IGGY & Litro have announced their annual contest for 13 – 18 year old writers , with a cash prize of £2000 for the winning entry. The theme of this year’s competition is Myths and Legends.
You can read all the entry details here.
Good luck!
Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Steampunk
She is too small, Kitkun thinks, the first time she enters his tiny workshop tucked between the market’s stalls. Too young to have left the nest alone. Yet, despite the years of waiting, he still feels a prick of hope as she steps out of the city’s unrelenting smog and over the threshold, thinking, perhaps she will be the one. Perhaps she will ask.
“Are you lost, child?” says Kitkun, setting down his tools. She is dressed in cream colored silk – a foolish color to wear in this city – but her shoes are covered in grime.
She nods. “I thought I saw a raven,” she says.
“And did you?”
Her face crumples with disappointment. “Nanny couldn’t keep up. She doesn’t believe birds exists.”
Kitkun smiles. Customers do not randomly wander into his shop. “Well, I do,” he says, pointing at the display next to her, “See?”
(Continue Reading…)
It’s October, everyone. That means it’s time for our annual Halloween special. This year we’ve gone for a theme, presenting a collection of horror stories about endings, both figurative and literal. The dead and the undying. Spirits sea monsters. Apocalypses writ both large and small. Welcome to The End of the World.
The shutters rattled in their hinges as rainy fists banged against the wood. Katina rubbed her knuckles. They made a creaky noise. “Old bones, what did you expect?” she chuckled. “Old bodies are as good as coffins.”
She stirred the pumpkin soup boiling on the stove and tasted her wooden spoon. “Almost ready.”
The wind pounded on the door with all his might and fury. It almost sounded like knocking.
“Are you set on tearing my house down?” she asked him.
Then, another knock. And another.
Katina looked at the door, her left eyebrow raised.
“Is someone there?” she asked.
Genres: Fantasy, Modern Fantasy
Welcome, everyone, to our Banned Book Week special. Banned Book Week is an annual event every September that aims to raise awareness about censorship and to celebrate the right to read. Many local libraries and bookshops hold events to highlight and discuss the social, political and legal issues around literature. You can find out a lot more at the Banned Book Week website, or at another of my personal favorite websites, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, where you’ll find lots of resources including free posters for holding your own event.
To celebrate, Cast of Wonders is proud to present Things We Leave Behind, written and narrated by one of our veteran authors, Alex Shvartsman. You’ve heard Alex’s work previously in The Field Trip; You Bet, and our short Christmas tale Nuclear Family. Excellent stories, each.
Some of my earliest memories are of books. They were everywhere in our apartment back in the Soviet Union; shelves stacked as high as the ceiling in the corridor and the living room, piles of them encroaching upon every nook and available surface like some benign infestation.
Strangers came by often, sometimes several times a day, and browsed the shelves. They spoke to my father, always quietly, as though they were in a library. Cash and books exchanged hands in either direction but there was little haggling, both parties reluctant to insult the books by arguing over their price like they might with a sack of potatoes.
I learned to read at the age of three. My parents showed off this talent proudly, bribing me with candy to sound out long, complicated words like “automobile” and “refrigerator” in front of their friends. I found it more difficult to pronounce the harsh Russian R’s than to put together the words written in Cyrillic block letters on scraps of paper.
Genres: Fantasy, Modern Fantasy
We dedicate these episodes to the memories of Kimberly Proctor and Tyeshia Jones.
Part 2:
The acoustics of the concrete stairwell magnify sounds ten-fold, a hundred-fold as Kyle climbs. His breath, his footsteps, the squeak of his hand on the steel railing reverberate, echoing up and down the depths of the great man-made cavern as he rises floor upon floor toward the Magician’s penthouse. I must be crazy, he thinks. The raw magnitude of The Magician’s sorcery is so powerful, the force of his will such that he must avoid contact with others, spend the majority of his time locked up in this tower lest he bend the world to his will with a stray thought. The light from improvised torches causes the spiral sigils and vaguely sinister runes inscribed on the walls to flicker and undulate like dancing demons. Kyle pauses. Stares up into the half-lit darkness. Then plods on.
A firefly glow on a landing far above: Kyle concentrates on it as he mounts step after step. Gradually the glow broadens until it defines the stairwell in a foliage of shadows. The rhythm of Kyle’s feet slow as he mounts the last set of stairs to a landing marked with a large number 13 painted on the wall in black. A ragged wall of cement chokes the stairwell leading up. The landing itself, lit by an improvised candelabra of paraffin-filled tin cans, is empty save for a young barefoot woman in a red evening gown who sits reading a book in a chair. She glances at Kyle, slips a black ribbon between the pages and leaves the leather-bound volume on the seat behind her as she rises.
“How do you enter the flames, child?” she asks.
(Continue Reading…)
Genres: Fantasy, Modern Fantasy
Part 1:
“ … out the windows on the left you’ll see the recent construction across the tops of the factory and high-rise buildings where the more powerful Infernals have established themselves as a kind of informal aristocracy. Originally called Morningside, this neighborhood was abandoned when the factory closed. But when our City passed laws regulating the Infernals, many moved here because of their restrictions on to employment, welfare, housing and healthcare. The majority live at street level, in poverty. High crime rates, addiction and violence remain ongoing concerns among this population of supernatural beings …”
Kyle transforms his thirty-seventh cigarette butt into a geranium as Sick Willy talks to the police.
