* Author : Amal El-Mohtar

* Narrator : Marguerite Croft

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes





Previously ran as episode 139 and originally published in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories.





Rated R

We unfortunately do not have the rights to publish the full text of this story, but it is available to read in full over at Galli Books.

To Follow the Waves

by  Amal El-Mohtar

 

Hessa’s legs ached. She knew she ought to stand, stretch them, but only gritted her teeth and glared at the clear lump of quartz on the table before her. To rise now would be to concede defeat—but to lean back, lift her goggles and rub her eyes was, she reasoned, an adequate compromise.

Her braids weighed on her, and she scratched the back of her head, where they pulled tightest above her nape. To receive a commission from Sitt Warda Al-Attrash was a great honour, one that would secure her reputation as a fixed star among Dimashq’s dream-crafters. She could not afford to fail. Worse, the dream Sitt Warda desired was simple, as dreams went: to be a young woman again, bathing her limbs by moonlight in the Mediterranean with a young man who, judging by her half-spoken, half-murmured description, was not precisely her husband.

But Hessa had never been to the sea.