Countdown: 365 Days of Flash Fiction Releases this Week

Science fiction, fantasy, dark fantasy, speculative fiction and a touch of horror, this collection plays with just about every genre it can lay its hands on. C.M. Simpson explores new worlds, new settings and lets loose some ideas that just needed to be gotten out of her head.

If short stories are your thing—and the shorter the better—you can find tiny tales from a wide variety of genres in 365 Days of Flash Fiction.

Here’s a final taste of the kinds of tales you’ll find:

Troll-Gate Guardian

Written on December 15, 2013, for 365 Days of Flash Fiction, this piece once again explores the Worlds Collide universe, and the trouble with associating with they fey.

“They have a troll.” Llew’ sounded far from pleased.

I marvelled at the lengths the queen’s enemies would go to undermine her authority, but a troll? You would have to be pretty low to do that. Still, they do say that all’s fair in love and war, and the queen had just rejected the hand of a powerful fey lord. An earl or duke or somesuch. He was the fifth in the last month. At this rate, we’d be at war with every petty noble in the fey world. I dreaded to think of what would happen when she got started on the princelings and their fathers.

I drew the bow, eyeballing the troll then adjusting for distance and the light breeze blowing across the culvert. It’s hard to see if the beast is being driven or led, but in the end I don’t care. I’ve fitted the arrow with an explosive head —don’t ask, let’s just say the local constabulary wouldn’t be too happy. The elves have augmented it with magic, so this should be fun.

Aim, allow for lead, fire.

I’m not the only one who gasps as the rejected suitor rides up alongside the troll. If the wizard riding with us hadn’t been such a quick thinker, we’d have had a real war on our hands, instead of this power skirmish. He thrusts out a hand, screaming a one-word spell, and the arrow shatters without touching the intervening lordling.

It surprises the guy’s horse, who shies away from the sharding missile, snorting and jostling the troll alongside. Course, trolls being the bad-tempered critters they are, this one takes offence and knocks the earl from his saddle. The noble steed bolts, getting clear before the troll can strike out again.

I am swearing a blue streak as I nock another arrow and raise the bow. This time no one ruins the shot by getting in between, and the troll goes down—it also goes up like a roman candle and explodes into several steaming chunks. I see movement in the shadows of the bridge and run forward. No way am I going to lose the ex-suitor to a bunch of small-and-shaggies, when I’ve just saved his ass from one of their larger cousins.

He comes round a little later and rolls unsteadily to his knees before the queen, glaring at me all the while.

“My lady, your wizard saved my life,” he says.

I roll my eyes, but his next words are like a slap to the face.

“I demand vengeance.”

I wait, not sure which way this is going to swing; the fey are so unpredictable. The queen is implacable, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

“You owe me a debt.”

“I owe you my life,” he confirms, and I get the feeling some sort of ritual is being enacted before me.

“I cannot accept your suit.”

“I understand, my lady. Forgive me.”

“It was a mistake,” she continues, referring to the whole arrow-and-troll debacle. I notice she doesn’t point out it was his own damn fault.

“Payment is still due.”

“I agree.”

Uh oh. I wait. The elf noble, whatever, looks up at the queen, and I hold my breath.

“You will wed.”

He recoils. I gasp and take two steps back, bump into her head bodyguard and his 2IC. Their hands coil around my upper arms. I get the feeling they’re laughing like a pair of hyenas at my discomfort. Give the earl this, he doesn’t throw up, explode with rage, or argue. He just turns his head and looks at me. The bow slides from my fingers and I go weak at the knees.

He is beautiful, but he is also very, very angry.

“When?” he says, getting slowly to his feet, his voice cold.

“Twelve months courting,” she replies, with the slightest of smiles—damn her! She’s enjoying this far too much—“and then mid-summer. She is my strongest ally in these lands, the Sunlight-Against-the-Trolls. Midsummer is fitting for such a union.”

Midsummer is their most-celebrated day of the year. His expression changes, and he looks me over once again. Even so, his next words are carefully chosen.

