SEAS AFIRE STARS ADROWN
a cosmic wonder sword & sorcery adventure
queer is a miracle—chaos is our god
from Brackenbury Books
The 3rd Goatskin novella campaigns with 3 companions
back us here
new-edge-sword-sorcery-novellas-2026/
listen to chapter one
In which a demoted sacred goat, an ex-shaman who gave up practice decades ago, and the itchy-footed Goatskin set out on their travels…
Art, once again, by the wonderful Goran Gligović 
Among the yak nomads, rowdy, restless young have thrown themselves into a cult of were-beasts ridden by unknown spirits, and they stalk Goatskin.
They feel evil: evil by the lights of the intruder Temple, or by the banned old beliefs? And the shaman Goatskin searches for – a sad old man who set off on a quest his people call insane – what beast does he impossibly grapple?
In the starry high meadows, what inhabits the night? Whose evil?
This is a standalone novella. But if you want to put it in the other back pocket with its fellow novella Waste Flowers, they go together nicely, and you too can look like my publisher.
Mass-market paperback, or digital — epub and pdf — can be ordered straight from the Brackenbury Books shop.
Cover art by Goran Gligović, with a black & white frontispiece by Linnea Sterte and a map by Caster Jones.
What Rough Beast? had a pre-release review by James D. Mills of The Arcanist Fantasy Publishing, in video or in written format on his blog. Quite in-depth but spoiler-free. James said:
This tale is unlike any S&S I’ve read, thus far… I am a notoriously slow reader, and as a cynical editor, prone to losing interest. I finished the book in about two nights of focused reading. That’s always a huge mark up, in my book. I was locked in…
What Rough Beast? is a strikingly unique contribution to the Sword and Sorcery lexicon, standing entirely on its own. The authorial voice is powerful, the characters are thought-provoking, the world is tangible and full of life, the plot is bloody exciting.
I hope you enjoy.
Among the yak nomads, rowdy, restless young have thrown themselves into a cult of were-beasts ridden by unknown spirits, and they stalk Goatskin.
They feel evil: evil by the lights of the intruder Temple, or by the banned old beliefs? And the shaman Goatskin searches for – a sad old man who set off on a quest his people call insane – what beast does he impossibly grapple?
In the starry high meadows, what inhabits the night? Whose evil?
My new novella from Brackenbury Books, What Rough Beast?, is out on June 15th.
You can pre-order now from the publisher’s website brackenburybooks.com
Every tale of Goatskin is a standalone — and I’m likely to urge people to start with the latest, since that’s what I’m most in love with — but events in this one do follow on from Waste Flowers, found in Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery, where I am back to back with a novella by Dariel R.A. Quiogue.
I’ve done a few interviews over the past six months, if you’d like to catch me on the new novella and Goatskin’s tales in general.
Rebecca Buchanan at Forests Haunted by Holiness, her pagan-themed blog
SE Lindberg at Blackgate, in his series on Beauty in Weird Fiction
Eric de Roulet at Sad but Building Worlds, in a joint interview with Dariel Quiogue and me around the subject ‘Writing Power Struggles on the Steppe’
As ever, my great thanks to Oliver Brackenbury, editor and publisher at Brackenbury Books and New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine. He is fantastic to work with, and has given my writing a new lease of life. And, forever, ginormous thanks to sister of the century — and last — Julie Bozza, without whom writing would not be writ, nor life lived.
Cover art by Goran Gligović, with a black & white frontispiece by Linnea Sterte and a map by Caster Jones
This month’s The Tuq — a two-page zine I do for Scribe & Sigil — is a craft ramble: ‘that pantherish outline, those thews of theme’, because I was outlining my next S&S novella.
