text: [Themes: urban fantasy, fantasy]
  
  Moondarkling: Elfboon
  A Rural Urban-Fantasy by Sam Kabo Ashwell
  
  In terms of mere geography, Ruritania is landlocked. Liminally it's a lot more complicated. On slow days, this is the bank of the Svonat, a minor river that for maybe sixty kilometres traces the Slovakian border, only distinguished by rather sparse settlement for such a fertile valley.Today it's the verge of a mangrove swamp, water the colour of strong tea lapping gently against a barnacle-encrusted jetty, and far off through the trees the suggestion of blazing light on a foreign sea. (You haven't seen this one before.) A crab darts across a salt-crusted log; the air is warm, with a strong taste of salt, anchovies and rotting mud.
  
  The Margin Cafe looks no more weatherbeaten than usual, and the prospect of cooler air is enticing.
  
  A mudlark is perusing low-hanging branches for lootable fruits.
  
  > look at the swamp
  The water is the clear brownish hue of strong tea, and sparkles in little wavelets around the sprawling mangrove roots. It's only about waist-deep, though the mud beneath it is probably many times that. The sharp scent leaves no doubt that it's a salt-water day.
  
  > examine the mudlark
  Mudlarking is the mildly illegal[1] practice of loitering on water margins[2] in the hope of happening upon valuable salvage or harvest. By your estimation, gold-sands, pearl beds and sturgeon populations manifest a lot less often than crocodiles, spring tides or bilharzia; every now and then some idiot prospector convinces themselves that they have developed a System, but more usually it's the domain of the more enterprising variety of indigent.
  
  This particular mudlark is youngish, scrawny and not conspicuously insane.
  
  > Note 1
  And in Ruritania, tedious, complicated and socially bootless to prosecute. As far as you're concerned, the law exists as an alternative way of nailing the ones who branch out into smuggling or elfin traffic.
  
  > Inventory
  You are carrying:
  the Nook of Shadows.
  semi-automatic
  
  > Note 3
  It's only in the last couple of years that anyone started making automatic rounds jacketed in cold iron; formerly you had to lug around a gigantic revolver that made holes of undiplomatic proportions in everything and kicked like an onager with a hornet on its balls, and the Glock.
  
  > Examine nook
  It's a sort of eldritch scrapbook of stuff that you've ripped off from people who ripped it off from a bewildering assortment of charlatans, Inquisitors, cat ladies, fantasists, perverts, aelfkultur-appropriators, cabalists, storytellers, alchemists, space cadets and paranoids. Stratified bullshit, deep and compacted and fertile, mounted up into a tell. Potent stuff.
  
  Its first incarnation was an age-yellowed Penguin that was bloated with inserts and shedding pages before you were twenty, and you recently upgraded to a more portable version. The problem is that it's a Lithuanian knockoff with an OS designed in Tanzania. It features a Weirding Manager intended to suggest the most dramatically appropriate spells, but either dramatic conventions are very strange in Tanzania or the manager has attained a limited but cantankerous sentience, and rare is the occasion on which it supplies a spell of transparent utility. It can, at any rate, be used to access the police databases and look people up, even in places where liminality banjaxes conventional connections.
  
  > Go inside
  The margins are not a stable place to live, but there are plenty of people passing through and they're all in need of something. This place supplies it: food, potable water, first aid, doss space, amateur legal counsel, trauma debriefing. Physically it's a low-ceilinged, broad, poorly-lit room, somewhere between bar, mess-hall and doss-house, with what would be a comfortable, homey scent if you liked fish soup, damp clothes and ill-washed foreigners[4].
  
  Druse loiters decoratively behind the bar.
  
  A particularly sorry-looking outclade[5], huddled over a bowl of Complimentary Soup, is the only customer.
  
  > Note 4
  And actually, having come here almost every day for three years, you are disturbed to find that you kind of do.
  
  > Note 5
  The Liminal Patrol does not make judgments act on behalf of the Outsider Office[6], and it is very important to use a term that remains agnostic on whether its referrent is an asylum-seeker, refugee of war, economic migrant, vagrant, smuggler, baby-snatcher or insurgent. It's best to just think of them as a shambling mound of paperwork.
  
  > Note 6
  Who's in charge of the margin is kind of complicated. The Frontiers Division is nominally in charge of securing the borders, but here they just make flyovers and kick the crap out of anything that looks like a monster or an invasion. The Outsider Office processes such immigrants as make it into a queue at a provincial capital (or, just as often, a holding cell). The Liminal Patrol deals with everything that falls in between, which is to say the difficult stuff.
  
  > look at Druse
  Dweller in the perpetual legal shadow of the boundary and proprietor[7] of the Margin Cafe, Druse is dark-eyed, slender-limbed and fine-featured and has perfect hair that falls across his face in silver strands and okay let's not be fucking coy about it, he's a half-elf. Which is good for him as far as getting laid goes, but ugly as all hell for legal status. You strongly suspect that you're carrying his child, which is kind of troublesome territory because apart from the whole wrong-side-of-the-tracks deal elves have this cultural Thing about human babies, a little bulb goes on behind their eyes and the last time one of those bulbs went on (or someone thought they did) there were riots and half the Kobolykunst ghetto got burned down. You dealt with more of the aftermath than you care to remember, and you had to call in favours from the Pale Colony, and unforseen complications arose and now the fangy pillocks think you owe them[8].
  
  However, all of this is going to be put off by angsty procrastination, implausible miscommunications and emotional immaturity until Volume La Troisieme of the Moondarkling Cycle, so at the moment he's just a distraction. Let's just pretend he's not here for now, all right? Like this.