“You honour me,” he says, and cannot keep the sneer from his voice, “but she is human.”

“She is a human who can wield elven magic, and who was the first to see the gates open,” the queen responds. I notice she doesn’t mention I have also wielded an elven blade, and drunk three drops of her blood.

“She is troll plagued.”

“As are all guardians against that particular form of the dark. It could be worse.”

“Not much,” he says, and sighs. “I obey, my lady.”

Then he places his fingers to his lips and whistles for his horse.

“Yeah, and I love you, too,” I mutter, as he mounts and rides away.

My two guardians start to chuckle. Soon they’re laughing too hard to hold me, and I shrug them off. I remember to make the smallest of obeisances to her trouble-making majesty and then stalk, over the iron drawbridge and back into the house.

I can shut the door against the coming dawn and the trolls fading back to their lairs. I can shut the door on the sight of my unwanted allies riding into the mist. But I cannot shut the door on the sound of the horn’s dancing silver notes as they bid me an all too temporary farewell.

365 Days of Flash Fiction is scheduled for release on October 4, 2014.

Countdown: Two Weeks to 365 Days of Flash Fiction

Science fiction, fantasy, dark fantasy, speculative fiction and a touch of horror, this collection plays with just about every genre it can lay its hands on. C.M. Simpson explores new worlds, new settings and lets loose some ideas that just needed to be gotten out of her head.

If short stories are your thing—and the shorter the better—you can find tiny tales from a wide variety of genres in 365 Days of Flash Fiction.

Here’s another taste of the kinds of tales you’ll find:

Storm-Riding Raiders

Written on Sunday, September 15, 2013, for this collection. Another battle, but not with swords.

They came in the clouds, riding the wings of a storm. Mighty predators, they struck, driving fear deep, driving it through bone, triggering bladder and bowel, making those who faced them feel fuelled by ice with innards to match. How could we hope to face them, defeat them, when our limbs trembled and sweat slicked our weapon hands, making grips tricky.

“Your families need you to stand!”—a healthy bellow—“Archers! Fire!”

Arrows whistled, upwards-falling rain, matching them shriek for shriek. The sky turned black, and not from clouds—the second volley. The third volley brought them down, saved us.

365 Days of Flash Fiction is scheduled for release on October 4, 2014.

Sneak Peek 4: 365 Days of Flash Fiction

Science fiction, fantasy, dark fantasy, speculative fiction and a touch of horror, this collection plays with just about every genre it can lay its hands on. C.M. Simpson explores new worlds, new settings and lets loose some ideas that just needed to be gotten out of her head. 

If short stories are your thing—and the shorter the better—you can find tiny tales from a wide variety of genres in 365 Days of Flash Fiction.

Some of them have been produced in answer to challenges put out by other writers, like the tale of Hasken’s choice:

Hasken’s Choice

This was written in response to Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge set on 30 August 2013. I had no title, no idea what the story would be, but I randomly rolled my setting and was given “a penal colony set up by space-faring elves”. This is what came out. It was posted on my blog on 2 September 2013.

The first guard doubled over at 1800 hours. Dusk. According to one movie, ‘magic hour’. None of the inmates had heard of the movie, let alone seen it. If they had, they would have recognized old history – an entire species wiped out by the ingenuity of man. No wonder the elves had been angry.

The dragons had been a trap – an elven trap, vengeance on the human race, any race who dug so far into the world for nothing more than mineral wealth. In truth, it had probably been a trap meant for the dwarves, the world-eating hives of kesteringus, or the Venusian mole men who murdered creatures of fire and acid whenever they could.

Knives in the gut, Hasken thought, seeing the figure topple as he set another seedling firmly into its pot. Poor bastard.

Hasken had not approved of the idea, and the others had exiled him to the potting sheds. No one liked the sheds; they were death traps for most months of the year, but this month Hasken was lucky. He wasn’t dealing with spike-throwing anthrogens, head-biting kalloskathies, or symbiotically-linked carnivores. This month, he was dealing with sap-covered, thorn-encrusted, stink-oozing floriskanths. Nothing a good pair of protective gloves and a gas mask couldn’t deal with. Piece of cake by comparison.

