PodCastle Miniature 89: Lapis Lazuliby Tania Fordwalker
read by Khaalidah Muhammad-AliThis story originally appeared in
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.
In Sesara, only the rich wear bright colours. My knight shines in the armour I buff for him nightly, glossy as a jewel. My clothes and skin are the colours of the earth. We stand together with two days of desert at our backs and a forest of black thorns before us. My heart is a bird in my chest.
Rated PG.Tania Fordwalker is artist and writer hailing from Tasmania, the gothic little island beneath Australia. A former Disney animator, she now works as a freelance illustrator (portfolio at
www.taniawalker.com) and studies Creative Writing Honours at the University of Tasmania. She lives to tell stories, swinging between pencil and keyboard to make it happen.
Prior publications include the short story “Lapis Lazuli” in
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (writing as T L Fordwalker); contributing art to
Anything That Loves and the
Goblin Quest RPG rulebook; and cover art for fantasy anthology
Defying Doomsday and
The Mocklore Chronicles series by Tansy Rayner Roberts. Look for Tania’s tabletop card game
Dracula’s Feast on Kickstarter in late 2016.
Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali is our Assistant Editor here at PodCastle. She lives in Houston, Texas with her husband of twenty-five years and three children. By day she works as a breast oncology nurse. At all other times she juggles, none too successfully, writing, reading, gaming and gardening. She has self-published one novel entitled An Unproductive Woman, has published a story at Escape Pod, and has a story in the An Alphabet of Embers anthology. Of her alter ego, K from the planet Vega, it is rumored that she owns a time machine and knows the secret to long youth. You can catch her posts at her website,
www.khaalidah.com, and you can follow her on twitter,
@khaalidah.
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