63. FIELD OF STORMS – Adult Fantasy

Mentor Name: Charlie Holmberg

Mentee Name: L. T. Elliot

Title: FIELD OF STORMS

Category: Adult

Genre: Fantasy

Word Count: 125,000

Pitch:

An illiterate rice farmer’s daughter steals God’s language and uses it to rewrite her country’s faith.

Excerpt:

Each morning Kwinn Mon Daing sought the river to quiet her sin. The tug of the current beneath a dimpled, calm surface often drew away the stolen power that filled her. The burbling splash drowned out two commands in her head: Run and Confess.

She had denied both for four years.

Storm clouds tumbled across the sky; behind them the sun began its wary climb. Soon fishermen would take to their boats, water buffalo fitted to yokes would trudge through unseeded rice paddies, and women would make their way to the village heart laden with baskets of food to share when the monks came begging. Fog skimmed the ground by the river. In the graying light, it clouded around the grass-covered huts perched atop their stilts. It seemed the heavens had captured her home, and carried it far above the earth.

Kwinn pressed a hand to her aching chest. There was no haven in earth or sky for her. She was ri’oo-yin, a woman cursed to see the language god used to pen the world—and she stole it in snatches.

For four years, Kwinn poisoned her village. Four years of dry starts in wet rice paddies, fruit ripening out of season, and longtime friends becoming enemies for little more than a misplaced word. Random and beyond control, it became harder to conceal. If her emotions overwhelmed her, Kwinn’s vision filled with God’s words: the Mruj Vak.

Nothing helped—nothing but standing in the river and watching the characters swirl away in an eddy, drawn downstream by a force that felt greater than herself.