The second guard fell off her hadrosaur at 1805. The hadrosaur stood, staring out at the horizon, while its rider curled into a ball, groaning at its feet. Hasken caught his glove on the thorns, swore as he carefully disentangled his fingers from the grasping points, ungluing the glove from binding sap. A cuff over the back of his head reminded Hasken cursing was forbidden.

Hasken apologized, crooning gently. Some of the other inmates were deliberately cruel, earning exile from the potting sheds. Most avoided the duty where they could. Hasken was one of the few who relished it. He waited for the guard behind him to move on. The guard did not.

Looking up, Hasken saw the guard staring out through the fence at the hadrosaur. Hasken supposed he should do something about that, but didn’t. He hadn’t agreed with the plan. It was stupid and cruel; it sickened him and he wanted no part in it. Not even the small one being offered. He followed the guard’s gaze, gasping as though just noticing the beast and its fallen rider.

1811.

The guard moved like lightening, slapping a hand on the emergency alarm, and jamming a long-barreled pistol against Hasken’s head.

“Don’t move.”

“The skanth,” Hasken said, locking himself in place, resisting the urge to sweep the pistol away and jam the thorny sap-coated seedling into the guard’s gut. He’d been accused of murder, had indeed committed it, and had never regretted it. The death wasn’t why he’d been imprisoned.

The dead man hadn’t been able to admit sabotaging the air processor, and Hasken was only half-way through repairing it when the ship’s security team caught him. Half fixed, half broken – it all looked the same to the captain, especially when the dead man had been meant to be in the life support area, and Hasken had not.

Why was he there?

A deterioration in air quality and change in the sound from the engines pumping the air, whenever that technician was on shift.

How had he noticed that?

The fact he’d been carrying his own testing equipment had only been held against him. The fact his room shared a wall with the plant equipment, ignored. What had he hoped to gain blackmailing the shipping line?

In the end, Hasken had been jailed for murder and sabotage. He’d been hoping to reach Earth, put some of his theories into practice, regrow something on the wastes, replant… Bad luck to have found an elf-hating saboteur on the cruise line for which he’d gathered a fare. Bad luck to be implicated in one of the most serious of space-lane crimes.

“Finish it, but slowly.”

Once the guard had stepped back, and was dividing his attention between watching the door, watching Hasken and watching the hadrosaur beyond the fence. Hasken set the floriskanth seedling in its pot, tamped down the earth, and disentangled his fingers before setting the pot beside the others. When he was finished, he placed his hands on his thighs and stayed, kneeling on the floor.

At 18:16, the third guard crumbled, releasing his grip on the shock chains keeping his velociraptors in check. Screams rose from the prisoners harvesting tubers two enclosures over. The elf guard swore. At 18:17 he groaned, and dropped to his knees, keeping the pistol aimed at Hasken’s head by sheer force of will.

At 18:18, Hasken watched and made his move as the pistol wavered. He rose, turning as he gained his feet, avoiding the first dart. The guard did not get to fire a second; Hasken kicked the gun from his hand, while reaching behind a row of floriskanth seedlings and potting tools.

“Here’s something I prepared earlier,” he muttered, pulling out the tuber he’d stashed there earlier. It was the only antidote he knew.

The guard had curled in on himself, by the time Hasken reached his side. Pulling the elf into his lap and locking him against his chest with his forearms, Hasken tilted the elf’s head back, relieved when the guard’s mouth opened in a groan. With a grunt of effort, Hasken twisted the tuber so that it broke, crushing the fibers at its core and releasing a mixture of seed-encrusted pulp held together in mucous-like sap.

