FENRIR

FENRIR, by Adam Stemple, Artwork by Miguel Santos

 

Let the moon slide down your throat, nephew.

Pale light and cold stone,

it is the last thing you will taste

before me.

And I am no savory morsel, no feast for a king.

Not even your subjects

(scavengers, mongrels, curs)

would care for this banquet.

I am fibrous meat and hardened gristle,

flesh turned to leather by long years spent

too near the sun.

You will choke on my old bones, nephew,

and I will make my death your own.

 

 

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Adam Stemple is an award-winning author, poet, and musician. Of his first novel, Singer of Souls, SFWA Grandmaster Anne McCaffrey said, “One of the best first novels I have ever read.” Of his later works, Hugo Award winning author Naomi Kritzer said, “No one writes bastard-son-of-a-bitch characters as brilliantly as Adam Stemple.”

Like most authors, his life experience is broad and odd. He spent twenty years on the road with a variety of bands playing for crowds of between 2 and 20,000 people. He started, ran, and sold a poker training site. He worked in a warehouse. He picked corn. He traded options and demoed houses. He drove pizzas for nine months in 1986, which for twenty-seven years was the longest he’d ever been employed. He drank too much and has now been sober for over eighteen years. He published his first book at the age of sixteen, “The Lullaby Songbook,” which he arranged the music for. His mother is a famous children’s book author. His children are artistic. His wife is a better person than him in nearly all regards. 

 

Miguel Santos is a freelance illustrator and maker of Comics living in Portugal.  His artwork has appeared in numerous issues of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, as well as in the Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 2.  More of his work can be seen at his online portfolio and his instagram.