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PodCastle 945: Gray Skies, Red Wings, Blue Lips, Black Hearts

Previously published in Apex Magazine (2021)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:41 — 73.7MB)

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Show Notes

Rated PG-13

Gray Skies, Red Wings, Blue Lips, Black Hearts

by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

 

A girl has lost her soul down deep in the City. It wandered away while she chipped out another grave in the catacomb brickyards. She set down her pickax, wiped grit from her cheek, and noticed how empty her body was. Looked down at her wrist and found it blank.

That’s what she tells Redcap Kestrel as she sits cross-legged on the abandoned warehouse floor, well away from the grimy windows. The girl who lost her soul doesn’t offer a name. Few people do in the City.

“You want me to find it?” Redcap Kestrel asks. She crouches at a right angle to the girl, not looking her in the face. It’s for the girl’s sake. No one likes to look at a half-alive thing for too long, lest you find yourself on the wrong side of dead. (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 944: Mail-Order Magic

Previously published in The Sunday Morning Transport March 2, 2025

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:56 — 62.2MB)

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Show Notes

Rated G

Mail-Order Magic

by Stephanie Burgis

 

Shopping online during a bout of brain fog was a terrible idea. Unfortunately, like everything else Hayley Bent tried to carry, common sense had a habit of slipping from her grasp whenever she was trapped in that state of thick confusion.

“I can’t take this.” Standing in the open door of her grandmother’s ramshackle wooden house, Hayley stared at the deliveryman, who waited for her to accept a barred crate from his hands. His van was still running on the street beyond her overgrown lawn, the driver’s door hanging open. “I’m sure I didn’t order it!” Almost sure. “I ordered . . . uh . . .” (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 943: At Death’s Door

PodCastle 943: At Death’s Door is a PodCastle original.

content notes for suicidal ideation and second-person narration

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:28 — 46.0MB)

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Show Notes

Rated PG-13

At Death’s Door

by T. R. Steele

 

Here are my instructions for passing through death’s door:

1. Trap one of Them, one who crosses in and out of the realm of death, and steal her name by any means necessary.

A. This is not entirely the first step, but I want to get to the point. In reality, first, you need to find the door. My advice is to find it in childhood. Like most doors that aren’t doors, it moves frequently, but is most often caught in the roots of old, old trees. Usually the tree has survived some sort of deforestation or upheaval; in my case, it was an ancient oak in the suburban sprawl, caged on all sides by duplexes and public parks. Me? I wasn’t sure what the door was when I first found it; an impossible shadow, shifting at the roots even when the sun was blocked by clouds. But after I followed the owls and bats and foxes through the woods and watched as they slipped into the gloom underneath, I knew: it led somewhere. Somewhere else. (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 942: TALES FROM THE VAULTS: Burning Season

Previously ran as episode 519 as a PodCastle Original

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:25 — 73.8MB)

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Show Notes

Rated PG-13

Burning Season

By C. L. Clark

It was burning season in Rashid. Again.

Even in the shop, I could smell the smoke. Can you believe I used to like the smell of burning paper? With my eyes closed, I can still see pages glow red before they burst into flame and curl into ash until they crumble.

I clerked at a small sundries shop in Commercial. The owner was a Duchies woman, one hand peach-pale, the other brown as her shop counter. She had no love for the All-King, who had toppled her Grand Duchess, but you don’t need love to run a business, just enough money to buy mercy. After that expenditure, though, she couldn’t afford to hire a licensed Translator. Coincidentally, I couldn’t afford a license, so she paid me a little extra to quietly broker transactions from the non-Duchies customers and shippers she couldn’t understand.

I am an Omniloquist. Some say we’re a curse the last true Rashidan king put on his enemies before he died, so that we’ll never flounder helpless under a conqueror. More say we have no true power, just an uncanny ability to pick up foreign sounds quickly. Until the All-King came, I was inclined to think the latter. We were a skill with a guild, like any other. And then he came, with his Collectors. There’s nothing natural about them. Maybe there’s nothing natural about us. (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 941: Last Train from Deadwall – PART TWO of Two

Previously published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #433

Content note for suicide attempts

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:05 — 70.1MB)

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Show Notes

Rated R

Last Train from Deadwall Part TWO of Two

by André Geleynse

 

The second time Knucklebone tried to kill himself didn’t work out any better than the first.

