Eighty-fifth Issue! Waking Stone
Welcome to January, a month of frozen ground and slow awakenings. The world holds its breath beneath layers of ice and silence, but something ancient stirs below. The year begins not with a shout, but a deep and steady hum — the quiet shift of root and stone, the promise of what lies beneath beginning to rise.
Welcome to the eighty-fifth edition of the Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter.
This month’s theme is Waking Stone. These are stories of buried power and long-awaited change, where fantasy cracks through the surface of the still and the forgotten. Thank you to everyone who submitted. Your tales have unearthed magic in the quiet places. Ready to hear it move?
Congratulations to both winners of the January theme: Chris Hall & Moh Afdhaal!
A Song of Sea and Stone by Chris Hall – A lyrical and immersive tale of memory, myth, and the deep pull of what calls us home...
The Assayer by Moh Afdhaal – A quiet, devastating story about power, tradition, and the toll of unseen magic...
This month's newsletter features:
- NEW Flame Tree Press and Beyond & Within titles!
- Myth & Fiction Podcast
- Call for Submissions
- Original Fantasy Flash Fiction #1: A Song of Sea and Stone by Chris Hall
- Original Fantasy Flash Fiction #2: The Assayer by Moh Afdhaal
- EXCLUSIVE Newsletter Subscribers Special Promotion
- Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme
FLAME TREE PRESS | January Title
Driving a logging truck through the Romanian mountains, smuggler Rosi and her crew come across a radio signal that hints at impending doom. As the world goes completely dark, their truck becomes a vessel sailing across a sea of nothingness.
But they’re not alone: transmissions trickle in through the radio from similar isolated islands across the country, from amateur radio hobbyists and police cars and customs facilities.
Attempting to rescue survivors and find a way out, the group save more lives, but soon discover that something hungry lurks below, and it's sending up agents – and transmissions – of its own.
Original Fantasy Story #1
A Song of Sea and Stone
Chris Hall
In the dim grey glow of a winter morning, waves crashed upon the rocky strand, and seabirds sang their shrill songs into the storm-wracked sky.
On the shore, Muireann swayed gently to the rhythmic advance and retreat of the waves, hoping, as she had day after day, season after season, for a visitor. But, yet again, the shore lay empty; the water bore no visitors this day.
How long the beaches had lain barren, none could say. What Muireann’s people did know was that the selkies vanished many human lifetimes ago. And they had not returned.
Some believed the selkies never really existed. More still believed they were not coming back.
A few, though, mostly wizened older people, their hair turned to snow, their skin the texture of cracked stone, their eyes still bright with secrets and stories forgotten by most, believed something else entirely. They believed that the selkies would one day return in droves. They believed that, in returning, the selkies would bring other things long absent from the island—green growing things and the promise of hope carried in limb, leaf, and bole.
Times were hard on the island. A meagre diet—gathered from dying forests, grown in struggling gardens, or plucked from the desolate sea—barely sustained Muireann and the people of her village.
The Crown made many promises. The Crown broke many promises. In exchange for their forests and their fish and their ceaseless toil, the villagers never saw the bright gleam of the gold they were promised.
In the old stories, a man would sometimes capture a selkie, hide her sealskin, and force the seal-maiden to marry him. The Crown had done worse. They had driven away the seals themselves.
The stories of the old ones helped Muireann imagine another possibility, a life of bounty and natural abundance, a life unbound by the fetters of the Crown.
The old ones remembered the days before the Crown. They remembered the days when the selkies still visited the Isle, sustaining the oceans and the forests and the peoples by their presence.
And so, for many long years, Muireann had come, as she did now, wrapped in her sheep’s wool cloak to protect her from the stinging winds and icy rains. For many long years she had stared out with eyes as green as the sea that sustained her and which was her namesake, daring to hope for the selkies’ return.
Each day, her hope grew a little fainter and her need more desperate, like the last candle nearly burnt down in the darkest hour of night.
But today the hour was dark beyond imagining, and the faint flicker of hope was more needed than ever, for today she would be taken from her home and forced to marry a man of the Crown.
So it was, on this, the last day of her liberty, that Muireann made an offering of precious dried fish and sent it out to sea in a little wooden boat she had carved by hand, a plea to the oceans to bring the selkies back, to save her people, and to liberate her from her impending betrothal.
