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FIVE MINUTES AGO You slip down silent temple hallways, clutching Kiira’s dagger in your fist. One wrong step, one stray sound, will reveal your presence. You know your failure is inevitable, but still you edge along the wall as quietly as you can. Aware of what awaits you, you proceed as if you are not. There is no avoiding it: your story will end with you dead at the feet of a god. Your divinations have told you this. There is no ambiguity. The portents float at the edge of your vision, haun...

Size / Zoom In the soft brown of early morning, my brother’s penmanship was always sharp against the rising sky. Other scribes handled their quill-spears with more grace, perhaps. My brother looked as though he was warring with the horizon, the ribbons of ink rising like jagged smoke from the tip of his quill-spear. But what he wrote was clear. Now he has gone. They say that from the cities of the Brittle Terrain, a full day’s journey behind us and away from the horizon, it is difficult to ...

Quintessence by Andrew Dykstal. Cleaning Up After the Blackout Boys by Evan Marcroft.

Size / Zoom Loren’s brother-in-law fell sick six weeks after the last rack-and-pinion train departed for the base of the mountain and three weeks after winter closed over the mine like a frozen diamond pane. A layer of cloud hid the world far below, gray and silver in the winter-long night. Thunderheads drifted past, stately as tall ships under starshine, and you could watch them rise and collide and throb with lightning until your eyes froze over. Which took about eight seconds. And in the s...

Size / Zoom Posters were going up all along Beetlebrass Street that morning. Some enterprising sergeant had put the city’s street children to work, paying them perhaps in haepennies to dash along its undulating cobblestones and paste writs of requisition across every storefront. Ustuus Creeg stopped to retrieve a loose one before the wind took it. Save the last bite for Private Cly it read, referencing the bashful soldier shown accepting a slice of pie from a pretty girl. The dictate below w...

You’ve lived this all before. That’s the thought that keeps me going, through the acrid sting of mage-smoke in my nostrils and the terror of almost having lost you already. There’s fear on your face, too—you’re only now straightening, one trembling hand clutching at your sleeve, and—and—no. I find I cannot call this woman you. You look older than your years, your hair streaked with silver. This woman is barely thirty. She does not have your easy calm; she flinches at the sight of...

What I cannot tell Fallon is who I am now. I cannot tell her about the new home I make. I cannot tell her that you were the only person I could ever fight for, because you looked at war and saw only despair. That, having set my blade down, you were the only person for whom I would pick it up again. She is Fallon Deere, First Minister to the Free State of Altorania, and you are you, the woman who sent me to her side.

I feel as if something important has passed between us, but I cannot fathom its true nature. As I make my way back to the ground, I think that descending should be harder, slower, more arduous than the climb had been. A return to the everyday. But it’s no more difficult than the ascent. Nowhere near as much fun, though.

The Guadalupe Witch by Josh Rountree. Her Black Coal Heart a Diamond in My Hand by R.K. Duncan. BCS 272: The Guadalupe Witch by Josh Rountree.

I staged a fight on the ground floor, scattered the broken furniture Ashton had found me and pinned scraps of the boy, the middle child, all around. He hadn’t been a fighter, but people would believe things of a boy they wouldn’t of a girl, and they had to believe for this to reach them. I put some breaks into the bulk of him with my knife and left him bent into unnatural angles beside the stove. A little ghost stuff and witchfire added to the coal would make it burn cold green, and I left t...