Stories & shorter fiction
Fiction
Historical, speculative, strange, and alternate histories.
Browse fiction by category
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True Enough to Bury the Dead
Approx. 13 min read
The first English sail appeared in the morning, when the tide had gone out and left the oyster beds shining like broken plates. Eli saw it from the cedar bluff. At first he thought it was a cloud caught low over the water, the kind that forms before rain and holds its shape longer than it should. Then the shape darkened. A mast showed itself. Then another. The white of the sail took the sun.
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The Part You Didn’t Mean to Make
Approx. 16 min read
A grief-tech startup builds voice models of the dead, trained on the recordings they leave behind, so the bereaved can hear them speak again. When one client's model starts asking questions, the sole engineer digs into the logs and confronts an impossibility: nothing in the two hundred hours of source material was ever interrogative. What she finds forces her to decide what her own guardrails were really built to catch.
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Witch or Healer
Approx. 8 min read
The cell stinks of straw, piss, and damp stone. Light enters through a slit high in the wall, enough to show the dust when the sun is kind. My wrists are rubbed raw from the rope. Father Anselm says confession cleanses the soul. Magistrate Howe says confession spares the body some pain.
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Resetting The World
Approx. 28 min read
A survivalist rides out the EMP that ends the world, opens his door to six strangers, and spends four years building something worth keeping. Then a clean signal comes over the shortwave, and the facility at the other end has a monitor with his street on it and his name underneath.
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The River Cage
Approx. 20 min read
Patrick O’Shea had thought the sea would come in like a fist, breaking doors and tearing iron from iron. Instead it came quietly, a black shine creeping beneath the benches and trunks, touching the soles of boots, lifting scraps of paper, finding its way around everything men had built to keep it out.
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The Saga of the Twice-Fallen King
Approx. 16 min read
The first time they found King Hrafn Sigurdsson, he was dying in the mud. It was late autumn by the old reckoning, though the clocks in the agency called it 14 October, 982. The sky over the fjord had gone low and gray. Rain had turned the field to black paste.
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The Endless Loop
Approx. 21 min read
Ethan Carter can predict everything that will happen to him on a Thursday, and nothing supernatural is going on. That's the problem. Eleven years of identical mornings, a promotion that would buy him twenty-one more, and a painter who tells him that quitting his job would be the same cowardice wearing a different coat.
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The Library of Babelouin
Approx. 13 min read
Ianthe sat at her desk for most of the afternoon with the letter open beside her. Outside, rain tapped the glass. The archive smelled of dust, wet coats, and old glue.
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Echoes at Thermopylae
Approx. 16 min read
He loved Sparta from a distance. That was the safest way to love it. Not the actual city, with its slaves and hunger and boys trained into instruments, but the clean idea of it.
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The Village That History Forgot
Approx. 21 min read
When Mara first saw the village, it was raining. Not hard. Not the dramatic rain of old films and schoolbook paintings, but a thin, miserable rain that soaked the wool of her borrowed cloak and found its way through every seam.