As the sun reached its zenith, the strand remained barren, the ocean empty. On any other day, Muireann would have returned home, so accustomed to disappointment she barely felt its sting. But today, she would wait until the Crown’s guardsmen came to carry her away.
Behind her, the shadows of the standing stones lengthened.
#
A green flash from the horizon woke her. She did not remember falling asleep, but hours must have passed, for the ocean had nearly swallowed the sun, and mist as thick as bog water swirled across the strand.
The Crown had sent no one to fetch her, but she knew it would not be long before they did.
She began, softly, to weep, knowing this would be the last time she would gaze upon the silent sea, dreaming a foolish girl’s dreams of seal maidens and of a future freed from the Crown.
Then she heard it.
Subtly at first, like a breeze rippling over the surface of the water, came the selkie’s song, a susurrus suggesting a deep and secret longing.
She peered across the misty depths, but the waters appeared empty still.
Still the song rose up from the sea, no longer a whisper, but a melody, strong and haunting and lovely, as if all the voices of those who had gone before joined once more in earthly concert, singing for all they had once loved and lost.
The voices echoed from the stones at her back, so it seemed for a moment that her ancestors had awakened from their sleep beneath the earth and sang now through the stones and from the sea.
Turning back toward the waters, she saw they now teemed with black heads bobbing amongst the waves, a great pod of seals gathered, keeping their distance, as if in waiting.
Like the stone within the sweet, red fruit of a wild cherry, her heart had been hard, hidden away and buried in the fear and darkness she bore within her breast. But now, as the selkies’ song filled the air, it also seemed to reach within her, like a light illuminating possibilities and a sense of rightness the likes of which she had never dreamed or had forgotten how to dream.
Perhaps the stones had been awake all along. Perhaps it was something inside of her that had to awaken, a subtle shift, a sharpening of the senses, the unfurling of shoots long buried.
Muireann watched as the Crown guard approached. And, with a final look at the stones that stood behind her, still echoing with the faint melody of ancient voices, she ran across the strand and dived into the sea.
The waters encircled her like vast grey arms, welcoming her home.
#
When the Crown guard came to the standing stones on the strand where Muireann had held her silent vigil, they heard an echo, a faint and melancholic air rising from the sea and from the stones.
The girl was gone, the only remaining trace a pair of human footprints that ended just before the water’s edge, where seal tracks marked the sand.
Chris Hall is a creative writer, sleight of hand magician, dungeon master, storyteller, and English professor. He was born in the Bitterroot Valley region of Montana and transplanted to the Yuba-Sierra Bioregion at the ripe age of one. Along with foxes, raccoons, squirrels, bears, and innumerable other non-human kin, he lives with his partner, their daughter, son, and the ghosts of several cats in a house on the fringes of a deep, dark wood.His writing has appeared in markets as diverse and divergent from one another as The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader (2011), Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities (2016), the Ancients drabble anthology from Black Hare Press, (2020), and the We Who Are About to Die swords and sorcery anthology from Rogue Blades Entertainment (2022).He blogs from time to time, but finds that his time is currently better spent writing stories rather than blogging. See his intermittent musing here: http://chrishall.blog. You can also find his site for his magical alter ego “Chris the Bard” here: www.christhebard.com
Original Fantasy Story #2
The Assayer
Moh Afdhaal
It was real.
Pranyar could feel its faint thrum between the whorls of his fingertips. It would be undetectable to anyone who didn’t have the decades of training he did. He rolled the bead between his thumb and ring finger. There were no defects—no pits, no asymmetries. Only an impossibly smooth, cloudy, opalescent surface.
Gently cradling the bead in the folds of his palm, Pranyar pressed it to his sternum. The reaction was immediate. He could sense its intense lithoflux with the complimentary bead that hung from his neck, hidden beneath his thick linen robe.
He stifled the elation that blossomed in his chest, the culmination of years of his life spent in search of the Liths. He finally had all twelve. But he could show no emotion. If the weathered miner who sat opposite noticed even the undercurrent of a reaction from him, it would unravel his designs.
He exhaled steadily, expunging the emotions and reinforcing his façade—face taut, forehead unbroken, and eyes unyielding. “No,” he said softly.
The miner’s sun-creased skin and bloodshot eyes descended into horror at Pranyar’s lie. She collapsed, disappearing into the heap of her patchwork thobe. It shuddered as her raspy cries filled the tent. “No. Assayer. Please. This is the… it is a Lith. Please. It must be...” Her croaks dissipated into silence, wisping away with her will to live.
