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Submitted to Contest #314
The heat was a hammer. It beat down from a sky the colour of a hot-forged blade, striking the cracked, ochre earth until the very air shimmered. We tasted it—a mouthful of dust and baked stone, thick and cloying. In the distance, the mesas wavered, their stony flanks distorted by the tyranny of the sun. This was the world, and the world was an oven.Lesser things hid. They cowered in the thin, sharp shadows of skeletal trees or burrowed into the cool dark beneath rocks, their lives a long, patient wait for the mercy of dusk.We did not wait. W...
Submitted to Contest #313
Memory, Drystan had learned, was the cruelest of cartographers.Each time he traced her face across the maps of years, she emerged transformed—not by time's honest erosion, but by the terrible alchemy of loss that transmuted recollection into hunger, fact into desperate mythology. Her eyes might hold the amber of late harvest wine one day, the storm-grey of northern seas the next. The delicate geography of her hands shifted between tellings: here, marked with the honest scars of an illuminator who had known quill and pigment as intimate compa...
Submitted to Contest #312
The silk felt like shackles against Fortuna's skin. She stood before the framed mirror in the Gilded Rose's preparation room, watching painted hands—her hands—adjust the bodice that pushed her breasts into a shape designed for other people's pleasure. The rouge on her cheeks couldn't mask the pallor of fear, and the kohl around her eyes made them look enormous, vulnerable. Sixteen years old. The thought tasted like ashes. "Such lovely features," Madame Amélie had purred, tilting Fortuna's chin towards the lamplight. "That silver streak makes...
Submitted to Contest #311
A rodent scurried across the narrow window frame, claws scratching against stone worn smooth by desperate fingers. It slipped through the bars with the fluid grace of something that had never known captivity, and Cal watched its vanishing with a bilious envy. He reclined upon the prison bunk—if such a charitable name could be given to the slab of mouldering wood he lay upon—tapping his forefinger against a worn playing card. The sound was barely audible, yet it anchored him. A whisper of cards shuffling, the soft percussion of coin against w...
Submitted to Contest #310
In the taxonomy of sorrows, there exists a particular species of grief that feeds upon itself—the melancholia that blooms in the aftermath of perfect beauty. It is a cultivated thing, this despair, as deliberate as any gardener's roses, and twice as thorny. Edwyn Silversong discovered this truth piece by piece, like a man assembling his own gallows from driftwood, though he would not understand he was both architect and fuel for an engine that ground the very cosmos until the final nail was driven home. The silence that followed his performa...
Submitted to Contest #309
The last of the salt pork hissed in the pan with bitter accusation, its meagre fat rendering into something that might charitably be called sustenance if one possessed sufficient imagination and desperate hunger. Duggan Flint worked the iron skillet with the methodical care of one who had learned to make miracles from scraps, his weathered hands coaxing flavour from ingredients that had surrendered their dignity weeks ago. The galley of The Siren’s Revenge bore the scars of recent violence—splintered timber, hastily patched, and the ghost of...
Submitted to Contest #308
In the peculiar mathematics of suffering, there exists a theorem known to those who traffic in souls: that guilt, like water, seeks its own level, and that the deepest currents always flow toward truth. On this night, as the moon’s silver coin grew tarnished beneath encroaching shadows, such theorems were being proved in the cold equations of consequence.The waters stretched before Fyszrā like a vast obsidian mirror, its surface disturbed only by the melancholy archipelago of his ship’s remains. Each piece of wreckage told its own sordid tal...
Submitted to Contest #307
In those twilight hours when Port Havens’ great machine of commerce and corruption ground to its nightly halt, when the last clerk had shuttered his ledger and the final merchant had counted his coin, there moved through the city's arteries a creature whose very existence was testament to the axiom that evil, like all things of true sophistication, must evolve or perish.Nylliveth had walked these streets for nearly three centuries, witness to the rise and fall of dynasties, the birth and death of empires, yet never had she felt the peculiar ...
Submitted to Contest #306
Faith’s bare feet slap against rotting planks, each step echoing down the warped dock. The old pier groans under her weight, years of storms and neglect having eaten through the support beams like ship-worm through hull. The stench of low tide and dead fish fills her nostrils as she flees, her breath ragged, tearing at her throat like splinters. Salt spray has made the wood treacherous, slick as seal skin, and she can hear the water churning angrily at the barnacle-crusted posts below. Behind her, death moves through the mist with unhurried ...
Submitted to Contest #305
The afternoon sun blazed through the salt-stained shutters of El Corazón Dorado, casting golden bars of light across the weathered wooden tables where gold was won and lost with the turn of a card. Cal "Splitjack" Caldeaux lounged in his chair with the easy confidence of a man who'd never met odds he couldn't charm, his fingers dancing over his cards like a maestro conducting an invisible orchestra. The sea breeze carried the intoxicating scent of spirits, danger, and possibility through the cantina's open doors, mixing with the earthy dampn...
Submitted to Contest #304
Oath. The word floated through her mind like driftwood on a dark sea, carrying weight she couldn't name.Ser Athelyn found herself walking through woods where black-green mist hung between the skeletal trees. Her spectral form cast no shadow on a ground that wept something darker than blood, the earth itself seeming to mourn beneath her feet. The trees here were wrong. Twisted into shapes that hurt to look at directly, their bark bearing wounds that never healed. Dead branches reached toward a sun that gave light but no warmth, its pale rays ...
Submitted to Contest #303
Some wounds close. Others whisper.—Old healer's saying⁂Irena pressed her palm to the tern’s wing. Bone shifted beneath the feathers with a noise like teeth grinding. The bird convulsed, its eyes rolling white with terror."Hush now," she whispered. "Pain before healing. Always."Blue light seeped from her fingertips, knitting what was broken. Tristan watched from the marble steps, his crown discarded beside him. Something coiled inside him when she focused like this. The way her eyes darkened with an eagerness that made him wonder what she saw...
Submitted to Contest #302
The stones cut into her knees. Blue-grey granite worn smooth by thousands of genuflecting limbs. She knew not to bleed on them. Blood attracted attention.Seven hours since Morning Illumination. Her bones ached. Through the high window, light crawled across the floor—time permitted only in slivers. Measured in illumination's slow arc.The woman entered without sound. Always did. The girl had learned to feel the pressure change when a door opened. She didn't look up, but something inside her flinched away. A part still unburned. The part that r...
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