“Amberblight.”
As his daughter Rebecca nodded, Thaddeus felt all his sixty years rest heavy on his shoulders, and set his tea-cup down on the table. The word lingered. His granddaughter, Eleanor, was only six — much too young. But Rebecca had showed him the tiny bumps in the back of her daughter’s left hand.
Eleanor emerged outside the atrium window, skipping across the manor’s grounds, followed by his elderly but spry valet, Cardellain. For now, the hard Amberblight nodules were benign bumps, but as they grew in number and size, they would bring pain, and settle into her joints so that they froze.
When death came, it would be a blessing.
A collection of twenty stories that endured a minefield of rejections before they made it out into the world, this new anthology from Metaphorosis Books is curated by B. Morris Allen, and will be released on August 1st. It’s available to pre-order now from Bookshop.org.
