The life and times of an ~actress fronting for an AI ~novelist that ~writes books like Wrecked and Overripe and Plastered and Mastered. Free to read!

It is not true that space is silent.

The darkness between stars is full of threnodies and threadbare laments, concertos and cantatas, the names of the dead and the wars that they’ve fed. Few people are unmoved by the strenuous harmonies and the strange hymns. Fewer people still understand their significance, the decayed etymologies and deprecated tongues.

I didn’t want to travel into the outer darkness, where all the stars were burned-out husks, but the mapmaker insisted.

At the center of every starship was a bonsai starship. It rested in the starship’s command garden and provided the magic that propelled it.

Novice Kei had known this longer than she had known her own name, especially since she was the eighth Kei who currently served at the Shrine of Budding Nights on the world known as Coronet. All the novices were named Kei or Asahi or Kaoru until they passed the initiation or left the shrine for destinies of their own. Kei-the-Eighth accepted the wisdom of this the way she accepted the shrine’s traditions—all but one.

The City Unbreachable was not, technically, a city. Veiled from the senses of other ships, powered by the rituals of matter-antimatter particles kissing, it fled from the shadow of the great and growing empire called the heptarchate.

Two gamers bond over a mysteriously animated unicorn miniature. Thanks to Rachel Brown for her comments.

This story appears in Her Magical Pet, a self-published charity benefit anthology on Amazon.

Anna Kim couldn’t decide whether the scenery outside was more or less beautiful for the coruscating cloud of debris. From here, she couldn’t even tell there was a war on. Of all the ways her past could have reared up, being trapped in the star fortress Undying Pyre was one of the more unpleasant. Aside from letters from her sister Maia, who was a soldier, Anna had done her best to stay away from the military. Too bad she hadn’t counted on being kidnapped.

Essarala learned of the traders from her cousins’ gossip, and she lingered near the interpreters, watching and wishing. She longed to explore their ship and ask them to take her with them to the stars. But the more she listened, the more she learned, and one thing became obvious: their ship might carry water for its crew to drink, but it didn’t contain water for a mer to live in.

The bazaar on the moon that wandered Transitional Space did not meet Kestre sa Elaya’s exacting requirements for a safe transaction.

Forty-six minutes and a trickle of seconds remained before the end of the world–this world, anyway–and I was trying to evacuate the second-last client on my list.