Fantasy

Onyankopɔn is a woman. And a man. And everything above and in-between. Akuba says Onyankopɔn kissed the tips of His fingers on the sixth day, and sculpted these bodies as worldly vessels for our…

Here. Listen. I’ll tell you a story. Listen. Once upon a time there was a girl. She was probably about twelve or thirteen, but that was an age when children were older than their years and expected to…

How did we end up so far east, on the flanks of a cold beach? You told me you always wanted to see the Pelagio, ever since you were a child. But your skin was never made for water. You shouldn’t ha…

My ghost is trapped in this bedchamber, much as I was in life. It had been my sanctuary, filled with sumptuous fabrics and exotic decor. In death, I understand the lie. We have all been trapped, dragonflies caught in golden amber. Just as my daughter will be, someday, by someone.

What she did? What she did?! My dear sister, she was a child. Nora didn’t do anything, nor did your despised Lady Lobar, nor did any of the women you’ve so eagerly watched executed. This cruelty is so foreign to the sympathetic character I know you to have. Well. If you won’t have mercy for these girls, at least be horrified for the crimes they’ve endured and do whatever necessary to assure you never suffer the same fate.

“I pursued my enemies and overtook them; I did not turn back until they were destroyed.” The absence of my lord from me, from my bed, from my daily presence, is like a chill of deepest winter that will not leave me. It is wrong to be without him now, when I should be swelling with new life as all of nature is. The grass and the corn are springing green. The lambs are born and suckling, and the orchard bees are busy with the blossom, assuring us of fruit to come.

The Pull of the Herd By: Suzan Palumbo My doeskin calls to me from under the woollen blankets in the cedar chest at the foot of our bed. Diya murmurs beside me, eases back to sleep. I cling to her, try to calm the panic welling in my chest by inhaling her cardamom scent. The […]

Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold by S.B. Divya   My parents taught me to lie as soon as I could speak. Before I knew the meaning of the words, before I understood heat or fire, and long before I felt the pain of singed flesh, I learned to tell strangers that I burned myself by […]

Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold – PART TWO by S. B. Divya Walter and his small gang visited as promised. Taking my mother’s advice, I told them I had failed. They delivered a beating, which I accepted while curled into a ball on the ground beside my mother, my hands tucked into my armpits to […]

Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold by S.B. Divya I was hidden in a tree near the mill when the Duke of Bavaria arrived in Talgove. I had never seen the man before, but the coat of arms matched the hangings I’d seen in Salzburg. The sizeable retinue stopped by the water wheel. Blasius emerged from […]

A woman who fears she’s failing as a painter and as an artist seeks inspiration from one of her favorite poets and finds something even more wondrous, but also more impossible to capture on canvas…

Homes for the Holidays by Heather Shaw & Tim Pratt   I stood on the slumlord’s doorstep and took a deep breath — one of the last I would take in this body, which had served me well despite being treated badly. It’s not the body I was born with — I don’t think I […]

At the edge of the world, on the island of R’evava in the Arctic Ocean, a blizzard rages outside as five people gathered in a small weather station pass the time telling each other stories while they wait for a break in the storm . . .

Set in the same thrilling world as Genoveva Dimova's The Witch's Compendium of Monsters series, “Ace Up Her Sleeve” is a standalone, spoiler-free story featuring the fire witch Kosara, who must match wits with the Tsar of Monsters in a high-stakes card game that is equal parts magic, skill, and subterfuge . . .

The aquarium is different every time I die. Exhibits reshuffling like a deck of cards. The blood loss, though, that’s reliable.

Seven subjects, Ethan thought. One of them a child. All of them physically torn into two distinct beings: a functional husk, and an abomination. He had read the doctor's journal. The subjects had come from different families, different boroughs, different backgrounds. None of them had known any of the others. All of them Raah?

On those late afternoons, when the day slipped away and the night lights came, the shades would wander out from the empty hills, down to the road. All kinds of them. People we knew. But more we didn't, moving slowly along in search of something, somebody. Wandering the road, following the lines of the dusty track. Then they would mill aimlessly until they found the broken edge of the garden wall and the thorny bushes that once grew raspberries, and they would follow that for a time, until it took them out to the field, where they could walk on.

