LORD OF THE TATTERED BANNER, by Kristopher Reisz: By the time they took Orsten Keep, the pretender had already escaped over the mountains with half her army. After the battle, the smell of blood and smoke lingered. It was a strangely fertile smell, like fresh-tilled earth. Fengr Tall-As-A-Mounted-Man felt his war-rage cool, leaving him with [...]

NICOR, by Matthew Quinn: Crows cawed in the distance. The Danes sitting in the longship began muttering ominously. Geiri Jorgenson, a dark-haired beardless boy of thirteen summers, leaned forward to listen. “Is that the other ship over there?” he asked his friend Halvor Skallagrimson, a big red-bearded man who sat across the aisle. Halvor nodded. [...]

THE LION AND THE THORN TREE, by J.S. Bangs: My husband’s voice came through the door of our house in the night. It was a ghost voice, muddled with the baying of wild dogs, and so I knew he was dead. I was four months pregnant. I followed the echo of his voice for half [...]

DUSTS OF WAR, by Ben Godby: The cart creaked, its wheels full of summer dust, as the peddler pushed it gently up the slope of the road, past the first houses, and onto the main street of the village. It was late afternoon, nearly dusk, and the sun had a lazy warmth to it. It [...]

SHADOWS AND HELLFIRE, by R. Michael Burns: “Dive heedlessly into death, and you will wake up.”                              — Yamamoto Tsunemoto,                              Hagakure All around him, the dead drew closer, faces ash-pale, sunken eyes blazing with hatred. Hokagé’s hand went instinctively for his sword — but of course he wasn’t armed, not in the dead of [...]

KINGDOM OF GRAVES, by David Charlton: Plague had come to the lands west of the river Elakk, and so Rakhar the Half-Orc came, too. He came to their towns with only his spade slung over his shoulder, taller than any man and uglier than most. His brow was heavy and hung low over dark, sunken [...]

DAY’S END AT THE THREE EELS, by Al Onia: Daryan the Bold lurched into the tavern. He hadn’t thought he could sink lower than the last waterfront dive but The Three Eels appeared to be a large step down in his spiraling night of debauchery. Well, at least, he likely wouldn’t be thrown out of [...]

A SONG FOR THE NEW KING, By S. Boyd Taylor: Archimandrus was fifty when the commission first came. A poem, a psalm for the new coronation. Oh how glorious! He had waited so long for this. Years. Decades. Had pushed away wife and child alike. Locked himself in dark rooms for months at a time. [...]

DEATH AND DIGNTIY, by Michael R. Fletcher: Thus Far: Some three weeks ago the Melechesh Pass, held for thousands of years by the Wizard’s Guild, fell to an unstoppable army of corpses. One corpse, Khraen, Fist of Sorhd-Rach, First General of the Invincible Hand, powerful demonologist, and loyal servant to the Emperor of eternal Palaq [...]

A GAME OF CHESS, by David Pilling: On the morning of one inauspicious day in early spring, with the sky as grey as the towers of Camelot and the incessant rain trickling into our chain mail, we rode out. One hundred and forty-nine brave young knights, eager to win glory and honour, and one miserable [...]