The Chaos Village – Part 2

By M.K. Hutchins

Sarsa was cooking some kind of coarse flatbread — it appeared to be made of wild roots and ground wild seeds — on a griddle slanted up toward the storage pit. Her hut was mostly empty otherwise, packed up into neat baskets still sitting outside the door. When she flipped a flatbread, it fell slightly sideways, hitting the tilted griddle squarely. The smoke didn’t rise straight up, but at an angle away from the storage pit and out the narrow window. That explained the lack of soot stains on the ceiling.

She didn’t look up as Rob stepped off the ladder. “Are you ready to apologize, young lady?”

“I’m not a young lady.”

(Continue Reading…)

The Chaos Village — Part 1

By M.K. Hutchins

The ground under Rob’s feet shifted from sand to jagged shale and back again. The mountains folded into valleys, then spiked into cliffs. The green clouds turned into triangles and tried to stab him in the back, but crumpled and fell off.

Rob turned another page in his notebook, skimming his research notes. Thanks to the natural Order present in all humans, his own body and the things he held didn’t randomly transform in the Chaos. But despite pages and pages of lovely charts and neatly-labeled columns, he couldn’t say much more about Chaos than that.

(Continue Reading…)

The Thirty-Seven Faces of Tokh-Bathon

by Effie Seiberg

I’ve counted eleven thousand, six hundred and fifty-two tiny soldiers carved in marble relief on the outer walls that ring the temple, though I’ve only named seventeen of them. Each one has a pointed headpiece, a carved cloth sampot, and at least one weapon. In preparation for the Reason Ritual I must polish them all, Baaun Oupom had said, and I cannot afford to anger him again.

(Continue Reading…)