Splintered sight shatter.., p.1
Splintered Sight (Shattered World Book 3), page 1
Splintered Sight
Shattered World
Book 3
W.R. Gingell
Cover Art by Moorbooks
Character Art by Kelsi (@scarvenartist)
Copyright © 2025 by W.R. Gingell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For Claire, with commiserations.
If fewer male fae slept with random human women, there would be fewer problems in fantasy book world, and I would not have needed to Talk About Sex on-page.
But there would also be fewer of our respective books, and I want to keep reading yours, so I’m glad we’re stuck with it.
“You said that I could kick Jasper in the knee and cut off his tie!”
—SooAh
Contents
1. Let Life Surprise You
2. Everything Is A Choice
3. Perfect Is An Illusion
4. Born To Be Wild
5. Failure Is Just Feedback
6. Think Outside The Box
7. Believe In Your Dreams
8. Turn Dreams Into Reality
9. Dare To Be Different
10. Focus On What Matters
11. Don’t Dim Your Light
12. What’s Done Is Done
13. Make Your Own Magic
Chapter 1
Let Life Surprise You
Viv had never punched someone in the face before. But then, no one had ever tried to kidnap a small girl from the top of a building she was living in before, either.
When she hit him, the man in black fell over backwards and tumbled over the parapet in a whip of feathers and shiny shoes. Viv saw, as if in a moment of slow motion, the very tiny wings that were on the man’s ankles as his legs flipped up and over.
Someone yelled; it was a wordless shout of dismay and useless warning, and it came tearing from her own throat, so it must have been hers. She tried belatedly to catch at the ankles as they swept past her, but caught only a feather or two, and then the parapet, to stop herself falling after him.
It was too late. He had gone.
“Abba!” said SooAh’s voice. She didn’t sound afraid, or horrified, or even worried. She sounded irritated. “Daddy! Stop playing jokes!”
Viv, sick with horror, still stared at empty space—and then there was an updraft of cool, ruffled air, and a handsome face with dark curls above it and a mask over the eyes rose gently into view. Behind that face, huge black wings beat rhythmically, stirring up the air.
“Oh, right,” said Viv, the words breathless in her mouth as she stared at him. “Wings.”
The masked man grinned at her, his teeth bright white and gleaming in the moonlight. He rose up and up until his shiny shoes also cleared the edge of the parapet. There were, Viv noticed once again, also tiny wings on his ankles. Those wings fluttered much more quickly than the wings that sprang from his back, though she wasn’t sure they were adding much to his mode of flight.
“I like you,” said the masked man, wafting forwards until he was directly in front of Viv. His lips, like SooAh’s, moved in the wrong shape and time for the words he was saying—unlike SooAh, however, this circumstance was for the merest blink of a moment, and when Viv looked again, she couldn’t perceive any difference between the sounds his lips emitted and the shapes they made. His feet touched down on the roof, the wings on his ankles still fluttering gently as if to properly calibrate both the landing and the couple of steps afterward. He added, “You’re a good person to have around our SooAh.”
SooAh, with great ominousness, said from beside Viv, “If you hit Abba again, I will have to hate you.”
The word Abba seemed to fizz in Viv’s head, and then, as though something had been tweaked inside her, her mind said Dad instead. Almost gasping with the speed at which the world had shifted around her, and struggling to take in these new facts, she said with some wildness, “He’s your dad? I didn’t know he was your dad!”
“Yes,” said the little girl. “That’s why I don’t hate you now.”
She was lucky, Viv now realised, that SooAh had said “hate” and not “bite.”
“Why are you meeting your father on the roof!” she protested. “Why can’t he come through the front door like everyone else? I thought he was trying to kidnap you!”
“Jasper is the one who kidnapped me,” SooAh said darkly.
“That’s not true, our SooAh,” her father said chidingly. “That was the stuffed-shirt gumiho elder and his feral friend.”
“Yes but they gave me to him, and—”
“Is that why they have a lock on your door and magic painted all through it?” Viv said. “I thought they didn’t want something getting in!”
“They don’t,” said SooAh’s father, his grin bright against his dusky skin. “They don’t want me getting in.”
Viv couldn’t quite help the way her eyes narrowed on him. “Then should you be getting in?”
Jasper was overly controlling and had fingers in far too many pies that weren’t any of his concern, obviously—but he also had a very good eye for dangerous people.
SooAh’s father’s grin grew rueful. “I suppose that depends on who you ask; but if you ask me or our SooAh, we should never have been separated. Is the opinion of anyone else important enough to do it anyway?”
“No,” said Viv. It wasn’t even a reluctant admission; it was a simple statement of truth. “Have you come to take her away?”
“Yes!” said SooAh at once.
“No,” her father said.
“You said you were going to come for me once you were free,” SooAh said, her little voice gritty. “You said we could go away together and that I could kick Jasper in the knee and cut off his tie.”
The masked man’s eyes slid towards Viv and then back to SooAh. “I didn’t say you could cut his tie off.”
