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This episode was edited and produced by Renee Powers on the ancestral land of the Dakota people.

Original music by Amarissa

Chapter 20

Burning. 

Icarus’s eyes were burning. 

He roared against the pain and tried to rub the Eidolon out. He dropped to his knees and the grasses huffed under his weight. He heard the tumult of the waterfall, the twittering of creatures in the rocks below, all of it tainted by the sound of his agony. 

“Damn it! God damn it!” He shouted.

Footsteps thumped in a jog in his direction and he forced himself to look up—someone was trotting towards him. Nobody ever trotted towards him, not in these between-states. It was a woman, vaguely familiar even in the haze of pain blurring his vision. Her hair was the red of a sunset on the sea woven in complex plaits studded with gold, eyes a rich forest green with a sparkle to them that had nothing to do with the perennial midday sun. 

Her dress was long and flowed around her like a current—wide sleeves brushed the grass tips and a neckline that bared her shoulders plunged to gather at a gold and pearl brooch between her breasts, all of it spun from ivory silk with edges that looked dipped in dye made of pale pink cabbage roses. She was barefoot, unconcerned with the prickle of the ground, and her slender fingers bedecked with rings and chains that made the most pleasant chime when they moved. 

He stared up at her, forgetting his pain when he spied the long, tapering shells of her ears that arced back in long points. The heel of one hand pressed into one eye and made it harder to register what he was seeing. It hit him like a carriage to the face. 

“Eilonwy?” He rasped and winced, gritting his teeth as another wave pierced his skull. “Wasn’t your hair brown?” 

“It’s called a glamour. I was trying to be inconspicuous,” she waved a hand and batted the moment away. “Doesn’t matter. I’m sorry, Icarus. I couldn’t tell you.”

“You vanished! No, worse - you broke the salt on purpose and I could’ve died. Do you understand that?!” He snarled, anger amplified by the stabbing in his eye. 

A blush crept across her freckled cheeks, “I had no choice. He was going to expose me and I needed to buy time to get away. You would not have died, but I know you think that. Listen to me. We don’t have much time.”

“Seems to be a lot of that going around,” he grumbled. “Was he even your brother?”

She winced, then nodded and he wasn’t sure which surprised him more, “He was. Dáire left to wake the Ancients, but he never came back. He wasn’t… he wasn’t supposed to offer himself, the fool. He was only supposed to wake it, but my brother wasn’t born with a lick of sense in his head. Now he’s paid for it and we’ve lost an Ancient.”

“I won’t apologize for killing him, that thing was going to rip my throat out,” Icarus hissed. “You keep saying we, what does that mean? What are you? It sure as all the Stygian hells isn’t a fae.”

The tips of her ears drooped in what he chose to believe was guilt, “Not fae the way you know them. Dáire could cross without taking a host, all my kind can. We’re… I’m Tuatha de Danann. High fae.”

His one-eyed glare could wither a forest, “Of course.”

She sighed and placed both hands on his shoulders to cut off whatever else he might say, “I know you don’t trust me, but I need you to try. The gaol that’s got your father won’t hold. The Morrigan is trying to free him. If she does, he’s going to unleash hell upon us all. He won’t just destroy our world, what he’s planning will destroy yours, too. You need to get there and stop him before she sets him free.”

“What happens if he gets free?” Icarus winced against another lash of fire whipping across his skull. “Why can’t you just kill him?”

“He’s got the blood of a demon in him, the only thing we’d succeed in doing is casting it out if we tried. Look, get to the gaol and I’ll find you. A fae can’t kill him in that state, that’s why we put him there in the first place,” she lifted her head, ears twitching at a sound Icarus couldn’t hear. “Get there. Find it or all of us are doomed.”

He growled incoherently and doubled over under the force of another wave, spilling out from under her hands. He collapsed on all fours with a groan, nausea welled up in his gut and turned into scorching bile in his throat. He spit and dry heaved until it passed. Everything was aflame, he could barely think. He managed to ease himself up on shaking limbs and sit back on his heels, then took a long breath before looking up at her again with both eyes. 

She startled. 

Icarus did not like that she startled. 

Eilonwy leaned down, wide-eyed, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

He furrowed his brow, “What? This is my-”

“Not you,” her eyes narrowed. “You.”

“What-”

She pointed at him with a scowl, “Get out.”

The tip of her finger tapped his forehead and Icarus was rocketed backwards, falling through the world and watching the colors bleed in that wet-paint way he was tragically getting used to. He cried out in alarm, cut short when he was unceremoniously dumped back into the human world and the aching physical body that came with it. 

