LINKDING

<blockquote>Once there was a prince of Ruyastan who was born in secret and hidden behind a false wall with a nurse to hush her and soothe and give suck. The prince and her nurse lived in narrowness for ten years, reading and watching the world through a crack no bigger than a needle. During those years, the dowager queen hunted down and killed, for jealousy, every one of the prince’s half-brothers and cousins, carelessly begotten in cities and villages and forgotten apart from notes in the royal genealogies. But the prince’s mother had died in giving birth, and the crabbed old genealogists who pried and listened never learned of it. So the prince’s name was never written, and she survived.</blockquote> ➤ fairytaleish

<blockquote>I know what Dave wants even before he says it, before I’ve even taken off my stupid work cap or thrown my keys on top of the pile of crap beside the door. He’s taken his head off again, somehow, and I never can figure how he does it with no thumbs or even fingers, and I know my uncle didn’t help, but there it is on the rug waiting for me, Dave’s head, and he opens his gigantic mouth wide and looks at me with his big, brown fake eyes, and says, “Road trip?” “I’m a senior porter now,” I say. “I can’t just skip work.” This is true. “I looked at your schedule on the fridge. Your next shift isn’t until Tuesday,” Dave says. This is also true. “So, road trip?” “You know I can’t leave Uncle Marty alone that long,” I say.</blockquote> ➤ Deeply weird and doesn't explain everything but it's great

<blockquote>Before the flute is a flute, it is a bird. This is the first act of magic. This is the first lesson the girl learns, when the world is still young and shaggy-coated with lingering winter. Sometimes things can be other things. An axehead hides in a chunk of flint. Before it is a meal, a mammoth is a squealing calf tagging along behind its mother. A fox is a white spirit barking curses until an arrow finds it and turns it into a friend that shields your ears from the wind’s teeth. And before it is a flute, a bird is a song lodged in a treetop.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Most boys in my position—or rather, most newly-minted young men—choose to discourse upon a familiar subject, such as the origin of our sacred holidays. But as many of you know, my mother is Lady Trent, the dragon naturalist. As such, I find myself drawn instead to a passage from the Book of Priests, on the impurity of dragon-kind.</blockquote>

<blockquote>She stood before the judges in the dim light, Justine just to her left. Lyra pulled a sheaf of paper from her pockets. Their marriage certificate. Proof of cohabitation. Sheet music for the nocturne. “I’ve come to ask safe passage for myself and my wife to the realm of the living,” Lyra said. Her voice was loud in the chamber and she did not let it shake.</blockquote>

Fanfic of a folk song, Lowlands Low aka Golden Vanity

<blockquote>“There is the past and the not-past,” Heron said, blood dripping from their arm onto the nightingale floor. “Which is this?” “The not-past, you idiot.” Dog grunted as he peeled back Heron’s sleeve. He was in Heart of Storms, shoulders tense and eyes alive with lightning. With a tsk, he tore off a clean strip of bandage. “Hold still.”</blockquote> ➤ I love this!??? About an undefined relationship that is nonetheless vital to the characters involved (one male, one nonbinary)

<blockquote>You’re looking down—a camera is looking down—at a man labeled Joseph Meyer (Dad). You already knew that. Born 1992, Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, currently residing in California. There’s a photograph attached to the label, but it’s wrong. It’s younger and skinnier and it has a beard. Both men are your father, but you don’t recognize either of them. “—So, this is how it’s going to be?—” Your father. You don’t recognize your own father. You? How do you know? Wait. You? No! You have to stop looping. You have to figure out what to do.</blockquote> ➤ about abuse

<blockquote>Alix Campbell is not particularly pleased to be on the list of staff for Earth's very first appearance at the Galactic Council.</blockquote> ➤ space bureaucracy! also, one of those stories where you can tell the author is familiar with the career in question, always a delight

<blockquote>What happens when a disembodied AI and her amorphous slime best friend get a synthesized body to experiment with? To start with....mammal bodies are weird. But also: they're kind of fun. </blockquote>