“Yes, you did! You said I can kick him, and cut his tie off, and cut—”
“Princess, princess,” said the masked man, his tone placating. “We’re on our best behaviour on the roof with Jasper’s minions.”
Viv, more insulted than she would have expected, snapped, “I am not a minion, thank you very much!”
“She’s not,” agreed SooAh, turning her scowling face on her father instead. “You can’t call her names! She lets me sleep on her bed when my room gets too heavy.”
“Princess, I’m not going to encourage you to sleep on the beds of strange women—”
“Viv isn’t a strange woman, either,” the little girl said. “Not very strange, anyway.”
“Thank you,” Viv said, her voice dripping with irony.
“I see, I see,” the masked man said, in smooth, soothing tones. Viv couldn’t help feeling that he was pleased with the direction that the conversation had taken. He probably was: he had managed to get SooAh’s attention away from the dire services she wanted to perform on Jasper’s tie and kneecaps, and from his stated intent not to whisk SooAh away with him, and all he had had to do for it was to insult Viv.
“Why does Jasper want SooAh?” she asked. She could have asked Why don’t you want to take SooAh away with you when you said she’s been kidnapped? or Why are you leaving SooAh here if you think you should be allowed to see her? and SooAh’s father knew that just as well as she did.
So he answered as carefully and deliberately as she thought he would have answered the questions she wasn’t asking. “He says that he likes to encourage the right kind of growth in the Behind, Between, and Human worlds,” he said. “And he gets the benefit of being a benefactor, and all the goodwill that goes along with it.”
“He’s collecting a set to put on his desk,” SooAh said, below her breath but audibly. “Then when Forex comes, it looks pretty and useful so that they know he’s got good tools.”
“Jasper has a good sense for people and things and talents that might come in useful for him later,” SooAh’s father said. There was a note of respect to his voice that Viv found slightly grating. It left her with the feeling that had Jasper not made off with SooAh specifically, her father would have quite admired and respected Jasper. “Or who might be worth money or connections later along the line. He likes to get to them early so that he can put in enough to their education and formative years to make it hard for them to cut ties completely, even if they don’t want to work for him. Our SooAh will get a good education here, and she’ll be safe. My work isn’t very safe, even these days. It got better, but it’s pretty far from perfect.”
“What is your work?” Viv asked. She was beginning to feel irritated—nothing that SooAh’s father said made any sense of the reasoning behind allowing his daughter to remain in a place to which she had been confined against her will. It seemed more as though Jasper was providing certain benefits that could be purchased at the expense of SooAh’s kidnapping, and that was uncomfortably reminiscent of her own reasons for remaining where she was.
SooAh’s father apparently didn’t have the lack of job opportunities that Viv’s physical limitations had left her with, but both of them had accepted less than perfect moral solutions to their problems.
“Me?” said the man, in surprise. “I’m the chollima. Didn’t they tell you about me?”
He seemed, Viv thought, ind ignant, or perhaps injured at the idea. “No,” she said, hard-heartedly. “They didn’t tell me anything about you. They didn’t even tell me that SooAh had a father still in the picture.”
She heard him mutter something about ranking and behindkind with eyes that looked too high, but the words he spoke aloud were cold and proud. “They were probably afraid that if they spoke my name, I’d appear.”
It was better, thought Viv, to leave him to his delusions—if delusions they were. So she asked only, “What does a chollima do?”
“The chollima,” the chollima said, in icy tones.
“He makes trouble,” SooAh said. “Useful trouble sometimes. It was my abba who helped to clean up Seoul this year.”
Viv said slowly, “So you’re…helping Jasper? Or you’re helping, what? The Between version of government?”
The chollima made an irritated, self-important clearing of the throat. “I’m non-partisan,” he said. “No man can tame me, and I make mockery of every system of government. I can fly the length of Korea in a single night.”
So, Viv nearly said, could a small plane. In fact, a small plane could probably do it just marginally quicker.
“Unless they catch him,” SooAh said gloomily. “And that’s why he leaves me here in a pokey little hole—so that no one can get me and use me to catch him again.”
Barely an eyelid flickered, but Viv was certain to her soul that SooAh’s father had sighed. Perhaps it was in the way that the wings both on his back and ankles very slightly lifted and then fell. Serve him right, Viv thought, in some satisfaction.
“I told you, our SooAh,” said the chollima. “You’re much safer here until the next chollima shows up. I come and see you every week, and Jasper keeps you safe for me while I work.”
SooAh’s lower lip trembled. “I don’t want to wait until the next chollima comes! I want to come with you now!”
She stamped her foot, too, making the tulle of her skirt wobble violently, and Viv saw the pinch in her chin. SooAh was going to cry, and she looked very angry about it. But instead of doing so, the little girl turned her back on her father, her shoulders hunched, and said in a small, tight voice, “I’m going back to bed. I’m not supposed to be up at this time.”
