January has arrived, ushering in a brand-new year filled with fresh opportunities and inspiration! We’re thrilled to share the seventy-third edition of the Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter as we kick off 2025 with excitement and creativity. This month, our theme is Broken Crowns, exploring tales of fractured power, lost kingdoms, and the fragile balance of leadership. Thank you to everyone who submitted their work – your stories captivated us with their depth and intrigue! Here’s to starting the year with powerful narratives and unforgettable journeys into realms of broken majesty.

Congratulations to both winners of the January theme: Rich Larson and Andrew Kozma!

Restoration by Rich Larson – A skilled tinker is tasked with restoring an ancient celestial crown for a tyrant king, only to uncover the chilling truth behind its purpose…

The Saving Bones by Andrew Kozma – A young girl chosen for a ritual grapples with the weight of her fate, the morality of sacrifice, and the cost of preserving her country…

This month's newsletter features:

• FLAME TREE PRESS: New titles coming this month!
• NEW Gothic Fantasy AND Myths, Gods & Immortals titles
• Call for Submissions
• Original Fantasy Flash Fiction #1: Restoration by Rich Larson
• Original Fantasy Flash Fiction #2: The Saving Bones by Andrew Kozma
• EXCLUSIVE Newsletter Subscribers Special Promotion
• Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme

The Saving Bones

Andrew Kozma

Every year the crown was broken, and every year a new crown was forged from a child’s bones. It was necessary, it was innocent, and it was Harah’s fate to be both the breaker of the crown and the owner of the bones the new crown would claim.

She had tried to run, but the Crown Keepers were ready for her. Harah didn’t realize how expected an escape attempt was until she saw the bored faces of men and women stepping out from the shadows to grab her arms and carry her, bodily, back into the crowning room.

Inside the room was the Bone Retriever she had knocked unconscious. The older woman leaned against the wall, clearly still shaken from her injury. She’d wiped her face clean of blood, but the stain of it still blushed her right cheek and the back of her left hand. The lighting in the room was soft, candelabras stationed at each point of the ritual pattern drawn over the floor in chalk. The Bone Retriever or someone else must have redrawn the lines Harah had scuffed in her escape. Harah broke the nearest line again with her foot.

The Bone Retriever sighed. “There’s no point putting it off.”

The older woman sounded sympathetic. She sounded tired. She sounded as if she’d be perfectly happy to never open her mouth again.

In the center of the room, in the center of the pattern drawn in chalk, was the crown. The bones had been carved and bent and shaped until what remained was a filigree as delicate as a spider’s web. It had been dipped in gold, all except the sharp tips at both the top and bottom of the crown, the white upper tips resembling flames while the once-white bottom tips were blood-blackened from a year of wear. Harah thought she could smell the blood, the rot of it, like a pool of water going stagnant. A pool of water with an animal drowned in it. And she was the animal.

“I can just not break the crown,” she said.

Surprisingly, the Bone Retriever nodded. “There are many things we believe we can do.”

Harah turned away from the crown and went to the door. The door had no lock. She could hear the Crown Keepers who’d brought her back murmuring in the hall outside. She sat and rested her back against the door, the polished wooden floor warming quickly through the thin dress she’d been provided with.

Harah would’ve thought the Bone Retriever would be unwilling to meet her eyes, as she was responsible for Harah’s oncoming death, and for stripping the bones from her dead body. And yet the older woman met Harah’s gaze directly and without apology. There was even warmth in her eyes, a sort of conspiratorial openness. Harah hated her. Hated this useless display of sympathy.

“So if I refuse, are you here to force me to do it? To torture me until I break the crown of my own free will?”

The Bone Retriever sagged back against the far wall and slid clumsily to the floor. Harah felt a bit of shock that she’d hurt the woman so badly, then hardened her heart. The woman was just one of the many keeping her captive.

Harah had never asked for this. She’d lived in Orphan Abbey on the outskirts of the city for most of her life, educated by the nuns and taught the basics of a moral life. When she’d been chosen a month back, at first she believed she’d been adopted, unlikely as that would be for a twelve-year-old, or at least apprenticed. Instead found herself in a kind of school, where she’d had this ritual driven into her brain by rote, cold-eyed instructors rotating in sequence as their voices gave out. From dawn until dusk, the ritual was drilled into her, though it was only in the final few days she was told the ritual would end in her death.

Maybe they thought she was fully invested by then? That she lived and breathed the ritual, and so couldn’t see it fail? At night, the chalk pattern inhabited her dreams, a labyrinth she walked continually, unable to escape her tasked memorization even in unconsciousness. Even now, when she closed her eyes, she returned to that room where she’d been shackled to the desk and could hear the voices repeating the movements she must make, the exact timing between each movement, and the words to say—ecstatically!—as she cut her neck with the pieces of the broken crown.

The Bone Retriever didn’t try to convince her. She was a fountain of silence on the far side of the room. Silence spread out from her and lapped at Harah’s feet.

“They told me it would preserve the country,” Harah said.

“They did not lie,” the Bone Retriever said.

“But what if I,” Harah said, pushing her hands palm down against the floor. “What if I just don’t?”

“You will.”

The Bone Retriever’s voice was quiet but confident, so confident it made Harah doubt herself. The future was unknown. How could that woman know what she’d do in the future? She gathered that confidence into herself and twisted it to her own ends.

“But what if I don’t?” she said, her voice strong, her words terrible to her own ears.

The Bone Retriever nodded. “Then the country might die.”

Harah imagined the country she’d never seen as a park so large it would take days to cross. All those wonderful trees burning or so rotted through they fall over. Tiny corpses of animals unrecognizable by the maggots crawling through their skin. People just soot-blackened husks, like when the plague took her parents. Could the ritual prevent that?

The Bone Retriever watched the thoughts flit across the young girl’s face. She knew what choice she would make. They all made it. The older woman waited, patiently, to retrieve the saving bones from the child’s flesh.

Andrew Kozma is a writer from Houston, Texas. His fiction appears in Apex,ergot., and Analog, while his poems appear in Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, and Contemporary Verse 2. His first book of poems, City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press. His most recent influences are Robert Aickman and Kameron Hurley. You can find him on Bluesky at @thedrellum.bsky.social and visit his website at www.andrewkozma.net.