#eco fantasy

[slugaccidentallywrites]

sorry for being mia! i've been working on a book!! here's a little snippet of the first chapter!

TW: dead rabbit!!!

[cgaubrey]

Reckoning 9 – Submission Call | Reckoning

Reckoning 9 is open for general submissions! There is no specific theme for this issue; if your work concerns any aspect of environmental ju

Very excited to share that I will be co-editing the 9th issue of Reckoning: a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. We love speculative works (cli-fi, eco fantasy, etc), poetry, art, and creative nonfiction. We are always seeking work from Indigenous writers and artists, racialized writers and artists, queer, trans and/or disabled writers and artists, and anyone, anywhere in the world, who has suffered the consequences, intended or otherwise, of dominant society’s systemic disconnect with and mistreatment of the natural world. (-from Reckoning's website)

[secretsofnature]

Chapter 4: The Vigil

I dreamed in green.

Not the green of living things, not leaf-filtered light or new grass, but something deeper and older, the green that exists below soil, in the dark where roots remember. I dreamed of the oldest root, the severed one, and in the dream I could see where it had been cut, a clean wound still pale at the edges, a thing that had bled slowly for generations and not stopped.

I woke with my cheek against bark and the forest breathing underneath me.

Morrigan was already awake, or perhaps he had never slept. He was perched above me in the dark, his shadow angling wrong in the early light, his green eyes steady on the Hollowreach.

'The first weeks are the hardest,' he said, when he saw me move. Not a comfort. A statement of fact, the way you might warn someone about weather.

I sat up and pressed my palm flat against the root beside me. The warmth was still there, patient and unremarkable, the warmth of a living thing that had simply waited long enough.

'What do I do first,' I said.

'You listen,' he said. 'That is always first.'

Learning to listen turned out to be the hardest thing I had ever done.

It was like having a thousand new senses all screaming for attention at once. The forest did not communicate the way I had expected, not in words or images but in sensation, pressure and temperature and wrongness, the way you feel before you hear a sound that is too low to name. I spent the first days with a headache that settled behind my eyes and did not leave, the kind of pain that comes from concentrating on something that has no edges.

Morrigan guided me through it with the patience of something that has done this before and knows the shape of the struggle.

'Your grandfather was better at this by now,' he said one morning, as I stood in the Vennwood trying to isolate the signal from a distressed oak whose roots were being strangled by erosion.

'My grandfather had seventy years of practice,' I said. 'Give me a break.'

He did not give me a break. But he did not leave, either, and I was beginning to understand those were the same thing.

I learned to quiet my mind and let the forest speak without it becoming noise. I learned to identify threats, a patch of blight spreading through a stand of beech, a corrupted spring, the particular quality of wrongness that meant something was moving at the boundaries where it should not be. I learned to work with the forest's creatures, who were sometimes helpful and sometimes cryptic in the particular way of things that have been around long enough to find directness tedious.

And I learned about the Hollow King.

My grandfather's journals had only scratched the surface. The Hollow King had been imprisoned for three hundred years, but he was not inactive. He spent every moment of his captivity pressing at the edges of his prison, sending whispers through the cracks, trying to corrupt the forest from within. What I had not understood from the journals, what I could not have understood until I felt it myself, was the quality of that presence.

I could feel him sometimes, especially late at night when the Vennwood went still. A cold thing at the edge of my awareness, patient in the way that only something without a body can be patient. He did not think like a person. He did not think like the fae. He thought like an ending, like the silence after the last note of a song fades and does not come back.

He was waiting. He had always been waiting. He had three hundred years of practice at it.

One month into my guardianship, I learned what a real threat felt like.

I woke in the middle of the night to a sensation of wrongness so complete it had no bottom to it, just depth and depth and more depth, the feeling of something wrong all the way down. I grabbed the iron rifle my grandfather had left, one of the few weapons that could harm fae creatures, and ran into the forest. Morrigan flew ahead, cawing directions.