Then she marched back towards the door and was gone in a brief yawning of soft yellow light that swallowed up her figure but not the defiant sound of her footsteps descending into the sixth floor.
That left the chollima looking ruefully at Viv. “Our SooAh is a bit sensitive about Jasper,” he said. “I tried to get her out before he smuggled her to Australia, but that was just because I was panicking at the time. If I tell the truth, she’s safer here with him than she is with me.”
“Yes, I gathered that,” Viv said. She had gathered a very great deal from the conversation, but what it all boiled down to was that SooAh was better at the Tea House than with her scapegrace father, and that Jasper had still either winked at her kidnapping or caused it. She didn’t like either notion very greatly. “What are you going to do? You can’t keep landing on the roof—Bazza will notice at some stage. I’m surprised he hasn’t noticed already.”
“I like to make sure the troll has something else to worry him when I time my descent,” the chollima said, rather loftily.
“That won’t keep working,” she said. “And SooAh is going to break her heart if you don’t keep coming. Can you work out something with Jasper?”
“This is working something out,” the chollima said indulgently. “So long as he doesn’t have to hear about it, he doesn’t mind. If he was really worried, he would have moved her again. He knows where he stands, and I know where I stand, and so long as we both do as expected and nobody ruffles feathers, everyone is comfortable.”
“Everyone except SooAh,” Viv snapped back. She suspected that the chollima was the reason that SooAh had bitten the lunch lady—or at least, the lack of him. “Were you supposed to meet her earlier this week?”
The chollima looked away and managed for a moment to look really very sorrowful, though Viv wasn’t entirely sure how much of it was real. She thought that if she were a little girl, it would look real to her.
“There were unavoidable circumstances,” the chollima said.
“I thought there might have been,” she said dryly. “But what are you going to do about these circumstances in particular?”
The chollima didn’t quite look at her as he said, softly and persuasively, “You could help us. Jasper wants you here, which means you’re valuable to him. You could leverage that for us.”
“Could I,” Viv said, her voice discouraging. She didn’t think that Jasper had any right to hold someone else’s daughter away from him, but she was also now quite well aware that the chollima had very little, if any, intention of freeing SooAh from that grasp. Judging from the chollima’s explanation, in fact, they could be considered as having entered into some kind of unnamed bargain—into which she had no desire to enter as a third party. “How would I do that?”
“Just leave a window open every third night.”
“Absolutely not,” Viv said at once. Immediately obvious to her was the fact that anyone besides the chollima could also enter her room via that window. Nearly as immediately obvious was the fact that the chollima himself could enter her room at will via that window. “If you really want to see SooAh, you can perch on the windowsill and knock like a civilised person.”
“I’m not civilised,” the chollima assured her. He seemed to think he ought to be congratulated on that fact. “But I will knock. Every third night.”
“Twice a week at most,” Viv said firmly. “You can spend more time each night if you want—you can use SooAh’s room—or,” she added, as she saw his mouth open to protest, “you can use mine, to make sure there aren’t any listening ears. I need to sleep enough to make sure no one dies while I’m on the clock.”
“Maybe we’ll start later next week,” the chollima said. There was a slight touch of sadness to his voice that she understood. “Our princess will come out of her little rage by then.”
Viv’s first instinct was to say, “Don’t worry; kids can forgive a lot from parents,” but a second instinct shut her mouth again. At last, she said, “She’s going to be a kid a long time, I hear.”
“I did not consider the ramifications when I met her mother,” said the chollima. There was a faintly rueful grin below his mask again. “Actually, I didn’t consider any ramifications. But then again, it does mean she’ll be able to keep up with me for a couple of centuries without taking over as chollima. And I hear we leave the childhood years in another twelve years or so.”
“That’s a long time to be waiting for her dad,” Viv said. “You’ve got time to work something out, but if you take too long, you might find that she gives up waiting. In the meantime we can start three nights from tonight, on Monday.”
“It’s a deal!” the chollima said swiftly. “I will see you next week.”
He didn’t wait for her to say anything else—now that he had got what he wanted, he was quick to be up and away, and in less than ten seconds, all Viv was able to hear was the steady, heavy sound of his wings beating.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
The sound thrummed in her head, and the waking past and the sleeping present began to be apparent to Viv. She was asleep, not on top of the Tea House, making inadvisable deals with SooAh’s father. She hadn’t, in fact, seen hide nor hair (nor feather) of SooAh’s father for the last two weeks, despite their agreement and much to SooAh’s hot, teary anger.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
Someone, thought Viv, trying to wake up, was knocking on her door. Which door, she wasn’t sure.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
No, they weren’t knocking on the bedroom door. And, she thought, waking more thoroughly, it couldn’t be the front door of the Tea House, because there was no way for Viv to hear anything from the front door up on the second floor. The spatial and physical barriers between her and the front door would have made that impossible, even if there hadn’t been the kind of magical softening and dampening between them that still gave her nightmares both waking and sleeping if she thought about them too much.
