Every day since he’d been seven and had first decided he would have to sail someday, he had stood at the edge of the salt sea and stared out at where white met the shimmering blue of the horizon. And… Continue reading

A flower for every soul. Some housed in glorious gardens, but she kept hers close always, in a little pot clutched against her chest. Wilted sometimes by wind or heat, but never killed, and she had no place safer to… Continue reading

Five days’ travel to the next homestead, they said. Five days, but ten nights, they joked, for how the few scant hours of daylight flicked past and the dark endured. Phantom rays, ripples of green and violet, poured through the… Continue reading

Sparks drift from our outer hull to die in the dark. It’s a damn miracle that we didn’t breach, but it might have been kinder if we had. We’re not going anywhere, which means our only options are to die… Continue reading

“Just get them out,” he pleaded again, rattling desperately at the cuffs that held him to the bed. “It’s just surgery, right? Just rip them out, I don’t care, just get rid of them.” The tears welling from the corners… Continue reading

They shackled her wrists in the same cold, magickless iron as mine, to the opposite wall of a room so small that our feet almost touch anyways. It would have been kinder if they’d covered her mouth, would have served… Continue reading

Nothing marks you as more of an outsider in these parts than being excited when spring comes. Grin and bubble over about birds and flowers and sunny summer days to come, and everyone who’s lived more than a winter here… Continue reading

Of course he’d known a forest on an alien planet wouldn’t look anything like the labyrinth of birch and deer tracks, rose thorns and skittish pheasants hidden in the undergrowth, where he had roamed as a boy. But with only… Continue reading

Dying the first time was easy – just as much so as most mistakes. Obvious only in hindsight, only without the hindsight, just one blurring, obliterating second to know it had all gone wrong somehow. Dying the second time was… Continue reading