Every Edvane Story can be read on the site or heard in audio. This archive gathers the narrated versions of Jonathan B. Edvane’s dark short fiction, including ghost stories, folklore, historical shadows and stranger tales. Listen through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or YouTube, or open each story to read it on the site.
The complete archive · 40 episodes · Most recent firstStreindarke – Seven – Now Everything’s Dark
On the night before the coup, Hagen Vada climbs through Streindarke’s wards, judging the city that excluded him. At dawn on the upper terrace, he raises his hand and gives the signal.
The Bramblejack
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.
The Grass Was So Green
A nurse returns from wartime France to bury her father in a Shropshire village, where children sing a rhyme on the green whose instructions she has been following all her life without knowing it.
The Crow and the Sparrow
A crow and a sparrow share a hedgerow until hunger and cunning turn their arrangement into something darker. A fable about strategy, loss and the cost of trusting the wrong neighbour.
The Second Commission
In March 1485, Richard Taillour is sent west with a royal commission to investigate a seized Austrian merchant ship and the disappearance of two earlier commissioners. What he finds aboard the Sint Marie in Axmouth harbour belongs to no report that any clerk could write.
Streindarke: Devenir Gris
Rhett Bormis flees through the abandoned transit tunnels beneath Streindarke after refusing to conceal a murder. In the dark below the city, he meets a young woman named Dove and discovers that others have already chosen to resist what the grey city is becoming.
An Old Family Recipe
A traveller shelters at an inn and hears the innkeeper’s tale of a murdered duke, a vast and unknowable cook, a seven-course feast and a ring found in the meat. The story ends, but something about the innkeeper does not.
Counting Out
Five children play a counting game on Bodmin Moor. The rhyme turns cruel, and Grace Pascoe does not survive it. Twenty years later, the old words come back for those who chanted them.
Pegwyche Goes Down
A village girl is chosen for the honoured ritual of Going-Up Day and raised in a decorated cage to the floating Rookery of Ninelast. The blind mole groundskeeper is waiting, and he has done this seven times before.
The Apportionment of Slyne Birch
A tithe surveyor arrives in an Oxfordshire parish in 1843 to map every field and account for every acre. The older records name a settlement called Slyne Birch, cleared by a local lord four centuries earlier. The dead do not want remembrance. They want someone to finish their paperwork.
The Tayle of Robyn Hode
A man disputes a royal demand and is pushed into outlawry. No Sherwood Forest. No merry men. No tights. A Robin Hood story drawn from the oldest sources, before the legend became comfortable.
The Legend of the Og Mori
On the Pictish coast at Dunnicar, Chief Talorc faces Anglian raiders who have violated his daughters and stripped his stores. The price of the shore’s protection has been known for generations. No chief has ever paid it.
Streindarke: To Shy From The Rain
In Streindarke, Nightporter Lysand DaVivi carries three people out of their lives in a single shift. The third warrant is the one the city should never have issued.
Good Luck, Old Man
In sixteenth-century Paris, the First Doctor encounters a rogue Time Lord tracking an ancient predator that nests inside fixed points in history and feeds on inevitability. A fan fiction set during the canonical gap in The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve.
Odd Man Dodd
In 1780s Shropshire, a parish midwife watches a man called Odd Man Dodd move between three townships. Three people die. The children learn a rhyme. Nobody asks where the words came from.
Mistress Grimshaw’s Purse
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.
The Vanishing of Spearhafoc
Spearhafoc, monk and goldsmith to Edward the Confessor, vanishes with the king’s gold before the crown is finished. In Selwood Forest he strikes a bargain with a woman named Jufreyna, and England never finds the man it lost.
I Spill It All
Regan was trained never to spill a tray. The night she spills Angel-June Nair’s wine, she spills far more, and the Field of Natural Consequence behind the Academy is listening for exactly that kind of girl.
The Little Birds of Othery Grange
William Cox tends the gardens at Othery Grange. He also tends the truth. Five Regency courtships, five birds, and one gardener who learns that an invented omen, once spoken, never stays his alone.
