A double-issue, in celebration of our 100th issue!
"Has death made you a demon, Lady? No! All who are mortal must die, but not all who die become ghosts. You did, and that is because your hopes and dreams as a living woman were so completely frustrated. Therefore, your defining characteristic is not death but rather an excess of the yin principle, which you would instinctively attempt to counter by taking my living energy. Your present condition is not fate but rather a condition, an illness. An illness can be cured."
Somewhat to his own surprise, Xu Jian awoke the next morning on the hard ground—chilled, weak, but alive.
"Another fine ghost story from Parks. Xu Jian exhibits an admirably philosophical demeanor along with the passion of a lover. This one comes to a particularly satisfying conclusion. Recommended" —Lois Tilton, Locus online
There are clankers and buzzers out during the bright hours of the day but the hidey hole is safe and I much desire to drink myself into blackness with a flask of the grog I trade for but I have my daughter with me and a man cannot live who loses his daughter due to insensibility or slowness of reaction. I shiver and sweat all day long and the sound of the clankers makes my blood boil with fury and despair and that is a most helpless kind of combination.
I much desire to drink myself into blackness with a flask of the grog I trade for but I have my daughter with me and a man cannot live who loses his daughter due to insensibility or slowness of reaction.
"A really grim setting... (offers) the satisfaction of sometimes being able to strike back, even if the cost is high. The narrator’s eccentric, overwrought voice grabs reader attention." —Lois Tilton, Locus online
Every one of our people hears three stories of Agani in their lifetime: once when we leave childhood behind and become women; the second before we marry and become one with another; and the third when we must face death and send a loved one off to the other world. I had hoped to tell you the first story in the summers to come. It is my sorrowful task to tell you all three, instead.
I had hoped to tell you the first story in the summers to come. It is my sorrowful task to tell you all three, instead.
"raises the interesting moral question of whether the god Agani is rightly or unjustly despised." —Lois Tilton, Locus online
Before Aunt Victoria, I hadn't realized that a virtue could be a curse. In the schoolyard, my friends and I had always pretended at being grownups, putting on old necklaces of our mothers' and aspiring to the greatness of colors we had heard of or invented—things like deep purple Valor and moss-colored Genius. A virtue like Aunt Victoria's, though...
The morning we found out, it was because of me.
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"And yet Now is upon us," said Tvarn Wind-Tamer. "For the Perfection is moving. Look."
Whether I was drunk or sober, Princess Teiko haunted my dreams.