Fantasy Archives - Lightspeed Magazine

Jempo took a deep bow on the iron platform. His body flopped forward, limbs like thick braided wire. No obvious weapons in his large and rubbery hands. Little digital eyes and a bright smile that lit the rounded ball he had for a head. More clown than competitor at first glance.

The Dragon, the Scarab, the Wolf, the Dragon

by Rhiannon Rasmussen

Ánar’s bootheels echoed on the iron floor. What a groundbreaking honor this ceremony was for a landless tenant like him—joining old house Veivilkas, of the wolf. Such an honor that it made him leaden to think of, made him long for sleep. At the conclusion of the ceremony, he would no longer be merely Ánar from the undercity, scarab-kin, but Ánar Veivilkas. Nobility. The first scarab-kin to wear that name, no less.

Long Goodbyes

by Anya Ow

Sui grunted as she straightened her back, digging her shoulder up into Taxue’s belly. The Zheng’s hind legs dragged awkwardly on the sand, trembling as the paws knuckled, the sudden weight on Sui pushing the knee she’d braced into the dirt. Sui braced her palms up under the Zheng’s hind legs, feeling for the distended sac of her bladder, swollen larger than Sui’s head overnight. Muscles bulged over arms used to drawing heavy longbows as she compressed it. For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

A Guide on How to Repay Your Vow to the Deity of Many Faces

by Oyedotun Damilola Muees

If every effort to bring down your child’s fever is unsuccessful and the doctors cannot diagnose anything wrong with her, then you should seek other means to alleviate her health. Before you help her into the house, if you notice that her shadow refuses to follow her body, then you should know that her sickness is numinous, and it is beyond what science can cure or fathom.

The Goddess of Not Enough

by Susan Palwick

You’re eighteen. Your fairy godmother just fired you, because after three balls, the prince has grown bored with you. Tonight you stepped on his foot during a gavotte. “If you’d been cleverer,” the fairy godmother says—her words silver chimes girded with steel—“you’d have pretended your clumsiness was really punishment: a reminder to focus on you, not that floozy in scarlet silk across the room.”

Of All Who Dream

by Adelehin Ijasan

“God” is not the word I’d use. But it is the only one that suffices. There are all kinds of gods: the old and the new; the useful, the useless; the capricious and the dependable; the wrathful and the meek. They all had one thing in common—whether they were created at the dawn of time when hunter-gatherers huddled in caves and cowered at the crack of thunder, or they were engineered by men in frocks, or worse, born of minds harvested by modern technology—all gods were born starving.

What Do You Mean the Nanobots Formed a Union??

by Joel W. D. Buxton

“What do you mean the nanobots formed a union??” I asked the lawyer, biting my thumbnail.

It’s an old habit, kept up well after I got the “Pro Nano Blitz Package,” as the ad called it. A muscular man in tight clothing explained: a quick, painless injection, then a couple days sick as a dog, then another month for the nanobots to multiply, specialize, and spread out through the body. Then: easy street.

Fragments of the Whole

by Brooke Bolander

Lise’s personas have no warning when the XexlCo Construct appears at the gate of her memory garden, smiling cheerfully at each of her personas in turn like a neighborhood milkman making his daily rounds. They watch the newcomer saunter by with open curiosity, moving aside to let him pass as though he’s a regular guest in Lise’s subconscious. There’s nothing threatening about him. He might’ve popped in a million times, the way he behaves.

Infinite Wishes

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Rachel sat at the edge of the sparkling pond in the secluded glen that had taken her five years to find. The air smelled of roses and lavender and pine. Tiny white sparks, like fireflies, floated upward, almost as if they were watching her.