On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness

(Wingfeather Series 1)

Andrew Peterson

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781529359800
• eBook ISBN: 9781529359817
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

After living for years under the occupation by the evil Fangs of Dang, the Igiby children find a map rumoured to lead to the lost Jewels of Anniera - the one thing the Fangs will do anything to find. The family is thrown headlong into a perilous adventure, uncovering truths about who they are that will change their world forever.Repackaged with new illustrations, this is the opportunity to discover the Wingfeathers.

Footnotes

Two • Nuggets, Hammers, and Totatoes

1. Zibzy gained wide popularity in Skree in the year 356 of the Third Epoch. A lawn game played with giant darts (hurled high into the air by the offensive team), a whacker (a flat board with a handle), and three rocks. Injuries abounded, however, and because of the public outcry the game was banned. In 372, it was discovered that a passable version of the game could be played by replacing the giant darts with brooms. For complete rules, and a deeper look into zibzy’s fascinating and bloody history, see We Played, We Bled, We Swept by Vintch Trizbeck (Three Forks Publishing, Valberg, 3/423).

Three • Thwaps in a Sack

1. Bip Thwainbly, The Chomping of the Skonk (Publisher and date unknown).

2. From “The Legend of the Sunken Mountains,” a traditional Skreean rhyme. A later version of the tale was printed in Eezak Fencher’s Comprehensive History of Sad, Sad Songs. See here in Appendices.

Five • The Bookseller, the Sock Man, and the Glipwood Township

1. Glipwood had prospered greatly over the years and was now a slightly larger cluster of buildings, thanks in part to the tourism generated by the Dragon Day Festival. Willibur Smalls, It Happened in Skree (Torrboro, Skree: Blapp River Press, 3/402).

2. Ridgerunners are a reclusive race that dwell primarily in the mountains of Dang. Their great weakness is fruit of any kind, in any form, whether plucked from the tree or baked in a crispy pie. Because of this, ridgerunners are the chief enemy of the people of the Green Hollows, who grow fruit of many kinds. Each year, swarms of ridgerunners descend the northern slopes of the Killridges and steal fruit from the Hollows. It’s said that as long as you are not a fruit, a ridgerunner won’t eat you. Since there was no fruit directly involved in the Great War, the ridgerunners of course remained neutral. Padovan A’Mally, The Scourge of the Hollows (Ban Rona, Green Hollows: The Iphreny Group, 3/111).

3. In order for Podo to hoe the garden, he had to fill out the Permission to Hoe Garden Form, then the Permission to Use Hoe Form to borrow the hoe. If the tool wasn’t returned by sundown, the penalty was much too severe to be mentioned in this happy part of the story. See here in Appendices.

Six • A Bard at Dunn’s Green

1. A delightful sport in which each team tries to get the ball into a goal without using their feet in any capacity, even to move. B’funerous Hwerq, Ready, Set, Chube! A Life in Gamery (Three Forks, Skree: Vanntz-Delue Publishers, 3/400).

2. Blaggus’s duties as mayor included running the town press, which now printed Commander Gnorm’s various permission forms for tool usage. Being a person obsessed with paperwork and rules of order, this suited Blaggus well. He also organized which Glipfolk would prepare meals for the Fangs each week, who would clean the barracks, and made formal requests to Commander Gnorm on behalf of Glipfolk who wished to travel to Torrboro. Blaggus had lost his youngest daughter to the Black Carriage six years earlier, and Gnorm kept him in his employ under the threat of taking his two remaining sons as well. Understandably, because of this the people of Glipwood bore the mayor no ill will.

3. Many Skreeans doubted that the legendary Isle of Anniera existed at all. It is a sad truth that some people only believe something exists if they can see it with their own eyes. Bandy Impstead, for example, had argued for hours in Shaggy’s Tavern one evening that there was no such thing as Wind for this very reason. His roof was torn off in a storm that very winter. Bandy’s mind, however, remained unchanged.

4. The Legends of Aerwiar are a collection of stories about the Maker and the Beginnings of Things. The greeting of Dwayne and Gladys, the First Fellows, for example, is well known in all the lands of Aerwiar. The legends also include the tragedy of “Will and the Lost Recipe,” “The Deep Holoré” (healing stones the Maker buried in the earth), and an early version of “The Fall of Yurgen.” The legends were once contained in old books said to have been written by the Maker himself and given to Dwayne for safekeeping, but the old books—along with the Holoré, Will’s famous cream of hen soup recipe, and Yurgen’s mountains—are lost.

5. It is unclear where the whistleharp originated. Each culture on Aerwiar claims to have invented the instrument, and each culture has good evidence to support its claims. Whistleharp tunes are referenced in the writings of Hzyknah, which date to the end of the First Epoch.

