He knew he’d find none for himself.

Even though Dara wasn’t physically gone, mentally and emotionally, she’d been gone for longer than she’d been with Catha. She was nothing but a shell now, and soon, she wouldn’t even be that.

“Hey, Catha! What news?” Tadh slid into the chair across from him, the front of his embroidered tunic smeared with something dark and apparently sticky.

“Gelda isn’t going to like that,” Catha said, nodding to the stain. Tadh grimaced.

“That’s what she gets for marrying a butcher and trying to dress him like a lord. My work is messy, Catha! I don’t need embroidery!” But he waved a hand, dismissing his favorite topic even as he addressed it. “News?”

Catha sighed. He’d grown to hate that questions.

“None, Tadh.” He took a deep swallow of the tepid beer in front of him. He’d thought — he’d hoped — that working at a message center would give him a better insight into what might have happened to the First Daughter. But appended messages were impossible. Too many of them for skimming, too full of foolish details. And the private messages were just that — private, until the recipient unlocked them. And most of those had no reason to share.