Something happened today, and if Papa finds out…
He can’t know.
He can’t know I have Voices.
When I first heard the murmurs early this morning, I almost jumped out of bed and ran to tell him. I’m lucky I caught myself. If he knew his apprentice—his own son—was a Voicer… I already disappoint him enough.
A grating roar shook the earth as if the apocalypse had just dropped a mixtape featuring cat yowls and broken dreams.
The dust bunnies bounced away in terror, desperately searching for hard-to-reach corners to hide from the Terror Which Is the Vacuum Cleaner. Spencer shivered in fear. A massive pair of slippered feet trudged slowly across the carpet, pushing the tool of destruction closer and closer toward the bed.
His mottled hands shook as Viktor Engel etched characters into the damp earthen brow. “The good book says it took a word to create the world, eh?” He shuffled back a few steps, flicking the scrapings from his cracked nailbeds. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” A smile crept across his face, deepening crevices under his grizzled beard.
Read it now
The walls crumble more every day. It’s not just something you can fix with workers and stone, either. If it were that easy, we would’ve saved the city long ago.
But these magic-imbued walls are held together by our relationships—by love—and that love is fading.
Mirrors never show the truth on our birthdays. They show only fractures, pieces that we can almost hide, but never completely.
And this mirror is no exception.
I steel myself before peering inside its depths. Darksouls—the reflected versions of ourselves living in mirrors—have a persuasive air about them.
The call from steel magnate Charles Weldon interrupted my plans to spend a pea-souper of a morning with two fingers of Jack Daniels and a newspaper. But I knew I wouldn’t regret it when I stepped into the tycoon’s home office. Whatever made one of the richest men in California this jumpy was bound to pay well.
Read it now
The wipers of the ’66 Corvette swept the rain from the windshield, but the downpour blurred Duncan’s view of the darkened road, and the headlights didn’t provide much help either. After the day he’d had, he just wanted to get home. Thankfully, the purr of the engine eased the tension in his back.
Read it now
The stars are my guide.
It isn’t their light that I follow so much as their song. Every night, I wait for them to come out, to paint the ocean waves. Water laps against my boat, and I follow the path laid out by the celestial chorus.
The king was broken in pieces.
Ezahtira shouldn’t have been surprised. Ever since the gods punished the kings for their corruption, the nation of Cadmar had suffered the Two-Taloned Curse. The First Talon turned each king into a stone-like substance at death, after which he would crumble.
My undead grandmother is my conscience.
By “undead” I don’t mean a decrepit, old woman who looks like she shouldn’t still be sucking wind. I mean a decrepit, old woman who died of a heart attack three months ago yet still manages to ruin my life.
Read it now
How in Hades could a three-headed dog escape the Underworld, cross the river Styx, and enter the world of the living without me immediately hearing about it? But Cerberus has managed it somehow. So here I am, calling his name like an idiot in the middle of New York City at what must be the busiest time of the year.
Read it now
By the time she reached the age of fourteen, the rest of the faefolk knew that she would not get any stronger.
Such a shame, they’d whisper as she drifted through the square. She’ll never find a trade, they’d mutter as she meandered through the market. It must have been her mother, they declared, infrequently caring if she could hear them or not. Was her mother a windfolk? Probably not.
Read it now
Recent Comments