Here’s the pdf you can download:
Scribe-Sigil_the Tuq 1.2 _Bryn Hammond
I started said novella on May 1st, as per schedule: May-June-July are devoted to it. Working title is An Ingratitude of Goats. I’m bubbling with how the first scene (I write this on May 2) is hitting notes I’ve felt were missing … Back when I overhauled Amgalant One after finishing Amgalant Two, a thing that had to be done and thoroughly, by the time I got to the last chapter of that rewrite I felt I was hitting a style I want to take forward. That style has been elusive to me since. And guess what? Goatskin is doing the free association in my close third that I think is what I meant, that was getting so voicey …
You just got another ramble. Hey.
I’ve joined an APA for sword & sorcery and adjacent genres, where we contribute a 2-page zine monthly: Scribe & Sigil, whose home site you can find here: scribe-and-sigil
I thought I’d upload the pdfs
The Tuq 1.1 is mostly a review essay on ‘Old Hands in New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine’.
Scribe-Sigil_the Tuq 1.1 _Bryn Hammond
New Edge Sword & Sorcery is gearing up for its crowdfund of the year’s issues from Feb 12.
Here’s me in 2026 with the cover story for #8, a 12,000-word novelette. In the utterly gorgeous art by Jimmy Makepeace you see my Goatskin and her Mongol friend Tahilga as they explore the gravesite sanctuary of Elteresh the Blest, Elteresh Qutluq, of the Gok or Blue Turks.
In a fit of enthusiasm I threw onto Bluesky:
It’s true, with this one I am gunning for those saga-inflected classics of sword & sorcery, and even more than usual, I am out to prove steppe history, steppe culture every bit as worthy for heroic fantasy as European medieval traditions. The story is about knights and wild heroes, steppe-style, and dips into writings from the Orkhon inscriptions of the Gok Turks to the Secret History of the Mongols. Those familiar with Amgalant know I love to stitch their poetry, their epic- and history-writing into my fiction.
For these issues I have also interviewed Jessica Amanda Salmonson, which has been a great honour and a joy. This follows my profile of JAS in NESS #3. The interview is to accompany a poem cycle of hers, original to New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine.
Please do pledge your axe at the sign-up page to be notified of the Backerkit campaign.
(buy me in December? hey)
A post to celebrate what’s come out in December with work by me.
New Edge Sword & Sorcery #5, #6
find at newedgeswordandsorcery.com
In these I have three items.
A story, #5 – this was a crowdfund extra, so I said in the Discord I’d listen to requests. Carl asked for: ‘Goatskin drinks milk alone in the grass, maybe slowly roasting something. Can it be at night? So she can see the stars and it’s all liminal? I just want 6000 words of her thoughts.’ (But do not worry, dear reader: this extra story was shorter than the NESS usual; I was given 2500 words). Bearji suggested Old Goatskin, which I’d had in mind for a while myself. While Nicholas Diak threw in food that talks back to her?? And then Nathan Long put a loop in that with ‘Hallucinating a conversation with the goat she is eating, which caused the hallucinations.’
These strange requests came together in ‘The Change’, a story that looks back upon the Mongol conquests, with its changes to the world and its traumas to Goatskin. There also fed into this story a couple of episodes of madness in my past and my treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder two years ago. So, not breezy, but I gave Goatskin the age I am now, and being a happy post-madperson (look, it’s absurd how happy I am on a lot of days), not dismal.
Read to the David Bowie song. Change, my people: it’s happened before, it’ll happen again.
Art by Savanna Mayer (@well_dipper) for ‘The Change’
A poem, #5 – ‘Sword & Sorcery I: It belongs to you’ is an invitation to Sword & Sorcery. At least, if you like dog’s suet and goat’s pizzle I suppose.
A profile, #6 – ‘Raw: Janrae Frank and Chimquar the Lionhawk’. In which I get to profile a Sword & Sorcery author who fell by the wayside, but whose story in Amazons! wowed me in 1979, or shortly afterward – I can’t remember when I acquired that anthology. This was an honour and a thrill to write.
