All Posts
Filter by keyword, tag, and category.
The Village-Keeper
Old Shuan keeps watch over a village empty for forty years, where a boundary of red ropes, a broken plow, and blood-soaked hemp bars the living from entering and the dead from leaving. Yet each night the village stirs with sounds no living voice makes, the stove ash stays warm, and footsteps tread broken tiles from east to west. The longer he keeps the gate, the less he can tell inside from out — until, at last, those faint footsteps sound beneath his own feet.
The Evil-Warder
A geomancer who wards evil from new houses finds his own foundation hollowing with every ward he sinks. The more he pins the dead beneath others' thresholds, the more the wronged fellow he once murdered returns to him—until the final ward he lays under his own floor gathers that ghost home, and the hands beneath the earth reach up. A lingering dread.
The Bone-Picker
For forty years Lao Zhou has gathered the dead for reburial, secretly keeping one small bone from every skeleton—because he was born short a piece and means to make himself whole. He hoards fragments in a jar that sounds at night, until he understands the last bone he must pick is his own. A lingering dread.
The Ghost-Bride Matchmaker
A matchmaker who weds the dead finds every union she brokers draws more lonely ghosts to her door. At last the one who comes knocking to be wed is her own sister, driven to death by a forced bride-exchange she never dared to arrange. A lingering dread.
The Corpse-Lamp
The lamp-keeper of a hillside mortuary chapel tends seven oil lamps, one to each unclaimed body; when a lamp dies, its corpse takes a step. Drowsy by nature, he lets a lamp go out — and the body that walked proves to be his sister, dead at seven, who had waited all along for him to extinguish the light so he would take her home. A lingering dread.
The Path-Guide
An old man guides night travelers through the mountain fog, one lantern and one party at a time. The more roads he remembers for others, the more his own way home is trodden away — until the blue-gray earth of the dead clings to his soles, phantom footsteps cross his own, and the mist's voices call 'path-guide, this way.' He walks himself into a fog that exists in no living place, where all he misled and lost wait with their guttering lamps. A lingering dread.
The Brush-Dipper
Shen Yan writes letters, birthday scrolls and pleas for the illiterate of the town. The more lies he pens for the living, the more his brush at night writes its own unsealed letters to the dead who were wronged. The last one bears his own name, and will not burn.
The Corpse-Keeper
A corpse-keeper guards nameless bodies in a hillside mortuary chapel, waiting for the unclaimed to be claimed. Each body he keeps borrows a little of his living warmth, so year by year he grows colder, forgets more, and his shadow thins. At last he finds the nameless corpse he tends is the one destined to receive his own — its tablet blank, kept only by the stick of incense he lights each day. A lingering dread.