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One Message Remains
A Collection, by Premee Mohamed Pageantry, pomp, pretense, and peril—”The General’s Turn,” originally published in The Deadlands, drew readers into the dark world of a ceremony where Death herself might choose to join the audience… or step onto the stage. Award-winning author Premee Mohamed presents three brand new stories set in this morally ambiguous world of war and magic. In “One Message Remains,” Major Lyell Tzajos leads his team on a charity mission through the post-armistice world of East Seudast, exhuming the bones and souls of dead foes for repatriation. But the buried fighters may have one more fight left in them—and they have chosen their weapons well. In “The Weight of What is Hollow,” Taya is the latest apprentice of a long-honored tradition: building the bone-gallows for prisoners of war. But her very first commission will pit her skills against both her family and her oppressor. Finally, in “Forsaking All Others,” ex-soldier Rostyn must travel the little-known ways by night to avoid his pursuers, for desertion is punishable by death. As he flees to the hoped-for sanctuary of his grandmother’s village, he is joined by a fellow deserter—and, it seems, the truth of a myth older than the land itself.Starstruck
By Aimee Ogden Prish has always been a radish who knows what she’s about; chiefly, her wife, Alsing, a literal and figurative fox. They’ve woven together a cozy life around welcoming other starstruck beings into the world—plants and animals ensouled by a falling star—but when the stars stop falling, all of that unravels. Prish gives in to Alsing’s longing to move on, and their new path leads them to two unlikely companions: an abandoned human child, and, impossibly, a brand-new starstruck who is neither a plant nor an animal, but rather a chunk of anthropomorphized granite with delusions of destiny.Summer in the House of the Departed
By Josh Rountree Summer 1981: Brady’s grandmother vanishes—along with an entire West Texas town. There’s no explanation, except those that don’t hold any logic. Brady doesn’t worry too much about that, having spent his childhood listening to his grandmother’s stories and playing with the pencil-sketched ghosts in her old Victorian: the young Shirley, the injured cowboy Glen, and others.People slipping away into another world is fantasy. It’s impossible.
Summer 2025: Brady returns to his grandmother’s house, hoping to understand what happened, and to find out exactly where his grandmother went. Brady holds a hope close to his heart: That he can duplicate whatever magic his grandmother conjured, to follow in her footsteps as his own ghost-tattered life comes to its close.I was there. I know what I saw…