Chimquar art for my Janrae Frank profile by Chuah Shih Shin (@sscindyss_art)
Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes
Has gone out to crowdfund backers; official release is January, when it’ll be available to everybody. I might write a blog post then, if I’m cheeky enough, about my story’s inspirations. In brief, as I said on Bluesky,
(find me on Bluesky, quite often: @brynhammond.bsky.social )
The queer joy is strong in this one, and we also eat a few of the rich.
New ebook, only on my Payhip —
A Visit from the Scythians: Four Shaman Stories
Two reprints, two originals.
Qamty used masculine speech tags for himself and kept a curl of bristle on his chin, and he wore what was a woman’s hat in Merqot, white stoat, with pearls and silver strung into his hair. His deer, the one he rode and the others under bags, six of them, were soft stags that had a doe’s proportions. These were sacred creatures, but uneasy in a camp.
The Cosmocrat of Ping had outlawed origin spirits for the peoples of the north. Instead, you must have ancestry, orderly, recorded, and limited to men. Ishet had to close her mouth once the court official addressed them. Even her presence was an impropriety.
The truth was, her brother’s riding-stag still represented to her Talisy’s disastrous decision, in the first place, to join the Agyr knights. Too often she saw, instead of his empty seat, the Talisy of two years ago in his splendid fishscale armour astride a young Batrad, the stag’s white hair and the opalescent armour both polished to a fine shine. Batrad already with a strut. To be picked out for a steed – on rude size and strength and the whiteness of his coat – immediately went to his head. In the home herd he had been all disruption and no sense, like any stag his age. Fit to run around the forest with a lance and act out twaddle from the epic quests.
Hands the size of shovels; her feet sprawl like a camel’s. I have never seen a woman walk like that. I think her hips are the axle of her cart. This is not athleticism, but rather ignorance of human motion – the opposite, in fact, of our sports. They walk rawly, as if never taught.
Together, 17000 words.
‘Ill Spirits’ first published in The Knot Wound Round Your Finger: An Anthology on Memory, History & Inheritance, edited by Devon Field, Bell Press, 2021.
‘A Truce with Evil’ first published in Queer Weird West Tales, edited by Julie Bozza, LIBRAtiger, 2022.
#
Update
A review thick with insights from E.M. White at Sad but Building Worlds:
https://sadbutbuildingworlds.blog/2025/11/15/im-reading-more-steppe-fiction-a-visit-from-the-scythians-a-collection-by-bryn-hammond/
Art by Goran Gligović. I am thrilled with this cover.
~excerpt~
They did not light a fire. Stars were thrown spectacularly close up here. No moon was out.
Until a glow slid through chinks in stone on the far side of the ring, behind cultists who turned to the encounter in a stance with lifted arms, pale flares licking at them like disastrous meteors, and slowly the moon loomed above the rim. As spooky a moon as Duz had seen, with as near a thing to a face: a blistered, cracked, eroded face, bleary eyes in heavy pouches, an old person’s slobbery pout. A monstrous moon.
It seemed their signal.
Down at the fair the young had favoured city liquor, mash you buy cheap in the wine shops – even though summer was the time for fermented milk in frothy vats, sweet and astringent, a sting and a tang on the tongue. Duz had indulged to bloat on bubbly milk. Now the stick insect Duz had leapt carts against dragged out a night-black yak calf and quickly slit its throat. They caught its blood in a leather pail, and then they poured in milk – milk others freshly squeezed from the dead calf’s mother’s teats, a clump of them around her to hide what they had done. But she smelt the blood and was suspicious, and she struggled free: they flung the carcass downslope and she bellowed, her whitened eyes on that limp arc, and the yak cow blundered away after her child.
Raw milk and fresh blood, swirled together in a pail, and the stick insect first dipped a ladle and swallowed. Others followed him. One by one the cultists crouched and partook of this filthy drink.
Duz almost heaved up her belly of fermented milk. The smell alone made her queasy.
