To come upon Betwixton from the south is to emerge from the oppressive vastness of the Forest Primedial, whose trees are not merely tall but contorted, their trunks bent like questions never answered, their vines hanging with the weight of centuries. The air beneath that canopy is of a quality seldom found elsewhere: heavy with oleaginous damp, thick with the scent of decay sweetened to near intoxication, and filled with a hush that presses upon the chest as much as upon the ears.

I set down these words not as one native to this land, nor as one who claims mastery over it, but as a sojourner whose path has been compelled here by means I scarcely comprehend. My first cradle was not Earth, nor yet this gloaming isle men call Gloomstrand, but another shore entirely, now lost to me, as all points of origin are sooner or later surrendered to silence.

Daughter of Dame Evaline, exiled of House Lamentaria, and Lord Deverow of House LacivasTitles: The Unkissed Lily, Damsel of Regret, She Who Sings What Was Physical Description Melantha possesses the spectral grace of a funerary sculpture glimpsed in moonlight—cold to the touch, yet shaped by longing. Her skin is pale beyond mortal comparison: not white, but absented, the color of light that has nowhere to fall.

It was nearly midnight, and Daniel lay on his back in the darkness of his studio apartment, staring up at the stippled ceiling as if expecting it to resolve into meaning. The lights were off, but the glow from the strip mall across the street filtered in through the slats of the blinds, leaving thin bars of diluted orange light across the floor and the base of the bed.

Daniel left fencing class in a quiet sweat, his shirt clinging slightly beneath his jacket where the fabric hadn’t yet cooled. They had practiced binds and envelopments that day—those small, forceful conversations of steel against steel, the negotiation of dominance between two blades that did not wound but still pressed meaning into the wrist and forearm. He liked that kind of control.

As told by Nyktimenes in the Hall of Ashen Bronze, a fortnight after the Eclipse of the Green Moon The air was different that evening—tense, sharp, and smelling faintly of burnt myrrh and silver ink. Nyktimenes stepped into the circle chalked upon the stone floor, dragging behind him a satchel of weighted tablets, his fingers stained with soot. “Tonight,” he said, without preamble, “we speak not of glamours, but of…

As told by Nyktimenes, Speaker of Old Moons, to his gathered pupils under the sloping eaves of the Dreaming Academy The wind sang low through the hollowed beams above us, and the scent of mothdust and cold lavender filled the vaulted chamber. There, amid curling motes and half-seen shadows, Nyktimenes rose. Clad in a cloak like burnt parchment and bone, he raised a finger for silence, and it came.

According to scattered references in the Liber Fuliginis and the Commentaries of Rasselin the Unbodied, Liao Aurex was born to a family of southern spice merchants but was sent as a youth to the Monastery of the Pale Gourd, where he studied the Dao De Jing alongside imported grimoires from the defunct libraries of Pythagoreon and Thalerne. Liao's philosophical system, known as…

Not all spirits of Gloomstrand stride through dolmen gates clad in brocade and riddles. Not all announce their presence with blue fire or whisper in the languages of dead gods. Some come silently. Some come small. Some enter you. Among the feral fay, or the anitu, as they are known in the marsh-villages and hedge-fringed settlements of the southern fenlands, there exists a seldom-seen but often whispered of species known only as…

In the vocabulary of fantasy gaming, the word elemental has come to mean something oddly sterile. In Dungeons & Dragons, an elemental is a summoned being composed entirely of one of the four classical elements: fire, water, earth, or air. The Elder Scrolls universe does much the same, adorning these beings with minimal flavor, but essentially tethering them to a single concept.

In the Season Between Seasons, when the moths have gone to ground and the stars forget their names (Or, by Earth’s less poetic calendars, this letter is dated sometime after the year 2020 by the reckoning of luckless and stranded wayfarers who now and again stumble through the dolmens.) To: Alfon Braith-Mkadi, Conjuror of the Fifth Candled Path, and Custodian of the Vaulted Reclamatory of Achlyon…

The Wilderlands of High Fantasy was never a “setting” in the modern sense, not a carefully-balanced world of trade routes and unified pantheons, but a glorious, anarchic sprawl, a hallucination mapped across hex and ink. Released by Judges Guild in 1977 and expanded in the years that followed, the Wilderlands weren’t designed so much as disgorged. To call it a campaign setting is to misunderstand its spirit.

I find myself adrift in Vance’s Madouc, that most subtle and quixotic installment of the Lyonesse trilogy, and as I drift, I begin to suspect that I’m not so much reading a fantasy novel as being gently ushered out of the known world into some sidelong orchard of possibility. The sensation is not unlike stepping into a realm where narrative bends like wind through sedge, and the air is sweet with menace and absurdity.

