THE PRINCESS TRAP, by Peter Darbyshire: Saleema was an orphaned sheepherder until her seventeenth year, when a talking dragon landed in the mountain meadow one summer day and ate all her sheep. Then Saleema was just an orphan. Saleema, however, liked to imagine herself not as a mere orphan, or even an orphan sheepherder, but […]

QUEEN OF THE DESERT, by Alex Marshall: Throughout the endless afternoon he walked the trackless waste.  With his coat held above to shield him from the sun’s brutal rays, Derwent toiled — his shadow and his hopes stretching to the empty distance. Near sunset, dark clouds boiled up overhead and rain fell briefly but the […]

THE WORSHIP OF THE LORD OF THE ESTUARY AND THE WAGES OF HEROISM, by James Frederick William Rowe: It came from the sea, a thing of cold, slime, and teeth. Declaring its presence through murder, it took the lives of three men fishing on the open water before it claimed as its home the estuary […]

DEATH AT THE PASS, by Michael R. Fletcher: That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial. -Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Somewhere there was a Necromancer. Of that there could be no doubt. Brushing a thousand years of dirt and rot from his robes, Khraen marvelled at how well preserved […]

DOME OF FLORENCE, PART II, by Richard Marsden: Mahir continued to berate Filippo, both in heavily accented Italian and in his own dialect as well as a few choice curses from long-dead languages as they meandered through the winding streets of the city. Whereas Mahir had followed Filippo into Cosimo’s lair, head downcast, now their positions […]