letters from the archive, in no particular hurry
by SepiaLore
He had a song powerful enough to make the dead listen. He used it to bring his wife back. One condition: he could not look at her until they reached the light. So he walked first. She followed in silence....
Read the story →by SepiaLore
They stole a lord's son and returned him to the world as a joke. Before he could remember his father's house, men cut a smile into his face and left him in the snow. Years later, crowds would pay to...
Read the story →by SepiaLore
A king had closed the land and sea, so a father looked upward and found the only road left open. He made it from feathers, thread, and wax. While he worked, his son played beside him, catching feathers as they...
Read the story →by SepiaLore
They burned books because books had a bad habit of making people unhappy. Not unhappy in the way a wound makes you unhappy. In the worse way. They made a person stop in the middle of an ordinary life and...
Read the story →by SepiaLore
A man loses his face in an accident and spends his days behind bandages, wondering when the world stopped seeing him. Then he is given another one. With the new face, strangers smile. Doors open. The city forgets to be...
Read the story →by SepiaLore
Three times a day, Daniel opened his window and prayed toward a city he could no longer see. They found nothing in his life to condemn, so they made the prayer a crime. That night, a king lay awake in...
Read the story →by SepiaLore
It was one in the morning when his eyes opened. Rain against the windows. A candle almost gone. A man standing over him, the only face he had ever seen. Then the man ran away. The Creature had not yet...
Read the story →by SepiaLore
Every dance ever danced has ended. That is what a dance is, beauty spent as it is made, kept by no one, gone by dark. But once, in a brick city on the Indus, a girl danced in the evenings,...
Read the story →