Literature / Harda Horda

When a few women combine their forces, extraordinary things happen

Harda Horda (Haughty Horde) is an anthology of fantastic short stories written by members of, well, the Haughty Horde.

Back in 2017, a group of Polish fantasy writers started an informal group for self-support and to exchange ideas, having in common only two things: all of them are writing fantastic literature and are female. What started as just a panel to talk together quickly turned into a handy marketing tool. By late 2018, the SQN publishing house decided to organise and print an anthology, taking a single story from each of the members. The lavishly decorated and illustrated book hit bookstores by March 2019, and was later followed by Harde Baśnie, another anthology, this time of Fractured Fairy Tales.

As a general theme, Harda Horda focused on "crossing the barriers and boundaries", but each writer interpreted it differently, befitting the anthology format. Due to the backgrounds of its writers, stories range from fantasy to sci-fi and even the most mundane of them make a few winks to the reader. The stories in the anthology are as follow:

• Jawor (Sycamore) by Marta Kisiel: A group of children go on a trip to a nearby sycamore-covered hill, not expecting their little adventure to go far beyond gathering raspberries and maybe holding hand of a crush.
• Dróżniczka (Rail Station Attendant) by Aleksandra Janusz: In a post-apocalyptic future, an elderly Japanese lady is going through the motions with her age and how much the world has changed during her life, while still attending her job as a railway worker.
• Tylko nie w głowę (Anywhere But the Head) by Ewa Białołęcka: A comedic take on Zombie Apocalypse, taking place somewhere in provincial Poland.
• Dokąd odeszły cienie (Where the Shadows Have Gone) by Magdalena Kubasiewicz: An atypical necromancer and his even less typical assistant have to solve a puzzling case of a Haunted House and deal with their personal issues in the process. It quickly takes a turn for far more dramatic than it initially appears.
• Po drugie (Secondly) by Aleksandra Zielińska: A regular day during regular summer as observed by a very special 9-year-old and all the insane things that follow.
• Z góry nie patrzą (They Don't Watch From Above) by Anna Hrycyszyn: The future might be flooded, but all that really changed were the means of communication, with people being as scheming and twisted as they have always been.
• Zielona zemsta (Green Revenge) by Aneta Jadowska: A teen witch, a druid crushing on her and their sweet, sweet revenge on a family of Small Town Tyrants in rural Poland. Part of a bigger Urban Fantasy series by Jadowska.
• Szanowny panie M. (Dear Mr. M.) by Anna Kańtoch: An elderly Proper Lady writes a letter to a man she once met, expressing all her repressed guilt and regrets as much as she's able to, recalling all the events that first brought them together and then separated forever.
• Bezduch (Spiritlessness) by Martyna Raduchowska: How much are you willing to give up to bring your loved ones back from the dead? Marek finds himself having to constantly re-answer this question.
• Lot Wieloryba (Flight of the Whale) by Milena Wójtowicz: After Earth and its magickal alternative collided and glued together for good, a cunning thief tries to make a living for herself, constantly dreaming about the flying whale she saw as a child.
• Jest nad zatoką dąb zielony (There is a Green Oak by the Sea) by Agnieszka Hałas: In the near future, a mother has to observe her son being wasted by glioblastoma and deal with the fact that she's completely helpless about it.
• Ognisty warkocz (Fiery Tail^note of a comet, but the title literally means "a fiery braid") by Anna Nieznaj: An account of one of the last people old enough to still remember Earth That Was, recalling all the events that brought her and her species to the new frontier and what it really takes to be human.

Due to the nature of the anthology and the general short form of the stories in it, it is impossible to discuss them without spoiling large chunks of their plot, twists or even simple reveals - those are simply unavoidable. If you want to keep your surprise, read the stories first, then come back here. You Have Been Warned.

The stories from the anthology, in the printed order, contain examples of:

Marta Kisiel - Sycamore

• And Then John Was a Zombie: The Fair Folk kidnap Karol and he's stuck with them on their mountain, not much different from them after a mere year since his "disappearance".
• Aside Glance: Despite it being a work of literature
  She looked on the side like a cat, observing invisible wonders on the wall
• Childhood Friend Romance: Karol would want to get closer to Wika. Except he can't spit it out. And she doesn't even know.
• Cosmic Horror Reveal: It looks like a standard "kids go on a walk to find something weird and have adventure", until they run into The Fair Folk, which not only turn out to be real, but just as petty and evil as the folklore makes them. Plus the general implication that All Myths Are True.
• Creepy Twins: The two fair-haired children that Karol just can't put to any household in the village. That's because they aren't even human in the first place.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Fik, the mongrel dog that goes with the children, gets really angry in the presence of the weird twins.
• The Fair Folk: The Sycamore Folk, but they check all the boxes of the malicious, people-snatching magical creatures that have their own realm.
• Forgotten First Meeting: When she was 3, Wika was almost snatched by the sycamore folk. And that's how she got her scars. The memory was then repressed, eventually being convinced by adults that it was just imagination playing tricks.
• Girl Next Door: Literally. Each summer, Wika comes to her grandma's house in the village, and Karol lives next door. He has become progressively more obsessed with her over the years.
• Not What It Looks Like: It looks like Wika might have some issues on her own, like self-harm or maybe family violence, given her oddly-shaped scars on the inner thigh. That's the mark the sycamore folk left on her when she managed to escape their kidnapping attempt.
• Magical Barefooter: The first thing that trips Karol that's something is off about the duo of strange kids is that they don't wear any shoes.
• Uncanny Valley: The sycamore folk have weird speech patterns and even weirder gestures and facial expressions. The narration constantly compares them to a duo of mantises and then a trio.
• Uptown Girl: Well, a city girl spending summer break at her grandparents' rural house each summer, but she still plays the role for Karol, a village boy.
• Urban Fantasy: A completely mundane, contemporary Polish countryside... and the evil, children-snatching sycamore folk.

