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The chrysalis hung as Thomas had left it, quiet and unmoving in the humid darkness of the basement. The room had been a wine cellar back when the farm was still up and running, and on warm days it still smelled thinly of fermented apples, the ghosts of enterprise past. Now the weather was turningContinue reading “THE LEPIDOPTERIST”

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”

The sun bled, eviscerated, across the skyline as the Crone climbed the mountain to visit the Storyteller. Skulls on fraying strings of rags swept the ground in her wake, and at the cave mouth the clansfolk awaited her like crows come after the dead. The old woman paid them no mind. They all knew ofContinue reading “Dark Spirit”

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”

There was a woman in our village who was mad, and had been for as long as anyone could remember. Agatha had come to us, mud-daubed, barefoot, stumbling out of the night, her own home set fire to by bandits, making dust of all that she had. We took her in, accepting her strangeness, forContinue reading “Mother Agatha”

Mam had always told Aneth to keep away from the sea— forbidden her from it, in fact, with threats of a beating, her cracked fists balling at the mere suggestion of the place. Aneth’s brothers and sisters were allowed to go, an agony of unfairness. They were forever traipsing sand into the house and shakingContinue reading “Aneth Of The Sea”

I was in love with an executioner, for a time; dark, and sombre, he was, his eyes all gloom and poetry. I’d watch their blackness fold under his long lashes as he smoked a cigarette through tender fingers, wondering if those he felled ever looked back over their shoulders to perceive his melodic gaze. WhenContinue reading “The Executioner’s Lover”

Again, again, the child cried, the strained sounds of its anguish rolling up from an apartment somewhere deep in the rankled bowels of the building, just as it had every day for months without without ease. The noise echoed along the spiral stairwell like the song of some eldritch instrument, sinister in its apex, desolateContinue reading “Rimanere”

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”