Lightspeed Magazine, May 2016

So good with lovely prose, such as:

“Someone” is a serpent of a word. It has fangs, and it can bite. It had bitten me, and now I had to go.

and

When I was very small, no more than a comma of a creature compared to the pages and paragraphs of my parents, they used to tell me stories of the world outside the wood. “It's terrible there,” said my mother, shivering. “Their sense is nonsense, and their nonsense is sense. You can trust nothing outside the wood. Nothing. All of it waits only to destroy you.”

Fantastic, albeit arguably ‘additional', world building, “The distance between the Tulgey Wood and the City of Hearts is always the same. When the city grows beyond its current borders, the road will stretch like the finest taffy, carrying it farther from the tree line, and keeping the people of both places safe.”

More great prose: Mirrors coated the walls, bouncing our reflections back and forth between them until we became an infinity.