The Legends

The chronicle records what it can bear.
These are the pages it could not keep closed.

The Aelf-King Legends

The Aelf-King Sagas is the trilogy. The Legends are everything the trilogy walks past: the legends standing behind the story, each one older than the books and complete in itself.

Every carol the world still sings is a true song, and every true song is smaller than the night it remembers. The trilogy tells one such night at full length. The Legends tell the others: the figures the songs made smaller, the customs that outlived their reasons, the gifts and the griefs the verses could not hold. They are complete stories, not appendices. Each one answers a question the trilogy raises and does not stop to explain, and each one stands alone.

You may enter anywhere. The Legends require no knowledge of the trilogy, and the trilogy requires none of the Legends. Read what calls to you.

The short legends are free, and always will be. The longer tellings, the novellas and novels among them, are made and sold as books. New legends are announced in one place only: The Chronicle of Mercy.

The Collection

A short legend · The last days of the Iron Century

The Maker's Wonder

Before there is a legend, there is a tinsmith. Tobias makes small tin stars for no reason he has ever found, in a valley too small for its own church bells, until a woman named Elizabeth walks into his shop and sees what the stars are for before he does. A story of ordinary craft, ordinary love, and the night the Wild Hunt rode through both.

Read it freeBookFunnel delivery; joins The Chronicle of Mercy

A short legend · A deep winter of the old North, long before the Sagas

Bowl on the Sill

For ten generations a poor farmstead has kept one courtesy: a bowl on the sill on the longest night, the butter not forgotten. Then the farm passes to a counting man, who calls the bowl waste. This is the story of what the courtesy was keeping, and of Inga, the child who set out her own small bowl when no one else would.

Publishing December 5, 2026Announced in The Chronicle of Mercy

A short legend · The Low Countries, in the age of sail

The Feast of Stephen

Everyone knows the carol: good king, poor man, winter fuel. This is the third man the verse left out. Klaas, a merchant captain who has never once given without counting, follows a young king into the snow on the Feast of Stephen and meets the one debt his ledger cannot carry. The night that unmakes a counting man, told at last from his side of the storm.

Publishing December 26, 2026, the feast itselfAnnounced in The Chronicle of Mercy

The Legends grow. New tellings are added in their seasons, most of them in winter, and they are never announced anywhere before they are announced in The Chronicle of Mercy. If a shelf like this one should stand in your house, the trilogy begins with The Book.

Some of what follows has not happened yet. Or happened long ago. The distinction matters less than you would think, from where I sit.