Short Fiction

James Roverton

Roverton is one of three mutineers aboard Volmar's space-flier, a man of rigorous intellect and prime physical fitness who has spent years enduring the vertiginous horror of the interstellar deep. Unlike the fanatical Volmar, he is more human, and the bleak confinement has broken his morale enough that he risked everything on a failed attempt to turn the vessel homeward. When he and his companions are marooned on an alien plain and stumble into a fog-bound ambush, his caution and quick assessment of danger become the reader's anchor in a hostile, incomprehensible world.

Jonas McGillicuddy

Jonas McGillicuddy is a failed vineyard-keeper and drifting laborer, thin, stoop-shouldered, and so tramp-like in appearance that the countryside is suspicious of him. He left his wife Matilda and three children abruptly after a bitter quarrel, and now returns unannounced, not from love but because every other attempt at a livelihood has failed him. His unstable, self-consoling temperament—dreaming of pear pies while ignoring the likely consequences of his absence—makes his homecoming a slow-burning collision between fantasy and the reality of what he abandoned.

Bently

Bently is a guest at the abbey of the learned Hilaire, a young man full of desires and curiosities, exactly the temperament his host warns is most vulnerable to the occult peril lurking in a few sheets of old French parchment. When Hilaire's face darkens and he forbids all questions about the manuscript, crossing himself and speaking of hidden heresies and necromancies, Bently's wildest curiosity is awakened rather than quelled. His inability to think of anything else for the rest of the evening sets him on the path toward the forbidden knowledge the story will unfold.

Malygris

Malygris is a master of all knowledge and arcane power, a sorcerer whose necromancy can call back the dead, yet he is tormented by age, despair, and the death of his evanescent hope. When he summons the shade of Nylissa, he scrutinizes her with growing cruelty, finding her lips less lovely and her form less supple, until his soul sickens with the suspicion that even memory is a dubitable mirage. His tragic flaw is the belief that magic can recover what time has taken, and his dialogue with the viper—who alone knew the one thing he did not—drives the story's meditation on the vanity of wisdom and the impotence of love.

Herbert Albert Adams

Adams is one of three mutineers—along with Chester Deming and James Roverton—aboard Volmar's flier, a man of proven intellectual ability and flawless constitution who volunteered for a voyage no ordinary man would dare. Unlike the fanatically devoted Volmar, Adams is more human, and the years of bleak confinement among the pits of infinity have eroded his morale until he can bear the nostalgia for Earth no longer. His failed, barehanded attempt to turn the vessel homeward, and the cold sentence Volmar passes upon him, establish the central conflict between human longing and inhuman devotion to an idea.

John Hawley

John Hawley moves through the same parched, fire-prone country that Jonas McGillicuddy tramps, a world of isolated ranches, yellow pines, and the spectral snows of the Sierras in the distance. His presence is tied to the social fabric Jonas has neglected—the neighbors, the suspicions, the small human connections that Jonas abandoned along with his family. As Jonas nears the hills beyond Georgetown, Hawley's role in the unfolding plot helps ground the story's early arc in the tangible realities of a rural community that Jonas no longer fully belongs to.