“Oh yeah she slummed around with us. A lotta rich kids do. Come and walk on the wild side, spend a night in the shelter before running home to mom and dad. Figured she was no different.”
“Oh she’s different all right.” Harriman, the cop, flicks an irritated glance at Kyle as a geranium drops to the sidewalk. “Different enough to wind up dead.”
“She was a nice kid.”
“The murdered ones usually are. When was the last time you saw her?”
Kyle remembers. It was night before last at the park where they went to score dope from a Grower with power over the Earth elementals. They watched him stick a few seeds in the ground, incant and, five minutes later, hand over a bag of fresh rich buds. Kyle, Sick Willie, Trad, Gryphon and Kimberly, the new girl. The rich girl. The dead one.
Genres: Fantasy
Starburst Magazine’s Bookworm Podcast.
Can We Watch It Again podcast.
Emma Thompson’s Donor’s Choose project.
Lord Hanvord of Proustof was for a very short time one of the richest men in the world. A load of gold of monumental proportions was discovered in the southern part of his kingdom which increased his treasury a thousand-fold.
Lord Hanvord’s first act after hearing the news was to arrest the owner of the land for treason and confiscate the mine. There was much grumbling of the eight remaining noblemen in Proustof and Lord Hanvord began to have doubts over condemning the man to die.
The night before the beheading, he visited the condemned man in the dungeons. At this point, the castle itself was a disheveled mess, with moss growing in the royal bedroom and three families of foxes who dwelled between the cloak room and kitchen. The dungeon, as one might expect, was the pits.
Congratulations to Chris Lewis Carter and the Camp Myth RPG for making the ENnie Award short list in the Best Family Game category!
The ENnies are a series of fan-created awards for tabletop RPGs given every year at GenCon in Indianapolis.
Good luck, Chris!! Felix, Argee and Moxie are rooting for you!
Genres: Fantasy
The man sitting at my left, Parl, groaned a curse while the stool to my right cooled. I’d be cursing, too, if my luck had been as bad as his. The stack of five-khorr coins he’d started with had shrunk to half its size in the short while we’d been sitting together.
I glanced over my shoulder. No one was walking our way through the bar—one of dozens like it in the frontier towns of the Jandar nations.
“That your whole bankroll?”
He shot me the “stupid girl” look I knew far too well. “Of course not.”
I nodded and pulled out a handful of twenty-khorr coins. As Parl’s eyes widened, I took another quick look around the room before leaning in toward him. “Here’s what we do. If I’m playing heads, I’ll cover the coin with both hands. Tails, with just one.” I mimed covering a coin with only my left hand. “Got it?”
Genres: Fantasy, Modern Fantasy
Everything was going perfectly. My prom dress was a shimmery hunter-green ballgown that matched my eyes and I’d spent over an hour at the salon, getting my usually frizzy red hair tamed into elegant ringlets. Theo’s jaw actually dropped at his first glimpse of my transformation from scruffy tomboy to fairy-tale princess. We were officially going together as friends, but he was as flatteringly attentive as a real date all throughout dinner and the dancing that followed. A few people even proclaimed us a “cute couple.”
In short, it was as magical a senior prom as any girl could want, right up until the moment the prom queen spontaneously combusted.
Chaos ensued.
(Continue Reading…)
Genres: Fantasy, Modern Fantasy
Theme music is “Appeal To Heavens” by Alexye Nov, available at MusicAlley.com.
By late afternoon the day was hot, hot and hot, my feet burning up through flimsy red canvas shoes. My skin too, even with its built-in mocha café au lait sunscreen, out all day with no protection but a nondescript outfit topped with my stifling jean jacket. I kept that between me and prying eyes, always.
The last of my water went down warm and barely dented the void in my stomach. A police chopper flew overhead but I didn’t look up, just hunched deeper into my jacket before turning into the Joe’s Hot Dog Heaven parking lot. I was scared and running, sure, but the cops weren’t looking for me. No one was.
Aging picnic tables crouched at the edge of the lot were splintered and stained, but still looked more welcoming than the street. Crumpled napkins and used cups littered the gravel under my feet but the place felt safe enough. We used it as an after-school refuge when classes were on. The owner kept the place free from the worst trash; you wouldn’t step on a needle here. I needed shelter and this place, surrounded by dust and wild day lilies, was as close as I would get. Settling against the shaded wall at the back of the lot with relief, I closed my eyes against the day. Lord, my feet hurt.
“Come with us.”
(Continue Reading…)
Genres: Fantasy
The old woman in the wheelchair has a brutal face and hands as soft as the mother of all children.
“You will be more than a warrior, little one,” she whispers in German, her delicate and wrinkled fingertips sewing a pressed metal button into his left ear. “You will be a guardian. You will protect more than tender flesh and frail bodies. You will be the sentinel that stands between the darkness and innocence itself.”
With eyes made of glass and wood he sees her thin, withered lips form the words. He cannot hear her; his ears, even the one with the signature button, were not made to hear, just as his mouth was not made to speak. However the small stuffed bear finds he understands her; the meaning of her words, if not the words themselves.
