Welcome to March, a month of unsettled skies and restless air. Winter loosens its grip, but spring has not quite taken hold. The wind turns unpredictable. The ground softens. Something stirs beneath the thaw. There is a rawness to March, a sense of emergence, as if the world is shedding one skin before it is ready to reveal the next.

Welcome to the eighty-seventh edition of the Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter.

This month’s theme is Blood Moth. These are stories of transformation and hunger, of wings drawn to warmth and bodies drawn to darker callings. Expect ritual and metamorphosis, devotion and dread, moments where beauty and horror cling to each other like blood on silk.

Thank you to everyone who submitted this month. Your stories fluttered in the dark and left their mark. Are you ready to step into the swarm?

Congratulations to both winners of the March theme: Georgina Kamsika and Jennifer Crow!

Consecration by Georgina Kamsika – A young woman enters a sacred rite that binds blood, faith, and power — only to discover the cost of devotion is far stranger than she imagined...

Fragile Wings Dipped in Blood by Jennifer Crow – An obsessed artist uses blood and moths to summon beauty from the dark, unaware that something may be summoning him in return...

This month's newsletter features:

• NEW Romantic Fantasy and Flame Tree Collector's Editions titles!
• Myth & Fiction Podcast
• Original Horror Flash Fiction #1: Consecration by Georgina Kamsika
• Original Horror Flash Fiction #2: Fragile Wings Dipped in Blood by Jennifer Crow
• EXCLUSIVE Newsletter Subscribers Special Promotion
• Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme

Fragile Wings Dipped in Blood

Jennifer Crow

In the artist’s studio, where evening’s gloaming settles deeper shadows in the corners of the room, Loren the painter lays out a saucer full of sugar water, dyed red. Beside it, the flame of a candle rises and falls with each gust of wind that seeps through cracks and slithers into the room. Moths rise and fall as well, their pallid wings fluttering into and out of the circle of light.

From time to time, one dips into the saucer of red water, tasting with its uncoiled proboscis. It tries to take off again, sags, and lands on a piece of thick paper pinned on the table with four smooth black stones. Its wings mark the white surface. A cypher, an untranslatable alphabet, the spatters begin as a few isolated spots. Gradually, though, more moths flock to the saucer, dip, and conjure tiny, spreading circles. More marks appear on the paper. Some are sharp and defined, while others blur and fade. Every so often, a moth lands and cannot take off again, its wings fouled.

To the artist, those dying insects seem like smaller and more delicate pieces of paper. Ash, perhaps, burnt to white. The remnants of secrets never to be revealed, he can banish them with a breath or two. And so, he does.

He means for this sheet of paper to become the basis of a new spell, a conjuration. Loren dreams nightly of a woman, pale and delicate, cast in shadow. In the dream, moths circle her like the tattered edges of a shroud. It may be that he has fallen in love or perhaps into bewitchment. Either way, he will have her.

Moon and stars wink at him through the narrow gap in the curtains. Then they continue on their journey, leaving him with only a guttering stump of candle to illuminate his studio. As dawn creeps in, its wan light drowns out the flickering flame, so he licks his thumb and forefinger and quenches the fire. He and the moths go to sleep as the world comes to life around them.

He sleeps through the shouts of street vendors, the quarrels which erupt in the tavern across the road, and the clangor of alarm bells as some greater tragedy arrives in the city. When at last he stirs, he makes a meal of stale bread and warm beer. The meal leaves his belly full and his heart empty.

Before his eyes, as the dagger of light grows brighter, the marks of his moth-art fade. Though they do not disappear entirely, whatever meaning he hoped to glean from the faint brushstrokes of their wings becomes nothing more than a series of smudges. Annoyed, he crumples the paper and casts it aside. His work, he now sees, requires something more substantive than mere plant dyes. He turns his hand over, studies the bluish lines which run from his elbow to his wrist, and sees the answer to his dilemma.

Night returns, and from his dwindling supply of candles, he lights another. The moths gather, ashen gray and stippled with red, as if they carry marks from the previous night’s labors. This time, the dish he sets out contains not dye but blood, drawn from his wrist and dripped into sugar water. He worries the change in flavor might drive away his collaborators. But as he waits and watches, they begin their dance again. Dip, splash, struggle. Flutter away or surrender to gravity and the weight of his blood.

The moths fill the first sheet of paper. He sweeps it aside and lays out another for them, and a third. Sleepless, he strains his eyes in the dim light. Have they left another message for him? Will he be able to read it in the morning?

When at last the candle gutters, and only a few moths remain in the air around it, he snuffs out the light and retreats to his narrow cot. Neither the bed’s groans nor the cacophony of morning in the city can keep him awake. He sleeps and dreams of a woman wrapped in wind-blown scarves made from thousands of moth wings, their silken ends brushing his skin in gentle temptation.

He wakes smiling, the memory of her beauty lingering. But when he tries to roll off the cot, all his mind turned to the moth’s painting, and what it might have summoned, he finds himself unable to move. With great effort, he wrenches his chin to his left. As he does, silken strands brush his cheek and sag into his eyes. Casting his gaze down, he sees his body wrapped in a cocoon like the one from which the moths emerge, but larger.

Loren struggles to clear his vision. Someone stands in the center of the studio, slender and pale. He smiles—he thinks he’s smiled—but something covers his mouth. The figure leans closer, brushes a cool hand across his brow and his lips. It is the woman from his dream, and she meets his gaze with eyes the color of storm clouds.

As he struggles to speak, she holds up the papers from the previous night, with their moth-made spell. A few wings dot the page, his blood glueing them in place. When the woman smiles at him, he thinks she must be grateful he freed her. But as her lips part, a tube unrolls. She has a proboscis as well, barbed at the end, and as Loren screams, it pierces the vein in his throat. Moths flutter over him, first a few and then untold numbers of them. A cloud, he thinks. A cloud of wings catches the light, and for a moment, he thinks he can see each individual scale on them. Not gray, but iridescent and refracting the light into a sheen so beautiful it breaks his heart.

Shy and nocturnal, Jennifer Crow has rarely been photographed in the wild, but it's rumored she lives near a waterfall in western New York. In the past quarter-century, her work has appeared in many venues, including Uncanny, Analog, and anthologies like Along Harrowed Trails and Under Her Skin. A Rhysling Award winner in 2023 for her poem “Harold and the Blood-Red Crayon,” she will have work in upcoming issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction and Penumbric. Those who’d like to know more about her writing can catch up with her on Bluesky: @writerjencrow.bsky.social.