He scrambled to his feet and bolted from his office. He threw open the door to the washroom, ignoring Edith’s worried calls after him. The water was cool and blessedly purifying when he splashed it into his face to smother the fire in his eye. Relief swept through him and the lingering Eidolon swirled and roiled until it was sipped away down the drain. 

Brass chilled under his palms, Icarus gripped the basin tighter and tried to steady his breathing and the mad dash of his heart at the same time. His mind reeled and tumbled over the faded edges of everything he had seen while desperately trying to commit it to memory.

Eilonwy, Tuatha de Danann. It explained a lot. Too much, if he thought about it. 

Danann were very rare, so rare they were mythologized and dismissed in some parts of the country as fiction which always amused Icarus considering the state of things. High fae could travel the realms without anchoring into a human host, no need for possession when you’re full to the brim with their weird magic. 

He blinked rapidly until his vision cleared and everything stopped coming in doubles. Maren’s voice carried in an unintelligible question he could guess at and the door creaked when it opened. Her hand was on his back and she lifted his chin to inspect the damage.

“Tell me.”

He flexed his hand, the chill of the brass must have crept into that damned wrist of his again, “I don’t know. I did everything

Hey Inkmongers!

October is nearly gone, which means it’s time to make our November book club selection!

My dream for Inkmonger is to one day publish a winner of the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction (or make the world a better place in the attempt). All of the Inkmonger book club picks will help us achieve this by teaching us all about Le Guin's literary lineage, and the qualities that give stories their hope-generating capacity.

Here are the contenders, hand-picked from the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction shortlists, and Le Guin’s own bibliography:

Elder Race • Adrian Tchaikovsky

Lynesse is the lowly Fourth Daughter of the queen, and always getting in the way.
But a demon is terrorizing the land, and now she’s an adult (albeit barely) with responsibilities (she tells herself). Although she still gets in the way, she understands that the only way to save her people is to invoke the pact between her family and the Elder sorcerer who has inhabited the local tower for as long as her people have lived here (though none in living memory has approached it).
But Elder Nyr isn’t a sorcerer, and he is forbidden to help, and his knowledge of science tells him the threat cannot possibly be a demon. . . .

The City in Glass • Nghi Vo

The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot.

And then the angels come, and the city falls.

Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.

She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other’s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever.

Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again.

The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to reduce a world to ashes and remake it anew.

Audition • Pip Adam

2026 Winner of the UKLG Prize!

A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.

Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves – experiences of imprisonment, violence and misrecognition, of disempowerment and underprivilege.

Pip Adam’s uncategorisable new novel, part science fiction, part social realism, asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given.

Five Ways to Forgiveness • Ursula K Le Guin

Here for the first time is the complete suite of five linked stories from Ursula K. Le Guin’s acclaimed Hainish series, which tells the history of the Ekumen, the galactic confederation of human colonies founded by the planet Hain. First published as Four Ways to Forgiveness, and now joined by a fifth story, Five Ways to Forgiveness focuses on the twin planets Werel and Yeowe—two worlds whose peoples, long known as “owners” and “assets,” together face an uncertain future after civil war and revolution.

In “Betrayals” a retired science teacher must make peace with her new neighbor, a disgraced revolutionary leader. In “Forgiveness Day,” a female official from the Ekumen arrives to survey the situation on Werel and struggles against its rigidly patriarchal culture. Embedded within “A Man of the People,” which describes the coming of age of Havzhiva, an Ekumen ambassador to Yeowe, is Le Guin’s most sustained description of the Ur-planet Hain. “A Woman’s Liberation” is the remarkable narrative of Rakam, born an asset on Werel, who must twice escape from slavery to freedom. Joined to them is “Old Music and the Slave Women,” in which the charismatic Hainish embassy worker, who appears in two of the four original stories, returns for a tale of his own. Of this capstone tale Le Guin has written, “the character called Old Music began to tell me a fifth tale about the latter days of the civil war . . . I’m glad to see it joined to the others at last.”

The Eye of the Heron • Ursula K Le Guin

In Victoria on a former prison colony, two exiled groups--the farmers of Shantih and the City dwellers--live in apparent harmony. All is not as it seems, however. While the peace-loving farmers labor endlessly to provide food for the City, the City Bosses rule the Shantih with an iron fist. When a group of farmers decide to from a new settlement further away, the Bosses retaliate by threatening to crush the "rebellion."

Luz understands what it means to have no choices. Her father is a Boss and he has ruled over her life with the same iron fist. Luz wonders what it might be like to make her own choices. To be free to choose her own destiny.