<blockquote>The Hiran capital of Ars Tagig has been sieged, its walls breached and people brought low, but for the assassin Arden, there is a more pressing concern: that she has been chosen to be the goddess Rovena's consort for the planting festival. Typically a revered position to ensure the prosperity of Hira in the next year, Arden can think of no worse fate. </blockquote>

<blockquote>John Wood boarded the Gracie-Ella ahead of the crew. He carried his sea chest on his shoulder. In a satchel slung low on his hip were his tools and the three things most precious to him: a lock of his grandmother’s hair, a shaving from the first cabinet he had built as a boy, and his freedom papers. </blockquote>

<blockquote>“She said, ‘You’re going to find the King.’” “King of what, Dad?” “Well, that’s just what I asked. And she said, ‘King of the Vipers, Mister. You’ll find the King of the Vipers, who is older than the land we stand on and has lived a dozen lives. When you find him, you must simmer the fat from his body and eat it, and then you will know everything.” Who else’s life’s purpose, Dad likes to say, reaches out to take them by the hand?</blockquote>

<blockquote>Chaeeunshinji was seventeen, and I was thirteen. Just going by years alone, she was way older than me, but that kind of comparison didn’t really mean much: the planet where Chaeeunshinji was from and the one where I came from each had slightly different rotational and sidereal periods, so that the relative lengths of days and years on those worlds worked out to be just different enough to be confusing. “Well, technically I’m in my late teens, but you’re just a little kid, so officially I’m your big sister.” “But who would go by that? If you count by wake-sleep cycles, I’ve lived longer than you!”</blockquote>

<blockquote>My glamour, I know, masks expressions of exasperation. Once I had loved this part of the job, calculating possible returns on risk. But that had been before the interminable waste of the Grass War and the long train of young women and men in front of my desk with the trinkets they thought would give them a chance of not becoming food for crows in a field somewhere.</blockquote>

<blockquote>As you enter the doors of this school for the last time, the girl who your brother slept with last night brightens for just a moment before she realizes you’re not Jesse. She deflates. You and your brother should be identical—technically you are—but no one has ever mistaken you for each other.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Is your tape still running? Oh, they don’t use tape anymore? That’s clever. Very good. But really, you came all this way to interview me about the family and what happened to the land and now we’re talking about ghosts! Now, in the twenty-first century, the magic future century we were all promised? No. I don’t believe in ghosts because the crying bride never haunted us. God knows, if anyone had reason to, it was her. You might think that would worry me now that I’m pushing eighty-nine but it doesn’t. It might surprise you, young lady, to learn that I’m pretty satisfied with everything I’ve done.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The bear wife took the cub to mommy and me yoga. She didn’t look much like a bear without her fur, but somehow the other mothers seemed to sense it; when she came in carrying the cub they shifted away, drifting on their yoga mats closer to the windows, to each other. She was left alone in the middle like a stone dropped into a lake, each woman a wave rippling outward. In tree pose she was a lightning-struck pine at the center of a clearing.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Pop-star uber-sensation Jaim Janan rockets off to promote their third album atop a SpaceX Dragon VII capsule today, where they will stream a live musical performance from orbit, some 350 kilometers above the Earth. Before today’s launch, when asked if they were feeling nervous about the trip, the young pop star coolly responded, “Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away.” It’s not clear how many of Jaim’s obsessive fans, or “Janatics” as they are sometimes known, recognized the star was quoting twentieth-century pop legend Elvis Presley [click for bio]. But by mid-afternoon #TruthIsLikeTheSun was the most popular hashtag on Twitter. —Naydeen Johnson for The Washington Post</blockquote>

<blockquote>My aunt the roasted chicken to the table and laid it out in front of Lord Ning. It was an excellent supper, and I had helped her with the roasting. I knew that it was good, and at first, from the way Lord Ning started to wolf it down, tearing the chicken with both hands, I thought we would soon be rid of him.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Nah. We are one hundred percent shit-outta-luck,” she said, voice high and brittle as she leaned back from the computer. She gave a tight little laugh as she gestured at different possible trajectories, the different deflections achievable with nukes or booster rockets or heroic space missions. The wall of screens in front of us showed projected death tolls and ecological changes, with a lot of graphs that dropped sharply right at the end. “Earth is, uh … not to be melodramatic about it, but, absolutely doomed.”</blockquote> ➤ this is AMAZING

