Ninety-first Issue! Crown of Serpents
The days stretch long and golden, the air thick with dust, venom, and old promises. In the glare of summer, crowns gleam, scales shift, and power coils quietly in the dark.
Welcome to the ninety-first edition of the Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter.
This month’s theme is Crown of Serpents. These are stories of cursed thrones, serpent queens, poisoned bloodlines, and rulers whose power was never meant to be held by human hands. Expect glittering courts, ancient betrayals, venomous magic, and crowns that bite back.
Thank you to everyone who submitted this month. Your stories slithered, schemed, and struck with deadly precision. Step carefully... something crowned is watching.
Congratulations to both winners of the June theme: Emily Y. Teng and Elitsa Dermendzhiyska.
Venom is Poison is Strength is Venom by Abigail Kemske – A haunting reimagining of myth that explores the power hidden within curses, fear and transformation...
Yasha the Undying by Robert F. Lowell – An immortal warrior embarks on a perilous quest where ancient magic, forgotten legends and fate collide...
This month's newsletter features:
- NEW Flame Tree Press and Beyond & Within titles!
- Myth & Fiction Podcast
- Original Fantasy Flash Fiction #1: Venom is Poison is Strength is Venom by Abigail Kemske
- Original Fantasy Flash Fiction #2: Yasha the Undying by Robert F. Lowell
- EXCLUSIVE Newsletter Subscribers Special Promotion
- Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme
FLAME TREE PRESS | July Titles
A Fugitive's History of the Known Universe by Nadia Afifi
After exposing the dark origins of Nabatea, Azad becomes a fugitive hunted across the galaxy by the Vitruvian Authorities. To spark a revolution, he and his crew must join forces with a space pirate whose motives remain uncertain. As their journey leads them into Nabatea’s past, long-buried secrets, a lingering death, and a mother’s struggle against her son’s terrifying vision threaten the future of their world.
Thorns by Gregory Bastianelli
Dr. Monica Cucinotta works on the front lines of a hospital in Cassino, Italy, dealing with a deadly contagion that causes thorns to erupt along the surface of the body. When Monica becomes infected with the virus and must leave the hospital, she begins a journey across the dark landscape of a pandemic world where she meets the best and worst of humanity that tests her belief in science and faith as she struggles to return home to her loved ones.
Original Fantasy Story #1
Venom is Poison is Strength is Venom
Abigail Kemske
You get your first serpent on your sixteenth birthday when you first attract the eye of men. Your body now a seduction, a temptation of lustful thoughts. It’s your fault for the clothes you wear, the rouged lips, luscious hair scented sweet berry. You steal their eyes away from their wives. You had it coming.
The first one hurts the worst, fangs sliding under the thin skin at your temple, the place it chose to latch. It wiggles around your posterior head as it becomes part of you.
Mother had told you to wipe away the blood and to hide the serpent beneath your tresses, for no man wants a woman-of-fangs.
But you don’t listen. You let the blood drip down your cheek, spattering your blouse. You let the serpent cling to your hair.
You show them what they’ve done to you.
#
Mother’s only serpent hides under her bosom, a loose blouse obscuring the slithering shape. One she received late in life for seeking pleasure from a man out-of-wedlock after Father died. She’d warned you of the danger of undoing the top buttons on your blouse and of wearing your hair down and wild with curls.
“Hope you’ve learnt your lesson.” Mother ignores your complaints about your suffocating clothes and the fire-ant-itch creeping across your skin when playing the meek role she taught you. “You don’t want to end up like Auntie.”
#
When the Serpenter first came to the door declaring your Serpenting in a week, only Auntie offered comfort. The sister Mother had estranged herself from. The Auntie you only knew from weddings and funerals. She beckoned you from the dark alleyway where she lived. When Mother left you alone in the foyer with your shame, you followed Auntie’s writhing form into the shadows.
Inside her apartment, you sagged onto her bed. She served you hot tea and reminded you it’s better to get fanged than be sent belly-crawling through mountains until you shed your skin.
No woman has ever returned.
“But you have so many.” You flinch as Autie’s arm undulates against yours. “Does it hurt?”
“The venom only stings if you let it. Use it before it poisons you. It’s too late for me.” Auntie lets you weep on her serpent-free shoulder.
#
Your second serpent pierces your other temple the day after Daughter’s birth. Fathered out-of-wedlock by a traveller, your baby bears no shame. But you-who-sought-pleasure from that generous lover, endure the burn of venom as it flourishes under your skin.
You don’t let it dissipate. You hold onto the fire.
Two serpents proudly ring two-thirds around your head, tails intertwined, and the people stare, their eyes on you like flicking tongues. Mother won’t have it either. Two serpents, and she kicks you out of the house.
Auntie takes you and Daughter in.
