William Cox tends the gardens at Othery Grange. He also tends the truth. Five Regency courtships, five birds, and one gardener who learns that an invented omen, once spoken, never stays his alone.

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In late-sixteenth-century Exeter, Curate Ralph Travers preaches too often against the Devil and gives an old children’s rhyme a power it should never have had. When Bucky comes to St Olave’s churchyard, three lives are demanded, and Ralph must choose who will be taught the words that open the dark.

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The Even Ash is a dark Yorkshire folk tale of Mother Greenwood, a travelling herb-woman who sells simples at country fairs and offers lonely girls an old love charm. But the ash does not promise kindness, safety, or happiness. It answers only the words spoken, and four girls learn that the first single man to draw nigh may be something far stranger than a true love.

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At St Mildred’s, every blessing has a shadow. Cecily Scratcher waits beneath the lychgate to tell seven old warnings of beauty, grace, sorrow, roads, love, labour, and goodness, and of the children made to carry what adults should not.

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At St Mildred’s, every blessing has a shadow. Cecily Scratcher waits beneath the lychgate to tell seven old warnings of beauty, grace, sorrow, roads, love, labour, and goodness, and of the children made to carry what adults should not.

If you enjoy Edvane Stories, please follow the podcast — a new dark fiction story every Saturday, and following helps new listeners find the show.

Read it at Edvane Stories

Follow Jonathan B. Edvane at edvane.world

In Streindarke, even scandal is expected to behave properly.

When Lord Suze Ben-Sashe vanishes from the upper courts, Civic Quiet Ballion is sent to keep the matter narrow. But Suze’s silent apartment contains more than absence. A watching cat. A staircase where no staircase should be. A memory Ballion would rather not arrange.

Inspired by Siouxsie and the Banshees’ The Staircase (Mystery), Arrange The Symmetry is a dark tale of status, desire, disorientation, and the terrible geometry of a city that corrects everything, even the truth.

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The Magpies of Hagley Stile begins with an old rhyme everyone knows and turns it into a sequence of dark folk warnings. Across seven tales, sorrow, joy, daughters, sons, silver, gold and secrets all gather beneath the watching eyes of the magpies, while Widow Green counts what others refuse to see. Ultimately, a village learns that old wrongs do not vanish, grief has a number, and some birds do not arrive to predict fate. They arrive to witness it. A dark folk horror story rooted in British magpie folklore.

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A dead ship returns through the storm, and lighthouse keeper Thomas Darling must decide whether the light is warning the sea away, or calling something impossible home. A Victorian ghost story about a ghostly vessel, a half-drowned stowaway, and a ticking machine that listens ahead. If the future can be changed, who pays the price?

If you enjoy Edvane Stories, please follow the podcast — a new dark fiction story every Saturday, and following helps new listeners find the show.

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