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We Barrens have always been gravediggers, for as long as anyone can recall. There once was a joke in our family that the first of us crawled out of cemetery soil rather than a womb, that being how the trade came so naturally to us. It is a grim and thankless toil, to tend aContinue reading “The Grave Bell”

Once upon a time there was a prince as ruthless as he was beautiful, whose callous acts forced his parents to lock him away in a chamber deep under the palace so that he may never assault those above. This decision was not made easily, for the Prince was so charming and fair of faceContinue reading “The Prince and Winter Rain- a fairy tale”

The sun ate the sky as if it had starved for a millennium, cutting the afternoon into slithers of topaz semi-darkness that were neither day nor night. “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 weContinue 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”

It started with the music, just one piece, jarring and experimental, played on the radio one summer afternoon by a pair of disc jockeys with little better to do. An unknown artist had composed it, an eccentric living in some basement apartment in Paris. It was easy to imagine them crouched before their computer, wild-haired,Continue reading “Zoanthropy”

The witch in the well would take your life for a coin, or so everyone in the village used to say. As a boy Jack hadn’t believed it, filing the story away with Bloody Mary and Jenny Greenteeth, and every other urban legend he could think of. But now he was twenty-eight years old andContinue reading “Lucky Penny”

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”

where did I walk before I knew of you?a haggard Earth, black soil, frost-eaten planes?some other nameless planet just as bluea moon with love nor colour in its wanes?what ash did I consume when you weren’t mine?few bites I took sustained that did not cloyfruit was but pulp, and water naught but brineand yet aContinue reading “His Sonnet”

The trees by the Great River had already lost most of their leaves by now, but Prince Sybll sat gazing at them from the bank as if they were still as laden as they had been at the beginning of Autumn. To her right stood her three elder brothers, filling skins with water for theirContinue reading “The Taunt of the Pale Wyrme”