We found the breach at one of the Standing Stones. A thing was trying to claw through the barrier, a creature made of shadow and a hunger that was not quite hunger because it had forgotten what satisfaction felt like. Its form shifted and reformed constantly, unable to hold a shape. Where its claws touched the earth, the grass died.

'Hollow-touched,' Morrigan said. His voice was flat, careful. 'A victim of the King's corruption. It's trying to break the wards.'

The creature was faster than I expected. It lunged and I barely rolled aside, its claws leaving furrows in the ground where I had been standing, the earth going grey and dead in long parallel lines.

I did not think about what I did next. The forest answered before I had finished reaching for it, the power coming through me like a current, something that had been waiting at the edge of my hands since the moment I pressed my palm to that first root in the Hollowreach. Vines erupted from the earth and wrapped the creature tight.

The thing shrieked and thrashed. Its touch withered the vines even as they held. I fired, and the iron tore through its shadow-form, and it screamed again, a sound like glass forgetting how to be glass, and then it was nothing.

I stood in the clearing with the rifle still raised and the Standing Stone behind me and Morrigan on a branch above, looking down.

'Not bad,' he said, after a moment. 'For your first real threat. Though you used too much power. You'll be exhausted for days.'

He was right. I barely made it back to the cabin before my legs gave out. I slept for eighteen hours, and when I woke, he was on my windowsill, watching the forest with those old, steady eyes.

'That won't be the last,' he said. 'The King is testing you. Testing the new binding. He wants to know how strong you are, how quickly you tire, how well you can hold the compact.'

'Can he break free?' I asked.

Morrigan was quiet for a moment.

'If you fail enough times, yes,' he said. 'The prison is only as strong as its guardian. Your grandfather was powerful, but he was also old. The binding weakened in his final years. Now it's your strength that holds the King in place, and he knows you're untested.'

'So what do I do?'

'You get stronger. You learn. You survive.' He hopped closer along the sill. 'And you accept that this is your life now. There's no going back, Kit. You're the guardian. The only one standing between the world and what he would do to it if he got out.'

I looked out at the forest. I could feel it like a second heartbeat in my chest, steady and patient and ancient, the rhythm I had first felt in the Hollowreach pressed up through the soles of my feet.

I thought about my grandmother, who had stood in the oldest part of these woods and felt this same warmth and chosen her daughter over it.

I thought about my mother, who had stood in the Thornring and turned around.

I thought about the eight-year-old version of me, who had promised to stay on the trail and felt something come untied inside her chest when she said it.

Three generations of women standing at the edge of this. And then me.

'Then I'd better get to work,' I said.

So began what I came to think of as my real education.

The attacks continued. Sometimes hollow-touched creatures, sometimes corrupted spirits, occasionally something stranger and more dangerous that I did not have a name for and Morrigan would not supply one. I fought them all, and I got better, not gracefully but incrementally, the way you get better at anything you have to do or die.

I learned to channel the forest's power without burning through myself. I learned the rhythms of the compact, the ebb and flow of old magic through the Standing Stones. I learned which creatures could be trusted and which were already compromised, working at angles I could not always see.

The fae lords visited periodically, their shadow-forms coalescing in the Heart Wood to assess me. They were not warm and they were not cold. They were simply ancient and pragmatic, and I was a function to them, a necessary component of something that had been running longer than any human institution. As long as I performed the function, they were satisfied.

Morrigan, for all his complaints, became something like a companion. He had served three generations of guardians, he told me, and each had been different. My grandmother had been fierce and uncompromising. My grandfather had been patient and scholarly.

'And me?' I asked.

'Stubborn,' he said.

'Is that a compliment?'

'It is an observation,' he said. Then, after a pause: 'In this work, it will probably serve you.'

I decided to take it as a compliment anyway.

The seasons turned. I marked time by the forest's changes rather than any calendar, the budding of spring, the heaviness of summer, the long slow surrender of autumn, the quiet of winter when the Vennwood went still and I could feel the Hollow King most clearly, cold and patient at the edges of everything.