And the smell took her back, took her back to Ominan, though the last shaman’s ceremony she witnessed must be fifteen years ago. Raw milk, fresh blood, was the concoction a community gave its shaman, because it was spirits’ food, an anti-food a human stomach turned to think of. At Ominan people fed the shaman laughing, for he was not quite human, he was one too with the spirits, he belonged on both levels of existence. People prepared a pail for him with exaggerated displays of disgust, and teased him with the treat, for in his trance he was the victim of a more-than-human hunger, a crazed desire for this strange sustenance, and when they let him at it he lapped and splashed, his head right in the pail, the picture of a wolf deranged with thirst.
Nobody drinks an animal’s milk from the teat, and blood you put in sausages or soup. People cook.
Among the yak nomads, rowdy, restless young have thrown themselves into a cult of were-beasts ridden by unknown spirits, and they stalk Goatskin.
They feel evil: evil by the lights of the intruder Temple, or by the banned old beliefs? And the shaman Goatskin searches for – a sad old man who set off on a quest his people call insane – what beast does he impossibly grapple?
In the starry high meadows, what inhabits the night? Whose evil?
What Rough Beast?, my second Goatskin novella (each a standalone), is being crowdfunded as one of four novellas from Brackenbury Books. Find us on Backerkit September 9-30. Here’s the link — do click and give us a look, and I hope support.
The excerpt above is from early on in the story; you can hear it in situ as publisher Oliver Brackenbury reads the first couple of chapters.
Meanwhile I have an interview out at Black Gate, part of S E Lindberg’s series on Art & Beauty in Weird Fantasy. This was right up my alley, and a perfect excuse to ramble about my Decadent influences in both Goatskin novellas, Waste Flowers and What Rough Beast? Beauty, the stranger places one can find it, has always been a fascination of mine, and likely to be a presence in whatever I write.
photo by Carl Ellis (@carlc75.bsky.social)
Here’s a smatter of sources and influences for my novella Waste Flowers, published in May as half of Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery.
1927, before the roads were too-travelled. On the brink of railways and the forgetting of journeys by camel. Owen Lattimore is a great writer, say what else you like, and I have stolen from him certain ethics and habits of camel men — over a large gap of time from Sogdian Traders: A History by Étienne de la Vaissière, but one does what one can to flesh out the sparse medieval sources.
Earlier travel. Go as early as you can with your travel accounts, and grasp over the space between French priests sent to spy on khans in the thirteenth century, and French priests out to wander in the nineteenth. Huc and Gabet have given me oddments from songs to animal behaviour: rich, lively, less rude than other old travels about Mongols and their way of life.
A great book for background on foreigners and reception of the foreign in Tang, but the photo is a stand-in for a more particular source: my most-consulted unpublished thesis (MA), Lee Chamney’s ‘The An Shi Rebellion and Rejection of the Other in Tang China’. I find this fascinating on an interaction of poetry and politics. ‘Just as the genre of frontier poetry briefed officials on what to expect at the frontier, it also briefed Xuanzong on how to understand the wars he commanded.’ How poetry shaped politics and not the other way around. I think the researcher writes SFF now.
Tang China’s ‘anti-foreign turn’ runs through my story. Nimgart’s little disquisition on how frontier poetry cemented the Walls, owes entirely to Lee Chamney.
Now we come to the people-eaters.
When my bandits sit around and discuss the end of aristocracy in Tang, and attribute it to the sheer destruction caused by That Terrible Bandit, they make the argument of this book.
For a quote on Huang Chao’s use of civilians as rations, and other incidents of people-eating, see my old post ‘They Eat People in the City’: three anecdotes.
These are what I turned to in preparation: old influences of mine that I felt the need to revisit, to stoke a mood.
Beauty and evil entwined in mine, so I went to Baudelaire. A website devoted to his Flowers of Evil gives you several English translations. This time around, I liked his Litany to Satan the most.
I was to write criminals, so I go to Jean Genet — again, for perverse beauty. My criminals always and indelibly owe to Dostoyevsky, but I think I talked about him in interviews (you can find more, much more, in the interviews I did when our crowdfund was on: collected here).
In the end, these two named my novella: between Flowers of Evil and Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, I went with the title Waste Flowers.