Sff Stories

A boy loses his life too early, as well as the memory of his death. This boy with the power of healing hands must spend his time in Purgatory until he can remember the truth. Only then can he move on to the world of blue, where the dead live on. A woman becomes one with a man, only for him to fall into death's embrace. With the woman's power to time travel, she must save her partner's fate and preserve the family she cherishes. A young man with prosthetic limbs yearns for wonderment in his life in a windy, cliff side town. He drifts through life until he meets a young child. These are a collection of short stories that take place in a world called Athre. The people in these stories struggle to find their own truths, while trying to endure the pain that comes with it.

Son of the Dragon is a short story from Volume 1 of Tales From Netherün - the free online fantasy e-zine. Tales From Netherün is available at www.quillandread.com/subscribe The zine is released bi-monthly and each contains 3 short stories set in Netherün. Netherün is a land dominated by vast swathes of wilderness between pockets of civilization, where the edges of the map are not yet known and magic not yet fully tamed or understood. Through these short stories, the world will unravel, piece by piece, but no one story will be the answer. There are many mysterious lands, peoples and magic in Netherün, and within each, stories to be explored and new mysteries to discover.

There is no business as usual when the early stages of new building construction unearths a violation of physics and causality. (Now the Fictionette Freebie for July 2017! Full text inside!)

A woman travels to Keystone hoping to finally pay off her debt to the nightmarish Mercy of the Road. All she longs for is freedom, but will she find it? visit www.quillandread.com to subscribe to a free, shared world fantasy e-zine.

[Short Story] @All rights reserved

Space is vast, and the Hauler is alone. It is a kilometers-long train of supplies, but it has been off course for years. Its lone inhabitant used to get transmissions from Earth, but eventually, even those stopped. An occasional visitor might be nice.

Franklin is alone and sick in the frozen Icelandic wilderness. The lights came from above. They came from the aurora. They bring with them either destruction or a new beginning. --- The Lights was inspired by two events this summer: my trip to the beautiful country of Iceland, and Gord Downie's (frontman of The Tragically Hip) very public battle with brain cancer. I dedicate this story to all cancer survivors, and to all those battling the disease.

TinkleWhiz, a robot from planet Sbarchink, acquires a magical power: he can turn invisible and roll through matter at will. He slowly discovers the joys of his new power and has some fun with it, until he gets a bit carried away and breaks the law when fame goes to his head.

Self-proclaimed super-sleuth, 12yo LEXI WALKER, suspects her hometown harbours secrets and investigates. She soon finds a glowing, arcane Orb. When it imbues her with magical powers she can't control & transports her to a hidden world, her suspicions are realised.

Magic caused the war. Magic is forbidden. Magic will save us. The Relic Guild is the award nominated first book in The Relic Guild trilogy. It was said the Labyrinth had once been the great meeting place, a sprawling city at the heart of an endless maze where a million humans hosted the Houses of the Aelfir. But when the Thaumaturgists, overlords of human and Aelfir alike, went to war, everything was ruined and the Labyrinth became an abandoned prison. The surviving humans were trapped behind boundary walls a hundred feet high, and all magic was forbidden. And now the war is returning. The Relic Guild are all that stand against the end of the city. But they are old, scattered and weak, and the enemy is growing in strength... Here in THE RELIC GUILD (and other stories) please enjoy a large chunk of The Relic Guild Trilogy (published with kind permission of my publisher Gollancz), complete short stories, the odd poem, one or two blog posts, and samples chapters from my other novels.

English translation of my short stories in French. Science-Fiction and Fantasy.

Very short poem-stories.

Hana is a recently graduated diplomat, leaving on her first assignment. She must travel to a world she has never heard of and try to stop a war. The war may already have begun. It may never have happened. There is no way to know, until she arrives, because news can only travel as fast as a starship. Hana has no authority, and no ability to compel the warring parties to make peace, and she cannot leave until the war is over. And if that takes more than a week - the length of time a starship remains in orbit around any planet - then the vessel she arrived on will leave without her, and she will have to wait for the next. That wait could take her whole life. It is a backwater planet, with neither strategic importance nor much of anything to trade. Exactly the kind of planet a recent-graduated diplomat is sent to. And on a forgotten, backwater planet, in a turbulent, seething galaxy, that next ship might be a very long time coming. It could be years, or even decades. If Hana fails to make peace in a week, she may be stuck, and her career over before it has begun. She may also be dead, if her peacemaking goes very badly wrong. * * * And to save people starting if it isn’t their thing, this is meant to be gritty, realistic space opera. So no aliens, no FTL, no neutrino communications, the technology is just there and who cares how it works, planets are sovereign polities and interplanetary war is almost impossible - and also pointless - but conflicts within a planet are common and this is what Hana wants to stop. So also, she isn’t saving the galaxy or anything important!

For Roleplays

The worlds-spanning conclusion to "The Codex Lacrimae," the first of nine novels in A.J. Carlisle's epic fantasy series, "The Artifacts of Destiny." With Aurelius believed dead and Clarinda cast to parts unknown by the power of the Dark Book, the Nine Worlds and multiverse of medieval times are threatened by reemergent threats from Norse mythology, the armies of Saladin and Hela Queen of the Dead, and the darkest of the Artifacts of Destiny, the Codex Lacrimae. If they manage to survive, Ríg and Clarinda will discover whether friendship and love can stand against the host of villainous enemies, supernatural forces, and the march-to-war on different planes of existence caused by the return of the most corrupt of the Books of Fates, and the different paths that they will choose are unexpected and filled with perils that are literally out of this world. In action-filled journeys and breathtaking battles that range across exotic locales such as the besieged Krak des Chevaliers on Midgard, to the Weeping Wood of Svartalfheim, the Dwarf-Caverns of Nidaveller, and even to the fabled Fjords of Asgard, the relationship between the Hospitaller and Norn develops and deepens. With an unpredictable outcome that confounds traditional expectations of the genre and begins the tale of a thousand year romance, this first book of The Artifacts of Destiny will surprise and delight readers of epic fantasy!