Fantasy

High Fantasy
Urban Fantasy

Outside the Sundae Fundae

Sometimes a perfectly rational conversation about chocolate gets derailed by morons and more morons.

Sister Spring

There were never such devoted sisters.

Ogre, Part 2

Lots of screaming in these dramatic ends, too.

Ogre, Part 1

Dramatic endings usually include a lot of running.

What is in a Name

For all major life events, it is considered obscenely rude for royalty to not invite every important dignitary. So rude, in fact, the consequences may be life or death.

Sir Alfred Quick, Knight Errant

Let me tell you a joke: What is the best day for performing knightly duties? Answer: Any day that ends in ‘y.’ Ho ho!

Ghost Train

Once the automobile industry managed to quash the growing public transportation system, all trains had to be viewed through a suspicious lens.

Fifth Anniversary

Some interruptions to a vacation are better than others.

A Different Sort of Smarts

You don’t have to be smart all the ways, as long as you find someone else who’s smart in the ways you’re not.

A Cat in the Morning

Remember to close your windows at night, and certainly do not leave out any fish.

Bloody Mary

Common sense is not so common, but it can come from anywhere.

Since When is Life Fair

At least not for the last three centuries, that’s for sure.

Same As It Ever Was

And you may ask yourself, My God, what have I done?

Tea Shop

Sometimes the best thing for your problems is a nice cup of tea.

Lands of Eternal Summer

Who wouldn’t want warm mornings, hot afternoons, and hotter evenings…forever?

Just a Little Crick in the Neck

So, your new friend just shoved you off a roof so you’d miss the sun and you landed on your neck and now you’re stuck in a motel storage room. Now what?

Reload From Last Save

Hero Chunk Dongle has some…interesting ideas on the afterlife.

What a Vampire Eats

It’s not French bread pizza and beer, unfortunately.

Fog

When the fog sinks in you can go anywhere.

Field Trip to The Cube

They go to The Cube every year! Why can’t they go somewhere fun this year, like the Aquarium?

Pasodoble

Bad things always happen in the cheap part of time. This time, though, it seems a little…extreme.

A Hero Reborn

A terrible war. An evil defeated. The world saved. All of that was centuries in the past, so why was he back?

Detective Story

Just another homicide for a homicide detective. Nothing special…

The Other Night

Death is, perhaps, the most misunderstood of the towering gods.

Quiet Love

Someday, someone will say the exact crazy thing that will make you fall in love.

A Plan Awry

They had a plan. It was a good plan. Not quite good enough.

Puck

Everyone could use a hand sometimes. Even a cutpurse down on his luck.

The Bad Side of Town

Last weekend sucked for Dexter. This weekend doesn’t look any better.

They Try

There’s just something about the ocean…

One More Thing

We don’t know what they are. We don’t know what they want. It’s kind of annoying when they show up during Prime Time.

The Mountains Are Calling

And although I don’t remember why, or where I came from, or what waits me there, and I don’t think I want to, I must go.

Want, Need

Mr. Morris wants a room unlocked in his house, but Marty is pretty sure he needs the opposite.

Which Witch

Deep in the Mortimor Woods and far off the Woody Path, but not too far, was a handsome, ugly cottage. Handsome because it was sturdily built, wood and nails and a low roof of shingles all coming together to create a small but cozy home. Ugly because the wood was the black of mildew stains,…

Two Oranges

Jeff didn’t want to look up at the flat-screen hanging over the Slushee machine, but he’d always had a hard time not looking when a television was on. Didn’t seem to matter what was on it. It was one of the many, many reasons his first wife Barb had screamed at him before she’d jumped…

Haunting 101

Tucker Winslow – alive for twenty-six years, dead for three, employed by Here and Beyond Solutions for two and a half – was sitting on a crappy plastic chair in the breakroom, staring at the soda machine without really seeing it. The Sector 1248 break room shared a physical space with the break room for…

A Witch in the Woods, or Said Isn’t Dead

This was the end. A journey lasting three weeks and two days, one that had taken them from one side of the world to the other, through the fields of Parda and the marshes of Silence and everything in between, one that had seen giants and wolves and the cat lady, one that had nearly…

Slide, Part 2

Maya didn’t die in 2028, but she did accidentally get some answers.

Slide

2006 The first time she died was on the side of the road. It was utter bullshit, too. Some real fluke of nature, Final Destination type crap that they only pieced together the next day. It started with this idiot contractor who didn’t secure the ladder correctly to the side of his truck, so that…

Bullshit

“Do you know what my first thought was, entering that trailer?” Rebekah asked. She took a quick sip of her beer and held up her hand. “I mean, after the screaming and confusion. My first real thought, looking at the scene.” Asche shrugged and leaned back in his chair. He expected some kind of platitude,…

Moon Over Prairie Fire, Part 4

Gus only got two seconds to be confused. A loud snap ricocheted around the room, causing everybody to jump. Gus the worst of all. The sound was that of his humerus bone snapping back into place. A second pair of sounds quickly followed as the two bones in his forearm found their proper place, but…

Moon Over Prairie Fire, Part 3

Inez was running across the parking lot, flanked on either side by Jesse and Mat. The van behind Gus shuddered as Adelaide slammed the driver’s side door. They all reached him at the same time.