Aleksandra Janusz - Rail Station Attendant

• After the End: Notably, there's no big, Earth-shattering event, but rather the "slow and boring" apocalypse: resources being eventually depleted, climate slowly, but inevetably changing, regular wars simply reshaping politics and so on and forth... yet the "present" is most definitely a completely different - and in many ways worse or at least less convenient - world.
• Ambiguous Time Period: It's the near future. How far into it? Maybe 50 years. Maybe 150. It doesn't really matter for the story itself.
• Apocalypse How: A glowing case of class 0, where, while society was disrupted and reshaped in a dramatic fashion on the global scale, it happened over the course of decades and, for a post-apocalyptic world, it's not really that bad, with clear signs of the situation on a slow, but steady improvement. For example, Mount Fuji tourism never really stopped, it just kept changing patterns, meaning people still had enough stability to bother with pure leisure.
• Audience Surrogate: Michiko is more or less a contemporary person, living in the post-apocalyptic future, struggling with the changing society and culture and being unable to fully adjust to the present.
• Ambiguous Ending: Michiko either simply fell asleep from overworking herself, or died peacefully in her sleep. The final paragraph of the story simply informs us that "Dawn found her asleep", but the story opens with establishing her daily routine, and she always wakes up by 5 AM.
• Cosy Catastrophe: Played with. The world went obviously through all kinds of shit and Japan itself is a pale shadow of what it was (even in a purely geographical sense), but there was no instant cataclysm or sudden crash. Instead, it was an ebb and flow of events that reshaped the world, with life adjusting and continuing as usual each time.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: In a positive sense. Having to live in a world squeezed like a lemon by previous generations, the people of the future are patient, stoic and just roll with various shortages and inconveniences that are still frustrating one way or another to Michiko.
• Doting Grandparent: Michiko dotts on Toshiro during his regular visits, even if he's already a middle-aged man with kids at the university.
• Dying Town: Nanbu is a small, seedy Japanese town, with but a handful of inhabitants, who are almost all elderly people too stubborn to leave their hometown. The majority of buildings are in the process of being Reclaimed by Nature, while short on the bare essentials, the electric grid has been disconnected - including the housing.
• Extinct in the Future: A great deal of animal species - including the majority of farm animals and fish species that normally can be easily bred on fish farms - are gone, to highlight just how bad things have gone.
• Future Imperfect:
  • Young people confuse tuna with dolphin (both are extinct) and attribute both human-like intelligence. So when Michiko once blundered that she would love to eat tuna again, the reaction was as if she was suggesting cannibalism.
  • Out of all possible forms of transportation, railway is seen as evil and a sign of the wasteful past. That despite rail transport being by far the most economical and ecological form of mass transit bar none.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: Michiko is a sweet old lady who owns a cat and dotts on it almost as much as on her grandson.
• Mono no Aware: One of the main themes of the story. Michiko is obviously nostalgic for things from her past, but has learned to let go over the years. The world at large embraced this attitude, too, having to deal with the fallout of the wasteful lifestyle of past generations and the environmental destruction caused by it.
• No New Fashions in the Future: Played With. Michiko takes great care of her railway uniform, because they aren't making new ones, but it's hard to tell if this means clothes are in short supply in general (which is likely, given how used this future is), or just the railway uniforms are a thing of the past, given railway is slowly phased out in favour of the Gate system.
• Noodle Incident: Most of the informations about the state of the world affairs is mentioned in an off-hand fashion. We get a few short snippets, each as short and devoid of any further detail as the previous one.
  [Third paragraph of the story]
  Years were passing by, the societal norms and geopolitical scene were changing, the oil crisis and Siberian flu pandemic happened, along with the Sino-Russian war and the long winter after Mount Aso erupted, but ultimately all the quakes and changes passed or smoothly merged with the everyday, slowly losing their importance.
• Portal Network: The Gate system is a network of connected, physical teleporters, allowing to move things at great distances instantly.
• Post-Peak Oil: The oil reserves, or at least the vast majority of them, are gone. Plastic toys of the past are seen by most people as a sign of the ultimate hubris of the old world, where they could waste critical resources on such banal things without a second thought.
• Railroad Employee Roundhouse: Michiko is at the same time doing the duties of a station master, signalman and basic labourer. Since rail is severely reduced, she spends most of the time simply manning her post at the station and performing basic maintenance - all while being way past retirement age. The Polish title, Dróżniczka, specifically refers to a person manning a railway level-crossing, which she is also handling.
• Reduced to Ratburgers: Since a variety of animals went extinct during Michiko's lifetime, the bento she's served uses crickets instead of shrimp. While she doesn't mind the extra protein, she still didn't manage to fully figure out how to work with the chitinous armour.
• The Reveal: The rail line going through Nanbu was discontinued nearly twenty years ago. The "train" that was passing by once per week was just doing a very short leap between two Gates, just to keep up the morale of the locals, but eventually even that was declared a waste of resources. Michiko is obviously shattered by this.
• Still Wearing the Old Colors: Rail has been phased out entirely, without anyone telling Michiko. Her prized, old uniform is one of the things that are left in the past by the world, but she was wearing it to all the big events.
• Technologically Blind Elders: Played with. Michiko is used to "our" standard for electronics: fast, always online (and with a fast net connection) and able to be simply hooked up to the grid to recharge. As such, she keeps struggling with her "futuristic" tablet, that's just slow, incredibly cranky and requires patience from the user due to its slow reaction time and low processing power, along with keeping it at the right angle for it to be both possible to read the display and get sufficient sun light to run it. Toshiro, her grandson (who isn't a youth himself) has to help her during his regular visits.
• Teleportation: The Gate system, which revolutionised the world and made it possible for the whole planet to weather through resource shortages - and also rendering Michiko's job at the railway mostly useless.
• Used Future: Since vast majority of easy-to-access and economically viable resources have been depleted a looong time ago, the industry in this setting relies on extensive recycling of everything, including the old stuff. Michiko herself does her darnest to keep the Nanbu railway station in top condition, but the building is way past its prime and some facilities are simply broken beyond her ability to repair them.
• Vague Age: Michiko is obviously an elderly person, but she might be anywhere past 70, if not even 100, given the various Noodle Incidents mentioned.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The main inspiration for the short story was the history of the Kami-Shirataki train station in Hokkaido, which was kept operational until the local student - the sole person using the station - graduated from high school^note Keep in mind that the story itself is an Urban Legend, very loosely based on reality itself, as the station in question was elsewhere and there is no indication it was kept open until the girl graduated - the Sekihoku Main Line was simply going through a serious reorganisation at the time of the report that started the legend.
• Wasteland Elder: Downplayed. Michiko is one of the few inhabitants still left in Nanbu and the only person with any sort of authority - even if that of a railway station attendant slash platelayer.
• A World Half Full: It's a rather bleak future, with depleted resources, climate change, various species going extinct (including food sources), and a few nasty wars and a pandemic between all of that, but life goes on, society has simply adjusted (althrough not fully and painlessly) and there is a hopeful future ahead.