Any runnier, and he’d have failed but, by the time the raptors had quelled the uprising in the field, and reinforcements had taken back  the buildings where inmates were still struggling with locking mechanisms biometrically attuned elsewhere ,Hasken had guided the oozing mess between his captor’s lips. Not a single prisoner made it past the inner fences, but only one guard survived.

Hasken had sworn he would never again be caught with a dead body on his hands.

365 Days of Flash Fiction is scheduled for release on October 4, 2014, and pre-ordering should be available soon.

Sneak Peek 4: The Year Just Gone (2013)

Every year, C.M. Simpson gathers up the short stories, flash fiction and poetry she’s written, published, or prepared for publishing, and puts them into a single volume. This year, there are two volumes. The second volume consists of all the work produced, prepared for publication or published in 2013.

As C.M. explains at the beginning of each volume “poems and short stories form the playground I use to explore ways of putting words on paper to create different effects” and each volume contains a variety of styles and subjects, accompanied by what it was that inspired her at the time. Sometimes, the inspiration from an element underlying a movie or novel concept, or voiced by a movie character.

Final Hunt

Written on October 27, 2013, for the October 20 entry for 365 Days of Flash Fiction, this piece was inspired by the idea of hunting a more difficult kind of prey.

Run, rabbit, run, I think, raising the rifle and taking aim. My prey does an odd little bounce, stops and skits three steps sideways, but this time I’m ready. I guess no-one ever told him an evasive pattern should be unpredictable. I’m ready to nail him as he starts to run forward, but a heavy weight slams between my shoulders, smashing my face into the rifle-butt. The shot goes wild, but I don’t really care. I’m too busy trying to roll, bring the damn gun up to take down whatever, whoever, has just tried to push my face in the dirt. Only problem is, they’ve got a boot in the middle of my back and the muzzle of something unpleasant against the back of my head. Guess now’s not a good time. I smell cinnamon and apples. I don’t need to hear them say it. “Your hunting days are done.”

Sneak Peek 3: The Year Just Gone (2013)

Every year, C.M. Simpson gathers up the short stories, flash fiction and poetry she’s written, published, or prepared for publishing, and puts them into a single volume. This year, there are two volumes. The second volume consists of all the work produced, prepared for publication or published in 2013.

As C.M. explains at the beginning of each volume “poems and short stories form the playground I use to explore ways of putting words on paper to create different effects” and each volume contains a variety of styles and subjects, accompanied by what it was that inspired her at the time. Sometimes, the inspiration comes from experimenting with new ways of treating monsters familiar from myth or legend.

Dragon-Bound Secret

Written on December 14, 2013, for the December 10 entry for 365 Days of Flash Fiction, this piece once again returns to the themes of dragons, colonisation, and creatures of myth mingling in a science-fiction setting.

“If that damn thing buzzes us again, I’m going to shoot it up the arse and damn the consequences!”

It wouldn’t have been so bad if Hadigan had been referring to a blowfly and a slingshot, but he wasn’t . He was referring to a dragon, and a jeep-mounted harpoon. Why a harpoon and a jeep? Because it beat the heck out of sitting behind a catapult until your prey came to you—and the jeep had jet propelled rocket grapples for anchoring it to the ground, if we actually caught something.

Today, that looked likely. Running along the headland, on a strip of road, too narrow for the catapults, we’d seen the largest beyznou we could hope for. Massing at around two tonne, if we could harpoon that, and anchor the jeep deep enough not to get dragged out to sea, we wouldn’t have to hunt for another season. It was worth the risk.

And then dragon had arrived.

As well as proving to be an annoyance to us, it was probably going to spook the beyznou, and we needed something by the end of the day, or there wouldn’t be enough fuel for tomorrow and we’d be back to the farms until next year. Neither of us wanted that.

Nope. It was the beyznou or bust. The dragon sure as hell was making it look like bust. We watched the damned beast loop hard and come at us crossways.

“Sonuva—“ Hadigan began, and lined up the harpoon.

And that was when the beyznou turned and my gut went to water.

“Hadigan, get out of the truck,” I said, keeping my voice low.