Each cycle made me feel more deeply rooted. More aware of the ancient rhythms beneath the surface, the ones that had been running before my family existed, before anyone had thought to name them.

And beneath all of it, steady as a pulse, I could feel the oldest root. The severed one. The wound that had been bleeding for generations.

I didn't know yet what came next. But the Hollowreach had told me, in the way it told me things, slowly and through the soles of my feet, that next was coming.

The Hollow King was waiting.

So was I.

[secretsofnature]

Chapter Three: What the Roots Remember

After the Reclaimer left, we sat.

There wasn't a discussion about it. My legs simply stopped working in any useful direction, and Morrigan, perhaps recognizing this as a reasonable response to the last several hours of my life, settled beside me against the base of one of the enormous trunks. The bark was warm. Not the intentional warmth of the cedar, not a pulse or a signal, just warmth, the way a living thing is warm when it has been alive long enough.

I leaned into it without deciding to.

The Hollowreach breathed around us, slow and deep, that low resonance moving through the roots under my boots and up through the back of my jacket and into my spine. I was starting to be able to separate it from my own heartbeat. They had different rhythms. The forest's was slower. More patient. The kind of rhythm that has outlasted everything that has ever tried to interrupt it.

"My mother," I said, when I had enough breath to say anything at all.

Morrigan was looking at the dark between the trees, his green eyes steady, his hands resting loose on his knees. He had shifted back into the human shape fully, or as fully as he ever did, which I was realizing meant that the feathers were gone from the edges of his shadow but the shadow still behaved slightly wrong, angling away from the ambient light rather than toward it.

"What about her," he said. It wasn't quite a question.

"You said the Vennwood remembered her."

"It did."

"She's lived next to these woods her whole life," I said. "She's never once gone off the trail. She thinks the forest is something you look at from a safe distance and appreciate from behind glass." I paused. "She made me promise, when I was eight, that I wouldn't go past the ridge alone."

Morrigan was quiet for a moment. "And how many times have you broken that promise?"

"That's not the point."

"How many times," he said again, patient as geology.

I looked at the roots under my feet, wide and pale in the dark, smooth as old bone. "Hundreds," I admitted. "Maybe more."

He nodded slowly, as though this confirmed something.

"Your mother was called," he said. "When she was young. Not much older than you are now." He paused, and the pause had the quality of something being chosen carefully, the right words from a language with too many options. "She came as far as the Thornring. She stood in it for a long time. And then she walked back to the trail and kept walking, and she did not come back."

Something cold moved through me that had nothing to do with the temperature.

"She chose to leave," I said.

"She chose not to stay," Morrigan said, which sounded like the same thing but wasn't. "The Vennwood does not hold that against her. It does not deal in judgment. It only records."

"But it grieved," I said, remembering what he had told me, slowly, in the dark, through roots.

"Yes," he said. Simply, without cushioning it.

I sat with that for a while. The forest breathed. Somewhere far above us, something moved through the canopy, not the Greywalkers, something lighter, something that belonged here, a sound like water over stone repeated at a great height.

"What about her mother?" I asked. "My grandmother."

Morrigan turned to look at me then. There was something in his face I hadn't seen before, not reluctance exactly, more like the expression of someone who is about to hand you something heavier than it looks.

"Your grandmother came," he said. "She came all the way to the Hollowreach."

I stared at him. "She was here."

"She stood where you are standing." He glanced at the root beneath my hand. "That trunk you are leaning against, she leaned against it too. She was here for three days."

"Three days." The number sat strangely in my mouth. "What happened?"

"She learned what the Vennwood wanted," he said. "She understood it. And then something in the world outside pulled her back, something she could not leave behind, and she went."

"What pulled her back?"

Morrigan looked at me steadily. "Your mother," he said. "Who was very young at the time, and sick, and needed her."

The breath went out of me slowly.

I thought about my mother, who hated the woods, who had made me promise at eight years old, who kept the curtains on the forest side of the house closed in winter when the trees went bare and the dark came early. I thought about all the years I had assumed her wariness was just fear, just the ordinary human impulse to stay on the path, stay on the side of things that had names and edges and rules.