Ewa Białołęcka - Anywhere But the Head

• Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: Subverted. The zombies in the nearby greenery square, unable to find anyone to chase or eat, eventually attack one of their own and beat him to death (which takes them a lot of time and effort), but seem to be confused and even distressed by doing so.
• Aliens in Cardiff: Zombies in an unspecified small town somewhere in the Polish province.
• Black Comedy: It's a Zombie Apocalypse... in provincial Poland. As experienced by an overmedicated hikikomori. Who fights zombies by tying their laces.
• Breather Episode: As printed, it was a comedic story put right after two melancholic ones and followed by another batch of bleak shorts.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror:
  • What's thrilling about King and his horror set in some small Maine town, when you have zombies right outside your balcony?
  • The volunteer stopped counting after dispatching his first 20 zombies, but it's implied that he reached three digits.
• Cosy Catastrophe: It turns out to be (mostly) controllable and with organised, functional government response going on since day one. The main character not only slept through the apocalypse, but also the evacuation, and spent a week on her own in an area that was simply declared "empty" of humans.
• Crazy Cat Lady: In a very literal sense. The main character is treated for severe depression and so over-medicated, she spends the first two days of the Zombie Apocalypse unsure if she finally went full gonzo, or if the world has actually ended, while having a cat as her only company.
• Dog Food Diet: The main character ends up so hungry, she contemplates eating her cat's food. The only reason she stops herself is that the survival of the cat is her main motivation, plus she has other things to eat and the cat doesn't. Ultimately, she decides to try to loot the nearby discount shop for the second time - this time successfully.
• Dramatic Irony: The main character has a semi-stocked kitchen of non-perishable food and access to running water, but no way to cook anything, as she has an electric oven - and there has been no power since she woke up the first day. She spends most of the story looking for a portable grill, while stuffing herself with dry corn flakes.
• Driven to Suicide: She contemplates it, being in a severe depression even before the world went down. But after a quick check list, she figures that she might botch it, even via overdose, and, much worse, who would take care of her cat - and the poor thing would obviously suffer if let loose into the wild.
• Genre Savvy: Sufficient to say, our nameless heroine is well-versed in zombie fiction. She, however, laments that most of the things she learned from watching The Walking Dead is useless, because she lives in provincial Poland. She also wonders if being bitten gonna work as it did in World War Z, where on the count of 11, she will turn into a mindless, man-eating monster, and follows Andy's advice^note Meaning she went into the extra trouble of watching a DVD featurette to stock up on water once it fully sinks in just how messed up the situation is.
  • Wrong Genre Savvy: She assumes Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain, while extreme, would probably work out. It doesn't - the zombies just explode with spores if their heads are damaged in any way, leading to the Title Drop.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Since the zombies are so damn hapless, just about anyone actually killing them comes off as a heartless monster.
• Improvised Weapon: Initially, the main character arms herself with a meat tenderizer, but she lost it in a struggle. She later replaces it with a makeshift spear made out of a mop handle and a knife taped to it. The spear turns out to be surprisingly effective, just not as an actual weapon.
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet: The first thing that tips off the main character that something is seriously wrong is that there is a constant, complete silence, all day long, with nothing taking her out of her anti-depressant slumber. Electricity can be off for a few hours, but children not screaming at the playground and people not honking at each other in the nearby parking lot just don't happen.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: Despite her quirks and mental illness, the main character is deep down a loving and caring person, who also can't stand violence and doesn't even try to harm flesh-eating zombies. Keeping her cat, Miłka, alive and fed, is the main motivation she has for her own survival.
• Lemony Narrator: Not only is the story narrated from the first person perspective for the most part, but the main character has an unspecified mental condition and is heavily medicated, so she has the most random tangents out of the blue.
• Living Emotional Crutch: The main character has a cat that apparently served this role even long before the story opened. The only reason she gets out of bed is because the cat comes asking for food. And she doesn't go through with a suicide attempt (also implied to not be the first one), because who would then look for her cat? The cat even has a Meaningful Name - Miłka^note "Nice One" with a female inflect.
• No Dead Body Poops: Averted. Much to the disgust of the main character, the first "real" zombie she meets shat himself upon his death. She's more terrified of the horrid smell than the fact that a creature straight out of a B-movie is chasing her around the apartment block. The particular zombie even ends up being nicknamed "Stinker" from that moment on.
• No Name Given: The only character with a name is Miłka the cat.
• Not a Zombie: The blonde neighbour eating the chicken in a really animalistic way... It takes the main character quite some time to process it and connect the dots, but for her credit, she's stoned silly on antidepressants and apparently has had hallucinations in her life, so that really isn't her fault for rejecting her first encounter with a zombie.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Averted. After having a nasty encounter with one outside the apartment block, the main character not only instantly calls the shambling undead a zombie, but also name-drops a bunch of real-life zombie finction, panicking that her life can't go that bad. In fact, she then playfully inflects the word zombie throughout the story, trying to find the right way to use it in Polish grammar.
• Our Zombies Are Different: First of all, they are quite fast - not running fast, but lacking the gait, which obviously unnerves the main character when she's given a proper chase, rather than easily dropping "Stinker". They seem to propagate by spores and are, in general, fast to get covered in mold. Their bites aren't fatal and are fully treatable with the most basic anti-fungal meds. But probably most importantly, they are presented as hapless, bumbling and just as much confused by the situation as the main character.
• Pocket Protector: Thank God for bags of cat litter.
• Rage Against the Heavens: Downplayed, but she ends up asking God why he hates her so much for not bringing a swift, painless end, but instead forcing her to wiggle, squirm and fight for her life.
• Reclaimed by Nature: In a sense. After just a few days, boars and foxes from the nearby forest, that were so far only showing up in the middle of the night, are flollicking between the buildings, looking for easy forage now that there are no humans in sight and everything went deadly silent.
• Rewatch Bonus: Or at least a re-read one. At first glance, it seems that the looters robbing the store are a bunch of petty, Stupid Crooks. Except after The Reveal you realise they were stealing all the high tech and expensive stuff, because it's a case of a Cosy Catastrophe and those things still retain their value, while food and other survival stuff is accessible with ease.
• Scooby-Dooby Doors: The chase by "Stinker" around the apartment block looks like a variant of those.
• Slapstick: When facing three zombies, she just pushes them around, and ties their laces together before they can get up. And since they can't connect what's up, they just keep tripping over their own legs.
• Slept Through the Apocalypse: The story opens with the main character realising she just did this and missed all the action in an overmedicated haze.
• This Is Reality: For all her extensive genre-savviness, the nameless heroine quickly realises how many of those things are useless in her situation for a variety of reasons that the fiction didn't account for and even comments on it. She has to figure out her own ways to deal with the Zombie Apocalypse instead.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Because she's a pacifist, and Violence Is Disturbing - especially when you have to do it yourself to someone who can easily just trip on his own leg.
• Title Drop:
  Anywhere, but in the head! They've got spores there!
• Unreliable Expositor: It is established in the second paragraph that the main character, who is narrating the story, is heavily sedated and apparently mentally unstable. This makes the entire story a play - is she experiencing a real Zombie Apocalypse, or did she go completely mental and the story is told Through the Eyes of Madness?
• Unreliable Narrator: The story gets the full mileage out of the first person narration done by the main character who is a social shut-in with a bunch of anxieties regarding human interaction and is heavily sedated almost non-stop for her severe depression.
• Violence Is Disturbing: Not only due to the fact that fighting for your life with a meat tenderizer or an improvised spear is disturbing by itself, but also how violent other humans turn out to be when dealing with zombies, which makes the main character want to puke.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The main premise of the story.

