Hera rows her boat out to sea,
She's searching for the island that never sleeps.
In its insomnia, it forgets to drop anchor.
It drifts across the ocean, a weary world traveller,
arms clasped around its hunted cargo.

Hera's rage could boil the seas.
Cursed never to die, to always remember,
she counts her age by her husband's lovers.
She recalls nights swinging in golden chains,
and before then, the heat of her own shame,
a virgin being raped by the sky.

by Keitha

My knapsack firmly in place, I wander in the darkness. The third quarter moon lights my way, glittering through the high, flowing leaves. I know the way; I've been here before. The clearing is just up ahead: the soft grass under my feet, surrounded by tall willow trees that weep around the standing oaks. The night is calm, as if admiring the beauty of this urban forest.

By Michele Wyan

Fire danced from the tip of the red candle she had just lit and Samantha Matthews stared at the flickering orange and yellow flame in an attempt to scry. She didn’t know what she expected to see in the candlelight but Elizabeth, the friend who had introduced her to Wicca six months earlier, said fire was a divinatory tool just like Tarot cards or rune stones.

by Lawrence Schimel

The fresh air almost made Ysabelle sneeze as she carried the heavy chamber pot out into the woods behind the inn. Spring was exploding all around her, flowers and buds and birdsong, and she was cooped up inside, dusting and working. It was her eleventh birthday, and she couldn't help thinking about how things would be different if her parents hadn't been killed in a raid last summer.

By Fangfluffy

Down by the lake, there is a gnarled old tree. When I was a small child we would often picnic under the shade of that tree, and my mother would make up stories to entertain my brother and I.

There were lots of stories, of places far away, and people long gone into memory, but the one story that sticks in my mind to this very day, and which will stay with me as long as I live, was the explanation my mother gave for why the tree leans into the wind which blows across the lake.

By Tenea

The year was 1920.

Zeus looked down from Olympus and saw man building cars. "Cars?!? Why should man have such a luxury?" he exploded. "What has man done to deserve this? Few even believe in us anymore. Ignorance, ignorance. Well, man shall have their 'cars'. I will have Athena design a car that will be man's undoing," he said.

Zeus called for Athena and told her his desire.

by Eliza Fegley

She stared across the land dotted by small bonfires on the Eve of November. None of them remembered the old ways or why they burnt their fires. But she knew. She was the daughter of her mother, a priestess of the old ways. That was so long ago, many lifetimes ago. She knew, she remembered, what those fires meant.

Here I gather a twig of thorn
And bleed my fingers upon its horns.
Now I light the sacrificial fires
To appease the spirits of darkened desires.