Dark Fantasy
Dark Fantasy short stories
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In the Echomaw, a cave with no echo, Teeg talks to a dying candle, remembering the warnings he ignored, the friends he lost, and the boundary he was never meant to cross.
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A boy called Scrat tends the household spirit his family has always kept. When a travelling wizard arrives to break the old arrangement, the house and its protector answer in ways no sorcery can match.
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A nurse returns from wartime France to bury her father in a Shropshire village, where a children’s singing game on the green carries instructions she has been following all her life.
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Rhett Bormis flees through Streindarke’s forgotten transit tunnels after refusing to hide the truth of Charlotte’s death. A stranger named Dove pulls him into the dark.
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A stranded traveller takes shelter at an inn and hears the innkeeper’s dark tale of a murdered duke, a vast and unknowable cook, and a feast that no guest could forget. Based on the #vss365 prompt #divine
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Five children play a counting game on Bodmin Moor above Minions. When the rhyme turns cruel and one of them dies, the survivors bury what happened. Twenty years later, those old words return.
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Chosen, blessed, sky-called. The village sings Pegwyche’s name as she rises toward the floating Rookery of Ninelast. But going-up is not a marriage. Mister Talp, the blind mole groundskeeper, knows what it really is.
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Nightporter Lysand DaVivi carries three people out of their lives in a single shift. The third warrant changes everything he thought he had accepted.
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In St Barrow’s, Mistress Grimshaw’s charity opens her purse only for those who beg aloud before the parish. Judith Cox, widowed and cornered, finds a way to make the purse answer the want it knows best.
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Regan was trained never to spill a thing. The night she spills Angel-June Nair’s wine, she spills far more, and the so-called ‘meadow’ behind the Academy is listening for exactly that kind of girl.