The Annotations of Vasilisa
A nineteenth-century Russian folklorist annotates the tale of Vasilisa the Beautiful, but her notes gradually reveal she is Vasilisa herself — immortal, hidden in academic respectability, still carrying the burning skull from Baba Yaga's hut.
Hedgewitching for Beginners
When the ancient beech tree anchoring her village's weather ward begins dying, hedgewitch Bramble Hopworth throws every remedy she knows at the problem. None work. The tree's bonded badger is dying too, and the only answer is one Bramble can't bring herself to accept.
Varnis and Grieving
A mason, a bureaucrat, and a conscripted girl converge beneath a city built on the compressed remains of a conquered people, as the earth's centuries-long silence breaks into sound.
Crowned in Mud
Three witnesses testify before a tribunal about the death of warlord Aldric, found face-down in mud outside his camp. Each account reshapes the night into a different story. The truth lies in the gaps between them.
Every Voice but His
When a singer of impossible power passes through a river valley searching for his dead wife, his music stops the water, kills the fish, and breaks the community. Five voices circle the aftermath — none of them his.
Scotoma
Nessa Daly reads objects for a living — touch a thing and know its history. When a routine insurance job leads her to a house she can't read, the failure points toward something she lost as a child and has never been able to see.
Desire Path to a Counting Room
A proofreader has spent eleven years mapping the impossible rules of her apartment — acoustic dead zones, desire paths worn by no one, a window that sometimes faces a courtyard that doesn't exist. Then a building inspector arrives with instruments that can almost measure what she's been hiding.
The Kept Rooms
Elspeth Carrow has tended the forgetting room for thirty-one years. The room is made of other people's worst moments, and it is the most beautiful place she has ever been. She cannot remember what she gave it.
Jamais Vu at the Dead Letter Office
A letter carrier collapses on her route and wakes in a municipal waiting room full of content, friendly people — including a girl who looks like her dead daughter. Three voices narrate: the new arrival, a long-term resident, and the Attendant.
Vasht Ascending
A sorceress stands over the body of the man who made her a weapon. Told in reverse across fifteen years, the legend of Vasht the Unmerciful unravels scene by scene — from goddess to exile to girl — and the reader carries the weight of everything she doesn't yet know.
Debts Paid in Iron
A minor lord dies in his keep. Three witnesses give testimony: a disgraced knight who loved too much, a court sorcerer who sold too little, and a squire who still believes. Their accounts overlap, contradict, and circle a truth none of them will name.
Unseeing Distance
Detective Nessa Tiernan investigates a body that doesn't fit her version of Stoneybatter. To find the killer, she must live the dead woman's life in the neighborhood's hidden twin — but the deeper she goes, the less certain she is which woman she still is.
Sung Below the Asking
A bard enters an ancient domain seeking a song older than naming, encounters a power he frames as seduction, and emerges changed — but what happened in the innermost chamber is never told, not even to himself.
Permits for Growth
Permits clerk Aldwyth Grieve processes building applications in Bas-Irem, a city whose architecture is alive and growing. When the growth accelerates past all projections, she discovers the bureaucracy she serves is part of the organism she is supposed to regulate.
Naming the Terms
Ilva Denn has hidden her illegal magic behind twelve years of clerical work and kid-leather gloves. When a ward-architect arrives to audit the binding contracts she files, two timelines collide: the past that taught her to hide, and the present demanding she stop.
Small Enough to Listen
An apprentice hedge-mage learns magic not through spells but through bodily transformation — becoming wren, carp, moth, and bee under the guidance of an eccentric teacher who believes the only real power is attention.
Bonecraft Ascending
A boneshaper's apprentice discovers her mentor's experiment has fused a district's living architecture with something sentient, and she must decide what she owes a city that raised her as a tool.
The Gods Below State Street
A disillusioned bartender in Chicago discovers the city's underground transit tunnels host an invisible war between forgotten immigrant gods. When a routine supernatural con goes wrong, she's dragged into a conspiracy older than the city itself.
Cupel and Passage
Siege engineer Feld Hauser marches with an army along an ancient corpse road to crush a rebel lord. The rebel is a fiction. The army is fuel. The furnace at the end has been burning since before anyone thought to give war a reason.