I thought about what it might feel like to be a child whose mother had gone into the forest and come back different. Quieter. Turned slightly away from everything, the way a compass needle turns.

"She never told me," I said.

"No," Morrigan agreed. "I don't think she knew how." He was quiet for a moment. "Or perhaps she knew that telling you would not keep you out of the woods. And she had already learned that nothing else would either."

I laughed, short and a little painful. "She tried. Every summer. Every year."

"The Vennwood is patient," he said, and there was something almost fond in it, or the closest thing to fond that a voice like his produced. "It knew you would come. It has been knowing for a long time."

"Is that supposed to be comforting?"

"It is supposed to be true," he said. "Comfort is a different matter."

I pulled my knees up and rested my arms on them, looking out into the Hollowreach. The dark here was extraordinary, not oppressive, just complete, the kind of dark that doesn't apologize for being dark. The massive trunks rose into it and disappeared. The roots spread out from them in every direction, and here and there, faintly, they glowed, a pale blue that was less like light and more like the idea of light, something the wood was remembering rather than producing.

"What did my grandmother learn?" I asked. "About what the Vennwood wanted."

Morrigan considered this for a long moment. Long enough that I understood this was not evasion. It was a real consideration, the process of translating something vast into something I could hold.

"The Vennwood is not well," he said at last. "You know this. You have felt it, the Greywalkers, the imbalance, the way the old patterns are fraying at the edges." He paused. "It has been unwell for a long time. Longer than your grandmother's life. Longer than several of your grandmother's lives."

"What made it sick?"

"The same thing that makes most old things sick," he said. "It was separated from what it needed. There is a root, the oldest root, the one that connects the Vennwood to the larger network of living things beneath this land, that was severed. Not by accident. Deliberately. By someone who understood exactly what they were cutting." His jaw tightened, fractionally. "It was a very long time ago. The who of it matters less now than the what."

"And the what is that the forest has been sick ever since."

"Slowly, progressively, yes." He looked at the glowing roots around us. "The Hollowreach holds. But the outer wood, the part you know, the part your mother knows, it has been changing for generations. The Greywalkers are a symptom of that. So is the Reclaimer coming closer to the surface than it should."

"What did my grandmother understand about fixing it?"

"That it cannot be fixed from inside," he said. "The Vennwood can sustain itself, but it cannot repair that root alone. It needs something from the outside. Something that belongs to both worlds." He stopped.

I waited.

"Something like a person," I said, "who has been walking these woods her whole life and felt them like a second heartbeat, and whose grandmother and mother before her were called and almost answered."

Morrigan did not say yes. He didn't need to. The Hollowreach said it for him, that slow resonant breath moving through the roots and up into the base of my spine, the forest's patient rhythm syncing briefly, just briefly, with mine.

I pressed my palm flat against the root beside me.

It was warm.

Not the cedar's warmth, not a signal or a welcome. Older than that. The warmth of something that has been waiting a very long time and has just, quietly, recognized that the waiting might be over.

"I still don't know how," I said.

"No," Morrigan agreed. "That is what comes next."

He rose to his feet, and his shadow moved with him, angling wrong, feathers ghosting briefly at its edges before settling.

"Rest," he said. "The Hollowreach will hold tonight. Nothing that means you harm can reach you here." He looked down at me, those green eyes steady and old and something else now, something with a longer name than I had yet. "You are not a lost thing, Kit Lapierre. You are not a stolen thing. But you are not yet what the Vennwood needs you to be." A pause, measured and deliberate. "That is what tomorrow is for."

He moved away into the dark, not far, just far enough to give me the silence.

I sat with my palm on the root and the forest breathing around me and thought about my grandmother, who had stood in this exact place and pressed her hand against this exact trunk and felt this exact warmth, and had chosen her daughter over it.

I thought about my mother, who had stood in the Thornring and turned around.