Magdalena Kubasiewicz - Where the Shadows Have Gone

• Always Save the Girl: Defied. Lilijas has an argument with Noah about his desire to save Edith and how unfeasible it is, pushing him into simply murdering the poor, possessed girl to at least release her from further suffering.
• Bad Powers, Good People: Played with. Necromancy in-universe is completely harmless. However, it gets a really awful rap thanks to folk beliefs, misconceptions and urban legends, so the end result is that people are still confused that Noah is a nice guy and such a weakling, rather than an Obviously Evil cultist equipped with a grave-digging shovel.
• Barrier Warrior: Not out of choice. Noah has a rather limited range of non-necromancy spells, so he ends up simply increasing his barriers when encountering Edith. It turns out to be a good call, since the first attack nearly shattered an already beefed up protective spell. He defeats her by surrounding her with another barrier.
• Bastard Bastard: Enforced. Edith apparently was treated with all the loving care and, more importantly, replied in kind, but eventually the manifestation and influence of her mother's spirit corrupted her into this, making her act like a mad person all day long and eventually going semi-feral once the manor was abandoned.
• Compelling Voice: Played with. It's not the voice that's important, but Edith can still force people to listen to her by giving them simple, verbal commands. When she tries it on Noah, his magic barrier barely holds, despite him reinforcing it beforehand. Every other person entering the house so far, however, was just added to the crowd in the ball room.
• Church Militant: The reason why necromancers are particularly rare in the south of the country? Igniati cult. Who, as their name implies, not only burn the deceased as part of their rite, but also the undead. Sometimes also necromancers.
• Freudian Excuse: Noah is five feet tall. This creates all sorts of problems for him, including very mundane ones, like reaching places or never being taken seriously. He turned towards necromancy as a student, because it's the line of work where he can still be respected despite his size and doesn't require him to be physically imposing, unlike other magic schools.
• Graceful Loser: Reynold Treyl doesn't mind that his father was disinherited, even if it is implied that Reynold didn't live the entitled life of a nobleman as a result. In the end, when he becomes the sole inheritor of house Treyl anyway, he arranges a proper burial for his deceased uncle and aunt - after all, his close blood.
• Haunted House: A manor house was abandoned a mere six years ago, still in decent enough condition to try simple repairs. But whatever is haunting it, managed to kill a bunch of people and others went missing, while normally ghosts are incapable of doing such things in-universe.
• Impoverished Patrician: Reynold prior to his Unexpected Inheritance. But even after it, he keeps the Working-Class Hero bent.
• Involuntary Dance: The ghosts at the ball are apparently forced to never stop dancing. Including the spirits of the mercenaries and the missing knight that went check what's going on in this place before Noah.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Arwald the Black, the necromancer hired prior to Noah, quickly figured out that he should bail, rather than bother with whatever was going on in the manor, as nobody prior saw anything like that and lived to write it down.
• Life Will Kill You:
  • The old cook died of a heart attack during a raid on the manor.
  • The people attending the ball danced until death out of exhaustion. Including any new "attendants".
• Mad Woman In The Attic: How Edith's life eventually started rolling. Lady Treyl kept her hidden from the public eye even more so than Lord Casian, her father, as the girl was acting progressively more unhinged and unstable.
• Mercy Kill: Edith is killed in the end, or, to be more precise - put out of her misery, since she's a very unusual case of a Technically-Living Zombie, along with being a half-mad vessel for a vengeful spirit beyond any exorcism. Lilijas convinces, and eventually threatens Noah with leaving him to make him go through the kill, for he is in no position to safely rescue the girl.
• The Mob Boss Is Scarier: Scarier even than an unknown, wholly new supernatural phenomenon.
• Mood Whiplash: It starts as a Black Comedy spoof of necromancy cliches, but becomes Cold Equation involving killing or not an innocent, barely teenage girl in the end, and far less amusing in general.
• Necromancer: The whole point of the story is to take all the related cliches on a ride. Noah is a mild-mannered, nerdy guy that isn't evil in the slightest, while his job is more or less that of a medium and an exorcist for hire, sending the poor, tormented souls stuck on the material plane to the afterlife. Oh, and it's a rare (and thus profitable) profession due to a heavy social stigma, since people in-universe either apply all the standard cliches to his line of work, or, much to Noah's annoyance, the emerging gothic romance genre instead created a cliche of a bad boy wizard that needs to be purified with the love of his (kidnapped) bride. The story also deals with the fact that for all the harmless nature of necromancy when done by professionals, it also has the unfortunate tendency to cause With Great Power Comes Great Insanity, especially when one is untrained with how to deal with all the occult and spiritual stuff - all of which seems to be the basis for the social bias towards necromancers.
• Not What It Looks Like:
  • Lilijas isn't a helpful mercenary working with Noah. She's a ghost that willingly travels with him and helps him around.
  • Edith isn't just a feral child who survived in the area. She's a vessel for her mother's spirit, a possession that normally wouldn't even be possible, if the girl didn't let her own mom do this to her.
