Just a girl who walks dogs and hangs out in cemeteries. Stay feral, y'all.
In a city that never slept, there was one woman who had been awake longer than almost everyone in it. Her name was Lenora Vale, although it had not always been. Over the centuries she had answered to Lenora, Leonora, Eleanor, Nora, and once, during a particularly inconvenient decade in France, Madame Valois. Names changed.... Continue Reading →
Elara had been a witch for twenty-seven years before she finally accepted that she probably wasn't getting a familiar. It wasn't that every witch had one. Plenty didn't. Familiars were not magical accessories handed out alongside cauldrons and suspiciously large collections of jars. They came when they came, if they came at all, and supposedly... Continue Reading →
The first thing Melinda noticed was the blue door. It shouldn't have been blue. She had lived across from Mrs. Bell's house for eleven years, and the front door had always been red. Not burgundy. Not faded crimson. Red. Mrs. Bell had once joked that she kept it that colour so she could find her... Continue Reading →
Everyone in the village knew not to follow music into the hills. Children were taught it before they were old enough to understand why. Never step inside a ring of mushrooms after sunset. Never eat food offered beneath a hawthorn tree. Never answer when someone calls your name from an empty field. And above all,... Continue Reading →
Long before cheerful little men in red hats began appearing beside garden ponds and flower beds, European folklore imagined something considerably stranger living beneath the ground. They were small, secretive beings connected to the earth and the riches hidden inside it. They knew places human beings could not reach. They moved through stone, guarded underground... Continue Reading →
The sea had always given something back. Sometimes it was driftwood, bleached white and smooth after years beneath the waves. Sometimes it was sea glass, cloudy green fragments polished until their sharp edges disappeared. After storms, the women of Blackwater Island walked the shoreline collecting whatever the ocean had surrendered during the night - shells,... Continue Reading →
For most of her life, Mara Vale believed magic belonged to other women. It belonged to the women in her grandmother’s stories. The ones who could coax fever from a child with a bowl of water, who knew which herbs to hang above a doorway, who dreamed of visitors before they arrived and could tell... Continue Reading →
The first thing Aveline learned about immortality was that everyone who dreamed of it imagined the wrong things. They imagined centuries stretching endlessly before them. They imagined watching kingdoms rise and fall, witnessing inventions that would have once been called sorcery, reading books that had not yet been written and walking through cities that did... Continue Reading →
For generations, people living among the rugged mountains and remote ranches of northwestern Mexico told stories about a cat that didn't quite fit with the animals they already knew. They knew the jaguar. They knew the puma. And they knew the onza. The creature was said to roam the mountains of Sinaloa and the surrounding... Continue Reading →
Deep in the mountains of northern Italy, where old stone villages cling to the slopes and thick forests stretch into the Italian Alps, there is said to live a creature that spends most of the year hidden among the trees. Its name is the Badalisc. The legend belongs particularly to Andrista, a small village in... Continue Reading →
