The Cistern
Thallos found the rope ladder still fixed to the siege ramp when the sun was two hands above the ridge, and he did not want to climb it. At the top the wind came off the desert flat and dry, carrying nothing. That was...
Read story →The Archive and the Imagination
History, mythology, research, and fiction by Nick Burchett.
The Ledger of the Low
Dornhaven keeps its accounts. Elsa Brandt is an archivist. When she finds a deed referencing a contract that shouldn't exist, she does what archivists do: she keeps digging. By morning, she doesn't exist either. Her...
View book →Latest Stories
The Cistern
Thallos found the rope ladder still fixed to the siege ramp when the sun was two hands above the ridge, and he did not want to climb it. At the top the wind came off the desert flat and dry, carrying nothing. That was the first thing he noticed and could not place until later, no smoke.
Read more →The Registry Number
An East Berlin records clerk encounters her own name inside the surveillance system she has served for years. The discovery changes how she reads both its files and the people around her.
Read more →One Night Before the Pyre
On the eve of her execution, Joan of Arc receives a final visit from the voices that have guided her since childhood and learns the truth about their origin, forcing a choice between survival and the meaning she has built her life around.
Read more →Custer's Luck
A cavalry general who chose caution finds himself on the ridge where the other version of him chose otherwise. He knows how it ends. He can't stop it, and he isn't sure he wants to.
Read more →The Prophet and the Poison
The room smelled of figs and something bitter underneath them, a smell Iras had stopped noticing after the third day. Cleopatra sat on the low couch with her feet bare, watching a slave girl drink from a small clay cup.
Read more →Household Gods
Three months of transport had done what three months of transport always did. The wax on half the tablets had cracked in the cold, and someone in Gaul had let rain into the wagon, so the wood underneath had swollen and split along the grain. His orders were simple. Sort what could be saved, note what couldn’t, and burn the rest before the damp bred mold that would ruin the good tablets stacked beside them.
Read more →The Gentleman Bandit’s Last Ride
The sack smelled faintly of flour and mice. Charles Boles held it open between his hands and considered, for perhaps the hundredth time, the foolishness of the whole business. A grown man in a good wool coat, standing behind an oak tree with a flour sack over his head.
Read more →The Beak and the Dark
Being the private notebook of Dr. Amброise Verrin, physician of the parish of Saint-Roch, kept against the express instruction of the magistrate
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