Sometimes, during the endless months of repair work on the endless track, Knucklebone and the other mechanical revenants amused themselves by crushing coins and other small bits of metal under the wheels of the train. Coins would fly off into the gravel bed, pancaked into paper-thin discs. Nails became miniature swords and tiny cogs spread into misshapen stars. The construction crew collected the most interesting shapes, trading them among themselves as an underground currency.

There wasn’t much that could crush a piece of hammered titanium, such as the one that housed Knucklebone’s aether core. But he was willing to bet that six-hundred tons of iron and bone just might get the job done. (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 940: Last Train from Deadwall by André Geleynse – PART ONE of Two

Previously published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #433

Content note for suicide attempts

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:05 — 46.8MB)

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Show Notes

Rated R

Last Train from Deadwall PART ONE of Two

by André Geleynse

 

The first time Knucklebone tried to kill himself, he’d already been dead for one hundred and thirteen years. He’d died in a workplace accident, which meant it was within their legal rights for the Cogsmith Railroad Company to bind his soul to his reanimated skeleton and hand him the invoice. Ten thousand chits for the soft tissue removal alone, plus a hundred thousand more for the brass gears, pneumatic muscles, aether core, and an impressively shitty diesel-powered engine to pilot his skeleton.

Knucklebone made about six chits a day. His family had written him off entirely after his death, so outside help was right out. After the first two decades of undead servitude, he’d learned about compounding interest and realized paying off his debt simply wasn’t possible this side of eternity. He’d have to find another way out. (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 939: The Worth of Ashes

PodCastle 939: The Worth of Ashes is a PodCastle original.

Content notes for death of family members to illness (off-page), grief

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:53 — 57.5MB)

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Show Notes

Rated PG

THE WORTH OF ASHES

by Amanda Helms

 

 

Aselya retained enough of her sister’s ashes to hear them sing.

She trudged through the marketplace, the ashes secured in a pouch hanging from her hip, while the ghost of Firall’s mezzo-soprano harmonized with the marketplace din of stall owners shouting their wares, shoppers haggling costs, and arguments between both on the quality of this bolt of cloth, that basket of oranges.

Death had had little impact upon Firall’s personality, and so she sang not a ballad of her life, not a sweet lullaby the likes of which she’d used to urge Aselya’s children to sleep, or even a forlorn ode to how she’d died. No, Firall sang rude tavern songs in which aubergines and melons featured prominently. (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 938: TALES FROM THE VAULTS – Scry

Previously ran as episode 292 and first published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Read the full text here!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:11:39 — 98.9MB)

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Show Notes

Rated R

Read the full text here!

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PodCastle 937: Kɛrozin Lamp Kurfi

Previously published by Apex Magazine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:46 — 64.2MB)

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Show Notes

Rated PG

Kɛrozin Lamp Kurfi

by Victor Forna

 

 

Breath

 

KADE MAKASI: In . . .

 

ALL THE CHILDREN: Awt . . .

 

 

Storyteller

 

She tells the children to call her Kade Makasi, and if this was one of her stories, she’d describe herself as bent and wrinkled and spider-like for a touch of myth and poetry . . . but she’s none of these things . . . she’s tall, thick-browed, with two braided rivers of night on her head, and you’d have never guessed what she was: kurfi, dɛbul, demon, and that she stole my child.

(Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 936: Ananconfabulation

PodCastle 936: Ananconfabulation is a PodCastle original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:32 — 45.2MB)

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Show Notes

Rated G

Ananconfabulation

by Mar Vincent

 

Our homes are buried, so we built tunnels. From Tomas’ window to mine, from Ryan’s to Kimber’s and back to Tomas’ attached garage where it has little windows up high in the door. A rabbit’s warren of passages just wide enough for our juvenile bodies.

I remember the day it happened. Opening curtains and seeing the sun, the trees, the clouds. Opening them again, only a few hours later, and seeing nothing but solid gray against the glass. Time keeps moving the cat clock on my wall and the appliances in our kitchens tick forward, but is it day or night or real at all? I don’t trust that time is what it used to be.

The TV stopped working, and the internet, even the radio, so all we could do was guess what had happened. Was the whole world buried, or just the neighborhood around us?

Tomas lived next door, so that tunnel was the easiest. The first place I thought to go. Both of us started digging through from our own sides as though we’d planned it (we hadn’t), and shouting for each other when we got closer (like we sensed it) until we lined up the tunnels to connect. Light came in from his side, through the ashy-concrete stuff that made the walls (that made the world), and then his fingers poked through, and I wasn’t alone anymore. (Continue Reading…)