Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #58 hit the electronic shelves on November 26^th.  We’ve got three stories and three poems — a full complement!

Fiction Contents

“Dragon Tears Part II,” by Caleb Williams.  Exiled sorcerer-scribe Larohd du Masiim continues his quest to  gather the rare artifacts needed to gain back his lost love, the princess Yadira.  Catch up with Part I here.

“Isle of the Thousand-Eyed Strangler,” by R. A. Quiogue.  Quiogue returns to our pages with a tale of fantasy south-seas derring-do among the Perfumed Isles.   Young prince Pandara, driven to piracy after the Wulongan Empire has laid waste to his home island, becomes embroiled with the last surviving priestess of a cult of the mythical sunken land of Sundramala.

“The Third Way,” by Darrell Schweitzer.  A classic reprint!  Grion, the faithful servant of the great warrior Mazantes, flees with his master, along with anyone else who can, from the implacable wrath of Garadis and his army of monsters.  But their flight takes them to strange otherworlds where they hope to make a most desperate gamble.

Poetry Contents

The Witch Awakens by Julie Shiel.  Like the inevitability of the long days of winter, the witch’s ire can be pushed back, but it cannot be stopped.

Selaphesne, by Kevin Sandefur.  Crumbling ruins!  This poem takes you deep into the very heart of the dreaming ruins of a once mighty city.

Hamelin in the Distance, by Maria Schrater.  Fairy tale type things are hard sells for us at HFQ, but this excellent long-form poem is the exception that proves the rule.  There are other bits of old magic floating around than merely those that the Pied Piper uses.

 

The issue was reviewed at Tangent Online. Reviewer David Wesley Hill quite liked our offerings, recommending the two-part tale “Dragon Tears,” and in a rare move he delved into one of our poems.

We don’t generally review poetry here at Tangent Online, but “Hamelin in the Distance” by Maria Schraater, published in the latest issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, is a prose poem, and thus falls within our purview.

The narrator, a fiddler, encounters the evil piper on the road, trailed by hundreds of enchanted children. Feeling sorry for the kids, he dares the piper to a musical duel for their freedom. Instead of accepting, however, the piper curses the fiddler, dooming him to a forlorn lifetime without music—until he makes a deal with a Nokken, who restores his musical ability for a price, allowing him to again challenge the dread piper in his desolate lair…

A simple tale, true, but as I mentioned, this is a prose poem, and what’s important here is the language. I’m no expert, but I enjoyed the rhythm and the rhyming, and I recommend that instead of reading “Hamelin” on the screen, you close your eyes and listen to the author recite it to you. There’s an audio file just above the text.

That is quite a positive set of reviews and we were happy to get it!

Check out our issue here, and read Mr. Hill’s full review here.

Much like Black Gate itself, HFQ has had its share of behind-the-scenes problems that have helped put us behind schedule, AND put us behind on getting our fourth best-of anthology fully launched.  We have soldiered on and the hammer falls upon the red-hot enchanted steal that will become issue #59 and the best-of anthology.  Check out some of the artwork we’ve got put together for it below.