For Zadie, the first ninety-nine steps under the oppressive canopy of nighttime Pennsylvania woods were hard enough. The air was still and stagnant, and only thin shafts of moonlight pierced the darkness. But at the hundredth step, Zadie hesitated and took a deep breath. She had reached the point where she would have
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One of us will die today, and it’s sure as hell not gonna be me.
I’m a billion miles from home, crouched under a pile of ice boulders. Methane rain pours from Titan’s dark orange clouds.
The LCD screen on my forearm pulses red.
THERMAL COIL DAMAGED
REGULATED TEMPERATURE REMAINING: 00:13:24
The lisuxx were on the move, rising like a lake of miniature stars over the dark prairie. I crouched at the edge of the forest, watching with a familiar sense of awe tightening my chest. They were a blinding, bright yellow. The color of poison. Forbidden to the tribe. Millions of
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Another boring Saturday.
I yawned, the report blurring before me. The faint buzz of life trickled up from the streets far below.
I continued scrolling. Just a few more before I could clock out and head home. Home, where my videogames patiently waited.
But nothing else did.
With a start, I realized
Darshia stretched her longest set of legs and hopped a couple times to limber up. Zephyriah was a difficult little brother at the best of times, but… he was missing. She had to go find him before darkness fell. Before anyone else died.
The last time he disappeared, Zephyriah and his friends
The first thing you notice is light—cool and soft white, pervasive and blank.
You are so comfortable and drowsy it doesn’t occur to you to wonder where you are or how you got there. The temperature is pleasant. There is no sound other than your pulse, no smell besides a faint,
The first thing Mia noticed was the blood—dark specks drizzled across fresh snow like errant paint strokes. Her boots crunched in pursuit until the spatter disappeared into a sheet of white beyond the remote compound.
Blinding wind cut at her eyes as she peered into the Yukon permafrost and shouldered her
Auahi is angry.
He burns molten hot, his flanks shaking, gray clouds billowing. I adjust the scarf over my mouth and continue hiking up the volcano.
After one hundred years of peace, Auahi is finally awake. Now, his fury will destroy my village—and those who are unable to escape it in time.
I gazed at the distant horizon, where the sky met the sea. The indigo twilight slowly faded into the dark ocean.
Something in that vast emptiness called out to me. It was more than just a vague desire to see the world. It was more of a beckoning. Like a beacon from a distant
The way I see it, you find a giant egg in the forest, you have two options. You break it open or you don’t.
The lodge we’d passed through was easy to see from the edge of the crater. Stand atop a fallen tree and there it was—civilization. Like children in sight
“I’m warning ye Elial, if it happens again, I’ll destroy yer vermin pets meself!”
“My wyrms didn’t touch your sheep, Malchi.” Elial fought down his irritation. This was the second dead ewe found mangled in Malchi’s fields, with neighbors suffering similar losses. No one knew the culprit, but many placed the crime squarely
The news ran rampant through the College of Advanced Mage Arts: there was a demon in the gymnasium. Students evacuated the area, congesting the halls with a tumult of people, strobing lights, and blaring alarms. Sebastian could hardly think in the cacophony, which was probably how he managed to wade so calmly against the
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