The Fields of Ur

On April 24, 2022April 24, 2022 By Cameron SueyIn Fantasy, Horror, Polished Draft, Science Fiction, Short Stories, Suggested StoriesLeave a comment

Previously, this story was behind a password for people who had donated in support of urgent causes. I have now reposted it for all to read. If you are able, please continue to do anything you can to protect trans kids. Links for suggested donations can be found at the bottom.

This story is nearly ten years old now, and I stopped trying to find a home for it after a few false starts over five years ago. The root of this story feels like a fever dream: someone named Ben emailed me to tell me that his friend Lachlan had been hit by a cab in Brisbane, and would I consider writing him into a short story to him. It was such an oddly forward request that I said yes without much consideration. Months later, when I completed it, I sent him a draft and wished Lachlan well on his recovery. He never responded, and that was the last I heard of it.

The Fields of Ur

On the morning of the incident, Lachie woke to the gentle trills of impossible birds, nestled in his bed in the boughs of the world tree of Ur. The cool breeze licked his face and ruffled his shaggy hair as he stretched, arching his back and feeling each joint pop with pleasurable release. He sat up and the branches and broad leaves of the world tree unfurled, revealing a glorious vista of the fields of Ur.

The world tree stood on the peak of the tallest mountain of Ur, a mountain still without a name. The craggy peak, modeled on the fearsome heights of the old Alps, but in miniature, rose only a few thousand feet above the plains below. The world tree was half again as tall, a wooden spire of red and green, perpetually wreathed in clouds, and Lachie slept most nights nestled in a bed of felt-textured leaves.

Pages: 1 2

Digger’s Lament

On September 15, 2016June 4, 2021 By Cameron SueyIn Fantasy, Short Stories, Suggested Stories2 Comments

In the night, the valley was so filled with smoke that Palta could not make out the dimmest guidestars. He had a dozen other ways to divine the time and his location, but it still filled him with a slippery dread, a feeling of being half-lost and pointed in the wrong direction. His tent, barely half the size of the reeves’ tents and still stinking of the marsh crossing, seemed to close in on him like a fist as he tried to catch a few fitful moments of sleep.

He had wet his scarf and tied a thin strip to his face, but the sharp stench of the burned town and a hundred cook-fires crept through, clinging to the soft tissue of his eyes and nose. Outside, he could hear the 17th Expeditionary Host of Imperial Kattaka, the insectile buzz of a thousand men talking grimly by the fires, reeking of dismay and unease. He knew it wouldn’t be long until they started to blame him for the men who had died that day.

Continue reading “Digger’s Lament” →

Between the Walls

On July 30, 2013October 8, 2019 By Cameron SueyIn Fantasy, Historical, Horror, Short StoriesLeave a comment

The Eastern Empire
Late July, Year of our Lord, 626

When Lecho saw the three walls of Constantinople, rising up like a storm on the horizon, each taller than the last, he knew he’d made his worst mistake. Around him marched the great host of the Avar Khaganate, dragging the skeletal fragments of siege towers. Ahead, he could pick out individual Roman watchmen lining the middle wall, leaning with relaxed arrogance on the crenelations.

Lecho summoned the vilest curses he could and spat them in a circle at his feet. Not for the first time, he damned the blind, hateful luck that had brought him to the foot of the greatest city in the East, ready to grind his flesh into the unbreachable walls until there was little but dust and blood.

As the sun sank in the west, and camps were staked, his motley detachment of Bulgar raiders, Carolingian fugitives, Slavic peasants, and mercenaries from across the continent gathered to hear the words of a minor Avar Khan. Lots were drawn, and they received the honor of being the first over the walls. Lecho watched the Khan palm the tile with the low number etched on it, and pretend to draw it from the ceremonial leather sack, made from some great enemy’s scrotum. He’d known they’d be first, one way or another, but he could do little more than spit in a circle and try not to catch the Khan’s eye.

Continue reading “Between the Walls” →

East

On January 2, 2012August 8, 2012 By Cameron SueyIn Fantasy, First Draft, Horror, Short Stories, Suggested Stories23 Comments

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the Storm.

It’s always been there, behind us, whispering through the shuddering ground. A background roar behind the wind. We’d been ahead for so long, moving slightly faster than its clockwork crawl. Until the mountains. Then, as we ground ourselves upward against these slopes, we heard it rumbling closer, a rising quake in the earth. But it’s been a while since I turned around and actually saw it. Sitting here on the side of the mountain, in the frigid morning, it fills my vision and stings my eyes with the monstrous unreality of it.

It rises like an unbroken wall into the sky, obscured only by the limits of my sight, fading into the clear blue, and stretching away north and south, curving away with the earth. The sunlight doesn’t seem to touch it. Nothing does. At the ground, where the churning wall of sickly blue lightning and black clouds grinds across the earth, I can see the Unmaking. The lower peaks, already shaking apart, burst and ablate away at the event horizon of the Storm. The land dips before the onslaught, as if shying away from the kiss of the boiling wall. I can feel the violence beneath my feet as millions of tons of ancient mountain falls away into its infinite maw.

It’s going to be on me in a few hours. I wonder if I’ll die when the peak caves away, crushed in a free-fall of slate and stone, or whether I’ll be alive when the Storm touches me, shredded and atomized, erased and Unmade. I wonder, again, what it might feel like.

Continue reading “East” →