• Only in It for the Money: Noah has a debt to pay and he also needs to eat something between jobs. Plus, he apparently owes money to someone far scarier than even the most incredible ghost.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: They usually can barely interact with the world around them and are - by default - completely harmless. Not to mention they can't possess anyone for more than a short while, and that's when they are particularly strong. Which is all why Noah is freaked out by the events in the manor house.
• The Power of Hate and The Power of Love: Both are very strong catalysts for magic and curses. In fact, so strong, it allowed Edith's mother to get her revenge from behind her grave, possessing her own daughter through their strong love bond, and then unleash hell on the house of Treyl with all the bottled-up hate.
• Pretty Boy: Noah, who is easily confused with a lady and thus even further doesn't fit the stereotype of his job as a necromancer. To make it even worse for him, there is also a recent shift in public perception thanks to the emerging gothic romance genre, which is currently all about handsome bad boys for the ladies to fall for and he has to deal with other kind of confusion by those few following the most recent trends.
• Properly Paranoid: When encountering Edith, Noah doesn't wait and instantly starts to discreetly reinforce the protective spell around him, hoping that an untrained girl won't realise what he's doing. It ends up saving his life mere moments later.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Noah is a reserved, calm and collected scholarly type. Lilijas is approaching all dangers by running straight towards them, screaming with glee.
• The Reveal:
  • Lilijas has been dead for years. She's a ghost that accompanies Noah and works as a very Helpful Hallucination for him. Which is also why she seems so careless and is going head-on into danger.
  • The reason Noah can't figure out why the haunted place is so weird is because it's not a regular haunting, but a curse, further bolstered by the fact that its original caster is still alive and maintaining it.
• Rewatch Bonus: When Lilijas joins the ghost dancing in the ballroom, Lord Casian's spirit is clearly shocked that she can act of her own free will, rather than being forced to dance like everyone else. His reaction can be easily chalked up as surprise at interacting with an outsider upon reading the exchange, but once knowing that Lilijas is also a ghost herself, his shock is in fact a foreshadowing of her real nature, rather than being outside the influence of the curse.
• Romance Novel: In-universe, The Black Prince by Lady de Yare created an overnight craze for the the "evil necromancer that just needs the love of his bride to turn away from his wicked ways" archetype, giving fair ladies from good families a rather... special idea of what necromancers even do. It's also a thinly-veiled Take That! on vampiric romance novels.
• Seen It All: Lilijas assumes this about Noah and usually, that's true. Then he quickly corrects her that he never ever read about anything resembling the ghost dance ball going on in the manor. However, other than that, he is completely nonplussed about things like suddenly lighting candles, Dramatic Wind or hearing whispers, because that is just the most regular stuff in his field.
• Shattering the Illusion: Lilijas enforces it, "breaking" the ball by making a scene in the middle of a dance, throwing around instruments and yelling at the ghosts. As the whole illusion is broken, she reveals a huge pile of corpses on the dance floor, along with the real, far less glamorous state of the ballroom itself.
• Shout-Out: To Supernatural in general, but to the feral children episode in particular, bordering on a Whole-Plot Reference.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: It seems that Lilijas falls under this trope, just running straight into danger, but that's because she's a ghost herself and, as such, can't get any more dead.
• Tainted Veins: When the spirit of her mother takes over, Edith's body is covered with black, pusling veins.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: The big problem for Noah is that, despite being a necromancer, he's pretty squeamish about violence and, in fact, has never killed anyone, always just dealing with ghosts and various undead in otherwise vacant buildings. Lilijas has to almost force him to kill Edith.
• Treasure Room: The real reason why Reynold wants the manor back: he knows the location of the otherwise perfectly hidden treature room in the basements of it, which is obviously loaded with the wealth of the whole house of Treyl.
• Unexpected Inheritance: Reynold's father, despite being the older of two sons, got disinherited from the Treyl estate and was cast out. But due to an entire string of awful events (and a war), Reynold ends up as the last living member of the noble house, inheriting what originally would have been his father's and then some.
• Villainous Lineage: Edith. Her mother was an untrained necromancer, and she has a natural talent for magic, too, which she uses on her own to harm people and induce them into the ongoing "ball".
• Wild Child: Edith is a borderline example. She did grow up normally until about the age of six or seven, but then everyone in the manor was killed, and all the companions she had were their ghosts. The girl is severely stunted when it comes to social interaction. To say nothing about the fact she's also possessed by her own mother and driven insane by that.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Invoked as a functional law regulation in-universe, since mages get simply dangerous when or if going insane. If a psych evaluation declares them unfit or unhinged, their talent is slowly, but surely extinguished to prevent them from becoming a Person of Mass Destruction. Noah also admits that in the case of necromancers, if they were poorly trained, the average adept simply goes bonkers within the first few years of practise due to the sheer trauma it can be to deal with all the spirits and the undead - and in turn being the source of the popular idea that necromancers are all evil, twisted bastards.

