Vampyric Requiem (Eald Cearo Fantasy Short Stories #1)

When a girl falls into a river in a Welsh forest, she enters the magical world of the Story-Catcher, a mysterious wizard who might just have an unexpected reason for her presence in his realm.

The night air felt cold under the moon that glared at me with a radiance that I did not deserve. The chill that crept over my body was nothing compared to the frost in my heart. Standing in the center of the disaster, all around me were corpses of friend and foes that I slew for a mere night’s sleep. It was then that I knew what I was…
The Bloodstained Rose, alone in a cage of thorns that would neither free me nor allow me to be freed. Unable to escape, I prayed for a hero to end my nightmare and cut me out of this cage of thorns…

This [7500+word] novelette is a stand-alone side story to the Arcane Advent series and takes you through the tragic story of Tanmay, a mage who was blessed with control over plants and turned into a weapon as a child during a civil war between the magical factions of India.

She longed for peace, but could only follow a path of destruction until her savior arrived. Over a decade later, when an old enemy arrives, will she have to become the Bloodstained Rose once again to protect her charge? 

Tags: magic, witch, wizard, urban fantasy, action-adventure, spells, magick, novelette, arcane advent

More than three hundred years ago there lived in England a poet named Edmund Spenser. He was brave and true and gentle, and he loved all that was beautiful and good.
Edmund Spenser wrote many poems, and the most beautiful of all is the one called ‘The Faerie Queen.’ He loved so dearly all things that are beautiful and all things that are good, that his eyes could see Fairyland more clearly than the eyes of other men ever could.
There are many, many stories in ‘The Faerie Queen,’ and out of them all I have told you only eight. Some day you will read the others for yourself.
In this little book Miss Rose Le Quesne has made one pretty picture for each story. But when you are old enough to read for yourself ‘The Faerie Queen’ that Edmund Spenser wrote, you will find that there is a picture on every page.

Tarburton-on-the-Moor – just another sleepy Dartmoor village. Or so it seems to Joanna Gard when she comes to visit her elderly aunt here, until the fabric of the village begins, like her personal life, to unravel. The villagers become less and less substantial as she watches, the local church degenerates into a nexus of terrifying malevolence, siblings of a horrifyingly seductive family pull her inexorably towards them, elementals play with her terrors on the midnight moor ... At last Joanna is compelled to realize that a duel of wills between eternal forces is being played out – that nothing, herself included, is what it seems to be.

In this uncomfortably disturbing tale of clashing realities, Hugo- and World Fantasy Award-winning author John Grant skilfully juggles a strange, fantasticated cosmology with images from the darker side of the human soul.

"Written exceptionally well ... grip[s] from beginning to end" – Sue Lange, Infinity Plus


Bonus Novella: "The Beach of the Drowned"

He thought he was booking himself in for a day's idle sailing and lovemaking, and it would all have been fine except then a storm blew up out of nowhere, his girlfriend suffered a horrible death, and finally he himself was sucked under the waves. But death eluded him. Instead he found himself drawn to the beach where all drowned folk go, a place outside normal existence where the few people who retain their intelligence band together in the hopeless hope of finding their way back to the living world again. After all, legend says it was done once before ...

"Involving philosophical exploration" – Rich Horton, Fantasy Magazine

SYNOPSIS

Seven years later...

Enna and Apollo are released from their punishment. Deron returns to the Vangoth family home, this is due to the mysterious illness of his uncle Vilk.
On the day of the vampire Council, will who be the Vangoth family emissary?
Apolo or Deron?...

Angel Acamdeny Is About A Kind That Had Not Planed To End Up In Heven At An Early Age But Did.