Read Dark Tales Of Lost Civilizations for Free Online Page A

who breathed the fog that concealed the beautiful autumn moon. They said she was the one who threatened the turtle with death if the rains didn’t come. But it was clear that she had grown to possess an undeniable beauty, like her mother Hapi, and when the ships from the south finally arrived, bringing Wajin in search of land and settlement, a sailor took her for his lover, but she could not trust him.
    She became skillful in the art of invisibility. One night she became invisible and followed the sailor back to his ship. There she overheard him telling his comrades how he had known the dog’s daughter. She heard how her father the dog had hunted down, savaged, and cannibalized his people. He laughed as he referred to her as a bitch, a beast, a barbarian. She looked on in fury as he lay down beside a goddess of the crystal mountain. Spurned, she built an effigy of straw and nailed it to a pine tree, prepared fetishes of the guilder-rose, and buried them upside-down. She chanted, “O demon, I offer this image of the man I despise to thee. Take his soul and carry it together with his body to the fiery depths of Hell. Turn thou my enemy into one of thy kind; make him a demon.”
    The sailor disappeared, but Izunami didn’t need the Saaghalian magician to divine his whereabouts. Besides, it was a vanishing custom.
    The Wajin settlers built houses of wood above the ground and erected magnificent shrines to the gods of the south. The season was dry when the officials came to count her head. They dragged her from her hole in the ground and told her she lived in a different country now. They changed her name and wrote the new name on a register in a language and script she could not read. When the official spoke, she didn’t listen. Her hand was in her robe, her fingers running over the grooves of the tiny cedar box in which she kept her two tiny navel strings.
    The stories of her ancestors that Huchi had told her and the customs Ekashi had taught her roared inside her head. She resolved to never again run a stick through a fish and face its mouth to the sky.
    =[]=
     
    Mark Lee Pearson is from the United Kingdom. Aircraft toolmaker, translator, and father of two little monsters, he has a degree in Philosophy and English Literature, and a Masters in Japanese. When he was nineteen years old, Mark founded the legendary indiepop label, Ambition Records , in his Southampton bedroom. He now divides his time between teaching junior high school students in Japan how to communicate in English, and trying to communicate his own ideas about the nature of the universe to the world. His stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies including Apex, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Space and Time. For more information check out markleepearson.blogspot.com .
     
     

 
    Jackson Kuhl
     
    =[]=
     
    Out of the submissions I received, few struck me as unique and colorful as this next selection. Connecticut author, Jackson Kuhl, infuses humor and mystery with an exceptional ability for story telling. Quivira is a legendary city of gold and has come to symbolize the misfortune that befalls those who search for it. Where Quivira actually was ever located has long been a mystery associated with the ruse of misdirection, purposely guiding those that get close to travel the wrong way. If it exists however, it just goes to reason that someday, someone will find it . . . or is even the legend itself a ruse for something else?
    =[]=
     
    The Sioux tell a story about four brothers who went hunting and came across a buffalo. The buffalo said to them, Sure, you can eat me—I taste real good—but when you’re done, lay my bones together so my hoodoo will make me whole and alive again . The brothers promised to do this and killed the buffalo. But after they finished supper and the youngest brother gathered up the bones, the others mocked him. Buffalo can’t talk, they said—they must have been hearing things. Besides, what good