Moon Over Prairie Fire, Part 2

Inside, Inez had just reached the bar and was reaching for where the phone was sitting next to a napkin holder on the bar when it started to ring. She waved it in the air at Matsui and Jesse who were looking at her with confusion before answering it.

Moon Over Prairie Fire, Part 1

“You’ll have to show me your photographs sometime.” It didn’t sound like the wrong thing for Gus to say. In fact, it sounded like the exact right thing to say. It showed interest in her work, he was honestly interested in seeing what kind of photography could be done, exactly, in Prairie Fire, and it…

Critter, Part 2

Previous The sounds started off to their left. It was making a large circle around them. At one point it got close enough that they could hear it’s breathing, slow and thick, but then it faded again, and all they were left with was the sound of it squeezing its body through the trees and…

Critter, Part 1

John Deacon killed the engine and stepped out of his pick-up, his boots rasping against the gravel that surrounded the EZ Pit Stop they had parked behind. He leaned on the open door and studied the woods his high beams were currently trained on. A thin barrier of shrubs and weeds that glittered with broken…

Teenage Dystopian Love

They stepped out of the darkness, bleeding and bruised and Renna’s ribs were definitely broken, but alive. They were alive. “Guys,” Molly said, still breathing hard and leaning on Johnny. “We did it.” For a few seconds, Renna only stood there. The cliffs in front of her. The cave behind her. The sun, hot on…

Anyways

Anyways, Spucky knew it was going to be a bad day when he woke up forty minutes before his alarm went off because there was some kind of super being or some shit standing at the foot of his bed. It was tall. And, uh, it had hair. Like, you know, long hair. For a…

Music Box

Sitting on the card table, nestled between a couple of Nerf guns and a tall stack of Hardy Boys novels, was the music box. It was made of a dark wood, and intricately carved all along the sides and the top. Celtic knots, mostly, but the design carved into the middle was foreign. Three triangles…

Control

The first thing she felt upon waking, besides the dull throbbing behind her eyes, was surprise. Fennix didn’t think she would be waking up again. At least, not in any way that mattered. What did those that were already caught by Emmaline’s web think and feel? She had assumed she would know by now, but…

A Call

It was a nothing town in the middle of nowhere South Dakota. Carina, population four hundred and three. There was miles and miles of pasture, and then the town, and then miles and miles of pasture. A selection of houses surrounding an intersection that had a grocery store, a gas station, a diner, and a…

Honestly, It’s Hot Enough in Florida Without the Sun

It was so bright out by the time Honey busted through the door onto the motel roof she thought he was already dead. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck,” she muttered to herself, scanning. She had gotten turned around on her way up. Which way was east? The sky in the direction she was facing…

Liminal Spaces

“They’re called liminal spaces,” she said. “Places that only exist to pass through.” “You mean a hallway.” Out of the corner of Brandon’s eye he could see her shift in the kitchen chair. How someone that tall could always get her legs tucked under her, wherever she sat, Brandon would never understand. Eunice – such…

Didi

October It was a heatherheart funeral, except instead of a bar they were at Ralph and Didi’s house. Just Didi’s house now. Not our house, she thought. My house. She was standing in the kitchen, staring at all the food. Tradition said it should have been casseroles and cobblers, but heatherhearts can’t cook worth a…

Cemetery

Let’s cut through the cemetery, Paul said. It’ll be fine, he said. Well, apparently the Applewood Cemetery was way bigger than either of them thought. If they had just walked around they would have gotten to the party by now. Instead it was full dark and they were still somewhere in the middle of a…

Making Friends

He met her at a bar a block away from his new apartment, the apartment where most of his stuff was still in boxes and maybe still was in boxes if not just tossed away or set on fire or sold off, not that he owned anything worth selling. It was a bar a block…

Ghostbusting? In This Economy?