Pranyar choked on the bile that rose violently in his throat. I am stone. I am stone. He repeated the mantra from his upbringing. It helped him remain stoic and persist with the mission. He raised two fingers to instruct the Ka’liph’s soldiers to remove the miner while he made an unspoken requiem. Habis mu’qadis bari. May the soul remain unshackled.
In the commotion of the soldiers’ activity, Pranyar deftly slipped the Lith into his robe unnoticed. Its discovery could not be allowed to reach the Ka’liph. He would need to continue the charade, indulging the endless line of miners queued outside the tent, hoping that they held the ticket for a chance at life. There would be more grief, and death. But this was the only way he could see it ending.
#
“Assayer,” the Ka’liph boomed. “My patience is wearing thin.” He was not pleased with Pranyar’s report—as expected.
“The search for the Liths will continue regardless of your patience, Mes Sha.” Pranyar would punctuate his words with spit if it didn’t guarantee his execution for treason. Instead, he delivered it impassively.
The Ka’liph bristled. “You push boundaries that others dare not seek,” he spat.
There had been a time when those words would have sent shivers through Pranyar. A time when the accretion of the Ka’liph’s empire was his life’s calling. Before he had seen its true corrupt nature—before Gariydh the Foretold had entered his life.
“Leave,” the Ka’liph commanded. He turned away, arms clasped behind his back, and gazed into the auric vista of Qabor under the setting suns. The Assayer didn’t need to be told twice.
#
Gari perched on the edge of the sandstone parapet, facing across the city at the Ka’liph’s Keep. The night was moonless, rich with the prismatic glimmer of myriad stars.
Pranyar studied the woman. In the years of their acquaintance, she had grown hard and callous from a life of adventure. He remembered a time when her eyes had carried nothing but an adamantine conviction to liberate the people of Qabor. It was the disease she had infected him with. A will to be more than a cog—to be the grains of grit that dismantled the empire’s tyranny.
“Do you have the twelfth?” she asked, noticing his gaze and turning away from it.
There was a time when he would have immediately told her the truth. A time when she had been just Gari, not Gariydh the Foretold. Pranyar was not sure who she was anymore.
“You held another rally in the Miner District,” he said, probing her face for a reaction.
“I need their support.” Gari brushed him off. “Do you have the Lith?” she repeated.
“The miner’s support was a given.” Pranyar kept his voice composed; he could sense Gari seething. “You are buying into a false prophecy, Gari. Do not forget that we composed the words of the Foretelling to put fear into the Ka’liph’s machinations, not for your glory.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything, Pranyar,” she snapped, anger clouding her eyes. There was something beyond conviction in them, a hatred—a possession. “You summoned me, and now you test my patience. Tell me, Assayer, do you have all twelve Liths?”
Pranyar made his decision. “No.” It hurt him to lie to his only friend. I am stone.
She disappeared into the night without comment.
#
Pranyar let go of the oars. The boat rocked gently on the Qaborias. The city’s walls were a distant shadow on the horizon, both banks of the great river equally shrouded. He slipped out a velvet pouch from his robe and unthreaded its seal. The twelve Liths clanked inside, pulling and pushing in a storm of lithoflux. He could feel the restrained energy that pulsed within. Power for which no wielder was worthy. Power that could only destroy in this impure world.
The Assayer emptied the pouch into the lapping water. The Liths fell like raindrops, sinking into oblivion.
In the silence of his solitude, Pranyar let the mask drop. Tears fell thick and heavy as he sank to his knees, wailing soundlessly. Habis mu’qadis bari. He could no longer just be stone.
Moh Afdhaal lives in Kandy, Sri Lanka, where he reads and writes speculative fiction. His short stories have appeared in MYRIAD, Tasavvur Nama, Moonpark Review and the Simultaneous Times Podcast, among others. He is influenced by writers such as Ted Chiang, Ursula K. Le Guin, and John Scalzi, and is drawn to stories that explore big ideas through human lenses. He works as a civil engineer and writes in his spare time. Find him on X at @mohwritesthings.
Next Month’s Newsletter SCI-FI Theme:
Our next edition of the newsletter will be SCIENCE FICTION themed, and we are looking for stories around the theme of:
Time Dust
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 18th January 2026.
We look forward to reading your submissions. Happy writing!
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