Good afternoon, everyone. This is the first weekly Dispatch. From today, it arrives every Saturday rather than once a month. The same coverage, just closer to the work.

Tales from the Woldwood

Three new tales since the last Dispatch.

It's Kinder If You Don't Struggle Three travellers, at different times, encounter Pethwick, an old road-trader with a story about standing stones. The details shift each time he tells it, but his dread never changes. Standing stones that glow at their bases. A voice from below that speaks names. And a warning that moving is the only safety. Pethwick eventually stops moving, and the consequence finds him anyway.

The Rinn In Nythara, a realm built around its Athenaeum, Station Releaser Narentis works opening sealed knowledge for release into the world. The work has become an addiction that is destroying his marriage to Lyrentia. When the Athenaeum suspends all releases, the Rinn break down. Violence follows. Those who escape flee through The Marker into The Shivering Vale, where the Shepherds of Aurivath are waiting. Narentis's craving is harnessed into endless recording. His name and his wife are lost.

The Axe, The Hut and the Woodsman Tarrold is a woodsman near Wyndeborne Heights who lives a life of honest, self-sufficient labour. A junior magister named Larine visits him to check a marker stone, sensing something wrong she cannot name. She warns him to come up to the Heights if he is told to. After she leaves, a supernatural cold arrives without weather or warning and takes everything before he can reach safety. Order fails first for those who did nothing wrong.

Access the full, free archive at edvane.world.

New Tales on Edvane Stories

The Vanishing of Spearhafoc Based on a real eleventh-century monk and goldsmith who vanished with Edward the Confessor's gold. History gives no end to him. This story offers one. Spearhafoc flees with the stolen crown jewels to a ruined chapel in Selwood Forest, where a woman named Jufreyna is waiting. She casts the gold into the glowing depths beneath the stone, and Spearhafoc discovers that vanishing from England means exactly what it sounds like.

Mistress Grimshaw's Purse In a Victorian parish, charity is given publicly and for praise. Mistress Grimshaw's purse opens only when the poor speak the appointed words of acknowledgement. When Judith Cox, a widow forced to the church door by her rent, discovers the purse can also answer the want it knows best, the coins turn on their mistress. The rector who enabled it all claims he heard nothing. Originally published in Story Glory Booklet 2, now republished here after the publisher and all purchase links disappeared without warning.

A new story publishes every week at edvanestories.com where you can access and read, or listen to, the entire archive

One new craft post this week.

How Forty Stories Solved the Problem I Could Not Solve in the Novel On lore, backstory, and the architecture of six books. The novel needed readers to know a world before they opened it, and the forty Woldwood tales are my answer. How three different stories do three different kinds of work for The Shivering Vale, and why the fiction that runs alongside my novel is the fiction I hope will earn the world the novel assumes.

Latest News

Nyctophilia Variations launched The Nyctophilia Variations anthology launched on Thursday 10 July at Clifton Community Bookshop in Bristol. I contributed a recorded teaser reading for the event, and as a Dispatch subscriber you can listen to it at the unlisted link below. The anthology features mythology and folklore pieces from multiple authors and is available now.

Story Glory has shut down The Story Glory website has disappeared, along with all purchase links for their booklets. The editor became unreachable and all socials were taken down. My story Mistress Grimshaw's Purse, originally published in Story Glory Booklet 2, has been republished on Edvane Stories with a full account of what happened.

The Red Lesson chosen for Gnome and Bone Issue 2 Gnome and Bone have chosen my story ‘The Red Lesson’ as the first tale for their second issue, Vermilion Cinders. My story ‘The Amber Lens’ was their first chosen tale for the inaugural issue, Greenfire. The Amber Lens is the lost Marchlands tale that subscribers to my Substack get the link for. The Red Lesson is a standalone dark fairytale.

Second VVD Post craft piece incoming A second craft collaboration with The VVD Post is coming in the next week. The first piece was Worldbuilding Must Carry Pressure. The new one, for me a part two, is Worldbuilding Must Carry Silence.

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Thankyou for your support and remember, Stay Dark.