WHAT YOU’VE BECOME, by Gretchen Tessmer   if wishes were horses? more like rooks and herons kings and beggar men— made weak by yellow-haze sloth sipped at the pond of mud-slick weeds and greed all fools in the face of temptation   I remember when you were brave and knew something of careful deliberation   […]

Although Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is an international affair, its physical headquareters are in Central Oklahoma, and it has been full-on winter here in central Oklahoma! A weird kind of winter, too, cold, but no snow or sleet or anything.   Just the cold, and the wind and the threat that any little spark will light up […]

WHITE RAINBOW AND BROWN DEVIL, by Raphael Ordonez   Francisco Carvajal y Lopez, vagabond of the Tashyan badlands, conquistador in his own mind, emerged upon a caliche bank from thickets that sang sweetly beneath the sun. The gravel floodplain stretched from north to south before him. Several sycamores, the first trees he had seen that day, […]

THAT SLEEP OF DEATH, by Mary-Jean Harris   “There is no religion higher than Truth,” Lady Wickham spoke as she raised her lace handkerchief to her eyes. Before I could comment on the great sensibility of such a phrase, she exclaimed, “Isn’t it blasphemous!” As a philosopher, I could by no means agree with that, […]

THINGS OF SHREDS AND PATCHES, by Norman Doege   Muffled voices and broken songs seeped like slow passion around a carved birch door. Scori, courier to the Lord-Apparent of Bremland, had ridden through the northlands to find himself in the cold dark staring at a brass knocker nestled between a pair of wooden breasts. Over […]