The Dark is a prequel story to The Dex Legacy audio drama. Below is a small extract. The complete story will be published in 2024 by Flame Tree Press in their Learning to be Human anthology.

Ren always liked the dark, and after two weeks fighting in the Domonos Mountains he liked it even more. Outside the sun was scorching the dusty brown landscape into shadowless submission. But here in his cabin, with nothing but the green glow of electrical dials to break the peace, all was cool and calm… 

I wrote this story for Twisted Fate Publishing’s second charity anthology for Mind, LIGHT.

Imogine wasn’t meant to work on her personal projects in the main hangar bay, but the dragon wouldn’t fit anywhere else.

They’d taken a shuttle down to the scrapyard on the planet Bheithir in the hopes of salvaging some usable parts, when she’d seen it - a tiny, blinking golden light, flickering in the gloom of a broken down warehouse. And there it was again, no more than a centimetre across, set in the centre of a gigantic forehead, shining like an electronic pulse as the robotic crane hoisted the immense creature free of the shuttle and laid it down in front of her.

A short Sci-Fi story written in iambic pentameter.

Is this, the desert, my victorious field?
My heart is heavy if it must be so.
I scan the vast horizon bleak and red
Beneath the anger of a swollen sun…

Published by Teleport Magazine - 9th June 2021

For years there had been no sound. Women were not allowed to talk; they were not taught. Girls and boys were separated in childhood and if a woman even learned to articulate a thought, she was imprisoned, or worse. Men did not speak to them. It was thought they didn’t know how, and that even if women had learned their language they would never have understood each other anyway. But in the darkness, in the solitary times when the men were elsewhere, the women began to make their own words. Sounds passed by shades of quiet from one hearth to the next, until the silence hummed.

One unbroken wall runs in a perfect circle around the encampment. Every twenty-feet, movement-sensitive laser points are mounted on smooth, round nodules that protrude one foot away from the wall. It’s impenetrable. I know this because I have tried, on countless occasions, to cross it. I have now accepted that this high grey wall is the boundary of my world, and everything I do to help, must be done within it.

I remember when this pier used to sparkle and shine, glinting like a new penny in the early morning and lit-up like a firework at dusk. Arcades filled my ears with music and the sound of coins and laughter...