Fantasy

Come the Waters High

Reading Time: 4 minutes A flash fantasy story about a High Priestess who must deal with rising tides that threaten to drown her people.

Neighbors

Reading Time: 4 minutes Being neighborly isn’t always easy. Morgred has to hold her tongue while her daughter makes other plans.

A Medieval Tale

Reading Time: 14 minutes A monk in a medieval priory faces the sudden appearance of aliens that seem strangely familiar, only to learn he was once one of them.

Dead Nana, Walking

Reading Time: 3 minutes Old people don’t die, but slowly turn to stone. Joey needs to get her Nana to her grandfather’s statue.

The Last Thing Taken

Reading Time: 9 minutes When Sophia meets Oloku, she thinks it’s the perfect, strings-free affair. But when she learns his secret, she finds there’s a price to pay for loving him.

Gentle Autumn Rain

Reading Time: 4 minutes The ages have been kind and humanity has spread to the stars, but the sun’s time is growing short, and all of her children are coming home.

Dragon Dancer

Reading Time: 4 minutes Every year as migrating dragons pass by from across the endless sea, tradition mandates one woman jump into the thunder and dance with the wild beasts as they pass overhead. This year’s Dancer is Lanitia’s sister. The Dancer must die or arrive at The Decent; this time, something new happens.

Behind the Standing Stones

Reading Time: 4 minutes Craig and Hailey had very different ideas about how to celebrate their anniversary. One wanted sunshine and drinks on an island beach. The other was more interested in the enchantments that might be found beyond the standing stones.

A Sampling of Seven Dragons

Reading Time: 4 minutes Before any of the more artisanal offerings you’ll be tasting today, let us begin with a fairly traditional preparation. Yes, the one just before you, and then we’ll go round the plates widdershins from there. Anticlockwise, that is. As you take a bite, note the full-bodied ferocity, the natural balance between dread and might, that …

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A Clairvoyant’s Misfortune

Reading Time: 4 minutes Someone might say: pal, since you know what’s going to happen, why don’t you do something to change your future! I can only say one thing: I did try it, many times, but there is no way to change your fate. If your life has got something in store for you, you will surely get it.

Deracination

Reading Time: 4 minutes Lovesick Serena is prepared to risk everything and uproot herself completely to be with the one she loves. But are her feelings returned?

Enough

Reading Time: 3 minutes This is the tale of a young photographer looking to catch her big break by capturing the perfect shot in the woods supposedly haunted by the ‘Snow Witch’.

In the Bowels of the Theater

Reading Time: 20 minutes There is magic in the theatre, ancient and powerful – not just of the stage, but of an elder and mighty god…one which Sucunde would see freed and restored.

The Feather and the Lamp

Reading Time: 11 minutes A magic lamp should have been a gateway to Imperceptibility’s every desire. So how did she end up in the underworld covered in slobber from a three-headed dog? And then there’s capture by fanatical priest-mercenaries, sacrifice to a quantum dragon, and getting trapped in a chicken coop. Will she ever find her way back home? More important still, what’s a goose feather got to do with any of this?

(Image provided by Ursula O'Reilly)

Changeling

Reading Time: 6 minutes Marion recalls a tale her grandma told which she has never forgotten. The story of Kara O’Brien, a strange looking child who attended the village school in Connemara, Ireland, where the old lady grew up. Marion’s grandma reveals a secret that was known only by herself and her Aunt Josie. Kara O’Brien was no ordinary child.

New Terry Pratchett book out today

Reading Time: 2 minutes Terry Pratchett is one of my all-time favorite authors, and even though he died five years ago, a new book is now out, a collection of never-before-published short stories he wrote for local newspapers back in the 1960s and 1970s.