Shall I Come Away?
A hard curate preaches the Devil’s name from his Exeter pulpit and turns a children’s rhyme into a summons. Bucky asks three lives of him, then keeps the bargain in a way Ralph never meant.
The Even Ash
Four women. Four Yorkshire fairs. One old charm. Mother Greenwood’s even ash answers the question spoken, not the protection wished for.
The Seven Blessings of Cecily Scratcher – Part Two
At St Mildred’s, every blessing has a shadow. Cecily Scratcher waits beneath the lychgate to tell seven old warnings, and of the children made to carry what adults should not.
The Seven Blessings of Cecily Scratcher – Part One
At St Mildred’s, every blessing has a shadow. Cecily Scratcher waits beneath the lychgate to tell seven old warnings, and of the children made to carry what adults should not.
Arrange The Symmetry
In Streindarke, even scandal is expected to behave properly. When Lord Suze Ben-Sashe vanishes, Civic Quiet Ballion is sent to keep the matter narrow.
The Magpies of Hagley Stile
An old rhyme everyone knows, turned into a sequence of dark folk warnings. Widow Green counts what others refuse to see.
The Return of the SS Strumble
A dead ship returns through the storm. Lighthouse keeper Thomas Darling must decide whether the light is warning the sea away, or calling something impossible home.
Doctor Who and the Bells of Winvaulx Abbey
A midnight call draws paramedic Ellen Ward to an impossible blue police box, and from there to the ruins of Winvaulx Abbey, where time is bruised, a dead tower rings bells it never had, and an ancient Engine beneath the stones demands a correction that could erase a child from history.
Merlin and the Unburied King
Three days after the battle of Arfderydd in 573 AD, Brother Robert walks a field of the dead searching for the bard Merlin. A dark Arthurian story rooted in the earliest Welsh sources.
Under A Yellow Moon
Rhett lifted the brush, then stopped. Charlotte’s face lay beneath the lamp, pale and beautiful, but not at peace. A gothic dark fiction story set in the city of Streindarke.
The Smothing of Dunsop Bridge
In Lancashire, everyone knows you do not take an unbaptised child near the Smothing. One family does not listen.
The Broomfield Witch
In Tudor Essex, Jess Harwood returns home after seven years to find her mother has been burned as a witch. What her mother left behind will set her on the same path.
Emmie and the Black Orchard
In Duskdale, winter has brought a blight that is taking the children. Emmie steals an apple from the black orchard, not knowing what the orchard will take in return.
The Children of Bradfield Wood
During the reign of King Stephen, two children of strange green hue were found near Woolpit. An imagined prelude to one of Britain’s most enduring medieval mysteries.
Night of the Broken Oath
The Blue Wizards, Pallando and Alatar, come at dusk to the fortress of Azhrath, where the clans and horse-chiefs of the East are gathering beneath one darkening purpose. Beyond the reeds of Rhûn, fires burn on the hill, drums sound in the evening, and whispers speak of an oath soon to be sworn.
Gossia’s Garden
Yarnulf takes a shortcut through the forest and finds Gossia, a pixie tending a garden of bones. Every skeleton was someone who laughed at her. She is not angry about it.
The Severed Heads
In 1812, Géricault painted The Severed Heads. A dark historical fiction set in Nimes, where two lovers tried to survive across political divides that France made fatal.
The Ghosts of Godstow Abbey
During the dissolution of the monasteries, Lady Katherine Bulkeley receives a letter that may end her abbey. In the chapel, the ghosts of Henry II and Fair Rosamund appear.
A Monk, 2137
A Cistercian monk from 1137 steps through a temporal door and arrives in 2137, where an artificial intelligence called ARIX governs truth itself.
Raven’s Sacrifice
In 1899, Felix Thollier captured a photograph called Horse Training. Neither horse nor trainer was ever named. Until today. A dark folk horror story rooted in real history.
His Pretentious Love
In the dark city of Streindarke, emotion is not forbidden. It is processed, certified, and filed. A gothic dystopian tale inspired by Bauhaus.
