Grimdark #44, October 2025“Ten Times Dead from the Goddess in the Womb” by Ryan Cole
“Reconnaissance Notes, Episode 1” by Miles Cameron and Emma Burnett (part 1 of a serial, not reviewed)
“The Iron Man” by Max Gladstone (reprint, not reviewed)
“Contagion’s Eve” by Rich Larson (reprint, not reviewed)
“The Bull Beneath” by Hûw Steer
“The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne” by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (reprint, not reviewed)
“The Salt Apostle” by Zamil Akhtar
Reviewed by Axylus
“Ten Times Dead from the Goddess in the Womb” by Ryan Cole is a flash fiction tale in which the servant of a bloodthirsty Goddess of the Womb makes a fateful decision.
In the short story “The Bull Beneath” by Hûw Steer, three Saxon thieves break into a hidden temple in the long-abandoned Roman city of Londinium (London). They are searching for ancient gold and treasure, but discover instead that the Roman Empire left far more than just shadows and ruins behind when they quit the soil of England.
“The Salt Apostle,” a short story by Zamil Akhtar, is an uneven tale. First, it is not entirely stand-alone. The unnamed, first person POV protagonist’s rambling thoughts include several not-wholly-necessary and not-always-explained references to backstory from “Gunmetal Gods,” Akhtar’s dark fantasy novel series. These created the distracting impression that perhaps the whole tale was an expanded version of a character study written in preparation for a novel. And the protagonist himself was regrettably uninteresting. He related dramatic events of his personal backstory, as well as minor events happening in his present time, in a manner that left him seeming dull, self-absorbed and rather small (figuratively speaking). This in turn reduced the impact of the story’s climax and epilogue. On the plus side, the street preacher derisively nicknamed the Salt Apostle was interesting (even if he necessarily did very little), as were the protagonist’s wife Gilnar, and some aspects of the setting. Perhaps small central characters make for small stories, because this one might have been far more compelling if it had been told from the POV of Gilnar, its actual hero. She disappears from the story, even though she wears the larger soul in the family. Plot summary: the protagonist is faced with a moral dilemma when his brave wife Gilnar risks her life in support of the Salt Apostle. The latter is tortured and left to die a slow, agonizing death by the city’s cruel, oppressive overlords.