Some stories a fellow delights in telling because they improve with age, memory, and exaggeration. Those are the respectable sort of stories, the kind that gather laughter around a potbellied stove and are polished smoother every time they’re repeated. This… Continue reading

Mason “Mace” Quinn had learned long ago that the high country kept its own ledgers. Some accounts got settled in gold. Others waited in the dust until a man came looking who ought to have known better. Virginia City still… Continue reading

With his back to the aeonic wind, he hastened toward the Cyclopean city, abandoning forever the humble dominion that had contained the whole circumference of his mortal days. The invisible current that pressed against his weather-worn mantle seemed no mere… Continue reading

The ache that had gnawed within me, ancient as the roots of forgotten mountains and relentless as the tide beneath a moonless sky, departed at last. It vanished not with triumph nor surrender, but as a mist withdraws from a… Continue reading

There I was, rattling homeward in my automobile after another day’s meaningless toil, when it occurred to me with the force of biblical revelation what had become of all those Nevada unicorns everyone pretends don’t exist. You see, what the… Continue reading

Virginia City clung to the slope of Mount Davidson under a sky the color of polished steel. In the late summer, the sagebrush held the heat of the day, and the wind that came down the canyons carried the dry… Continue reading

On the forgotten marches of the planet Nythora, where violet suns cast long shadows across fields of translucent reeds, there stood an abandoned byre fashioned from black meteoric stone. Its roof was woven with crystalline vines that chimed softly whenever… Continue reading

You still shake as though the marrow of your bones remembers a terror older than waking. Sleep clings in tatters behind your eyes, dissolving beneath the sharp wind that sweeps across the impossible plain. Your thoughts are little more than… Continue reading

The three crimson suns of Nhalor hung like blood-red lanterns above a plain of violet crystal, where no wind had ever dared to linger. Across that silent expanse wandered a lone traveler whose garments were stained by the dust of… Continue reading

A young newspaper reporter named Edwin Barker possessed the uncommon habit of believing that facts were more valuable than opinions. It was an unfortunate belief for a man entering journalism in modern times, for facts require labor, as opinions come… Continue reading