Stories by Elara Nightwood

Elara Nightwood

The frost should not have been there. Castor woke in darkness to the familiar weight of flour dust in his throat and found the table marked with silver. A singl…

Elara Nightwood

The yew tree had been hollow for three hundred years, and in that time it had held owls, rot, offerings wrapped in linen, and once — according to the oldest sto…

Elara Nightwood

The fish began to swim backward three nights before the flood season ended. Kael noticed it first in the blue lantern—the one she kept above her workbench where…

Elara Nightwood

The bell began to shiver at dusk, when the sun had half-disappeared behind the treeline and the air hung thick with the particular stillness that comes before b…

Elara Nightwood

The river had forgotten how to flow. Gareth woke to the absence of sound — the wheel silent, the rush gone quiet — and knew before he reached the window that so…

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…