As July dawns, bringing the peak of summer's brilliance, we're thrilled to unveil the sixty-seventh edition of the Flame Tree Fiction NEWSLETTER! Immerse yourself in two riveting stories woven by our contributors, as we revel in the battles and mystical sagas of their elemental narratives. Thank you to all who submitted their work this month. We were captivated by the power of the elements alongside you. Here's to a month of sunny days and boundless imagination!

Congratulations to both winners of the July theme: Bekwele Chuku and Charles Ta!

Blessed by Bekwele Chuku – A former priestess and her child face a tragic reckoning when past secrets and revenge plans unfold, revealing hidden powers and resulting in great loss...

The Battle of Hollow’s River by Charles Ta – In a magical wood, Forsythia and her comrades must face down an invading foe seeking to destroy their home. Setting a trap, they summon the powers of the forest to fight back, but will it be enough?

• This month's newsletter features:
  • FLAME TREE PRESS: New titles coming this month!
  • Original Fantasy Flash Fiction #1: Blessed by Bekwele Chuku
  • Original Fantasy Flash Fiction #2: The Battle of Hollow’s River by Charles Ta
  • Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme

Blessed

Bekwele Chuku

On those rare days when nostalgia heavied Mama and squeezed out the stories of her past, she would tell me about this place. And her words would fill me with awe and longing. Awe dwarfed only by this wonder of observing those heard tales. This was once a barren land, Mama would say, at least until the goddess Anyanwu cut her hair and scattered it on this land. Those hairs grew into these trees. It was why the trees had charms in their leaves and flowers, and could heal diseases. The hair did not only sprout into giant trees; it gave some people gifts. Mama was one of those blessed people.

You see, before we became ‘outcasts’, Mama was royalty – more than royalty, a priestess. And she would have remained so if Papa had not fallen so ill that herbs would not heal him. I never laid eyes on Papa, but if he was anything like the dreaminess that shrouded Mama’s eyes every time she talked about him or the lucent rapture that branded every memory of him, he must have been beautiful. She fell for him, healed him, and did the forbidden: opened herself up to him. And lost her connection to the gods.

Mama did not care. Nothing was as grand or precious as the love that wove her and Papa into a single knot. So she hid her powerlessness behind performances, while they planned their leaving. They would escape the wrath of the gods – Mama and Papa’s banishment from the seven kingdoms – and live their love wherever would accept them.

It was time. Stars broke out of the clear sky in shimmering bits. Two lovers sneaked behind shadows, their eyes piercing through the dark. They were on the outlying path that curved out of the village when guards sprang out from behind the trees. Papa drew out his sword.

“My love, go, I will be right behind you.”

Mama ran with his words in her ears and the clang of blades jagged into the night. She never saw him again.

Papa escaped, but Mama, in her grief, fearing that Papa was killed, returned to the village and was captured. They discovered Mama's pregnancy and that the child cocooned inside her was the prophesied child, and treated us like royalty.

A miracle happened. Papa was in the village and alive.

Papa’s coming was not a miracle. An elaborate plan? Yes. Revenge? Yes. Miracle? No. After Mama’s running away, Papa’s scuttle with warriors, and Papa’s banishment, he spent futile years searching for Mama. Years that were at first swathed with hope and desire, then defeat, then despair, before settling on revenge. He knew one way to pour out the rage that racked him on the people who snipped his joy at its budding and left him wilted.

Papa divulged secrets to these feared people. What was shrouded from man was visible to animals. Papa hunted. He knew how to listen to the earth, how to borrow wisdom from it and learn from that wisdom the whereabouts of the things he hunted. But even Papa’s gift and secret could not elude the village’s defence, at least not without the charm the feared people made for him.

Everything was panned out. Papa would go in and then create a path for the invaders. He got in, learned about the had-been priestess who returned with a son, found his way to the square, and found Mama. This discovery doused the inferno inside him, which amended his mind, and made him unknot the charm around his waist and set it on fire. As he watched the orange spurts eat up the charm, he thought it was all over. He was wrong. The deed was done.

