Short Fiction

Stories of myth, wilderness, and the quiet work of transformation

a mountainside with aspens and road in fall
Wormwood
Deana Armstrong Deana Armstrong

Wormwood

When a dragon sheriff finds another dragon hunting in his valley, the law becomes personal.

Content Warnings: predatory violence, livestock death, blood and injury, territorial conflict, shifting (dragon and werewolf), mild body horror (transformation), rural law‑enforcement setting

Summary: When a rancher’s bull is taken, Sheriff Sarkany follows the scent into the mountains and finds the truth: another dragon has moved into Wormwood Valley. Shedding badge and skin, he drives the trespasser out in a brutal aerial fight, then returns home exhausted to his werewolf deputy and the town he protects. Just another night’s work for a dragon sheriff guarding his territory.

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Remains of the Feast
Deana Armstrong Deana Armstrong

Remains of the Feast

On the day the world celebrates the Host, the abandoned ones fall to Earth instead.

Content Notes: religious trauma, themes of abandonment by divine authority, non‑graphic violence, exile.

They fall through the sky on the Feast of All Angels, the day every church on Earth lifts hymns to the Host that cast them out. Stripped of rank and radiance, the exiles arrive bewildered and burning, carrying only the memory of a Heaven that devoured its own. As they navigate a world celebrating the very beings who abandoned them, they must decide what remains of holiness when the divine has turned its face away — and whether anything sacred can be rebuilt from the scraps left behind.

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Surplus to Requirements
Deana Armstrong Deana Armstrong

Surplus to Requirements

A soldier built to be a weapon learns what it costs to be human.

Content Warnings: military violence, institutional abuse, body transformation, trauma responses, references to war and experimentation

Summary: Captain Mitchell Rask is sent to evaluate Master Sergeant Reid Lyall, the Army’s most successful product of Project Werewolf. At a remote ranch, Mitchell discovers a wounded soldier and a unit behaving more like a pack than men. As he witnesses what the experiment has done to them, he realizes Command has no plan for soldiers engineered to be weapons — except to decide when they’re no longer needed.

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