History, mythology, research, and fiction by Nick Burchett.
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.
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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 →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 →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 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 →Being the private notebook of Dr. Amброise Verrin, physician of the parish of Saint-Roch, kept against the express instruction of the magistrate
Read more →By then the village had stopped expecting him. His mother was dead. His father’s fields had gone to bramble. The boy who used to run after his horse with a willow switch in his hand was now a broad-backed man with two daughters and a bald place showing under his cap.
Read more →The villa had been known for decades. A few test trenches in the 1970s, another survey in the nineties, and now a proper excavation before a housing development claimed the field. It was respectable work, the sort that filled journals but rarely newspapers. Roman pottery. Animal bone. Coins worn almost smooth. Fragments of painted plaster that hinted at rooms grander than the low hills around them deserved.
Read more →The fishing boat found them at sunrise. Old Håkon, who had spent forty years working the waters outside Trondheimsfjorden, noticed the sail first. It hung loose against the mast, catching just enough wind to push the vessel toward shore.
Read more →The grass rolled over gentle hills, greener than Iceland in summer and richer than anything he'd seen in Greenland. Forests stood beyond the shore, taller than any timber he had known. Rivers emptied into broad inlets where seals floated without much concern for the longship easing toward land.
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