<blockquote>Leah Beecham is cast as Marguerite, and that's only the first surprise that the university Operatic Society production of Faust brings with it. And Ellie Everett should probably have kept out of OpSoc altogether if she wanted to avoid Music Department drama, but it's a bit late now, because she's got the part of Siebel...</blockquote> ➤ I really liked this! I loved how the themes of the personal lives of the characters ended up fitting into the themes of their final performance, and although the characters were relatively lightly sketched I still believed in their relationships

<blockquote>Novice Theo was not supposed to hate. He was expected to feel some negativity, of course, but he was not supposed to. Purging that was part of his novitiate training, burning away everything but love for and devotion to the Great Tetratheon that blessed their land. He had been with the Brothers for ten years now, and he had entered freely, wanting nothing but the serenity and discipline that a life of godly service promised to bring him. He wanted to be pure of heart and spirit. He yearned for that inner peace, earned through deep contemplation, which he could then reflect outwardly to better the entire world. But oh, he hated Novice Clarence.</blockquote>

<blockquote>When Vivian and her daughter witness the family matriarch die without leaving a corpse, Vivian can no longer ignore the family “gift” or the choice that lies before her.</blockquote>

<blockquote>He is not a remarkable student, Neconnu. Some among more senior Masters—those not required to take on teaching duties—did not even recognize his name when they found it entered into the lists for examination. But this is not as unusual as one might think; magi are not known for their humility. Already this year three candidates have overreached themselves, and been sent away. Odds are high that Neconnu will be the fourth. But he must have his chance. The Obsidian Master asks the question that pulses behind every serene expression. “What act will you perform, to prove your right to the degree of vīs faciendī?” Harrik Neconnu says, “I am going to return the dead to life.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>My name is Tetley Abednego and I am the most hated girl in Garbagetown. I am nineteen years old. I live alone in Candle Hole, where I was born, and have no friends except for a deformed gannet bird I’ve named Grape Crush and a motherless elephant seal cub I’ve named Big Bargains, and also the hibiscus flower that has recently decided to grow out of my roof, but I haven’t named it anything yet. I love encyclopedias, a cassette I found when I was eight that says Madeline Brix’s Superboss Mixtape ’97 on it in very nice handwriting, plays by Mr. Shakespeare or Mr. Webster or Mr. Beckett, lipstick, Garbagetown, and my twin brother Maruchan. Maruchan is the only thing that loves me back, but he’s my twin, so it doesn’t really count. We couldn’t stop loving each other any more than the sea could stop being so greedy and give us back China or drive time radio or polar bears. But he doesn’t visit anymore.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Aimee’s big trick is that she makes 26 monkeys vanish on stage.</blockquote> ➤ love the ending, reveals just enough to be satisfying while still leaving things mysterious

<blockquote>Apá always said I could come home. He never had to say the words if it doesn’t work out, but I heard them clear enough the day I left to live amongst the Fair Folk.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Il était une fois—there was a time when Ti-Jean was very old. His fiddle was long out of tune, and his brothers Cordon-Bleu and Cordon-Vert had moved away. He’d spent the gold the Devil put in his tuque, and the bones of the seven-headed dragon he’d killed were crumbled to dust. One day, he was sitting by the fire when • • • • “Wait,” Raccoon says. “Ti-Jean had brothers? There was a seven-headed dragon?” “Those are Ti-Jean’s other adventures,” I say. “Don’t you know any heritage?”</blockquote>

<blockquote>“What’s your name, girl?” “Dust.” “Dust! What kinda people named they child Dust!” She sat in thought a moment, recalling what her wayfaring aunt she rarely saw told her to say whenever someone questioned her name, if she could remember it all. “It’s short for Dustdaughter…” “That’s a heavy name for a child.”</blockquote>