Author Archives: (Not actually a Lady) Ruthless

The day Laney discovered the ouija board in the attic was the first and last time she would ever play with it. It wasn’t even a board at all, precisely, merely a grid of letters chalked beneath a flap of loose carpet. A floating ‘YES’ and ‘NO’ sprung in an arch over the configuration, eachContinue reading “THE BOARD IN THE ATTIC”

winter was the nightI went to take my wife backfrom the witch snow broke its backunder my bootsas I trod outacross the wastelandunder the mountains with me I had my swordand whale-tooth knife and braided the hairwore down my back I blacked my eyeswith war paint fear was all I knewof the magicthat made baremyContinue reading “Witch Wife”

At first, I didn’t believe that it was her; it couldn’t have been, not the girl I’d seen drinking champagne on a balcony overlooking the sea, her dark hair running through the sky like a crack in sea glass, smelling of cinnamon and salted breeze. Not the girl that had held me with hands softContinue reading “Giada”

My Sire had once made me the promise that She would never take a second human lover, that She would have no contact with those She drank from beyond their sustaining Her unlife. But, in time, it seemed that vow did not exist to Her, nor had it ever; it was a misremembering on myContinue reading “Blood Oath”

Elsdeth heard of the iron champion long before he arrived in the kingdom, his reputation a bard’s song on the wind. He had many names—the Black Giant, the Forged Knight, Scourge of Warriors, Wolf Lord–but the Armoured Death was what most folk called him, and as Elsdeth knew him thenceforth, until she learned of hisContinue reading “The Armoured Death and The Dragon Obsidian I: Parting As Friends”

There was a room in the convent of Saint Odilia that was never used, or so Sister Emily had been told. The door had been locked for years, the key mislaid by a novice, its innards—dust-clad, ridden with dun-legged spiders—long forgotten, as many such chambers were in the labyrinthine bowels of the nunnery. Emily mightContinue reading “Forgotten”

They would die together, the Preacher-King had said, and rise again as children of God, washed clean of the filth and sediment of human sin. But Ruth alone had risen, and the others were dead, still, their bodies strewn like flower clippings across the floor of the Chapel, and in the fields beyond where theContinue reading “Together”

The sun ate the sky as if it had starved for a millennium, cutting the afternoon into slithers of topaz semi-darkness. “I will not kill a dragon,” said the Prince, to the elf-witch, as they approached the cavemouth by the sea. “If that is what lies here, then we will leave this quest to someContinue reading “The Brackish Lord”

The villagers had told the Prince that there was a tower, and indeed there was, a phallic spike of black stone cocooned in crimson thorns. It thrust up from the valley at the bottom of the great hill like a clenched fist, a silhouette in the rain. The Prince, whose name was Sy, put aContinue reading “The Prince And The Fortress”

we’re all looking for someone in our livesgrasping at the wrong shoulder in the darkand holding on with grim-jawed stubbornnessas the one we want observes us and sighsand opens a newspaper for the waitlong and white and as clinically coldas a hospice corridor; its lights blinkand the water in the cooler is stale,and swims withContinue reading “Knucklebone”