Aleksandra Zielińska - Secondly

• Accidental Murder: When she was still of pre-school age, the girl was playing inside a parked family car. Either the engine was running or she accidentally started it and ran over her own sister, crushing her under the wheel.
• Alien Sky: It's a very mundane story about regret and falling apart family ties... until there are suddenly two Moons in the sky and the world apparently "doubled over" with its own version from a few years prior.
• Alternate Universe: Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows? The ending is ambigious and abrupt, without explaining anything. It's like watching Coherence while being high as a kite.
• Ambiguous Ending: The story ends with the older mother running into a house with Maja from a few years ago, completely ignoring her younger self and younger main character. We don't know how it will unfold from that moment on, since that's just how it concludes.
• Bad Moon Rising: Two Moons show up in the sky. Needless to say, it makes everyone and everything panic, and that's just the start of unreal things happening around.
• Cosmic Horror Reveal: Maybe. Maybe not. The ending makes it incredibly screwy, but unreal... things just start to happen all around.
• Dead Sparks: The marriage of the parents of the girls entered this stage after Maja's death. They separated or maybe even divorced after the main character Interrupted Suicide.
• Death of a Child: Maja is long dead at the start of the story, but her death is lingering over all the other members of the family.
• Dwindling Party: The family of the young girl started with five people: her, her sister, their parents and grandma. At present, there are only the girl and her mom left.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: It's a very, very regular day in the countryside. Until it turns into the biggest mind-screw in the whole anthology, as you can't even tell what the hell is happening.
• Interrupted Suicide: How the "offer to the river" ended up looking to everyone but the girl herself. A Heroic Bystander ran into the river and took her out before she drowned or froze to death.
• Mind Screw: The ending. Whatever happened - if anything happened at all - duplicated everything on Earth, putting on it people from "present" and from a few years "ago". Maybe. Probably. Is it Time Travel? Alternate Universe? Both? Something else entirely? You are left to figure it out on your own, as the story ends right after the event itself.
• Mundane Horror: The first 2/3 of the story is about the life of a 9 yo girl who has to deal with the world around her falling apart due to her accidentally killing her sister a few years ago. Then the Mind Screw happens, making it incredibly confusing as to what exactly even happened in the end, but for sure it's no longer mundane.
• No Name Given: The only character with a name is Maja, the older sister.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Maja was 9 when she died, devastating her parents and leading to their marriage falling apart.
• Posthumous Character: Maja and the grandma are both deceased when the story opens.
• Scars Are Forever: Floating ice cutting the girl's forehead left her with an itching scar.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: When she was 7, the main character decided to "offer herself to the river" as a penance for accidently killing her older sister - which meant going on a walk in the middle of a winter to a nearby stream, stip-naked and lying in the freezing water, floating downstream.
• Tough Love: What the girl is given through all her life, especially after accidentally killing her older sister. It is clear that her mother still cares for her and loves her, but is at the same time distant, harsh and almost entirely suppressive of any displays of affection.
• The Un Favourite: The nameless girl is one of those, right down to her mother saying it once to her that some things would be better if never happened.
• Unreliable Narrator: It's hard to tell how reality truly aligns with the narration of a 9 yo.

Anna Hrycyszyn - They Don't Watch From Above

• Accidental Murder: Hanka killed one of the lighthouse keepers when struggling with the doors to the observatory on top of the lighthouse - the man lost his balance and rolled down the entire staircase, breaking his neck.
• Accidental Passenger: Hanka decides to hide on a ship while escaping from the police and being sick. When she is found out, they are a few days away from port.
• After the End: The story is set decades after climate change raised sea levels, changing the world forever (Kent is all that's left of southern England, Low Countries are no more and so on).
• All There in the Manual: You learn more about the plot and the setting from the foreword to the anthology than from the story itself. And the foreword does it in two sentences.
• Apocalyptic Log: The letter is re-read at the end once more by the commander behind the assault team sent to destroy the Underwater City. Even if Hanka wasn't killed after sending her letter, she won't survive the assault, as the base is intended to be destroyed, without taking any survivors.
• Artistic License – Geography and Geology: "Kent Island" is implied to be the only thing left of England. In reality, Kent would be among the very first places that would get flooded.
• The Conspiracy: The inhabitants of the Underwater City are responsible for deliberately knocking all the satellites off. All their future plans remain hidden, but they do keep meddling with the world around them.
• Cosy Catastrophe: For a wide definition of cosy, but the world just marches on after sea levels rose by about 100 metres. In fact, most young people don't even see the big deal about the world they are born into, as it's just the regular world, with more sea in it. Whatever upheaval happened, it's long gone.
• Deconstruction: Of the self-reliant young adult. Hanka completely ruins her life with her teen rebellion and ignoring good advice given to her by people around her. And it only gets worse and worse as she keeps acting rash throughout her life.
• Disappeared Dad: He died in some random traffic accident when the main character was 7.
• Epic Fail: After measuring the distance between the ramp she's on and the deck of the ship below, Hanka jumps... only for the ship to go down and the ramp to go up on a high wave, leading to the girl badly hurting herself from the utterly failed attempt to measure the distance or making the jump itself.
• Epistolary Novel: Excluding the final three paragraphs, the story takes the form of a letter.
• Evil Luddite: Played with. The Retro-liberators deliberately damaged most of the world's electronics and disabled all satellites to both bring humanity "back to better times" and also to keep their own existence, along with their underwater cities, well-hidden from being accidentally found. However, at the same time, they use themselves all sorts of high-end technology.
• Flooded Future World: Downplayed. It's the 2130s and due to climate change, sea levels rose a few decades earlier, redrawing the map of the world. The sea level is higher at the very least by 120 metres, given that Denmark is no more.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: The people of the Underwater City don't seem to have any real goals beyond first flooding the world and then staying hidden, creating all sorts of obstacles for the rest of humanity just for that single goal of maintaining secrecy.
• Hollywood Hacking: A single, simple computer virus knocked out all of Earth's satellites. All of them. At once.
• Left Hanging: We learn absolutely nothing about what are even the people of the Underwater City planning or why the surface population is planning to simply wipe them out, rather than trying to salvage any part of their structures.
• Made a Slave: "Guests" are kept fed, clothed and lodged. But they also do all the manual labour needed for the Underwater City to operate.
• Near-Rape Experience: One of the sailors tries to force themselves on Hanka. She struggles and eventually manages to escape, but as a result, she falls overboard.
• No Ending: The original letter cuts in the middle of the sentence, implying Hanka had to put it into the bottle post-haste and get rid of it.
• Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be: Zig-Zagged. Heniek yearns for the world he never experienced, the one pre-flood. However, the world was a better place indeed, given the story is set After the End.
• Painting the Medium: Part of the text is weathered off, and part is in hand-writing (a very childish one), because it's a letter in a bottle, found years later.
• Promotion to Parent: Heniek, and twice. First, he had to throw away all his plans as a 17 yo and become the man of the house. Then he had to replace his mother, as she decided that since both of her children are now adults, she no longer has to give a single damn about Hanka.
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: All the mysterious disappearances and sightings at sea are the result of the Underwater City and their ongoing schemes. They actively strengthen the "sea tales" about all sorts of nasty things going on in specific areas to discourage people from going there, as those happen to be where their city is.
• Spoiler Opening: The foreword spells out the existence of the Underwater City and paints them as the villains of the story.
• Superstitious Sailors: Invoked and discussed. They stick to the old ocean maps and routes. Part of it is for practical reasons (no underwater ruins that they might end up hitting), part is because they are afraid of the new sea tales about disappearing ships and monsters snatching whole crews.
• Time Skip: The story ends at least a few months after June 2137, while it started in 2130. It might even be 2140 or even later.
• Unreliable Narrator: The girl is pretty bad at narrating, with choppy and also very subjective notes on various things. Then again, this is the very first letter she ever wrote in her whole life.
• Willing Suspension of Disbelief: The story only works if one can ignore large parts of how absurd its worldbuilding is, as various elements of it run on a heavy dose of various Artistic Licenses.
• Used Future: Downplayed. Certain old structures get repurposed, like an astrological observatory being turned into a lighthouse, but new stuff is also constantly being made, creating mix of old and new.