#
Your third Serpenting is the day of Daughter’s first, her fourteenth and fearless. Auntie is here too. A line of other women waiting. All of you are here for marching naked through the city, serpents quivering wildly in the wind. Daughter handed out the fliers. At your age, the venom will wither your womb and mould your body to softness a decade too early.
Auntie hobbles across the Serpenting platform, hunches over the hissing pit beneath. The gathered crowd hushes at the serpent’s release. It slithers up Auntie’s body toward her last bare spot, the shoulder where she let you weep. Fangs sink into flesh. Auntie wobbles and collapses. The venom of so many, finally too much to bear.
You gasp. Shoving the soldier aside, you rush to cradle Auntie’s head, vision blurring with tears. “This isn’t right!”
Auntie cups your cheek. “Use it…before it poisons you.”
A soldier shoves Daughter toward the pit, her eyes widening with each step. Another stills you with a firm hand on your shoulder. The crowd jeers as the hissing pit opens and the Serpenter swings in his hook.
“Use it!” Auntie grips your hand.
The venom inside that you’ve never let become poison, a heat that’s swirled around for years, fuelling the march and your defiance, raising a daughter to be free. What life will she now have, forced into shame? Maybe Mother was right; you shouldn’t have shown your serpents so freely.
“Now!” Auntie wheezes.
A serpent rises from the pit.
“Mom?" Daughter squeaks.
Your stomach flops. You thought she’d be brave.
At the serpent’s release, you use the venom. Veins swell, pupils widen. You roll out of the soldier’s grip and snatch the serpent slithering up Daughter’s leg, letting it latch onto your head, completing the crown. New venom, new strength.
“You can’t have our shame.” Your resonance silences all around you.
All except Daughter. “Mother, what’s happening?”
Teetering at the black pit’s edge, your voice a hiss-on-the-wind. “It only stings if you let it.”
You drop into darkness.
There’s a shout, a wailing-that-could-be-yours, but it’s difficult to tell as fangs pierce and pierce and pierce. Your insides molten, your outsides too, thoughts puddling as you melt down.
Is this the end? It is too much to bear. What were you thinking?
Use it before it poisons you.
A distant voice above, “Mother, come back!”
Daughter. You’re doing it for Daughter.
The serpenting platform quakes. You burst forth, shattering wood with the hundreds of serpents coiling atop your head. Their venom allows you to bare their weight, the shame. You have the power to rise.
Eyes slitted, teeth fanged, you speak the voice of many. “Free them all.”
The soldiers cower but don’t move. You spit acid at their feet until they comply.
#
You can’t be there for every instance of shame, every time women are forced to compliance and invisibility. You’re not a goddess, not quite human. Yet they call you Queen Serpentine. When you can, you cast slithering shadows over the accuser, the suppressor, the man-who-thinks-he’s-owed. You spit acid at their feet, let your serpents devour the most violent, and bear your own fangs in a pinch. Mostly, you use the venom within you to let women live and live and live.
Abigail Kemske is a writer of weird things and dark forests. She lives in the forested suburbs of Minneapolis, MN where she finds inspiration for most of her stories and shares her home with with her spouse, two children, and their two Maine coon cats, Mr. Benedict Flufferbatch and Hades. Her fiction is published in The Saturday Evening Post, The Dark, Apex Magazine, Nature: Futures, Adventitious, among other venues. Find her on social media @abigailkemske and online at abigailkemske.com.
Original Fantasy Story #2
Yasha the Undying
Robert F.Lowell
With the strength of Anaconda, Yasha crushed the guardian monk’s chest. She let his body fall to the floor of the rock-cut temple and spat Cobra’s poison in another guard’s eyes. As he screamed and writhed, a third guard rammed his spear at her spine. Her ring mail turned the point harmlessly aside. Fast as Mamba, she wheeled, grasped the spear, and snapped it across her thigh. She rammed both halves of the broken shaft into the monk’s guts.
Yasha circled around the antechamber, searching for new threats. Satisfied, she glided across the floor and silenced the blinded guard with a flick of her sickle-shaped sword. Pain bit into her left side. She looked down. A lucky spear thrust had slipped under her coat of mail. Before she’d gained the first jewels in her seven-headed serpent crown, the cut would have ended her, but now all she had to do was touch the wound and summon Rattler’s resilience. Her slashed flesh knitted together, leaving her sepia skin smooth and scarless as the day she was born. The air, cold as death, reeked of smoke and blood.
She sheathed her blade and lifted the serpent crown off her helmet. Torchlight glinted off a dozen jeweled eyes and pooled in two empty golden sockets. She took off her helmet and lowered the serpent crown into the dark ringlets of her hair. Only then did her heart quicken its pace. Not with the exertion of slaughtering forty temple guards, but with anticipation that the eyes of Ouroboros would finally be hers. Those eyes would grant her immortality, the last power she needed to avenge the massacre of her people.
