• The Bastard's Cathedral
    (Act I: The Ash and the Iron) The year was 1422, and the valley of Oakhaven was a graveyard of burnt villages and broken crosses. Cedric, the bastard son of a disgraced Earl, returned to his ancestral lands not with a plea for forgiveness, but with a sword of cold iron. He had spent ten years in the mercenary camps of the East, learning that the only true law was the edge of a blade and the...
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  • The Water Line
    I. The water was at my knees when I realized I was alone. That was the first thing. Not the storm, not the flood, not the fact that Manhattan was drowning. The first thing was the silence. No radio. No phone. No voice on the other end of anything. Just the sound of water moving through concrete tunnels and my own breathing, which sounded too loud in the empty dark. My name is Nick Delaney. I am...
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  • The Rust Belt
    The factory had been closed for ten years. The sign in front said SOUDER STEEL WORKS in letters that had once been blue but were now the colour of dried blood. The windows were all broken, and weeds grew through the cracks in the concrete parking lot like the earth was trying to reclaim what the steel had taken. Ray Kowalski sat in his truck outside the gate and watched a crow pick at something...
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  • The Observer at Five Points
    Case file #47: Margaret O'Brien, personal notes. Date: March 14, 1963. I did not want this job. I wanted to finish my degree at Columbia, like my father had wanted me to before the incident at the precinct that made finishing anything feel impossible. Instead I was sitting in a third-floor office above a laundromat on Broadway, typing up case reports for a man who treated the rules of criminal...
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  • The Black Signal
    I. The package arrived on a Tuesday, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, postmarked from nowhere I recognized. There was no return address. No note. Just my name, Jack Morretti, written in a hand that looked like it had been trained in a monastery and then ruined by whiskey. I opened it at the bar—Sal's Place, a dimly lit hole on Sunset Boulevard where the beer was warm and the patrons...
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  • Blood and Magnolias
    Magnolia Hall did not so much stand on the land as lean against it, the way a dying person leans against a wall that will not hold them. The porch sagged on its left side, where the pillars had rotted from the inside out, swollen with moisture and then collapsed, leaving the veranda to tilt like a ship taking on water. The magnolia trees that gave the estate its name had grown wild and tangled,...
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  • THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE RANGE
    The Mississippi delta in 1955 was the kind of place that remembered everything and forgave nothing. Captain Henry Ashworth drove through the swamp and oak trees, past abandoned plantations and collapsed sharecropper cabins, to a house that had once been grand and was now grand in ruin. Black Oak Manor sat at the end of a quarter-mile dirt road, surrounded by Spanish moss and memory. He had not...
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  • The Paper Trail of Silence
    (Epistolary Novel Variation) Dear Clara, I am writing this from a room that feels less like a home and more like a waiting room for the inevitable. The rain has been falling for six days, a relentless gray curtain that has erased the horizon. I can hear the clock ticking in the hallway, each second a small, precise hammer blow against the silence. You asked me why I left the city. I cannot tell...
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  • The Gilded Cage of Reason
    The city of Aethelgard was a monument to the Enlightenment, a place where reason was the only currency and logic the only law. In Aethelgard, the "Academy of Pure Thought" governed every aspect of existence, from the architecture of the streets to the frequency of the citizens' heartbeats. To feel was to be inefficient; to love was to be irrational. Julian was the Academy's most celebrated...
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  • Whispers on the Estate
    The heating in tower block seven broke on a Tuesday in November. By Thursday, the flat was cold enough that Sarah Murphy could see her breath indoors. She pulled her coat on inside and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders like a shawl and tried not to think about the bottle of whiskey in her cupboard. Manchester in 2008 was a city that had forgotten how to pretend. The financial crisis had...
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