Tide of Shadows and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

Under Heaven , which provided inspiration for both the gravedigging aspect of the story and the approach to its prose, and Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold , which served up the story’s ensemble cast and its dark tone. Without a doubt, “A Night for Spirits and Snowflakes” wears its inspirations on its sleeve. In intervening years, I’ve tried to be more subtle in the ways that I allow other books and stories to inspire and mould my own, but I’d be remiss not to tip my hat to those two authors and the impact they had on this story.
    I didn’t know it then, but I was also writing my first “grimdark” story, a label and a set of themes that I have a conflicted relationship with 1 !
    Since 2011, I’ve gained a better understanding of fantasy’s (and all fiction’s) need for diverse voices, characters, cultures, and genders. When I look back at “A Night for Spirits and Snowflakes”, I see some first attempts at playing with a world that’s larger than just boundaries of the popularized perception of faux-medieval England. There are characters of colour, several different cultures and religions represented, but it’s also a story packed to the brim with straight males. Kameron Hurley taught us in her Hugo Award–winning essay, “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle, and Slaves’ Narrative” 2 , that war is no excuse to forget women in wartime narratives. I wonder what this “A Night for Spirits and Snowflakes” would look like if I were to revisit it—to find a truer telling in which the women were not written out by the historians?

    “A Night for Spirits and Snowflakes” was originally published in the Sword & Laser Anthology (2014), edited by Tom Merritt and Veronica Belmont.

The Girl with Wings
    of Iron and Down

I woke in a white room. The gentle hum of electricity enveloped me, and a blinding white light shone down from a single point in the ceiling. I felt like I had just crawled out from the pits of death. Hell. A shadow moved into the light, then resolved into a head, then a face, and then a man. He reminded me of my father.
    "Don't worry, girl," said the man. “I’m fixing you."
    The light faded, the man drifted into shadows. I fell back into sleep.
    Or death. It was difficult to tell which.

    The next time I woke, I was still in the white room, but the light was now a dim orange. I was free to move my head, but leather straps held me tight against the table. I looked around my prison as best I could. Two walls were bare, one had outline of what looked like a door, and the third was dominated by a lifeless screen built into the wall above a small desk. On the desk sat a simple table lamp, much like the one in my bedroom. This was my bedroom now.
      I didn’t know where I was. The easy answer was that I was dead—but was Heaven really just a white room with an orange lamp? My grandmama had always said it would be wonderful, and this room was anything but. It was boring. Small.
    The ceiling held several lights settled into shallow depressions. They looked like the watchful eyes of angels. I thought again of my grandmama and her silly stories. Father hadn’t liked it when she told me those stories.
    They were just stories, though. So where's the harm, Father?
    The hiss of a door broke the room's silence; the light shifted from orange to white and back to orange as new light invaded from whatever lay beyond the door, then was shut away again. Slippered footsteps whispered across the floor.
    A large hand touched my shoulder, tender and delicate. It belonged to a stern-faced man in horn-rimmed glasses. The same man as before. The datapad in his hand glowed; its colours danced across the pale skin of his palm as he used the device one-handed, manipulating the screen with his thumb.
    "You're not supposed to be awake," he said. His voice was also like my father's but sadder.
    He turned and walked to the desk. He put down his datapad and fiddled with the wallscreen. It