BLADE AND BRANCH AND STONE, by Spencer Ellsworth: Lassan   The trees were screaming. Mortars shattered white wood that bled golden sap. The Fei looked down from the ridge with cold blue eyes, raised their muskets and hailed lead onto the human lines. Blood blossomed on white shirts around Lassan, under black-coated Imperial jackets. “Form […]

THE GOOSE AND CRADLE, by David Austin: Fewer and fewer people were stopping by the Goose and Cradle.  Everyone that had anyone was at home holding them close, waiting for the walls to crumble.  Mirsare was under siege, and massive chunks of rock rained steadily down.  The walls were strong; the boys could hold them […]

THE PRINCESS TRAP, by Peter Darbyshire: Saleema was an orphaned sheepherder until her seventeenth year, when a talking dragon landed in the mountain meadow one summer day and ate all her sheep. Then Saleema was just an orphan. Saleema, however, liked to imagine herself not as a mere orphan, or even an orphan sheepherder, but […]

QUEEN OF THE DESERT, by Alex Marshall: Throughout the endless afternoon he walked the trackless waste.  With his coat held above to shield him from the sun’s brutal rays, Derwent toiled — his shadow and his hopes stretching to the empty distance. Near sunset, dark clouds boiled up overhead and rain fell briefly but the […]

THE WORSHIP OF THE LORD OF THE ESTUARY AND THE WAGES OF HEROISM, by James Frederick William Rowe: It came from the sea, a thing of cold, slime, and teeth. Declaring its presence through murder, it took the lives of three men fishing on the open water before it claimed as its home the estuary […]