I’m pulling the wok off my bike and setting it on the butane when I spot Emilio standing in the shadows like a vulture. He’s still wearing that trench coat, all waxy on the bottom from years of wading through Diyu’s deepest calles. Emilio is the reaper he looks like, tall and gaunt, neuros creeping […]
Whatever path you seek, the map will show you. The cartographers mixed their ink with the light of the stars and the infinite possibilities to which the heavens have borne witness. Their quills have drawn every possible route a life might take. The parchment is blank now, but you need only state your desire, and […]
In the city at the heart of time, with its spires of lapis and its foundations of coiled brass, where death is a whispered legend and the sun itself stands motionless in the sky, the Grand Harvester saunters to her execution. The air is finely scented with the sharp bloom of ice florets at dawn […]
Chapter One I drove into Deepcalm, the single small town on the edge of Lake Caill, peering through veils of rain for my hotel. Then my tires left the ground and the world fell away. It was rainy. I had been driving too fast and with no thought for the rain on the road. I […]
To: Her prestige Navaneth Anassa, High Imperatrix & First Keeper of the Institute of Erudition [9th Ring, Inner Order] Your scholarly eminence, Even now this unworthy hand trembles with excitement at your impending arrival to the Telperi flower’s research site. Upon hearing the High Imperatrix herself had accepted my invitation to witness the flora’s deadly […]
A midsummer night, full moon overhead. Its golden light is ancient and worn. A breeze sighs through forest and over stone, bringing the echo of laughter. The song of a zither seems threaded in the wind. A boy stands outside a crumbling gate, and his face is of one lost in a dream. Slowly, he […]
Content Advisory: murder, themes of death The apartment is near enough to the river that the walls are stained from an old flood. The murderer—I can’t remember his name, but it doesn’t matter—unlocks the front door, throwing a glance toward the neighbor’s windows. It’s mid-afternoon on a Tuesday. No one is home. “I don’t know […]
Content advisory – attempted suicide, self-harm, emotional abuse, and homophobia. Uniform and her sisters sat in a circle. They had altered their customary cinema-style Space to a much smaller room. With its drab light-green walls, all they needed to do was trade their chairs for a bed, a TV, two foldable chairs and a drawer […]
I’m not here to tell you lilac-scented stories of the Fair Folk; do not ask such things of me. Though it is true that I know more of them than any other mortal here, I can promise you that they are not fair in any sense of the word, and many of them are barely […]
I met up with Manny Valez at Rocco’s Irish Tavern in Somerville, a bar that had been a hangout for our group of mutual friends back when we were in college, mostly due to the bar’s lax policies on carding. It had been a rancid, skanky dive back then, but it had since gone into […]