There were more than a few of the planks that could become chairs, but Lucas passed them by. None of them were suitable for the likes of Lord Adelard. The vampire wished to appear powerful. There was only one kind of wood in the cellar that fit that description. He squeezed back, back, back, into the furthest reaches, where once mice and rats might have made a home, back before the rats and mice had found themselves in stewpots and on skewers.

Would you give up your throne to sit by the fire? Would you hold a baby over it? Would you empty the chamber pots of heaven when you hold rightful claim over the highest throne in the room, as the …

He lifts the onion to the lantern’s lone light, and in it, I suddenly see: the goldwork towers and walls of the Old City; the broken bridge, jagged after a recent bombing yet still shining; rows of humble houses etched in ebullient metal; the curve and sway of the historical museum. I reach out my hand, and he drops the city into it. It feels warm in my palm.

Her family brings their best to the table and talk unreservedly in their first language. Rviv cannot keep up with the conversation. She understands the words, the phrases, but not why they make her parents laugh or grimace. They reference a place Rviv has never seen and a history she has not lived. The stranger and her parents commiserate about living in such a strange country. Together they laugh at the way the Cuialo smile with their teeth and eat meat with their hands. Her parents wait with excruciating patience to ask what news of home.

This was the mood the second time my late guest arrived. They were still dressed as a witch but this time wore a cloak of ambiguous cut that masked it from a casual observer; the slashing diagonal weave might be a witch’s style, or it could be the even horizontal line a breath-person would wear turned askew in the weather. Something in the ambiguity called to me, an enticing possibility, though I was still unwaveringly comfortable folding my clothes into the straight hems and smooth lines of second-childhood. I nodded as they entered but waited several moments for them to settle before approaching their table.

“That would be a fine thing, to hear that fiddle played as it should be,” the ferryman said, mostly to hisself. He cast an eye over the dark expanse of river, dotted with white ice cakes. “You sure, jacks? A trip like this, it rarely takes you where you’re planning.”

"Grandpa, you don't have to." Dovan's little hand rests inside his. Cyfris closes his fingers around it. "I know I said before that I wanted you to tell everything, but I changed my mind. You don't need to tell this part."

“We found something,” Matias began. He had rehearsed what he would say and was determined now to watch their expressions. To see if this was a revelation for them—or if they already knew. “We’re expanding the palace kitchens, putting in a new hearth and tables. The builders knocked out a wall—turns out it was a closet that had been sealed up. In the closet was a body.”

The Poet Laureate was fetched from his retirement in a lighthouse on the far shore of the Founder Mer to compose a song of eighty-six interlocked stanzas like steps on a stairway spiraling down into a cool dim quiet. But on the forty-seventh stanza of its recitation, the Governor squinted into the space over the Poet's shoulder and said, "listen, any deeper and we shall hear the words those beasts sing as they pass" and demanded that the previous stanzas be read in reverse; "back to the surface," he said.

27. Parsifal confessed to me that she has never dreamed of Valis. Not once. In her youth, she learned of the city in a book: a philosophical dialogue where a poet, a knight, a musician, and a madman argue about the nature of reality while awaiting the arrival of a fifth person. Near the end, the madman recounts the story of Valis, which the others think is nonsense. Parsifal disagreed, and the city quickly became an obsession (she herself used the word 'obsession'). She said all this while pacing back and forth, refusing to look me in the face until the end.

Whatever the mallepulpus’s moral stature, it would not allow its enemies an uneventful exit. Even as Jacob, dripping and shivering, urged the Abbess and the canonesses to back away from the shore, a portion of the swamp coalesced into a roaring and amorphous mass of silt and muck. With a noise like a thousand oxen breaking wind, the monstrous pudding detached itself from Paludis Cochlea, flopped onto the shore, and undulated forward, seeking to suffocate its parent bog’s tormentors.

Gorel could smell the sea. It was always there, the water like a black mirror, upon which glided the enormous black ships with the seven-pointed star on their hulls. From time to time spells crackled in the air above the port. Wind-mages and speakers-to-whales and astrologer-navigators and sun-talkers and battle-sorcerers with the power to level whole cities. Goliris’s fleets sailed across the World and brought the civilising influence of the empire to its furthest reaches. They came back laden with the World’s goods; with all the riches the World had to offer.