Fictional Worlds

A silk merchant travelling through heavy rain in his wagon offers a lift to a black-clad man named Erroi. He accepts, and after they travel together for some time longer, their road is blocked by a fallen tree. This diversion has been caused by two …

He says: You’re cold as clay this morning. Where are your socks? Your toes are cold as the silver snout of Old Catch, darling. Coffee’s brewed. Old Catch: A trickster figure, not quite the Devil. Sometimes a psychopomp. One of his common mischiefs i…

The Dark Lord Mogrash descended to his deepest basement, below the lower dungeons, below the magma reactors, below the well-warded and unquiet family crypts. via Pocket

The convoy appeared in a cloud of dust against the Martian dawn atop the eastern hills. Sister Hecuba had just connected the catheter to its port over her right breast. via Pocket

via Pocket

The artisan hesitates, about to turn the page of the sketchbook given to her by, she is realizing, the most important client she might ever have. “Not alone,” she says, and her own honesty surprises her. “Most of the design, what you’re asking, it’s…

She was alone the first time I saw her, at a table in the student union, drinking hot coffee with the same furious intent I’d seen on the upside-down faces of frat bros with rubber taps in their mouths. Jesus, I thought. Her throat must be on fire. …

Do you know the tale of the armless maiden? In most tales, it is only her hands she loses. If I were the sister of a king, I could claim that I cut off my own arm so that my brother would not want to marry me. via Pocket

He was fiddling with the vial his mother had given him. He had considered throwing it on the ground and smashing it in front of her before he left, just to prove how determined he was. But something in him had stayed his hand. via Pocket

They say we broke Nairobi; we whose tears do not burn; whose blood runs cold. We did not, although we did tell lies around it—we used to be the lowlifes; the dregs in the social stew, the spit-out gum, all holes and no people—it was in our nature to…

via Pocket