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.
https://podcastle.org/
PodCastle 707: TALES FROM THE VAULTS – Feed Me the Bones of Our Saints
* Author : Alex Dally MacFarlane
* Narrator : Eleiece Krawiec
* Host : Tierney Bailey
* Audio Producers : Peter Adrian Behravesh and Pria Wood
*
Discuss on Forums
Originally published in Strange Horizons
Content warning: violence.
Rated R
This episode is a part of our Tales from the Vaults series, in which a member of PodCastle’s staff chooses a backlist episode to highlight and discuss. This week’s episode was chosen by associate editor Tierney Bailey. “Feed Me the Bones of Our Saints” originally aired as PodCastle 302.
Feed Me the Bones of Our Saints
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Jump up! Take arms! Bare teeth!
We fight for these sands.
Sink iron knives and white teeth into their scented flesh, their soft city flesh, those stealers of our homes. This is our city now, this desert with its winds that scour our cheeks, its dunes that join us in song, its rare springs that we lap at so gently. We once gulped rivers of rubies and pearls; now they do and we will never be able to claim them back. We will not let them take this final city of air and graveyards from us! Jump up!
We fight for these sands with everything we have and sometimes we forget the feel of a sister’s shoulder beneath our heads, we’ve been so long without sleep–but today will be remembered for more than this.
Today we retrieve the bodies of our Saints.