The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle, #1)

by Nghi Vo

Chapter One

I wrote The Empress of Salt and Fortune because I saw that Tor.com Publishing had a call out for unagented novellas, and I realized that a novella only had to be about 20,000 words long. I'd finished writing my first novel about six months before, the forthcoming Siren Queen, and I realized with some delight, 'wait, I can totally write 20,000 words!' Empress was written in about a month, but the concept, the tale of the end of one dynasty and the beginning of another told through a catalog of objects, was an idea I'd had for a while. I tried to make it a poem only to realize very quickly that I'm not a poet, and I even wondered about making it a fake museum catalog complete with photographs, but in the end, I'm glad it's what it ended up being—a complete story that nevertheless hints at so many other stories to come.