Beneath Ceaseless Skies #467, October 1, 2026
“Oh Grave, Thy Victory” by K.J. Parker
“Every Force Evolves a Form” by Tom Marcinko
“In Search of Better Deaths” by Zet Madej
“Clocksong” by Katarina Garcia
Reviewed by Wendy Vidlak
This anniversary issue features four new stories woven together with the theme of what makes a good afterlife. I enjoyed every story in the bunch, with “In Search of Better Deaths” as my personal favorite. These were all stories that made you think and reflect long after they were finished, yet were also entertaining to read.
The issue begins with “Oh Grave, Thy Victory” by K.J. Parker, a story about two friends of sorts in a monastery, that figure out a way to conquer death. The story starts with a monk working on his alchemy experiment and ending up with crystals. We get introduced to his theologian friend Xoilus, who is the self-appointed marketing chief of this venture and gets very excited to take credit for the work he didn’t actually do. They decide to experiment on a rat, kill it with mercury and then bring it back to life with the crystals. It works, but the rat runs off and creates chaos around the monastery.
As the story continues, Xoilus insists on being the human guinea pig. Unwilling to kill his friend, the narrator acquiesces to getting poison and standing there while Xoilus kills himself, then administers the drug to revive him. It does work, but there are consequences, which form the bulk of the story. He goes into the underworld and finds the religion he teaches is wrong. Yet he is forced to keep teaching it as an immortal forever. A thoughtful piece exploring religious beliefs that carries the caveat found with most magic: be careful what you wish for.
Vivid character development and political intrigue permeate “Every Force Evolves a Form” by Tom Marcinko. In a post-apocalyptic world that holds an ancient garden, called the nursery, fertilized by the unexpressed confessions of criminals, the protagonist serves as leader and head gardener in a strong religious hierarchy. The flowers that grow in the nursery create death and life depending on how they are used. The leader of the nursery is confronted by her past when she gave up love for the good of the people. A theft of one of the flowers meant to be a weapon for the front line of an ancient war brings on a moral and national crisis for the leader. The flowers take hundreds of years to grow, and when one is plucked the rest die. The theft was a valiant attempt by a father and his relatives to save the life of a child from a terminal illness, for the same flowers used in combat to kill can, in smaller doses, cure a patient. In the ensuing chaos, the leader follows the letter of the law, even when it means killing her former lover. This psychological tale packed a lot into a small package and manages to pull it off.
In “Search of Better Deaths” by Zet Madej the story follows an old knight and his gray-haired squire as they work for food in search of honor. At first it gave me a bit of Don Quixote vibes as the squire pokes fun at the knight trying to convince him to go retire to a nice, warm land or if he works, do it for coin rather than honor like he had done most of his career.
It quickly becomes a search for a noble death by a real knight who had, like most knights of his time, been a mercenary most of his life. The knight had taken the time to write up a book about knight’s honor and now wants to follow the fantasy and die a noble death. He takes up the quest of some peasants in a village to kill the one man alive who still walks around the abandoned castle on the hill that led to a curse on the village, his only payment some food for the mission.
This is when I lost myself in the tale. A haunted castle, an ancient wrong done by a knight, a damsel needing help, and a choice for our newly noble knight. Make the same selfish choice he would have in the past and live forever, or do the right thing and die a good death, the chance to rewrite his story to match the saintly knight in the book he wrote. Definitely worth a read.
In “Clocksong,” Katarina Garcia presents a magical world where time is an organic construct, not a human one. The clocks are based on the natural rhythms of the earth and the sway of trees that the clocks reside in. A cult-like devotion to time and the clocks splits into various orders, the green-gloved who focus on the living parts of the clock, in this case a Banyan Tree, and the blue order that believes in the science of the sound of the bells when the clock tolls. It follows a member of the blue sect as she seeks to fix a clock destroyed 10 years ago by a storm. The story studies the meaning of time through her relationship with her spouse who died 10 years ago, when time stopped. An interesting look at how time passes and whether time has any real scientific meaning or is simply a human construct.