Free Shattering the Ley by Joshua Palmatier

their scent heavy on the air. Somewhere close they could hear the sounds of a stream, water gurgling over stone. They passed beneath a canopy of intertwined branches, leaves rustling in a breeze, and then the trees opened up and fell away.
    Before them, the path wound down between huge stones, the boulders angular, edges sharp, completely unlike the river stone found throughout most of the Eld District. They paused, Kara running her hand down the striations of the nearest stone, the dusky browns and reds stacked upon each other in layers. Energy flowed through her into the stone and back again and she felt her fingers tingling, her skin prickling beneath the touch.
    Ahead, the gardener appeared around a turn in the path and smiled. “I see you decided to come.”
    “I thought you’d be waiting for us at the entrance,” Kara said.
    He laughed. “I wanted to see where you’d head if you were left unattended. Not everyone finds the stone garden.” He shared a meaningful look with Kara’s father, then turned his attention back to her. She suddenly realized that her father had let her lead them through the park, that he’d simply been following her. “Follow me. I want you to see something.”
    She moved forward, the stones rising up above her head, the spaces between the rock cooler, smelling of earth and dust. Her father trailed behind. The gardener chose paths seemingly at random, although Kara realized she could sense something ahead, a strengthening of the energy, and her pulse began beating faster.
    They stepped into a grotto, the closeness of the stone retreating as it opened up into a wide, roofless chamber. Water poured down from the lip of the recess in a small waterfall, pooling below before disappearing through a crevice in the stone wall. Moss covered the rock near the stream, glistening with moisture. In the center of the grotto, six stone plinths rose in a rough circle, none of them the same height, a few canted to one side. Another ring of mismatched stones encircled these, waist-high. The gardener moved toward the stones at first, then veered off to one side, closer to the waterfall, and sat down on a ridge of stone that rose from the floor to form a natural bench. The ground was littered with rocks of various sizes and colors, scattered haphazardly, some the size of Kara’s fist, most smaller. Unlike the surrounding rock of the grotto and the plinths, these were river stones, smoothed and rounded.
    The gardener motioned them toward seats to one side and Kara sat down beside her father. The moment she touched the stone beneath her, she felt something was wrong. She frowned, but the gardener didn’t seem to notice.
    “This is the heart of the park,” the gardener said, nodding toward the plinths and the surrounding walls. “This grotto was discovered before Erenthrall was even a village, before anything had even been built near the confluence of the two rivers. It is believed that the local population realized the power that resided here, even if they had not yet learned to harness it as we do, and so built such stone monoliths to mark its location. There are such stellae scattered throughout the Baronies, the Demesnes, the Temerite lands, and even as far south as the Gorrani Flats and the Archipelago.”
    Kara found herself only half listening as she stared down at the smoothed stone beneath their feet and the scattering of rocks. The energy she’d felt outside the park flowed beneath her, beneath the stone, as if there were a large lake far beneath the surface, rivers of power sifting back and forth below, barely perceptible to her. Here on the surface, she could feel its pulse, feel the eddies as they shifted. But something had disturbed the flow.
    She curled her toes up inside her shoes, then spread them out, trying to sense what was wrong, even as she heard her father ask, “Are the other stone markers in the other Baronial cities? Where the Nexi are?”
    The gardener snorted in disgust. “No.