Havok Publishing

Category - Staff Saturday

The Color Gold

The table was cold against my back.
“Mrs. Young, before we begin the Neurological Reinvigoration Process, we have to ask you some final questions.”
I nodded.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Young, but we need you to give us verbal confirmation for all questions. Do you understand?”
I started to nod, then caught myself. “Y-yes.

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Threat Level: Cuttlefish

What’s a spy’s greatest enemy? Ask any red-blubbered agent in Her Majesty’s Sea Critter Service and they’ll give you the same answer.  

Stairs.  

I sighed and looked down my glasses at the long flight of marble steps awaiting me. Bubbly Christmas music played in the background. The ballroom was alive with sea creatures mingling.

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The Monastery’s Treasure

Wherever Tovar looked, flames engulfed his monastery home. He shielded his eyes and raced for the abbot’s dormitory, praying his mentor hadn’t been killed in the attack.
He found the abbot lying face down. “Abbot Cralin, what happened?”
“Tovar? Is that you?” The abbot turned toward him, clutching a wound in his side.

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Buried Alive

A bitter breeze rakes over my cheeks as I step from the Jackson Hole Aerial Tram, but it’s not the cold that sends shivers skittering through my gloved hands and up my arms. It’s excitement.
Up ahead, my best friend, Brandon, faces me, a wide smile plastered on his face. He signs the words,

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Rainbow Rider

“Can you help me?”
Charles blinked several times to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. He was proud to be among the skeptics who placed fairies into the same category as little green men, ghosts, and the Man in the Moon.
Yet there she was, collapsed on the ground in the middle of the rose garden

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Ice and Lilacs

“Dad! Dad? You have to come see this. It’s like the Northern Lights but better.” Deedee ran into the bunker, snow spilling behind her as she whipped off her hat.

Cyclopes raised his head and wiggled his nose as he took in her lilac scent. The only flowers this side of the galaxy. 

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Like Grim Death

Hessie crept through the underbrush, in search of an ancient pyramid filled with legendary treasures. The rustling ferns, howling monkeys, and cawing toucans told her the jungle was alive and awake.
Grima had gone first. Not because he was the best at navigating the jungle—though his knee-high boots, the wide-brimmed hat

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Of Cedar and Death

The carved scenes on the face of the casket looked alive, despite its intended purpose, and with it I would bury my nightmare.
The shop smelled of fresh-shaved cedar, delicate curls collecting in small drifts upon the dirt floor as I poured my pain into finishing this task.
The shop door scraped open,

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The Wild Hunt

tore through the woods, paws churning up soft dirt. The smell of mud and recent rainfall filled my snout as I raced through the bracken, desperate to reach the castle. Her scent was fading quickly. Soon even my powerful senses would be useless.
But I had to keep moving. Please let me be on time.

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Predator or Prey

I sit, enthroned in the branches of a mighty oak. Waiting…
Grandmother had warned us not to gather herbs in the woods. “Beware the wolf who hunts the forest for unsuspecting souls,” she would say.
That day, I forgot.
I should have known better, but I was drawn by a man more beautiful

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Departures

I watch through frosted windowpanes as the alchemist rides into town.
His furs are damp with dew, his hands hidden but for his reddened fingers. He glances up at the orphanage, and the vision lashes my eyes like a pine branch.
A fat old man with dead eyes. A little black bottle

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Desperate Junker in Need

Tank had a sixth sense about space junk. He could intuit the difference between a salvageable satellite and orbital debris, a useful skill ever since the collapse of the Sagan-Hawking interstellar gateway had induced collisions and made debris removal a prime concern for space travel. If only his spacey superpower could differentiate

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