By dusk, the Watchers had vanished. But the silence they left behind was a warning more than a comfort. Selene packed quickly—bundles of herbs, spell-scrolls, a dagger etched with runes so old eve...

Morning came with a hush. Ronan woke to the scent of jasmine and smoke, her body curled against his like a spell still unfolding. Selene slept with one hand resting on his chest, her breath steady,...

Ronan stayed in the forest that night. He didn't mean to. It was like falling asleep in a dream and waking up more awake than he'd ever been. The fire Selene built crackled with blue flames—w...

Ronan didn’t return the next night. He returned that morning, before the sun had fully risen, as though sleep itself had rejected him. The forest accepted him again—too easily, he thought. The tre...

The first time Ronan crossed into the Forest of Whispers, the trees did not attack, but they watched. He felt it in the brush of windless leaves, the way roots curled beneath his boots like curious...

They said no man entered the forest past midnight and returned unchanged. Ronan did it anyway. The air thickened as he stepped into the glade where the moonlight danced unnaturally—too silver, t...

The house was quiet, save for the soft creak of the floorboards under Mia’s bare feet. The guest room door was ajar, a sliver of moonlight spilling across the hardwood. She shouldn’t be here, not at t...

Mira hadn’t meant to stay the night, but the hotel sheets were softer than her willpower—and so was Jack’s voice when he whispered her name at 2 a.m. They’d met at a conference. Strangers, technica...

The snow came early that year. Thick, heavy, merciless. Bran was hunting alone when he heard the scream — sharp, wild, tearing across the frozen pines like a hawk’s cry. He found her near the riv...

In the House of Bastet, hidden deep in the labyrinth of Memphis, only those marked by the goddess herself were allowed entry. Neferu was one of them — a priestess cloaked in linen so sheer it barel...

Ixchel was once a weaver in the city of Copán — her fingers stained with the colors of crushed flowers, her eyes wide as the full moon. At sixteen, she was taken — not by war, not by plague, but by ...

In the high mountains where the condors wheeled and the stones drank sunlight, there was a girl named Amaru. She was an Aclla — a Chosen Woman — raised in cloisters of gold and silence to weave, to b...

Before the earth split and Hades claimed her, Persephone had another secret. A lover. One no poet dared to name. He came from the woods beyond Eleusis — a wild god of no temples, no hymns, only t...

The night Alethea dared the sacred grove of Artemis, the olive trees whispered warnings. No mortal woman was meant to walk there after sunset, especially not alone, especially not bare-footed and bare...

It was in Rajasthan, where the sands eat memory and the nights hum with ghost songs, that Kiara found the temple. Locals warned her: The Temple of Mirrors does not welcome the living. But Kiara, r...

The night air in Shiraz was heavy with jasmine and old poems. Elena, an American tourist with a cracked leather journal tucked under her arm, wandered too far from the bustling square. She was tipsy o...

The summer air in Kerala was thick with the scent of ripening mangoes. Maya wandered barefoot into the grove behind her grandmother’s old house, her cotton saree clinging to her damp skin. She hadn’t ...

It started with a free punch card. Eli, who considered himself both a realist and a proud pessimist, found it fluttering on the sidewalk outside Perky Bean Café. Ten stamps already. One free drink....

Dina had a gift. A sixth sense. Some call it luck. Others call it witchcraft. Her neighbors just called it annoying. She could always find a parking spot. Always. In Brooklyn. On a Saturday. During...

Jamal hated elevators. Not because he was claustrophobic—no, he just knew too much. Worked IT for a midtown high-rise. He’d seen things: spreadsheet crimes, VPN sins, one guy using Excel to draw fan a...

It began, as most things in New York do, with a bagel. Terry, a junior analyst with a mustache of dubious confidence, stepped out of his apartment with an everything bagel slathered in cream cheese...

The cathedral was silent at midnight. Empty pews stretched like shadows. Candles flickered near the altar, casting a soft glow over centuries of stained glass and stone saints. She stepped inside, ...

The hotel hummed with post-wedding laughter. Distant music still pulsed from the ballroom, muffled by floors of carpet and champagne. She leaned against the suite door, barefoot, bouquet wilted in ...

They shouldn’t be here. The library was closed. The kind of quiet that hums in your bones had settled in—only the creak of old floorboards and the occasional gust of wind against the stained glass ...

It started with a look—just a look. They stepped into the elevator together at 11:37 p.m., both damp from the summer storm outside. Her dress clung to her like second skin, rain-slicked and scandal...