Hoody Hoo, It's Friday

Q. What is best in life?
A. To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to read and listen to all their free fiction.

 
Fiction

• At Daily Science Fiction: "The Rift Cell" by Chris Batchelor.  Fantasy.
"It roared at him. Waves of heat and noise blasted up the blackened walls from a surging lava flow in the bottom of the chasm. He scowled at the thing, etched in the Earth in defiance of nature, in a perfectly straight line, exactly a hundred feet wide and a hundred feet deep. It pushed everything apart. The house on Cavanaugh's right had been split to reveal street after street of interrupted roads, sidewalks, and lawns, all the way to a gap in the distant hills."

• At Paizo: "Queen Sacrifice- Chapter One: Lord of Summer" by Steven Savile. Fantasy. Pathfinder.

"It was easy to see why the range was known as the World's Roof. Even here, far from their loftiest heights, the snowcapped peaks were spectacular to behold, intimidating as they clawed up at the sky. Some of the mountains, like the Mhar Massif off to the east, pierced the clouds and kept on climbing until their summits were far out of sight. There was something primal, elemental, about the mountains' presence in the world. They seemed to taunt the fleeting nature of humanity and promise that no matter what, the land would abide."







 Audio Fiction

 At  Fantastic Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs: "Tarzan the Untamed" Adventure, Parts 1-17.
"Chapter XVII – The Walled CityTarzan, Bertha Kircher and Lt. Smith-Oldwick are seeking water in the parched landscape where the aeroplane has crashed.  They are surrounded and attacked by a great pride of huge lions accompanied by odd humans. Tarzan is knocked unconscious. When he awakens, Bertha Kircher and Lt. Smith-Oldwick have disappeared."

• At PodCastle: "Baba Makosh" by M.K. Hobson, read by Eric Luke. Fantasy.
"This had been going on for quite some time. While they quarreled, the sky had faded from ice-blue to bruise-purple, and the moon had risen cold as a ball of clenched snow. Dark pooled in low hollows beneath the ink-stroke birches and shadows moved within the frosty mist. Stag-like shapes that moved like men."

• At Pseudopod:  "Pseudopod 395: Fishhead" by Irvin S. Cobb, read by Maui Threv. Horror.
"And in the midst of the retching of the land and the vomiting of the waters it depressed to varying depths a section of the earth crust sixty miles long, taking it down — trees, hills, hollows, and all, and a crack broke through to the Mississippi River so that for three days the river ran up stream, filling the hole."