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Seasons Set in Skin

Slipping into the dead girl's body was like meditating inside a stone, cold and still. Yōsei filled her with tendrils of gold and divided life energy between two bodies—one cold and dead, the other hot and familiar. The girl was too plump, too dense, and filled with tiny creatures that decomposed her flesh. These Yōsei banished, drowning them in golden light.

Horimachi's own tattoos were from before the war, when black ink was made of soot instead of faery blood.
Stone Prayers

It is the nature of empire to calve new words, and Mattar has walked ruined roads and suffocating marketplaces to find them. She knows the word for how a Kilin-kasa woman turns a wax-melon in her hands three times before she asks a price—tsa-tsa-tsa. She knows the name the now-dead Enokoans had for her, diabi-sai, witch-mother. She knows, too, the syllables of the arrows of the Hasha as they fall, tulbuku, on Korondi shields and Korondi flesh.

Mattar comes to the house of Anaharesh in search of a single word; a word to end a war.
Audio Fiction Podcast:
Court Bindings

Podcast: Download (Duration: 19:23 — 13.32MB)

The sparrow had too diminutive a mind to realize it could serve you longer by taking time to eat and sleep.
From the Archives:
Our Fire, Given Freely
I will earn no glory here, Rider Bray wants to shout. I will still be Rider. I will still be a woman with a name that spreads its legs across a horse.