Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores, December 2022

“The Second Concert” by Brian Blanchenot

“The Shadows Left Behind” by Ian Pohl

Reviewed by David Wesley Hill

In “The Second Concert” by Brian Blanchenot, the first story published this December in Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores, Perry is a drummer in a band on a tour of “backwater colonies.” Their first concert is on a terraformed moon orbiting a gas giant. Horsing around after the show with his band mates, Perry puts on an emergency survival suit, which protects him when a deadly storm strikes, swallowing the colony in “sparking mist” and killing every one of the two thousand inhabitants except for him. Unfortunately, it isn’t “economically feasible” to dispatch an interstellar ship to rescue a sole survivor, so Perry is cast away on the empty moon for the next forty years, where he spends his time burying the dead while surviving on emergency rations. Then the storm returns and as the weather rages, Perry decides to pick up his sticks one last time and to perform a final concert for the “uncanny beings, shaped like twists of molten glass” swirling in the roiling clouds… A melancholy science fictional tale that ultimately reveals itself to be a cautionary fable about human hubris.

The second December story, “The Shadows Left Behind” by Ian Pohl, although self-contained, reads like part of a larger fantasy novel. In a world where the ruling cabal of wizards has collapsed due to civil war, and barbarians are at the gates of civilization, Devlin is a thief of magical artifacts. While ransacking the castle of the deceased magus, Pallius, he discovers an enchanted seashell imprisoning the soul of Naya, formerly the Keeper of the “great library of the Seaward Islands.” Determining to free his new friend from her ensorcellment, Devlin appropriates the dead wizard’s owl ornithopter and sets out to find the magic slate that might break the spell confining Naya. As many good fantasy stories do, this one includes several tricky riddles and a battle to the death with darkest evil… Recommended.