Beneath Ceaseless Skies #459, June 11, 2026
“A Candle for Her Tireless Dead” by Louis Inglis Hall
“Fletcher’s Flights” by Jonathan Olfert
Reviewed by Henry Gasko
“A Candle for Her Tireless Dead” by Louis Inglis Hall is a refreshingly straight-forward tale. The narrator, Alachat, is a religious fanatic, plain and simple. She was raised in the local equivalent of a convent, with never a doubt about the teachings she was fed throughout her childhood and adolescence.
Now, as an adult, she is on a mission to convert the heathens of the neighboring principality from their false beliefs. And the crux of those beliefs is that the people there, when they die, are resurrected into a zombie-like state but without the nastiness that usually accompanies that term. In fact these walking dead perform menial but useful roles such as builders until they “die” for a second time and their souls are finally allowed to depart their bodies in peace.
To Alachat, this is an anathema: souls must be allowed to depart immediately upon their first death. In fact Alachat refuses to believe that this could possibly be a natural state for the deceased, despite that evidence that they are quite happy to be given a second chance to be useful.
This interesting scenario, made almost comical by Alachat’s vehement belief in the correctness of HER religion, is proceeding nicely when the story takes a sudden turn. Instead of following her guide into the heathen’s enclave to begin teaching as any good missionary would, Alachat decides—for reasons that are far from clear—that the best way to proceed is to kill her guide and continue on her own.
And so rather than an intellectual contest between two competing religious world views, the story ends rather abruptly with a simple physical battle—a survival of the strongest if not necessarily the fittest. A pity, since there were elements here of a rollicking satire about a certain type of religious fanatic and their belief in a god-given right to impose their vision of the universe on anyone who disagrees with them.
“Fletcher’s Flights” by Jonathan Olfert is part of an ongoing series about Carmora, a Paladin-like figure with a complex history, wandering in a pseudo-wild-west landscape, not so much to help those in need but to simply survive himself.
However I only realized this was part of a series when I read a reader’s comment at the end of the story. Unfortunately the author chose not to explain the background in sufficient detail, and that meant that for myself at least the many unusual aspects of this world lost whatever mythic or allegorical power they might have had. For example, what can a casual reader make of the sight of children pulling carts in a Wagon Train-like procession into the wilderness, lead by leaders who are intent on bringing religion to the wilderness, and what might it actually represent in the author’s mythology?
The story begins with a too-convenient plot twist: Carmora still has his trusty hunting bow but has broken his last bow-string. And would you believe it, the people of the caravan have bow-strings but have broken their last bow. They join forces and for a few days everyone is eating meat again and happy. That is, until one of the women in the group asks Carmora to take her away with him and he, in true Paladin fashion, agrees.
Together they decide to escape from the group, taking the only complete bow and bow-string. But unaccountably, they run away in the middle of the day while the group’s leaders are all watching and are understandably not pleased. And later that evening, why do the runaways light a large and highly visible campfire to roast their kill? Predictably, the religious leaders soon find them and the resulting fight once again leaves Carmora alone to continue his wanderings into the next installment of his tale.
Is there a moral to this? Perhaps more context about the world and Carmora’s place in it would have made the point of the story clear. Standing alone, it is merely perplexing, with many intriguing images that don’t quite form a coherent whole. I only hope that the author might one day gather it into a complete and compelling myth, similar to Stephen King’s Gunslinger saga, which is clearly resembles.