Heroic Fantasy Quarterly–Q58

HFQ senior editor Adrian Simmons has been filling in the edge of the wilderness hexmap and the encounter locations in the urban settings.  From such dangerous locales we have brough you the best  S&S fiction and poetry—well worth the wait!  We’ve got finale of Caleb Williams’ “Dragon Tears”, new south-seas adventures, and have unearthed a copy of a classic Darrel Schweitzer tale. We’ve got three excellent poems, and updates on our 4^th best-of anthology and notes from the field on the field in general.  Build up the winter fires and settle in!

 

Fiction Contents:

Dragon Tears Part II, by Caleb Williams.  Exiled sorcerer-scribe Larohd du Masiim continues his quest to  gather the rare artifacts needed to gain back his lost love, the princess Yadira.  Catch up with Part I here.

Isle of the Thousand-Eyed Strangler, by R. A. Quiogue.  Quiogue returns to our pages with a tale of fantasy south-seas derring-do among the Perfumed Isles.   Young prince Pandara, driven to piracy after the Wulongan Empire has laid waste to his home island, becomes embroiled with the last surviving priestess of a cult of the mythical sunken land of Sundramala.

The Third Way, by Darrell Schweitzer.  A classic reprint!  Grion, the faithful servant of the great warrior Mazantes, flees with his master, along with anyone else who can, from the implacable wrath of Garadis and his army of monsters.  But their flight takes them to strange otherworlds where they hope to make a most desperate gamble.

 

Poetry Contents:

The Witch Awakens by Julie Shiel.  Like the inevitability of the long days of winter, the witch’s ire can be pushed back, but it cannot be stopped.

Selaphesne, by Kevin Sandefur.  Crumbling ruins!  This poem takes you deep into the very heart of the dreaming ruins of a once mighty city.

Hamelin in the Distance, by Maria Schrater.  Fairy tale type things are hard sells for us at HFQ, but this excellent long-form poem is the exception that proves the rule.  There are other bits of old magic floating around than merely those that the Pied Piper uses.

 

Ongoing Graphic Adventure  Spear and Fang!

We’ve uploaded page 9 of Gary McClusky’s interpretation of Robert E. Howard’s first published story “Spear and Fang”.  We’ll be updating once a month until the tale is told!  Want early access?  Support us on Patreon and you’ll get it!

 

Artwork:

You thought arguing with a robot about items in the bagging area was bad, what do you do when your magically manifested monstrosity runs amok?  Such is the weighty considerations behind Jereme Peabody’s “Rock Golem”.

Jereme is a software engineer in the DC area and is also a freelance concept artist working mostly on video games and books.  He started his artistic career dabbling with sculpting, pencils, and even still-life oil painting.  As tablets became available, he crossed over from traditional art to digital by first digitally painting still-lifes, then through experimentation and practice, transitioned to landscapes and fantasy.

 

Tales From Around the Fire

 The kickstarter for Heroic Fantasy Quarterly’s fourth best-of anthology funded at 140%– sweet!  Of course, that did not come with a 140% increase in the time we have to work on it, but work on it we have!  Behold some of the artwork we’ve put together:

 

Speaking of time constraints, with issue #58 and the best-of anthology taking up so much time we’ve had to kick back our online S&S writing workshop to an unspecified date in 2024.  It’ll happen when it happens!

HFQ Alum Howard Andrew Jones has written/edited/marketed through a red-haze of literary fury and the result?  Magnificence!   Behold “Lord of a Shattered Land”, a novel told in S&S vignettes that follows the adventures of Hanuvar of Volanus.  The second book in the series, “The City of Marble and Blood” just came out and you need to check it out!

Unfamiliar with Hanuvar?  Behold a review of book 2 here, and check him out in “A Stone’s Throw” from HFQ # 40.

Robert Zoltan’s kickstarter for the Incomparable Quill Trilogy finished off in mid-November.  Check out his projects at his Amazon Author’s webpage.

I know you’re sick of hearing us talk about struggling against our time constraints, but one of the stories that slipped through our greedy fingers is “The Maiden’s Sleep”, by Micheal Stiehl.  We got this story, liked what we saw, but in breaking our own self-imposed two-month deadline it found another home at Word Castle Publishing, due out in January.

 

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