A semi-barbaric king devises a semi-barabaric (but entirely fair) method of criminal trial involving two doors, a beautiful lady and a very hungry tiger.

It felt dark, but not uncomfortably so. Sometimes they dimmed the lights or pulled the curtains, but this felt different.

Here in Saint Lizard, the one road starts on the cliff by the lighthouse and crawls in circles down to the sea. We have enough town to justify a strange-shaped road, but not enough to justify two roads.

Nothing is as visceral as holding a handful of human ash. I resist the impulse to sift it between my fingers as I walk. Everyone, from the mourners to the pastor, are far away and yet too close.

Three o’clock on a Thursday was an odd time for a visit, but it was the only downtime between my part-time jobs that suited Jo. More unusual than the time was the prospect of a one-to-one rendezvous in my bedsit with someone about my age and attractive.

She was not unused to calls of distress, the groans of the feverish, or the cloying stench of broken bodies and all their expulsions, but never so many at a time and never so twisted and ripped.

His fingers moved over the strings of his violin with ease and without effort. The bridge, the neck, the strings, and the bow was an extension of his talent as well as his soul.

My mother is the weather. As a child, I was the core target to which she would unleash her hailstorms and earthquakes that tore me down and broke me into pieces.

“So.” she began. “The thing is. You’re a shadoweater. From a long line of shadoweaters. Me, your nan, her mum, stretching all the way back as far as anyone can go ...”

I reach the Styx, whose sluggish waters remain inky even in the bright of day. Just as my guide said there would be, a queue of people in white chitons similar to mine line the river banks.