Aneta Jadowska - Green Revenge

• 0% Approval Rating: The Dziurlikowskis are the family of would-be Small Town Tyrants. Except they are both mostly powerless and, more importantly, a relieved laughingstock for the whole town of Zielony Jar. Even people who work for them do so solely because there is no other job left in the town and hate them even more due to workplace abuse.
• Aerith and Bob: Klon, Malina, Aronia^note Maple, Raspberry, Chokeberry... you can probably see the pattern here, but also regular, at least in Poland, names like Janusz, Bronisław or Wiktor. Notably, Malina is a real name in Poland, but in-universe, it's clearly on the Aerith side of the trope.
• Best Served Cold: It takes Klon weeks for the whole elaborate plan to kick off, but the results are spectacular: Dziurlikowski's mansion, along with their lumberyard, ends up overgrown by a lunar skorfydia, a rare, endangered plant that, as the name implies, grows during full moons. Grows really fast and big. And it can only be removed by a highly-competent and licenced green mage, to be moved to a nature reserve, which costs extra. In other words - Klon made his family business flourish, while turning the life of his bully into hell.
  Apparently, green mages like their revenge served cold, then heated up, then cooled off again.
• Cursed with Awesome: There is a hex known as the "Curse of the Three". It operates as Laser-Guided Karma - whatever you do, it will come back threefold. Be a dick, and you will suffer. Be a nice person, and you will win the main lottery ticket.
• First-Person Smartass: Malina is barely out of high school yet considers herself to be the smartest person in the room and makes that known through her narration, always full of snark.
• Forced Transformation:
  • On raw reflex, panicked Malina turned Klon into a goat when he proposed to her. He got better a few hours later.
  • Meanwhile, the old grimoire of her grandma has a spell that turns penis into a venomous snake, which then attacks its "owner".
• Green Thumb: Almost literally, as a sort of magical power. However, the "green" magic is super-picky when it comes to its rules and how one can even use it in the first place.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Klon is tall and slender, fit for a basketball player. Malina is not only tiny, but also heavily underweight, looking still like a child despite being 20.
• Inept Mage: More in tune with "pretty lame range of magic power" than "can't cast spells properly", but Malina has very limited access to magic as such. Especially when compared with her mother or the infamous witch that was her grandma.
• Our Witches Are Different: The main character comes from a witch lineage, with all the curses, cauldrons and what not, but also dancing naked around fires during solistices, cultivating various folk beliefs, and being high on goth fashion. Or at least Malina is, being in her "rebel teen" stage.
• Mundane Utility: Green magic, which is pretty much your generic fantasy earth magic, as a way of running a landscape architecture company, a florist greenhouse and a tree school.
• Noodle Incident: Somewhere in the past, Klon, a green mage, tried to propose to Malina, a witch. She panicked, and on pure instinct, she turned him into a billy goat.
• Rules Lawyer:
  • Young Dziurlikowski figured very early on that Klon would make a great pick-up kid, because, as a green mage, he has to Turn the Other Cheek, or else he will lose his Green Thumb. Forever. Hence, the school runt was constantly picking on the biggest kid in his class, knowing he would never get smacked back.
  • Klon's entire plan hinges on doing the most harm possible to the Dziurlikowski family, without displeasing the green magic. He spends weeks germinating seeds of a very rare, yet endangered, Alien Kudzu and plants them all over Dziurlikowski's home and lumberyard, turning both into a magic jungle by the time of the next full moon.
• Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up: Except Wiktor is still a massive dick.
• Shout-Out: Malina turned her love interest into a goat, even if by accident. That's also the conclusion of a famous Polish fantasy short story, titled "A kochał ją, że strach", where a village bumpkin falls for a local witch, and eventually agrees to become her goat-shaped familiar.
• Theme Naming: All the "weird" names are plant-related.
• Unreliable Narrator: It's narrated by Malina, a snarky, feisty 20 yo witch with serious grudges against various people, so whatever she says has to be taken with a grain of salt, because she just won't stop attributing things to people.
• Urban Fantasy: It's contemporary provincial Poland, with more or less real-life history happening, except also magic galore and in the open.
• Will They or Won't They?: Malina and Klon eventually do hook up, just not in this story.

Anna Kańtoch - Dear Mr. M.

