Featuring two bonus stories and new cover art: "Garden of Solitude" by Bruce Brenneise. Oh Grave, Thy Victory by K.J. Parker. Every Force Evolves a Form by Tom Marcinko. In Search of Better Deaths by ...

The foals don’t recall the age of enthrallment because we never taught them of that dark eon when the kin marched on the cities of man. I do. I was in that horde scouring the land, mindless tools of t...

Katarina, who had seen her share of premature deaths said, “Nonsense. I’m not a physician, I don’t cut live women open.” Still, death was coming for Vlasta, diving like a hawk on its dark wings. The b...

The power to fold life carries great responsibility, so we must fold a thousand cranes before we can touch a sheet of living paper. We fold them with writing paper, with newspaper obituaries, with pla...

The rest of us, too, had grown to about that age before our immortality took hold. My sisters all looked fresh and beautiful; the past ten years had not touched them. But what made the new girl look y...

Grey had felt a drift of air against the back of her legs when she had stepped behind the earl’s table. She knew she would find a slit in the tent fabric that the earl’s killers had used to enter. She...

“My father forbid me to come to you, either with mushrooms or with the dog's collar,” Vanya told the dog witch. It had been early in spring when his father killed Mishka the three-legged dog. For sava...

Afterwards, while the mother and baby slept or cooed at each other, Jesset was freed to the fresh air to deliver the grace-bread. Sister Grain baked two loaves after every birth. One for the church, t...

Issue #467 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies online magazine, our Eighteenth Anniversary Double-Issue, featuring stories by K.J. Parker, Tom Marcinko, Zet Madej, and Katarina Garcia and cover art by Bruce Br...

The ambassador takes a bite of her fish. It rolls across her tongue, rich and sweet with the barest hint of salt. It is not the flavor that she savors. She can feel the burst of energy from it almost ...

Rugg read her. Not just her face but the veil in front of it. The knit was funny to his eye, not the usual fine hatching but a more elaborate twisted warp and weft, and the fiber looked to be made fro...

He had neither the energy nor the interest to argue. Nor to talk at all. With a grunt, Guy got behind his cart and pushed it forward. The night would only get darker, and he had a long way to go to th...

Even here, in the midst of the mob, they could sense her power somehow. A feeling of unease, perhaps. Despite the crowd, no one touched her. Those who brushed against her clothing shuddered, though it...

The Smart Search List of the Day is: Paying Fantasy Short Stories feat. @apexmag.bsky.social @bcsmagazine.bsky.social et al. https://duotrope.com/search/smart/fiction/paying-fantasy-short-stories-51CIR9SM

The Cold That Brings You Home by E.M. Linden. Sous Lumière Aigre by Jonathan Louis Duckworth. BCS 366: Sous Lumière Aigre by Jonathan Louis Duckworth.

True horror settled over Dagn when Rille's distinctive heavy tread scuffed on the hall’s stone floor, drawing nearer. Just her luck. On the eve of the invasion's final stroke, of course she’d be stand...

Azrael went back to the dead horse and considered the trading post for a moment. Whatever was going on here, he had no choice but to walk into it. Nakir had to be still inside, after all. She never le...

In smoky light, Carmora watched for jackals and looters (which he'd been at times) and Churchmen (which he'd also been), one hand by the short-sword on his thigh. For months, he'd ranged back and fort...

In The Blood by Alex Irvine in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Dragons have valuable items, but often eat them. Due to the caustic, awful pro...

—then this child wearing Jen’s clothing, with Jen’s hair pulled into tight braids that she hates, smiling with Jen’s face is running toward me, laughter ringing from her like a bell, clear and bright—...

"Go mind your sisters and your brother," Jeanne-Marie tells her. The girl would have had a decent life, before the curse damned them all to this mortal Hell. A roof over her head, enough food to eat—m...

We have delicious cuisine. We are lovers of life. We are lovers of love. We are so many things, but above all else, we are lovers of freedom that live in a cage that no one can enter and no one can le...

We have delicious cuisine. We are lovers of life. We are lovers of love. We are so many things, but above all else, we are lovers of freedom that live in a cage that no one can enter and no one can le...

Issue #466 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies online magazine, featuring stories by E.M. Linden and Jonathan Louis Duckworth and cover art by Sam Jumisko.

The foals don’t recall the age of enthrallment because we never taught them of that dark eon when the kin marched on the cities of man. I do. I was in that horde scouring the land, mindless tools of t...

The Eldest Bird of Paradise by Denzel Xavier Scott. Seneschal of Shattered Tor by Abhijeet Sathe. BCS 365: The Eldest Bird of Paradise by Denzel Xavier Scott.

Anatolio allowed her to argue a little further, for he could respect that she needed to be heard before ordering the deaths of those who trusted her for only the paltry sake of a distraction. But at l...