Seven • Barefoot and Beggarly

1. According to Eezak Fencher’s Comprehensive History of Sad, Sad Songs (Torrboro, Skree: Blapp River Press, 3/113), Lanric and Rube grew up closer than brothers, but both fell in love with the same girl, a maiden named Illia. Armulyn sang of how they fought like bitter enemies for her hand in marriage before finally resolving to ride to her home in the green hills and ask her to choose which man she’d rather have. When they arrived, they found her already wed to their cousin Doug, and the brothers went away weeping at their folly.

Nine • The Glipper Trail

1. The Glipper Trail had been there since before Podo was born. Podo’s parents, Edd and Yamsa Helmer, had planned to take advantage of the cottage’s nearness to the cliffs by doing their fishing from there. After carving out a path, Edd purchased a crate of fishing line from a merchant in Lamendron (later to become Fort Lamendron), tied a hook to the line, placed a horrified worm on the hook, and lowered the string down into the Dark Sea of Darkness. Just getting the hook down to the water took the better part of the morning, and, of course, Edd had no way of knowing from that great height whether or not the bait and hook were indeed submerged. Near dusk that evening, Edd felt a tug on his line and began hauling in his catch. Sometime after midnight Edd finally reeled in a small glipper fish. Yamsa wasn’t happy about being awakened by Edd’s cry of victory, or that in the dead of night he cleaned, cooked, and ate his little fish. Edd decided the next day that for all the trouble he had gone through for that one fish, he may as well have caught several. So he purchased a spool of rope from the same merchant in Lamendron, fastened it to a net, and once again spent all morning lowering the net into the sea. This time he fastened the line to a team of oxen and had them haul in the catch. By sundown the oxen were exhausted and the catch was only halfway up the face of the cliff. Edd tied off the rope and let it hang for the night. Early the next morning he set the oxen to work again. By noon, the net full of glippers, small sharks, pinchers, and squid was pulled over the edge and onto solid ground. Even Yamsa had to admit that it was a good catch, and they ate nothing but fish for the next three weeks. Fish and biscuits for breakfast, fish sandwiches for lunch, fried fish for dinner. They ate so many fish, in fact, that both Edd and Yamsa got sick, and they were never again able to eat fish without gagging. Edd never again fished from the cliffs, but the path by which his oxen pulled the heavy net remains.

Ten • Leeli and the Dragon Song

1. Mayor Blaggus broke his vow on the walk back to town.

2. Though it is impossible to be sure, most scholars agree that this is likely the song that Leeli Igiby sang at the cliffs that evening. Holoré is an ancient word with several meanings. Its most common definition is “the feeling of forgetting to do something without knowing what that thing is.” For example: Foom was overcome with holoré for the whole journey, but when he returned home to find his wife still waiting on the front steps, he realized what he had forgotten. The word holoré is also used to describe the scent of burned cookies, and is often applied to any potentially good thing that has turned unexpectedly sour. For example: When Foom realized he had forgotten to bring his wife on the three-day vacation, the holiday was holoré. The ancient meaning of the word, which is how it is likely being used in the song, refers to the stones laid deep within the earth by the Maker at the creation of Aerwiar. The stones, according to The Legends of Aerwiar, are imbued with power to keep the world alive and growing, functioning much the same, it is assumed, as Water from the First Well. The meaning of holoél is uncertain, but very likely has to do with cookies as well.

Eleven • A Crow for the Carriage

1. When townspeople broke the law or were singled out for no reason by the Fangs, they were sometimes brought to jail where they were beaten by Gnorm and his soldiers. If this happened, it was considered by the Glipfolk to be a wonderful fortune, and upon a prisoner’s release (if he was conscious), his family and friends congratulated him and carried on as if he’d just won a major award. If one wasn’t lucky enough to receive jail and torture, Gnorm sent a messenger crow to summon the Black Carriage.

Twelve • Not the Same as Ships and Sharks

1. Ships and Sharks is a yard game introduced to Skreeans by merchants from the Green Hollows. Typically, the children play the role of Ships, and the adults are the Sharks. The game begins when the Shark says to the Ships, “Gwaaaaah!” which is generally agreed to be the sound a shark would make if it weren’t a Sea Creature. The Ships then run like mad to escape the Shark. If a Ship is overcome by a Shark, the Ship is rolled in the dirt and tickled severely. This brutal simplicity is typical of games invented by the Hollowsfolk. Another popular game from the Green Hollows is called simply Trounce.

Thirteen • A Song for the Shining Isle

1. The women of Skree had a similar weakness for jewelry, but they were less inclined to kill one another for it.

2. Of the Torrboro Baimingtons, who prided themselves on having an ancestor who coined the phrase “Jouncey as a two-ton bog pie.” The Baimingtons were careful to insert the phrase into every conversation of which they were a part.

