PodCastle is the world’s first audio fantasy magazine. Weekly, we broadcast the best in fantasy short stories, running the gammut from heart-pounding sword and sorcery, to strange surrealist tales, to gritty urban fantasy, to the psychological depth of magical realism. Our podcast features authors including N.K. Jemisin, Peter S. Beagle, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Jim C. Hines, and Cat Rambo, among others. Terry Pratchett once wrote, “Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.” Tune in to PodCastle each Tuesday for our weekly tale, and spend the length of a morning commute giving your imagination a work out.
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PodCastle Miniature 89: Lapis Lazuli
by Tania Fordwalker
read by Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali
This story originally appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.
In Sesara, only the rich wear bright colours. My knight shines in the armour I buff for him nightly, glossy as a jewel. My clothes and skin are the colours of the earth. We stand together with two days of desert at our backs and a forest of black thorns before us. My heart is a bird in my chest.
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Rated PG-13.
Tania Fordwalker is artist and writer hailing from Tasmania, the gothic little island beneath Australia. A former Disney animator, she now works as a freelance illustrator (portfolio at www.taniawalker.com) and studies Creative Writing Honours at the University of Tasmania. She lives to tell stories, swinging between pencil and keyboard to make it happen.
Prior publications include the short story “Lapis Lazuli” in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (writing as T L Fordwalker); contributing art to Anything That Loves and the Goblin Quest RPG rulebook; and cover art for fantasy anthology Defying Doomsday and The Mocklore Chronicles series by Tansy Rayner Roberts. Look for Tania’s tabletop card game Dracula’s Feast on Kickstarter in late 2016.
Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali is our Assistant Editor here at PodCastle. She lives in Houston, Texas with her husband of twenty-five years and three children. By day she works as a breast oncology nurse. At all other times she juggles, none too successfully, writing, reading, gaming and gardening. She has self-published one novel entitled An Unproductive Woman, has published a story at Escape Pod, and has a story in the An Alphabet of Embers anthology. Of her alter ego, K from the planet Vega, it is rumored that she owns a time machine and knows the secret to long youth. You can catch her posts at her website, www.khaalidah.com, and you can follow her on twitter, @khaalidah.