SerahMarlowe

Were Tamasin altogether a less empathetic individual, she might have been tempted, when Armadeus stepped on the backs of her shoes, to repay her with a three-note spell to send her careening down six flights of stairs to snap her freckled neck like a branch in midwinter. But she understood, unwittingly, that this malice was only jealousy in disguise; Tamasin was far and away the best student at the Fata Morgana Academy of Magic, and Armadeus had never been able to keep herself from baiting Tamasin, taunting her the way a rabbit might taunt a fox, all the while half-expecting to be bitten. It was a comfort to Armadeus, Tamasin knew, that Tam

Sahsin was whispering, “You must do what I say, do you understand? She is wounded - there will never be another chance like this. If I die, you must run. Find another hunter. Scour all the world if you must.” “Sahsin, if you do not walk out of here, neither of us will.” “No,” Sahsin hissed. “Do not tie your life to mine. Run, if I am losing, and leave me.” “Then do not lose,” said Ziesl, angry still that she was here, angry that it was her fault after all, her inability to resist the vampir, that had led the two of them here to this furious, hushed conversation, to this fear cold

Death was a waltz atop a crimson sea, the waves a shifting ballroom floor, saltwater the color of heartsblood lashing her ankles, while the partner she thought was Dietrich whirled her around like the mad, rolling pupil of a wrong-wolf’s eye. There was no sky, no shore, no delicate music fit for a glittering concert hall, only the violent surge and churn of foam like scarlet lace gilding the tops of the swells. They danced an ever-widening spiral, their ankles never sinking into the boiling red heat, but when a wave splattered, the color of cinnabar, across Ziesl’s face, she tasted salt, and knew that it was not water upon which

The silence stretched between them. Finally, the girl said, “I admit you are not what I expected. At the very least, I thought you would be older, but it seems you are scarce older than I.” No one responded. Ziesl realized her mouth was hanging slightly open. The girl sniffed. “And I do not think much of your travelling companion.” That, at least, broke the silence. “Ziesl is…indispensable to us,” said Sahsin. She sounded like she’d been hit over the head, which, Ziesl supposed, she had. “Hmph,” said the girl. Then: “Înger and Liufrit said they had to wrest you from the

 “Would you like to talk?” It was Dietrich, kneeling on the ground before her. At some point she had slid down the tree to sit upon the blood-soaked earth, roused only at the jingle of the chain as two hands freed her. Her eyes cracked open to stare at his face, two eyes floating in an utterly crimson visage, a red silhouette against the silver firs. The sun had crept lower in the sky. There was a piece of spinal column in his hair. He was saying, very seriously, “I have never done this before…I do not know how to go about – well, whatever this is.” Ziesl blinked. After several seconds, she croaked, R

The village of Ungeheuerlich was a three-day journey from Erschütternd. As the sun rose and fell, the twins took turns hunting rabbits. Given that Ziesl could hardly transcribe anything without parchment, the twins had decided, in the meantime, to begin teaching her how to defend herself. Sahsin gave her a short silver dagger to keep in her belt beside her scribe’s knife, and every evening they switched off showing her where to stab and how to dodge. Nothing fancy – no footwork, no drawn-out sparring, nothing that was not immediately lethal. It was not, comparatively, an enormous amount of work, but it was more than shelving

The man in Die Scharlachroten Archive was drenched in blood, from the pointed leather toes of his boots to the silver bars glinting in his ears. “Verzeih mir, Fräulein,” he said. “I am looking for scrolls on vampir hunting.” A bead of blood, jewel-bright even in the gloom between the stacks, rolled off the tip of his nose and dripped onto the floorboards between them. He said, “It is purely theoretical.” The archivist’s eyes narrowed. Her grip shifted on the blade in her hand, narrow as a bone, still spattered with ink at the tip where she had been using it to sharpen her quill pen. “He

Ex-mercenary Alazaïs stood high on the gallows platform, divest of her silver rings, divest of her starseed chainmail, and with bound hands made the traditional minstrel’s salute from her heart to the lilac sky. There was a collective groan from the crowd. The villagers of La Morue were a tatty, death-loving bunch, apparently not over fond of minstrels, nor her, after her list of odd jobs – ‘crimes,’ in the words of the bailiff – had taken nearly an hour to read in full. Minstrels, she supposed, often used the question any last words? as an opportunity to showcase their final compositions, in the hopes tha

At the heart of the Red City, there is an egg made of glass. In St. Petersburg, it is whispered, the egg is a hospital. The egg is a museum. The egg holds Death, the Glorious Death of our Most Glorious Czar, carved out of him raw and laid wet upon velvet like the crimson tarot spread of organs atop a butcher’s table, so that he may never die and St. Petersburg’s spires and domes may, too, stand eternal. It is whispered that the egg is a theater – the Teatr Steklyannykh Yaits– private theater of our Most Glorious Czar, wherein he watches with piercing eye performances to play the heart like a balalaika. Opera, perhaps,

At the scorching heart of the Cobalt Desert, L’Esqueleta rides her horse of smokestrung sinew, wrapped in strings of rusted bells and crystal soul jars that ring together with a sound like to bring you to your knees. Her face is yellow bone, she’s dressed all in midnight, and at her throat a silver skeleton key dangles like a burning star, is how the story goes, though I don’t reckon there’s any other kind of star. Cobalt, we say, because here the sands are blue as glass, blue as heat, blue as the stillborn ananuca flowers trailing all withered-like from the hems of L’Esqueleta’s skirts, as many skirts as t