My Darling,

I know you hate the winter. The bitter, cold, forbidding of it all. You moved west as soon as you could and, of course, I followed, as I always have. You’ve been sick for a long time. Perhaps it was the cold that did it, doctors used to say. Your mother would prepare all kinds of medicines. Your father would wrap you up and hold you close. There wasn't much else they could do.

That...

“Damn, it’s freezing out here!”

The wind made it difficult to hear, so Lenore tried again, raising her voice against the blizzard of snow and ice. Chris, who was far too engrossed in snapping pictures, finally glanced in his friend’s direction. His smile was almost hidden by his beard, which was thoroughly caked with frost.

“It’s amazing, I know!” His snowshoes crunched over ice as he started t...

You don’t know the feeling of my skin, or the sound of my breath. You don’t know how touch-starved I am, do you? How eager and desperate to please. I don’t think you know my name, or the way my lips form around yours. Oh, but how I wish you felt the longing in my chest. The aching pain. For you must know that it astonishes me still, how broken you’ve made me. How cold you stand, shivering in my so...

He was an exhibit. With honey-colored skin and hair dipped in gold. They would gather around him, morning and evening, inhabiting the cold, linoleum space of his new home. Breathing in the residue of the artist’s fingers. The air she left behind when she couldn’t color any longer. And when they read his name, etched below his body, they lamented. For his beauty was as tragic as the Devil....

Fatima hated the color green. It always gave her a headache if she stared at it for too long. It was sickly and unpleasant. Envious. Judgmental. And it reminded her of that dreadful shade of eyeshadow she wore to prom five years ago. Sometimes she still shudders thinking about it.

Nonetheless, it was the only nail polish in her bathroom cupboard that survived a pipe burst last week. And she had p...

When they arrive on their machine, landing near the Crescent, General Feran appears unnerved. He tugs at the royal armor around his neck. There’s something strange about this one, he tells Jules. And when they reach the dust of the purple hills, stepping out of their transport, Jules asks him to elaborate.

“Well, Princess, it’s just that our technology was unable to identify their spacecraft.”

...