Fifteen • Two Dreams and a Nightmare

1. Three Honored and Great Subjects: Word, Form, and Song. Some silly people believe that there’s a fourth Honored and Great Subject, but those mathematicians are woefully mistaken.

2. By Jonathid Choonch Brownman, the explorer known to have been the first to find passage through the Jungles of Plontst. Though no one contested that the expedition itself was successful, people questioned the truth of many of Brownman’s claims about his discoveries. When his memoir of the journey was published in 421, most of it was believed to be a fabrication. This was due in part to Brownman’s insistence that while in the jungle he had lived for a time among a community of flabbits. Brownman insisted that they were docile, unlike flesh-eating flabbits in Skree. Scandalized, his readers challenged him to go and fetch one of the so-called tame flabbits back from Plontst, and Brownman agreed. It was the last anyone ever saw of Jonathid Choonch Brownman, though people still enjoy saying his middle name.

3. This was done with a shovel Podo had checked out from Mayor Blaggus early that morning by filling out the Permission to Shovel Hogpig Droppings Form. See here in Appendices.

Sixteen • In Books and Crannies

1. Snot wax is too repulsive a thing about which to write a proper footnote.

Seventeen • The Journal of Bonifer Squoon

1. According to Padovan A’Mally’s The Scourge of the Hollows (Ban Rona, Green Hollows: The Iphreny Group, 3/111), “Ridgerunners are particularly fond of artful verse, though their subject matter is almost exclusively fruit. A free-thinking ridgerunner named Tizrak Rzt scandalized the ridgerunner culture when he composed a poem entitled ‘Love, Love, Love Hath No Endingness’ and famously made no mention of fruit.”

2. See Appendices, here, for a sampling of Pembrick’s seminal work. Bahbert Pembrick,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Also by Andrew Peterson
• Praise for The Wingfeather Saga
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map
• How to Use this eBook
• A Brief Introduction to the World of Aerwiar
• A Slightly Less Brief Introduction to the Land of Skree
• An Introduction to the Igiby Cottage (Very Brief)
• One: The Carriage Comes, the Carriage Black
• Two: Nuggets, Hammers, and Totatoes
• Three: Thwaps in a Sack
• Four: A Stranger Named Esben
• Five: The Bookseller, the Sock Man, and the Glipwood Township
• Six: A Bard at Dunn’s Green
• Seven: Barefoot and Beggarly
• Eight: Two Thrown Stones
• Nine: The Glipper Trail
• Ten: Leeli and the Dragon Song
• Eleven: A Crow for the Carriage
• Twelve: Not the Same as Ships and Sharks
• Thirteen: A Song for the Shining Isle
• Fourteen: Secrets and Cheesy Chowder
• Fifteen: Two Dreams and a Nightmare
• Sixteen: In Books and Crannies
• Seventeen: The Journal of Bonifer Squoon
• Eighteen: Stumbling onto a Secret
• Nineteen: Pain and Woe and Sorrow
• Twenty: Into the Manor
• Twenty-One: The Horned Hounds
• Twenty-Two: The Catacombs Below
• Twenty-Three: The Groaning Ghost of Brimney Stupe
• Twenty-Four: The Road Home
• Twenty-Five: In the Hall of General Khrak
• Twenty-Six: Trouble at the Bookstore
• Twenty-Seven: A Trap for the Igibys
• Twenty-Eight: Into the Forest
• Twenty-Nine: Cave Blats and Quill Diggles
• Thirty: The Untimely Death of Vop
• Thirty-One: Khrak’s Medallion
• Thirty-Two: The Making of a Maggotloaf
• Thirty-Three: Bridges and Boughs
• Thirty-Four: Peet’s Castle
• Thirty-Five: Fire and Fangs
• Thirty-Six: Shadowed Steed and Shadowed Tack and Shadowed Driver Driving
• Thirty-Seven: Talons and a Sling
• Thirty-Eight: An Unpleasant Plan
• Thirty-Nine: Buzzard Willie’s Gift
• Forty: Betrayal
• Forty-One: A Rumble and a Screech
• Forty-Two: Good-bye, Iggyfings
• Forty-Three: A Ghost in the Wind
• Forty-Four: Following Podo
• Forty-Five: A Long Night
• Forty-Six: Water from the First Well
• Forty-Seven: Old Wounds
• Forty-Eight: Shelter
• Forty-Nine: The Jewels of Anniera
• Fifty: The Throne Wardens
• Fifty-One: A Letter from Home
• Appendices
• Footnotes
• More from Andrew Peterson
• Copyright