When We Look at the Stars, We See Them as They Were

On the last world of a distant and lonely system, there was a circus made of light.

Mind Your Head

It's not the height you have to worry about when you pass through the gate, it's the angles. They aren't quite right (not euclidian enough, they say, though we have tried our best) and people have been known to go mad at the sight of them and at the glimpses of what lies beyond, outside...

The Road Through the Wilderness

There is a strange road that runs through the wilderness. Beside it lie the troll-lands where the trolls sleep as stone by day and walk by night, the barrow-mounds where dwell the unquiet dead, the wildwoods full of snarling wolves and wild, and the river where lurk the merfolk and the river-spirits.

The Abbot’s Afternoon Off

It would be five hundred years that Thursday since the monks had begun their long watch of the Sleeper Who Must Not Wake, keeping up a constant chant and a constant vigil. Since in those five hundred years (give or take a day), the Sleeper had done nothing of interest and shown no sign of...

With Eyes like Starlight

She loved an elf with eyes like starlight, bright and unfading, and that was her curse, because for the elf each day was as the day before and those eyes were unchanging, while hers grew dim with the crawl of time. And when she looked into those beloved eyes, she knew that she could never...

Fruit of the Lonely Tree

There was a tree that grew music. In spring, it sprouted symphonies. March overtures became triumphant swellings by May. On a mild April day, the melodies shamed the birds to silence. In summer, the music continued, but it seemed to most that it was dimmer, paler. Not a patch on its earlier stuff, most people...

An Artist Inside the Painting

Glass roses sung like wind chimes in the morning breeze, crystalline stems trembling. The sun shone a brilliant gold and the cloud-marbled sky gleamed. A bee buzzed by, clockwork wings carrying a wire-striped body, and alighted on long needle legs. In the sky the birds circled, watching with glinting eyes and knife-sharp beaks. And in...

Jumping Too Far

Verity hangs in the air, gravity tugging, orange curls flaring behind her, the deep water so far below and she remembers what her mother said: "Never jump unless you know you'll land on your feet." But the rocks were placed so perfectly, one after the next, each just a little further, the waters between them a...

Strange Skies

The sky was strange in the Cursed Land that day. The people shielded their eyes and asked the hero Petromir to sort it out. Petromir was a hero in the traditional sense, which meant he had more swords than braincells and solved his problems by hitting them, which worked well when your problems were monsters but...

Running Through the Waters

Saera heard the rush of the waterfall before she saw it, bursting from the thick of the woods and onto the steep riverbank. Behind her came shouts and the metallic jingling of swords and mail. They were coming for her, to slay her as they slew her mother and sisters. But this was the wild....