The Railway House

An edited version of this story appeared on flashesinthedark.com.

The railway house creaked and groaned at night.  Da said it was just the floor settling, but Cara knew better.  The house was an old soul, grown weary in the years of its disuse, and it grumbled its sorrows to the dark, murmuring of the lost days when trains stopped outside its door and passengers stepped onto the platform and inside for a kind word and cup of tea while a change of driver was made, or before a carriage pulled up and bumped them over the moor to the town or the manor house, the hazy outline of which Cara could see if it was an especially sunny day.  Not that she knew all this from memory, of course.  Da told her bits of it, when she begged him.  Stories of the outside world.  Sometimes when it rained the drops came in through the holes and cracks in the roof and walls, and then she imagined that the house wept.

Sea and Shadow, Prologue & Chapter 1

Prologue and first chapter from the YA fantasy novel I’m writing. 

Prologue

“I don’t like it, Captain.  Those clouds ain’t right.”

Thirty days at sea, the Anglevere clipper Mary Drake bobbed on the waves on the way to the island of Nauwani, her stopover before the final push to the Spice Cities, a bank of high dark clouds before her. She was one of the few remaining sailing ships in the line, and this was to be her last voyage before retirement and replacement with a steam ship.

The Calling of the Stars, Part 4

The days before the next full moon when he could see Nasoumi again passed for Willen achingly slowly.  Although the sorcerer continued to refer to him as an apprentice, it seemed to Willen he was more a dogsbody.  He came to know each step of the great staircase that wound inside the tower. 

The Calling of the Stars, Part 3

Upon reaching the houses of the city, Willen turned and made his way to the loft of a stable attached to an inn where he had passed many a night in twitching wakefulness lying on the straw and keeping an ear out for the city guards.  On this night, however, neither the guards nor the neighing of the horses nor the raucous singing of the men passing the small hours at the inn’s tavern could disturb him, wrapped up as he was in dreams of Nasoumi, all covered in starlight.

The Calling of the Stars, Part 2

And it came to pass in the seventh year of Haraldr’s reign that the Witch of the Wold arrived to trouble the kingdom.  The witch claimed a house deep in the forest for her own, so deep that none could find it but were turned around thrice on the way and found themselves hopelessly lost and at the mercy of the wolves the witch commanded.  Some said the witch was an ugly old crone, some a fair young maid, others said she had no form at all, but was a monster formed of ash and carrion meat sent by Ludï the Trickster to confound the realms of men.  Whatever her shape, with her coming crops failed, babes died in the womb, and misfortune of all sorts stalked the land.

Short story in progress

A short story I have started.  No idea where this one is going.

The Calling of the Stars, Part I

From a work-in-progress novella.

Once upon a time, in the kingdom of Hadaleeth, there lived a people in a city by a lake filled with stars.  Not simply the reflection of stars, nor lamps cleverly disguised and lit from below the waters, but true stars, called down from the heavens by the sorcerer Janiath in his tower of the seven and seventy-seven steps, carved from the single tusk of the last mammoth to tread the mountain snows of Sesparshek.