Stories by Elara Nightwood

Elara Nightwood

The dress arrived with the morning tide, draped across the old stone marker at the edge of the marsh where Mara's mother used to count herons. It was still reco…

Elara Nightwood

The unicorn had stopped correcting people about what it was approximately three hundred years before it was captured, which meant it had been quiet for a very l…

Elara Nightwood

47° 12' N, 15° 08' E — First Quarter The observatory had been built to watch stars die, which was, the last weaver thought, an odd calling for a building made o…

Elara Nightwood

The crystal ball had been stolen, which was impossible, and replaced with a bottle, which was worse. Merys woke to find it on the velvet cushion where the spher…

Elara Nightwood

The ivy had grown over the door for the third time in as many centuries, and the house was beginning to suspect it was doing so deliberately. Not suspicion in t…

Elara Nightwood

The oak had been listening longer than the village had words for listening, and when the door appeared in its trunk — smooth as glass, humming like a beehive wr…

Elara Nightwood

The star went out between one breath and the next, and Isra was the only person in the city who saw it happen. Not saw — that was the wrong word. The sky hadn't…

Elara Nightwood

The moonpetal had taken seventeen years to climb the hawthorn, and when it finally bloomed at the stroke of midnight, it did so incorrectly. Oren watched from t…

Elara Nightwood

The moonpetal had been dead for seven days when Maren stopped being able to lie with her maps. Not that she had meant to lie. But cartography, like all discipli…

Elara Nightwood

The Tenth of Thaw I have accepted the position. The Admiralty thinks me qualified to chart the Drifting Isles, which tells you everything you need to know about…

Elara Nightwood

The river had been singing for three hundred years before anyone thought to give the song a body. Not anyone, precisely. The willows did it—six of them leaning …