Beneath Ceaseless Skies #440, September 4, 2025
“The Good Life and the Gaze of Staivash” by Jonathan Olfert
“Compass Rose, Running” by Julie Reeser
Reviewed by Axylus
“The Good Life and the Gaze of Staivash” by Jonathan Olfert is a story written with an abundance of style about a protagonist who lacks any defining external goal. A nomadic survivor and minor sorcerer named Tyrra limps into the desert city of Marun Sal Sesh in tattered clothes, weakened by the meagerness of her violent existence. She has one valuable thing: a gold amulet, taken from the corpse of a powerful sorcerer whom she had recently killed with her walking-stick. Finding a blacksmith, she asks him to beat the amulet into small nondescript pieces so she could use its gold to purchase supplies. The gold brings unwanted attention from city priests who run an extortion enterprise. She defeats the priests, partially through her own battle skills and partially by calling on the curse of the god Staivash to riddle them with fatal wormholes. Disposing of what gold she has left after trading, she decides that the good life for her would be to remain in Marun Sal Sesh rather than flee back to the desert. I genuinely enjoyed the tasty writing, with lines such as “[t]he part of her that was a sorcerer, however patchwork her experience, felt discerned by a thing she could not discern, a remnant of an unknowable being that dead cities had called a god.” But a protagonist with cursory opposition, and without a clear external goal, brings a story without emphatic stakes or tension.
“Compass Rose, Running” by Julie Reeser is a refreshingly original short story set in a world of predatory gangs and organizations, where psychically gifted people called Sensates coexist with those without gifts. Sensates all have one of a common set of skills, such as influencing others (Influencers), finding the shortest direction between any two points (Navigators), and sensing illness or lies or secrets. They are typically tools of the powerful, and the powerful seem to be chiefly the ungifted. The protagonist, Rose, is a Navigator who grows up in an orphanage. Among the children she knows is an idealistic Influencer named Bailey and a physically strong but ungifted boy named Gus. As time goes on, Rose finds work as a message runner for a madame, and Gus works as muscle for a crime boss. Rose had lost track of Bailey for years until she learns that he is running for political office, with an eye toward reforming the brutality of their society. She gets an opportunity to make a fateful decision that will affect the course of Bailey’s life and political future.
It’s hard to find flaws in this story. A minor one is that there are hints that Gus will become an important and potentially destructive figure, but he plays little if any role in the outcome. Rose’s affection for the orphanage where she grew up is also repeatedly highlighted, and its eventual fate seems important to her choices in life, but it is not really clear (to me at least) how that is the case. There is also a minor theme of prejudice against homosexuality, but this seems tacked on to the tale without clear reason or purpose. A common thread among these flaws is that story elements are hinted at but left wholly undeveloped. However, these minor drawbacks are clearly outweighed by the story’s strengths. It left me wishing I could stay considerably longer in Rose’s world to see how the events play out. Recommended.