The sky was all stars and moon and no cloud when they invaded. Screams greeted their arrival. Guards ran into our hut. They would take me and Mama somewhere safe, while Papa would join the fight. We did not get to this safe place before the invaders found us. They rode on rhinos and tigers, all huge like themselves, and circled us. The guards that followed us fell in swift succession until it was just me and Mama.

“So, this is the prophesied child that would unite the seven villages and rule over them.”

Their laugh chilled my bones. Mama pulled me behind her. She would not let these men lay a finger on me. It happened in an instant. The leader of the clique swung his sword, so fast, so suddenly, that I only noticed it after. Mama’s head touched the floor. Blood gushed out of her. I cracked. Everything was swallowed in nothingness. No scream. No wails. No running away from this horror. I simply stood and watched Mama’s lifeless body slumped on the floor, bleeding dry. My eyes left Mama’s body and sat on the leader. Horror replaced the smirk on his face.

“Kill,” I said.

They all obeyed. Trees, animals, the earth. Animals turned on their riders and attacked them. Trees came alive and impaled invaders. The earth vomited golems that crushed them. By dawn, there were no invaders alive.

Dawn met me on that spot where Mama’s body lay. Loud wails swallowed the village. Papa crumbled at the sight of it. Men carried Mama’s body along with the other mangled ones for burial. There was no consolation to spare.

After the burial, Papa spilled his secrets. Rather, guilt forced it out of him. They brought him to me.

“You saved the village. You have seen war. You’re no longer a child. What should be his punishment?”

Whoever this kneeling, tied up, withered man was, I did not care. To me, he was the same as the invaders who crushed anguish and forced the searing shards down my throat. He killed Mama.

“Kill him,” I said.

Bekwele Chuku is a Nigerian writer and storyteller. He writes fiction and screenplays, runs a growing blog, and dreams of his stories being read all around the world. His stories have appeared in Flame Tree's African Ghost Short Stories anthology, and the So to Speak literary journal. When he isn’t writing or reading, he loves to sing, play games, and watch anime. He is inspired by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Toni Morrison, Shonda Rhimes, and his best friend, Ebuka Uzoma.

The Battle of Hollow's River

Charles Ta

In weirding forests ghastly grown
By thorny Nature’s verdant dread,
There wander woodland wizards known
To enchant life through magic said.

They contort trees by their command,
And bend seedlings to writhing spread
With wild Gaia’s righteous hand
To vanquish baneful forces dead.

Now witching war has been proclaimed
By wicked nations iron wrought
Who wish to see all Nature tamed
And amass power fiendish sought.

“Tellurians spotted! They’re coming this way!” said Forsythia, who stared through the foliage in front of her with amber eyes, while sitting crouched next to her friend, Mildew, on the canopy branches that overlooked the Weirding Wood. The pair had been scouting its understorey for hours for any dangers to the dendromancer clans they’d known all their lives, camouflaged by hooded cloaks woven from leaves and twigs.

“Where? Can I see?” Mildew asked.

Forsythia pointed to the horizon, behind clouds of misty haze. Following Forsythia’s line of sight, Mildew’s eyes widened in fear as she saw a company of shadowy troops marching through the Weirding Wood, ironclad with blades, and supported from behind by massive walking armored beetle tanks that hissed with blackened smog.

The Tellurian Union had finally arrived in Mapleheart territory, Mildew thought, and would destroy them if they did not act now, like they had crushed the Wood’s other clans from their encampments. Arrowfern, she recalled, was the most recent tribe to fall to the metalmancers, forcing them to flee their burning villages and warn their allies nearby.

“They’ve arrived faster than expected, those magicidal bastards,” Forsythia said, her eyes blooming with fury and disgust. She turned to Mildew. “We need to inform Central Hollow immediately, while we still have the element of surprise. We’re now officially in a Wilting Rose Scenario here, Mildew – a.k.a. Code Black.”

“Fortunately, time is still on our side thanks to the Arrowferns,” Mildew said, determined. “But we’ll need to change our battle plans, and fast. We need to encircle and distract the Tellurians – bog them down against each other deeper in the forest, near Hollow’s River, until they’re overwhelmed. What do you think?”