The beyznou started to lift itself out of the water, its beady eyes fixed on us, and not the dragon coming straight at us. I jacked on the brakes, pulled the hand brake up, hard, and fired the first grapple into a nearby rockface.

“Get out of the truck!” I screamed, standing up in the driver’s seat and grabbing Hadigan by the arm, dragging him from behind the harpoon mount.

Hadigan came out of his seat, turning his head to give me a face full of invective, but taking one look at my face and glancing back at the beyznou. That monster had lifted half its body length out of the sea, undulating its full length as it dropped its jaw wide. And Hadigan was suddenly holding my arm and leaping with me over the edge of the jeep.

We braced to hit the ground running, hoping to make the other side of the outcrop I’d fired the grapple into, but we didn’t make it. The dragon stooped, catching us at the apex of our jump and lifting us as it flipped into a vertical climb.

The beyznou screamed, its voice bouncing eerily off rocks that exploded at its touch.

“Not a beyznou,” Hadigan said, gasping for breath.

“Siren,” I puffed back.

“And old,” Hadigan said, as the creature raised tentacles, flicking them towards us.

The dragon swerved, jinking sideways before tucking its wings to drop in a gut-wrenching dive. Hadigan wrapped an arm around my shoulders, pulling me hard against him, and I locked an arm around his waist. We then did our best to brace inside the cage of dragon claws, as it spiralled into another climb and dropped again.

Shards of slime-coated chitin whistled past us, trailing filaments stronger than the rope around our harpoon. If we could only have caught the siren, I thought, and heard its haunting scream once more. The dragon flew on. Dodging twice more, before gaining enough height that I found it hard to breathe. Hadigan wheezed beside me, but his grip on my shoulders eased.

By turning our heads, we could see the coastline change beneath us. The view improved as we descended, and Hadigan’s breathing eased, although we both grew tense when the creature skimmed wavetops and wheeled around the base of iron-coloured cliffs. We relaxed when it climbed once more, but the tension returned as it backwinged and came to rest inside a cave high up in the cliffs.

“Shoot it up the arse?” the dragon said, setting us carefully on the sun-warmed rock. “That’s hardly hospitable, is it?”

To his credit, Hadigan flushed beet red.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and my mouth dropped open in surprise. I’d never heard Hadigan apologise before, not even when he really needed to. I was also relieved that he had, and closed my mouth.

“Do you know how many days that siren had spent stalking you?” it asked.

Hadigan shook his head.

“Ten.”

This time I managed to keep my mouth closed. Ten? That was… We’d been manning a catapult ten days ago. On the Far Arm.

“Is it the first?” Hadigan asked.

“No.”

“Can we save them?”

“Your people don’t like to owe us debts.”

“But can you save them?”

“I will need help.”

“How many?”

“Five of my kind.”

Hadigan swallowed, and I slipped my hand into his, felt the dampness of his palm, felt the same hollow fear I heard in his voice, leant on him a little and felt him lean back.

“What would you ask?”

“Five pairs,” the dragon said, “to live among us.”

“As your slaves?” Hadigan’s voice was hoarse, with grief for our future, perhaps, but also with fear. No one knew what the dragons did with those they took.

“We do not keep slaves,” the dragon replied.

“As food then?” Hadigan’s voice was a bare thread of sound.

“Never that.” The dragon sounded ill.

“For what, then?”

“For that, we are bound to secrecy,” the dragon replied, and settled back on its haunches, waiting.

“How long?” Hadigan sounded weary.

“Now? Your people will have hours.”

I felt Hadigan’s hand tighten around mine, and looked up at him. We, of course, would be the first couple. I nodded. The sirens could devastate the settlement before enough help arrived. We both knew the dragons were the only chance they had.

“Go,” he said and, with a roar, the dragon took flight.

Other roars answered, the settlement’s salvation on its way. I pulled Hadigan over to a portion of the cave that gave us an ocean view. We would know when they returned. We would greet our kinfolk, comforting them in exile.