Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Renunciation of the Crimes of Gharad the Undying”
We’re slowly capturing all the online fiction we’ve published here over the past 12 years as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction series. This week we present the complete text of Alex Kreis’s “The Renunciation of the Crimes of Gharad the Undying,” one of the shortest tales to ever appear in Black Gate.
I am very sorry about seizing the throne of Falland and establishing a dictatorship based on terror and intimidation. As ruler of Falland, I enforced a number of highly unfair and immoral policies for which I now feel very badly, including putting all orphans raised by any forms of wildlife to death, and ordering the execution of all wandering bards (although I must say in my defense that that decision was not entirely unpopular).
Alex Kreis is a graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop and a member of BRAWL, the Boston SF/F writing critique group. He lives with his wife and two children in Massachusetts. “The Renunciation of the Crimes of Gharad the Undying” was his first fiction sale.
You can see the complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mark Rigney, C.S.E. Cooney, Donald S. Crankshaw, Aaron Bradford Starr, Sean McLachlan, Harry Connolly, and Jason E. Thummel, here.
“The Renunciation of the Crimes of Gharad the Undying” originally appeared in Black Gate 14. It is a complete 960-word short story of satirical fantasy offered at no cost. Art by Bernie Mireault.
That’s a little gem, that one is. I remembered the surface layer of the story from its appearance in BG14, but I’d entirely forgotten the other layer.