Ember Randall

In the near future, with water running out and large swaths of land turning into desert, the Bureau of Reclamation has turned to helping communities relocate. Thorn, a long-term employee of the Bureau, is tasked with moving a Santa Fe neighborhood. It should be an easy task, except for one small issue: the community flat-out refuses to relocate. If Thorn can’t convince them to find a new home, none of them will survive for long, but how can she convince them to leave the place they’ve called home for generations?

Read Thorn’s story in Drips of Hope, published in the anthology Solar Flare.

When you’re a familiar, your person’s happiness is your primary charge, even if they’re too dense to see what’s right in front of their nose. For Terrix, a feline familiar for the witch Melissa, and Alfonsius, Death’s owl, that’s the obvious affection between their two people. Yet neither Melissa or Death seem to realize that the other is interested. Clearly, Terrix and Alfonsius must fix that!

Read or listen to their attempts to bring their people together in Match.cat, published by CatsCast.

Gender apocalypse (noun): a catastrophic event that affects a single gender, almost always in a binary way.

Trans-inclusive gender apocalypse (noun): a catastrophe that targets people based on gender in all its squishy, multi-variate complexities.

For the folk in this story, a gender-based apocalypse was never something they thought they’d deal with. But, as flowers grow out of the bodies of anyone who identifies as a man, the cast begins to realize that they may have more to bring to the table than they’d thought. Read or listen to their story in Notes from a Trans-Inclusive Gender Apocalypse, published by Cast of Wonders.

For years, Aquila has been the best librarian she can possibly be, until the sudden loss of the library’s magic throws everything into chaos. The flight of the newest books would be bad enough, but the discovery that something is preying on those books, leaving nothing but husks behind? Without magic, Aquila has no way to speak, but somehow she must find the monster that’s invaded the library before it’s too late.

Listen to or read Aquila’s story in On the Tip of Her Tongue, published by Cast of Wonders.

As a time mage, Rowan O’Carroll knows one thing better than anyone: never mess with the timestream. But, to protect their friends, they may have to do just that. But, when the repercussions threaten the safety of every part-blood Fae in Londinium, they face a reckoning — either they can undo their changes and let their best friend die, or see every part-Fae like them suffer.

Or, maybe, they can find a different path. But it will take all the ingenuity they can muster.

Learn what they choose in Tempus Reverso, published by Abyss and Apex.

A young phoenix whose flame burns brightest while in the service of others. A kelpie who will lure you to a watery ride, though it might be your last. A dragon who sees the best in everyone except the one who matters most… and transformed toys struggling to survive and learn the secrets behind their existence in an eerie mash-up of the myths of the Wild Hunt and St. Nicholas’s traditions.

Read the story of those toys in Paint the Void, published in Selections of Anthropomorphic Regalements: Vol 1s. Then enjoy ten other anthropomorphic tales of courage and destiny!

All Kaena children must spend a year abroad before earning their adult name. Ystara, a young healer, thinks that’ll be easy — until she arrives in the hostile human city of Little Rialor and realizes that the humans shun her magical gifts. And her empathic magic, always, is acting up…

Find out how Ystara navigates her new home in Healer’s Trial, published in Aurealis Issue #127.

Three planets, devastated by war and exhausted from a years-long struggle. One training center to bring them together and find new resources. What could possibly go wrong?

As you’ll see in One Easy Trick for Creating Inter-Planetary Unity, everything.

In Victorian-era Londinium, being a part-blood Fae requires walking a dangerous tightrope. For Rowan O’Carroll, the danger doubles when they find an artifact that appears to turn their roommate into a statue, leaving them little time to find a cure before the matrons at the boarding school discover the issue. If they’re outed as Faeblooded, it could be the difference between success and a life on the streets.

Join Rowan for their origin story in Tempus Erratum, published in the wonderful anthology Temporally Deactivated by Zombies Need Brains. You can order the ebook version or the paperback version now!

When you’re trapped on a prison moon with no way to escape and a host of unruly prisoners to watch over, what do you do? Warden’s Dilemma, published in the third edition of Future SF, answers that question, at least for one AI. Admittedly, said AI may not be the best person, but they’d prefer to call themself misunderstood, thank you very much.

The Society of Misfit Stories Presents… is a unique periodical of long form fiction published three times a year. Each issue provides an eclectic collection of novelette and novella-length speculative and literary fiction. This issue includes the story Tempus Cessat, a novelette set in a Victorian-era version of London where the Fae and humans coexist uneasily and one young part-Fae struggles to protect their chosen family.

The first edition is available in both ebook and paperback!