24 Dizzy
"What day is it?" I asked nobody in particular as I got out of bed. I stood up too quickly, which rendered me dizzy momentarily as blood struggled to get up to my head. I had to place a hand on the door frame momentarily to steady myself before I...
20 Tread
It is one thing to be in a land full of dangerous predators. It is another still to be knee-high to a mouse and needing to fear the tread of creatures chasing prey many times your size. Every trip out of your lair - a small alcove in a towering...
14 Overgrown
It was a place largely untainted by modern civilization. A few relics of the past could be found here or there, but this section of rainforest was overgrown and had reclaimed any space which had once been lost. As with the flora, the fauna, too, were...
23 Ancient
It's amazing that it still worked, really. A cell phone, circa 1997, found in the midst of moving from one apartment to another, in the bottom of a box that hadn't been fully unpacked in the last several moves. But after plugging it in and swapping out...
10 Pattern
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. The electronic music fired up at the beginning of the show. Pyrotechnics showered the stage as the performer began the act. A steady pattern underlined the beginning of the set, with a slowly evolving...
30 Catch
A feline and ursine were sitting by a lake shore, spinning tales of their pasts while they were fishing. The two hadn't been there for much more than an hour before the cat had a bite on his line that nearly pulled him out of his chair. The struggle to...
21 Treasure
"You've come to steal my treasure!" the king exclaimed, backpedaling quickly from the dragon that had poked his head into the throne room." "_Your_ treasure? Don't be absurd." The dragon snorted in disgust. "You've taxed the life out of your citizens...
13 Ash
It started with a simple misunderstanding. A few words, poorly chosen at a difficult time. It created a resentment that smoldered, getting just a little hotter with every subsequent misinterpretation of something that, on its own, would be...
07 Enchanted
Legend has given us no shortage of enchanted objects and places. Swords. Lakes. Entire kingdoms. Some stories were pure fiction. Others, perhaps, held a grain of truth that had grown wildly with the passage of time. Little thought is given to the...
09 Swing
"Be gone, foul demon!" the cleric shouted, wildly swinging his staff at the creature with black hide before him. "Oh you poor fool," Osimaret responded. The demonic narwhal watched for a moment before casually grabbing the cleric's staff in one hand...
15 Legend
Out in the vast desert in the middle of a continent, near and otherwise unassuming oasis, sat a dragon. A thousand years ago, when this was just a stop on a trading caravan, the dragon would invite travelers to stay a while and share a story. In return...
18 Misfit
The world was originally made for humans. Adapting to anthros was a challenge, but something society copied with well enough. Chairs needed holes for tails and some shirts needed to be designed for wings, but in general things went on as usual. Then...