She stopped at the forty-eighth kingdom, above the clouds but still below the stars, when she realized that the forty-seventh was the last place she had felt human. There had…
The first kingdom on the stair was little more than a foothill, green and sparse and drowsy with endless summer. Its residents hadn’t set out with any ambitions, and so…
The first time he saw her, she was standing on a platform at Moonrill Station, waiting to board the afternoon train with three dozen other people. The only reason she…
For someone like Thomas, who had always had a particular horror of death, attending the funeral of someone close to his own age came with a shameful sense of relief.…
The final call for boarding. She had told herself she wouldn’t hesitate. But she’d been imagining the cheery whistle of a steam train, a conductor’s bellow over a bustling platform.…
He was made of moonbeams and music notes. He was a sigh only in gardens and on lonely balconies, only outside of parties with enough melody to conjure him. Only…
The dangers involved in keeping a phylactery were many, of course. As any academy class or pearl-clutching missive would tell you, at length and with some supporting anecdotes that were…
“It’s all right,” she told him. “It doesn’t hurt.” He squinted more closely at her than most did when she said that sort of thing. Most, when she said it,…
“Oh, that?” He cast an unconcerned glance at the painting looking back from beside the desk. “That’s just a phylactery. Pay it no mind.” Of course she paid it even…
I woke up that morning in what had become the usual sticky haze of dread, five hours of sleep sawn apart by moaning, senseless dreams, to find that the vines…