I thought about the eight-year-old version of myself, who had promised to stay on the trail and felt something pull loose inside her chest when she said it, like a knot coming untied.

Three generations of women standing at the edge of this.

And then me, sitting in the middle of it, in the oldest part of a forest that had been waiting longer than my family had existed, with a crow who was not a crow asleep somewhere in the dark above me and the slow certain pulse of something ancient moving through the soles of my feet.

I did not sleep for a long time.

But when I finally did, I dreamed in green.

[theenglishnook]

Pastoral fantasy envisions enchanted countrysides where magic meets daily labor. Fields remember, seasons guide, and heroism becomes care, offering gentle refuge and fragile harmony rooted in place.

PASTORAL FANTASY

[bookstattoosandtea]

Blog Tour, Exclusive Excerpt & Giveaway: Heart Wood by Katey Hawthorne

Blog Tour, Exclusive Excerpt & Giveaway: Heart Wood By Katey Hawthorne The Stone City and the Heart Wood: uneasy neighbors separated by the Bluebird River. In the City, Hendrik is about to lose the only life he’s ever known, the only love he’s ever wanted. In the Wood, corruption threatens the carefully cultivated ecosystem and Dagan’s way of life. Two worlds, fated to collide at last. It could…

Blog Tour, Exclusive Excerpt & Giveaway: Heart Wood by Katey Hawthorne

[bookstattoosandtea]

Release Blitz, Excerpt & Giveaway: Heart Wood by Katey Hawthorne

Release Blitz, Excerpt & Giveaway: Heart Wood By Katey Hawthorne The Stone City and the Heart Wood: uneasy neighbors separated by the Blue Bird River. In the City, Hendrik is about to lose the only life he’s ever known, the only love he’s ever wanted. In the Wood, corruption threatens the carefully cultivated ecosystem and Dagan’s way of life. Two worlds, fated to collide at last. It could be…

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[africanmorning]

"A Cappella Voice" — Excerpt

A lanky Wyrhan with coiled braids of hot pink hair careened nir torso over a ruddy Magnai attendant’s desk, causing the variety of colorful stud and dangling chain earrings lining the length of nir pointed albino ears to shake and glitter in the sky’s ambient purple light. Ne casually cast nir gaze around the open field that was already beginning to fill with Ecei, Magnai, Salians, and Wyrhans setting up their stalls. 

“Name?” the attendant asked with practiced patience.

“‘Yihen,’” ne responded, not even bothering to look back at him as ne spoke.  “Y-I-H-E-N. Just that. The ‘A’ is silent.” 

The attendant, who had dutifully started writing the name on his list of vendors, stopped in confusion. “What ‘A’?”

“Exactly—that’s the spirit!” Yihen cheerfully slapped the man’s bulky bicep and sauntered off into the crowd before he could say another word.

Ne sang a light, airy tune as ne bobbed and swayed through the assembling stands. 

Another Wyrhan, catching a glimpse of Yihen’s strange technicolor outfit that seemed to gather and billow in the most inconvenient places, couldn’t help but stare as ne passed. Her own fashion expressed itself with a blue frost on the tips of her short white hair and some trendy-yet-tasteful accents on a slender, short-sleeved jumpsuit that left the snowy patch of feathers on both her elbows exposed. Yihen noted the female earring neatly placed beneath the lone Apprentice and Adept badges on her right ear. Her frown at Yihen’s unusual appearance deepened when ne politely tilted nir own bedazzled ears for her to see, then furrowed into a scowl of disgust at the sight of nir earrings for all three sexes clustered in the same spot where she wore her one.

Ne looked her in the eye and grinned. Here in the cosmopolitan Ecei city of Fulmine, where Wyrhan laws no longer applied, ne knew she couldn’t do anything about it.

***

An excerpt from my short story, which was written for the Aegis of the Elements project as an audition piece for the position of Wyrhan writer and later published as a bonus story. You can find “A Cappella Voice” for sale as a PDF here or as an audio file here. If you’re new to the Aegis world, I highly recommend reading the free 5-page setting guide, which you can find here.