All Posts
Filter by keyword, tag, and category.
The Ink Immortal
A poor scholar studying in an abandoned temple finds his inkstone refilling itself each night. He stays awake to discover the source.
The Last Order
A delivery rider takes an order to a mountain villa on a stormy night. When he arrives, there is no villa, only a graveyard.
Codex of the Eight Wildernesses · The Bone-Marsh Bird
By the black mere of Forgotten Bones lives the Bone-Marsh Bird, which feeds on words left unspoken and cries in broken human phrases. The fisher Da heard it carry his dead brother's last unfinished words.
The Cold Ward
A nurse on the night shift hears a call bell ringing from a ward that has been locked for twenty years.
Codex of the Eight Wildernesses · The Flame-Horn
In the northern burning mountain dwells the Flame-Horn, an ox-shaped beast wreathed in fire whose horn foretells plague and plenty. An old soldier tells how it once strayed to the flatlands and set the crops aflame.
The Guttering Lamp
A cloth trader loses his way in mountain mist and finds a thatched hut with a guttering lamp, where an old woman feeds him porridge. At dawn the hut is gone; only an old grave remains, a lamp still burning before it.
The Green Snake
A shepherd boy spares a green snake from the woodcutter's axe. Years later, when mountain floods sweep him and his mother into the water, the grown snake coils around them and bears them to a tree.
The Tame Cat
A childless old widow keeps a yellow-and-black cat. When she falls ill, the cat brings healing herbs; when she dies, it guards her body and bites a thief. The villagers, moved, bury them both.