HANDFUL OF SPRING, by Charles Paysuer Mina watched each step fall into the snow, those brief shadows around her feet the only landmarks in the shifting white. Directly behind her she felt Natham stumble again, heard his curse as she was forced to stop, to wait, her arms full of spring. “How much farther?” Natham […]

A MATTER OF GOATS, by Ben Fenwick:   An eerie call fell down the wind from the dark mountainsides. It was a high-pitched tone that fell slowly into a humanlike, ululating sob. Anton Le Bouveret felt the hairs on his forearms and the back of his neck prickle. The dark, rugged, Balkan shadowland surrounded them […]

LADY CARDULA AND THE GRYPHON, by Shawn Scarber:     Duncan hated human-sized books. Sadly, they were about the only tomes created and though he wrote long letters to the monks who lived in the Sambata monastery imploring them to copy larger editions, his letters often went unanswered. “If I were a dragon, they wouldn’t […]

  A BREATH OF DARKNESS, by Liz Colter:   The wind gusted up the mountain, rattling the pine cones and shaking the blue-green branches of the trees. This was no fickle spring breeze, nor even a winter gale; it was a wind that carried the feel of fangs and decay and misery. # The chorus […]

MOUTH OF THE JAGUAR, by Evan Dicken: Hummingbird was to be the final sacrifice of the day. The man before her struggled on a raised stone slab, chest heaving as a flock of blood-spattered priests pinned his arms and legs. Sunlight glittered on the Cazonci’s obsidian dagger — curved like a jaguar’s claw to better […]