“I agree. A force as powerful as them cannot be defeated head-on but through alternative tactics. Let’s go,” Forsythia replied with a nod, leaping off the branch she was on, onto other branches from the trees behind her, and quickly disappearing behind a thicket. Mildew, not wanting to lose her, followed close behind.

* * *

“Are we ready?” asked Forsythia, two days deeper in the Weirding Wood beside Mildew and Captain Bramble. The three were hiding in wait, this time within sight of the mountain-sized tree that was Central Hollow. Nearby, dozens of dendromancers also waited silently in the dark of the trees above the muggy swamps surrounding Hollow’s River.

“Yes. We’re in position, and will act when I give the signal,” replied the Captain, wearing the toughest tree bark armor. He faced Mildew. “The strategy you recently proposed to me was impressive but risky. It had better work. Otherwise, the Hollow will fall.”

“It’ll work, I know it,” Mildew said. “Recall, Captain, that I was once an ambassador to Telluria before the War. I know our enemies well. Their weaknesses.”

“Then our victory, if all goes well, is assured,” the Captain concluded.

“Get ready,” Forsythia warned suddenly, breaking pieces of wood from the trees around her with her mind, then shaping them into several long, needle-like floating splinters. “Look down at the river. The Tellurians are approaching it.”

“The time has come to spring our trap,” the Captain said, watching from above as the mages they had sent to bait the Tellurians ran under the trees, bent their branches to cross Hollow’s River, and dove into the bushes on the other side to hide. Close behind them, weapons brandished, were the Tellurians and their insectoid tanks, forced to trudge through the waist-high, murky water of the wide river to search for their targets.

Captain Bramble waited patiently until he and his militia were behind the beetle tanks as they advanced through the river, before looking to the trees around and across the river from him, at the guerilla mages awaiting his orders, and casting a spell on a large mushroom colony he had bound with vines to a nearby branch. The bioluminescent colony grew to several times its size and flashed brightly on and off in a controlled manner – creating a signal coding for ATTACK that could be seen all around the river.

“Move! Now!” he ordered, jumping down to the ground with Forsythia, Mildew, and his dendromancers. They acted quickly, running through the marsh and towards the river, and summoning parasitic fungi, carnivorous plants, massive vines, and giant wooden stakes from the river’s depths, ensnaring the Tellurians caught in the middle.

By the time they realized what was happening, it was too late. Chaos erupted as dozens of soldiers were dragged by vines into the river, where they sank from the weight of their armor, and suffocated or drowned. Others were devoured by gigantic flytraps, or impaled by stakes or splinters aimed at the gaps in their armor. As more plants rose from the watery wetland, they coiled themselves around the confused beetle tanks, then dismantled, crushed, or dissolved them in corrosive acid. Parasitic fungi, too, amassed everywhere, seeping into the bodies of the remaining panicked, screaming Tellurians, rapidly overtaking their minds, and turning them into puppets forced to kill one another while controlled by dendromancers.

In minutes, the Battle of Hollow’s River – really a massacre – was over, and as Captain Bramble, his men, Forsythia, and Mildew gathered to inspect the bodies of the dead that turned Hollow’s River red, their hearts were renewed with hope. Hope that the Weirding Wood was not yet lost, that its clans would live to fight another day.

“We won…” said Mildew in disbelief. “We actually won…”

“Only for now, thanks to you, Mildew,” Captain Bramble replied, removing his helmet and revealing a stoic face scarred by battle. “This War, however, is far from over. It has only just begun.”

Charles Ta is a writer, illustrator, and educator based in Union City, New Jersey. His short story "Tough Luck, Kid" was previously published in an anthology in BLAST, the latest novel in Robert Blake Whitehill’s Ben Blackshaw series. He has also been published in Sci-Phi Journal and 365 Tomorrows, and has written nonfiction pieces for LinkedIn clients. Recently, his story "Tales from the Dragoning" was selected for publication by Dragon Storm Publishing for their new indie anthology Dragon Dreams. When not immersed in a book or traveling to alien worlds, Charles teaches special education in West New York, New Jersey.