Paige was sitting at the table, eating her cereal and watching the salt and pepper shakers floating above the table and circling each other, when Riley came hustling through to the door. Still wearing her pajamas and slippers, she looked out the window for a mere second before flinging open the door. Paige cringed against…

A Dragon’s Cave is No Place for a Princess

Angus knew that dragons were supposed to be fierce. Marauders. Attack a town and take their ill-gotten gold and burn down a few buildings while at it. Wait for the kings to send their knights and thieves to send themselves to come for the gold, then cut them all down. This was the way dragons…

The Grace

 The air that rushed in to meet his face was sharp and icy, and Laurent knew they had gone through the wrong gate even before the world on the other side revealed itself. The tips of his nose and ears began to freeze, and his first inhale was such a change that his lungs shrunk…

Moment’s Peace

A proper green mage would balk at the idea of going into the desert to ply their trade, and in fact they had. Ana was not, and would never be, a proper green mage. She’d started with a mage of the highest regard in New York, one carefully chosen and courted by her parents. Six…

The New World

The year is 1721, it is a bone-frigid winter night, and a boat from Europe has just docked in Boston Harbor. This, of course, is nothing so strange. Every winter night in Boston is the coldest a person has ever been, and the coldest they will ever be. Until the next night. And boats now…

Friends in High Places

He hit her again, in the face this time. She took it with a grunt, her entire body twisting in the chair under the ropes. For a brief second Garza thought she had passed out. Then she opened her eyes and spat blood at the hunter’s feet. Lester looked down at his shoes, once-white sneakers,…

Woman in White

“Is that someone walking?” “Who’d be walking out here? It must be a deer.” But as their car got closer to the figure on the side of the road, it became impossible to deny that the figure was human. A woman wearing a white dress, dark hair falling down her back. “Why would someone be…

A Heatherheart Wake

This is the traditional heatherheart wake. Specifically, this is the wake for Jeremiah Jones, or JJ to his friends and family. He was forty-six years old, and had been a heatherheart for the last eighteen. He was well liked. Real good at the job, very clear-headed and rational, and in the past he had been…

Just a Little Magic

This is the tale of Cecilia Ramos, who never figured out she was mildly psychic. Strictly speaking, ‘psychic’ is a garbage term that umbrellas so many different types of mental abilities as to make it quite useless. A mind reader and a medium could both be called psychic, and if you asked, for example, the…

Dinner at Rosa’s

Sometimes jobs fall right into your god damned lap. Paulie and Tosh were sitting at a booth in Rosa’s, a twenty-four hour diner directly off the highway in a town that had grown up only to serve it. The highway, not Rosa’s. In the same large parking lot as Rosa’s there was a Trucker’s Haven…

Lost Soul

Humans cannot possess magic. It was simply one of the known facts of the universe among people who knew these things. Humans could borrow magic, if one of the factions was willing to share. And if someone was only part human they could have magic from whatever else ran through their being. But full humans…

Invocation

In a small clearing of trees not far from the Route 85 Rest Stop #14, three men and a woman stood staring at each other. Rocky Lopes and Verity Fields stood on one side. Ozzie Gomez and Perseus Onri on the other. Between them was a hastily assembled shrine, a heavy leather book with the…

The Gate

The Guardian There was no questioning if Milo was okay to run. It didn’t matter. If he wasn’t, he’d have to find a way anyway. That thing knew where they were. It was coming. They had to find the gate first. He took Laurent’s hand and pulled. Waited for some piece of his body to…

The Guardian

Their laughter faded as one of the sounds coming through the trees caught their attention. The crystal had taken them deep into the forest. They had been surrounded by animal sounds the entire way. Birds’ wings flapping above. Critters crashing through the underbrush below. At first even the sound of a chipmunk chittering at them…

Girls Weekend

The farther they got from the carnival the softer the sounds became. The high pitched bells and whistles from the games and the screams from the rides and the off-key jangling of the local band on the stage faded and blended together until it was all just a wash of distant buzzing. The sounds that…

Deals With Strange Men

That – and the sound of another chair being pulled up to their cramped table – make Theo jump and pull back. His own hand had been inches away from the man’s, he’d been about to shake. Had he wanted to? Did he want to? He couldn’t remember.

Grasslands

They’d never find her here, because here there was nothing to find. She was taking her break on the back porch of the diner, leaning against one of the white-painted wooden posts holding up the little roof. It was just past midday. The sun was somewhere above, and the roof cast a shadow across the…

ABP, Part 2

Part 1 Croak grinned wide, and for the first time he looked ugly, the fire putting weird shadows on his face. “As you may know, Alpha Beta Rho has a proud, bitchin’ reputation. Party hard, then party harder. But we also have another rep, one that made us, like, totally paranoid. Alpha Beta Rhos always…

ABP, Part 1

While Eagle had always been a meathead, he hadn’t always been Eagle. Before that balmy September morning when he was eighteen and a freshman at Carson College, he had been Tyler. Not a single person would have expected him to go to college. He hadn’t been the type to really get work done, or even…

The Type of Guy Who’s Always In a Quick Mart Parking Lot

Janet looked out the plate glass window, over the snack cakes and through the neon sign for the lottery, and stared at the two idiots outside. From one of the many pockets in his long black coat BJ had produced a butterfly knife, and he was attempting to spin it around his fingers. It was…

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