Angel or madman? The greatest swordsman of his day contemplates his victories and defeats as he prepares to step off into the great unknown of apotheosis.Author Clay Coolidge has returned home to Sunapee, NH with the intention of laying his most famous character to rest. Based on the woman who saved his life when he was fifteen years old, Sylvie Monroe has been his obsession for the last ten years. Now Clay's literary world is about to collide with the reality of what happened that summer day — and the truth is stranger than anything in one of his books.Sylvie Monroe is a Children of the Hunt short story. If you like this story, don't forget to check out Hunt, the first book in the Children of the Hunt series.

Underland Arcana slips through the cracks, bringing with it the numinous, the esoteric, the supernatural, and the weird. This issue contains stories by Brandon Crilly, Manfred Gabriel, Christi Nogle, Catherine Hansen, Ro Smith, Vera Hadzic, Jetse de Vries, A. P. Howell, Forrest Aguirre, Lorraine Schein, and Sarah Day. Stories about preserving planets, stories about seeking solace, stories about course catalogs, stories about strange circumstances, and stories that unfold on the periphery of consciousness. These are the stories that we shall find in the piles of dead leaves that the wind gathers as the year comes to an end.

In a bizarre post-apocalyptic Africa, Chadwick Giles, a recent arrival from the north countries, navigates his way through social strictures, a mutant uprising, and a cultic religious revival, learning to create art from love and life. Giles discovers that there is much to gain through loss, though the rewards are nothing like those he expected or desired.Chadwick Giles is new to Ngome, having travelled from the cultured north countries to a bizarre post-apocalyptic Africa to assume new employment as an artist for an expatriate entomologist. There, at a masked ball, he meets the mysterious and carefree Emile Beckwith. His discoveries in this new land expose the underside of a society embroiled in conflict and intrigue. Try as he might to remain aloof, he soon finds himself in the midst of the war between the colonial authorities and an uprising of human mutants and four-armed apes that may or may not be associated with a mystical fly-cult, a war that threatens to change him and his art forever.Forrest Aguirre's short fiction has been published in over fifty venues including Asimov's, Postscripts, Exquisite Corpse, and Gargoyle. Forrest's work has received several honorable mentions in various Year's Best anthologies and his fiction has been a finalist for the StorySouth Million Writers Award. He has won the World Fantasy Award and was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award for co-editing the Leviathan 3 anthology.

Judicar Parmour Pelevin rules the ancient kingdom of Procellarium on an environmentally decimated desert moon of a blue world. His stubborn insistence on establishing order, in the name of upholding ancient tradition, sets his own family’s swords against him. But is tradition strong enough to contain the chaos that erupts all around him and throughout his kingdom?