Showing results for "the troll" in Anthologies & Short Stories

It’s fate when a man accidentally drops his phone off the bridge. It’s fortune when it’s retrieved by a friendly shape sloshing in the muck underneath. From that day forward, as they share a coffee every morning, an unlikely friendship blooms. Considering the reality for the man above, where life seems perfect, and that of the sharp-witted creature below, how forever after can a happy ending be?

This collection of Willa Cather stories - her first book of fiction and the capstone of her early career - is as relevant today as at the time of its initial publication. As different and individually distinguished as the seven stories may be, they share as their subject the role and status of the artist in American society.

Selden, a former mercenary, gave up war to settle in Balathex, the City of Fountains, and set up shop as a fencing master. But old habits die hard, and a man can use a secondary source of income when he has a habit of picking losing horses at the hippodrome. So he still hires out his sword on occasion and generally finds himself enmeshed in supernatural mysteries and fighting sorcerers, demons, and the like. This is an origin of sorts. It relates how he first got himself established in Balathex

Lia Stanton, a woman who likes things safe, accidentally gets caught in a wormhole when she's just supposed to be getting a nice, easy fluff piece to write. It throws her forward in time and space, landing her on a planet she doesn't recognize. On the heels of her arrival, she's accused of espionage and forms a connection to a man she never should have met. Troll Maglaya is on his third tour of duty on Jarved Nine. Just when he thinks nothing here can surprise him, he's assigned to watch a suspected spy. As soon as he sees Lia, he knows her claim of time travel is true - he's carried a drawing of her for years, one made fifty years earlier.