He woke in the dust, head resting on a curtain of filaments thick as spun hair, breathing in a bouquet of mildew, wax, and the long-dead roses of forgotten ceremony. No light poured in. The air was not cold, it was heavy and still. It clung to his skin like damp wool and bore the taste of ancestral regret. Devlin rose slowly, his joints cracking like old floorboards.

Phan arrived without warning, as he always did, knocking twice on the frame of Daniel’s open door instead of the door itself, then letting himself in with the vague, distracted air of someone stepping into a room they’d already imagined. He wore the same secondhand army coat, damp at the shoulders, and his breath still held the cold from outside.

I’ve been thinking lately about the lineage of rogues. Not the clean-cut antiheroes of modern screen fantasy, all well-timed quips and misunderstood moral cores, but the real bastards—the street-level scoundrels, the petty thieves and wandering charlatans who lie, seduce, or cheat their way out of trouble only to land in deeper, stranger kinds. The kind who will drink your last wine and take your only boots, but might—just might—save your life if the moment calls for it, especially if it brings a reward or a decent tale to tell.

Devlin Wickwoode, bloodied and bereft, stepped across the dolmen’s flickering threshold with the gait of a condemned noble mounting the scaffold, deliberately, without hesitation, and with no further prayer. A shimmer displaced the mist at his back, then folded inwards like the petal of a closing nightbloom. He emerged not onto mossy slopes, nor toward the wheaten hills of Devon nor the sunlit Loire, nor, indeed, to any corner of Earth he had ever imagined.

Late afternoon light slanted through the dust-streaked window of Dylan’s studio apartment, catching on a slow drift of airborne lint. The room smelled faintly of instant noodles and the sour rind of old citrus. A paperback on the Nag Hammadi library lay open in his lap, its pages a faded off-white, marked here and there with penciled marginalia from a previous reader whose reverence for Gnostic heresy surpassed Dylan’s own.

It was just after eight when Dylan stepped out into the street. The sun was already warm against the crown of his head, although the air still carried the tentative coolness of a September morning that had not yet surrendered to the day’s heat. His route to the college took him through two modest residential neighborhoods, where ranch houses sat like tamed animals on their clipped little lawns.

The copy of The Oregonian had already been folded and re-folded by other hands. It bore the soft creases and slight dampness of having been handled in poor light, perhaps by someone with coffee on their sleeve or a disregard for newspapers as physical objects. Dylan stood at the tall reading shelf near the windows on the second floor of the library, a place he liked for its quietness and its lack of foot traffic, and he read—or tried to read—the front page headline: …

Dylan had retreated into the library’s back stacks, where the books smelled like old basements and the ceiling fluorescents buzzed softly above half-dead potted ferns. He was browsing a shelf labeled “Comparative Religion” not because he cared about it, particularly, but because no one else ever came back here, and it offered an illusion of purpose. He heard the footsteps before he saw them—hurried, rubber-soled, erratic.

The shopping trip took less than twenty minutes. Dylan walked the aisles with the same somber precision he applied to everything else: canned soup, pasta, off-brand cereal, a small jar of instant coffee, toilet paper. He stood in front of the frozen dinners for a long time before choosing one that promised “hearty beef stew” in a microwavable tray. It wasn’t what he wanted, exactly.

He saw her near the vending machines in the math wing—the one at the end of the hall where the overhead light buzzed like a trapped fly. She was crouched in front of the soda machine with the door wide open, rearranging cans in tidy rows. A plastic dolly rattled beside her, stacked with cardboard boxes and half-crushed snack cartons. Her cardigan sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and her glasses had slid slightly down her nose.

Phan insisted the boiler room under the gym was a "thin place." He said it with the calm authority of someone used to being dismissed. “It’s not a haunting,” he clarified, crouching to peer at a vent grate, his breath fogging faintly in the musty heat. “It’s a membrane. Thin. Porous. Like an eyelid when you're half-asleep.” Dylan stood near the door, his hand still on the knob.

There was a flyer on the bulletin board outside the science building. Neon green, half-torn, the ink blurred from yesterday’s rain. It read: “DON’T LET THEM TELL YOU WHAT’S REAL.Noise Massacre – Live @ The Crucible – Friday 9pmALL AGES // BRING EARPLUGS // LEAVE OBEDIENCE AT THE DOOR” Dylan stood in front of it longer than he meant to.