Author Archives: (Not actually a Lady) Ruthless

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”

I wake with a skull-biting migraine around midday, as always, forever too tired to greet the morning. My mouth is as thick as linen, and I wouldn’t get up at all if the wardrobe weren’t so eager to dress me, which she does, in blue and white, like the habit of a nun I onceContinue reading “The Beauty In The Bell Jar”

it was a bare and barren nobody,that afternoon, wet air and sodden earth the razed umber of a firebird’s huetrod in by wading footfalls, and the sunbored through the trees a red and dripping holelike a gunshot, bruising the sky yellowand the moist clouds, dragging their crumbling tails,drew words and features long-condemned to fadebefore theyContinue reading “That Afternoon”

my old clothes don’t fit anymore I try them on again, sometimes, to seeif they flatter me still- there are daysthat they do, jarring as a flowerin the dregs of a nuclear ruin, and days that they don’t- I feel like oil on a blackroad, all thin-film and refraction:this dress I hoard, another given awaymakingContinue reading “Old Clothes”

their threat was a tubeand a starch white bedas if I was some suffragettein a cell that I had chosen as if I was thin-fingered malicewith a scheme on the skinof my kneeswhen I shrieked in the mouthof the box they clapped shut but a rat can slipthrough a hole like a dimeand a TomContinue reading “Tubes”