Yasha turned toward the bronze doors to the inner sanctum. In the polished metal she saw battles won, creatures slain, and hoards plundered to acquire the six pairs of serpent eyes ensconced in her crown. Other visions slithered in beside them, of allies betrayed and friends murdered, but she drove them from her mind. Justice demanded a high price. Innocents had paid it up to now, but once she had the crown’s final pair of eyes, the enemies of her people would pay it a hundred times over. She spoke the incantation she’d tortured out of the high priest. When she heard the magical lock rasp open, she pulled the doors’ ring-shaped handles and stepped through.
There was no light beyond the portal. Her tongue flicked out but tasted nothing, not even dust. Viper’s sense showed her nothing warm. Lighting a torch revealed a semicircular wall, blacker than a starless night. A magnificent serpent swallowing its own tail, folded on itself into a sideways figure eight, was sculpted in high relief on the wall’s otherwise blank surface. At the center of the sculpture, where the head consumed the tail, the serpent’s eye sockets sparkled with two colorless, flawless diamonds.
Yasha’s right hand trembled and dropped the torch. Eternal life was literally within her reach. She drew a dagger and staggered forward through her own shadow. As carefully as she could with shaking hands, she pried one of the eyes from the great stone snake and pressed it into the face of the central serpent in her crown. The gem blazed white as it accepted its new setting. In the frigid chamber, Yasha dripped with sweat. Cursing herself for showing weakness so close to her ultimate triumph, she reached her dagger toward the remaining diamond.
The wall cracked. Yasha jumped back. The stone serpent spat out its tail and lifted its head from the wall. It pointed its one-eyed face at hers and flicked out its forked tongue.
“You have come to do what you have done before,” the serpent hissed.
Yasha, who had stared down dragons without flinching, needed three deep breaths before she could speak. “What do you mean? This is the first time I’ve set foot in this temple.”
“It is, yet it is not.”
Fury banished Yasha’s fear. “Stop talking in circles!”
“That is the only way I can speak. My beginning is my end. Leave me my eye and you may go forth to take your revenge. Take my eye and your beginning shall be your end as well.”
Yasha clenched a mailed fist and drew her blade. “This is your end, serpent, not mine. I’ve killed too many to come this far. One more, man, beast, or demon, won’t make a difference. I will have your eye and avenge my people!”
The tip of the serpent’s tongue tasted the point of Yasha’s sword. “No need for threats. You have won your prize, as you have a thousand times before and shall a million times again.”
“Then hold still and shut your mouth.” Yasha grabbed the serpent’s neck. “I have no time for this.”
The serpent hissed with laughter. “You shall become immortal. What is your hurry?”
Yasha stared into the serpent’s jewelled eye. She saw pain-twisted faces, burnt cities, mass graves, and the rotting bodies of her slaughtered people.
“One lifetime will not be enough to do what I must do and atone for what I’ve done.”
The serpent nodded. “Take what you came for and you will be innocent again. Farewell, undying one, until next time.”
Yasha sheathed her sword and, with her dagger, pried out the serpent’s second eye. Yasha the Undying. A fitting name for the avenger of her people. This time with confidence, she fitted the eye of Ouroboros into the last empty space in her crown.
A tremendous blow struck her from behind. Yasha screamed.
# # #
The midwife dangled the newborn by her feet, ready to spank her again if she stopped breathing. The baby continued her wailing, so she wiped her clean of blood and laid her in her mother’s arms.
“A fine healthy girl,” the midwife said. She smiled.
The baby’s mother glowed with love and sweat. “I shall name her Yasha.”
The midwife nodded. “May she live long and cover her name in glory.”
Robert F. Lowell is a Writers of the Future winner and Baen Fantasy Adventure Award finalist. His complicated relationship with reality began when he was born between two movie studios in Burbank, California. In previous professional lives, he researched and wrote about international relations, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism. He taught at universities in the US, Costa Rica, and Switzerland, was kissed by a dancing horse in Siberia, and now expands the universe of online learning as an instructional systems designer. Stumbling in the footsteps of Tolkien, Niven, Vance, and Wolfe, he writes about swords, sorcery, robots, aliens, and mystical beasts as a member of the Wulf Pack Writers. He, his wife Lady Lowell, and their dog Murphy live in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. You can visit his website here, his Facebook here and his Instagram here.
Our next edition of the newsletter will be SCI-FI themed, and we are looking for stories around the theme of:
Ghost Code
Please note that all stories submitted should be within the SCI-FI genre.
Terms and conditions for the submissions here: https://flametr.com/submissions.
Please send your 1,000-word story to the Newsletter Editor:
Leah Ratcliffe
flashfic@flametreepublishing.com
The deadline is 19th July 2026.
We look forward to reading your submissions. Happy writing!
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