• All Love Is Unrequited: Part of the tragedy of the story is how all the characters are suffocating under the social mores, not allowed to show their affection, for that would be "inappropriate".
• Ambiguous Time Period: Somewhere in the tail end of the 19th century^note O. mentions reading Tennyson's "newest poem" when she was 16, while he died in 1892, and the letter itself is written somewhere later, probably after WW1, given a "modern" societal upheaval is mentioned.
• Be as Unhelpful as Possible: The father is deliberately and intentionally unhelpful to the police, for no reason at all.
• Blithe Spirit: Zig-Zagged with M., who goes against just about every single feasible Victorian social norm, but he's not a rebel or, for that matter, someone to follow - just a regular, smarmy guy doing dirty businesses and being a serial killer. Meeting him still manages to be a world-changing experience for O.
• Deconstruction: Twofer
  • As a whole, the story is a pretty vicious deconstruction of a Proper Lady with a Victorian backdrop. The nameless main character is always acting like she's "expected" to, while the whole thing is narrated as her inner monologue, showing that she's faking just about every one of her actions^note Going hysterical, because women are hysterical, being callous towards her servant, because servants should be treated badly as lesser beings, being a Moment Killer for her own sister, because love is such a silly concept and she shouldn't be looking for it in marriage, getting herself stuck in a loveless Marriage of Convenience, because that's the only proper thing to do... the list really goes on and on, while in reality feeling absolutely nothing and just cruising forward, knowingly making her own life miserable just for the sake of it being part of being "a proper lady". She's deliberately written as antipathetic as feasible, but she's not evil in any way and none of her actions are intended to make her pitiful or to make readers wonder what broke her - she's absolutely content with the horrible lot she's making for herself, which is probably the main reason why she's so revolting as a character.
  • Of British Stuffiness and Victorian mores that took it to the extreme. Sans for a small handful of characters, everyone is an incredibly uncaring and unloving - but also unloved - automaton that would rather do what's expected than what's right, act like a human being, or, God forbid, allow anyone to show any kind of affection. It is telling that a brutal serial killer comes off as more humane than anyone else in the story.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Where to even begin? Nobody cares about the death of a local girl, because, well, she was local - if she were a white woman, that would be something worth sensation or even to mobilise the police. The bodies starting to pile up? Surely, it's just a man-eating lion. The constable eventually showing up to question about the disappearance of a house servant? Treat him like dirt, because he dares to stop the family from having a spot of tea, and how he even dares with interrupt them in the first place, the low-born commoner like him, the nerve!
• The Disease That Shall Not Be Named: Because there is no actual physical disease - Violet is just incredibly lonely and melancholic. Once Richard starts to court her, she quickly starts to improve.
• Dramatic Irony: Violet ends up murdered by M. just as her health starts to improve.
• Epistolary Novel: A short story, but it's still a letter to the titular "Dear Mr M."
• How We Got Here: The letter starts with the description of the first meeting with M. and then, in the end, goes full circle through the chronological order of events to get back to it.
• Hypocrite: The story is a deconstruction of the Victorian moral code, societal Double Standards and British Stuffiness, and it wouldn't be full without a hefty dose of hypocrisy displayed by just about every single Briton in it.
• Impoverished Patrician: O.'s family spends their riches on trips around Europe and the Med with O.'s dying sister.
• Last Request: The younger sister is dying, so she wishes to see a specific place. Her parents agree... until it turns out she's not dying fast enough and thus keeps having those last requests, draining family coffers, as they spend their wealth on various spas and trips to fulfil her wishes and find a better dying spot for her.
• Lost in Translation: Inverted. Ironically, the ending makes more sense in English, than it does in Polish. O. spells the doom of her own sister when mentioning that forest violets shouldn't be planted in Egypt, as they don't belong here and it would be better for them to die. Her sister's name is Wiola. As in - Violet. M. murders her the same day, fulfilling O.'s "wish".
• No Name Given: Various characters are only known by their initials - and some are not even given that.
• Nobility Marries Money: The parents want to fix their budget by "selling" O., but the convenance prevents them from doing so before her sister dies and the year of mourning has passed.
• Noodle Incident: Apparently, M. is married to a local, "aboriginal" woman.
• Obliviously Evil: Just about every single character that isn't M. and Violet, in large part due to their British Stuffiness and exaggerated indifference towards the world around them.
• Old Maid: Invoked, specifically in the Christmas cake variant - the main character was 23 upon meeting M. for the first time, which was "a lot, but not enough to be called an old spinster".
• The One That Got Away: O. spends her life longing after M.
• Police Are Useless: Not only do the police ignore the blatantly clear signs of a killer on the loose for a looong time, but once the sole constable for the whole area starts asking questions, he's effortlessly shrugged off for intruding on them during their five o'clock tea.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: It's implied that the serial killer eventually got encouraged enough by the lack of response to his crimes that he "upgraded" the murder spree with rape. The Englishmen insist that it's still part of lion attacks and shrug it off.
• Sheltered Aristocrat: O. complains about the sort of upbringing she received, with non-stop "protecting" her from anything ugly, dirty or grounded, leaving her utterly unprepared for anything else than being a Trophy Wife and a mother.
• Sibling Rivalry: Eventually. Since the younger sister just won't die and thus makes O. life increasingly worse, she starts to hate her. Not even due to being a burden for the rest of the family or absorbing attention, but because she finds her happyness, making that unbearable for O.
• The Snack Is More Interesting: O.'s father would rather have his tea and a small, cream pie than bother with helping police with the murder of a local girl that served at his house. He quickly grows inpatient and pretty much throws the constable out, along with forcing his own daughter to be unhelpful.
• Stiff Upper Lip: Part of the deconstruction going on in the story. The Britons are portrayed not as stoic, but as deliberately uncaring and just flat-out inhuman in their cold-blooded behaviour.
• Too Important to Walk: O.'s sister was too sick to walk but, at the same time, came from a "good family".
• True Love's Kiss: Played With. Wiola is getting better and better when engaging with Richard W. - not because she was actually sick on anything physically, but because she was in depression prior, and interacting with him let her finally find someone to bond with, rather than treating her like a burden or a walking corpse. O. even invokes the trope when concluding her letter, as she's dying herself decades later, unloved and lonely.

Martyna Raduchowska - Spiritlessness

• Aerith and Bob: Marek Karewicz is a perfectly normal name for a Pole. So is Adam Tabaka. Róża and Feliks are a bit old-timey, but still... and then there is Lajla.
• All for Nothing:
  • Lajla's attempt to bring back Róża leads to a monstrous Enfant Terrible familiar being summoned instead, and in the process also possessing Lajla, ultimately driving her to suicide.
  • Marek sells his soul to get his wife back. All he gets in return is a fight for his life against Lajla's possessed corpse and then being tricked into being an errand boy for Soul Devourer.
  • Eventually, Marek successfully kills his best friend in a fit of rage over the (staged) affair Adam apparently had with Lajla. The Soul Devourer keeps his bargain this time, granting Marek his soul back... only for him to realise he can never meet his wife and daughter in the afterlife after all the things he has done so far.
• Amnesiac Hero: Marek has no clue where or why he is (and for a moment, who he even is), and the story opens with him trying to figure it out.
• Cliffhanger: The first part of the story ends just as Marek is about to drive a knive through Adam's chest over first seducing Lajla, and then murdering her. The story returns to that moment only in the very finale.
• Conveniently Placed Sharp Thing: Defied.
  Nowhere any nail sticking out of the wooden wall or the pillars holding the ceiling. He couldn't see anything that would allow him to cut the rope.
• Deal with the Devil: Very literally so. Marek sold his soul to get Lajla back after she refused to simply come back during his regular summoning ritual. Except the original deal is all a sham by the Soul Devourer, who tricks people into giving up their souls without being obligated in any way to fulfil his side of the bargain. The Devourer offers Marek a new deal - his soul back, so at least he will be able to see his family in the afterlife, rather than ceasing to exist after death, but only if the necromancer will provide in return the soul of his best friend, who is the very last person emotionally connected with Marek.
• Death of a Child: A newborn, at that. It plunges Lajla into depression, followed by a few suicide attempts, until she eventually succeeds.
• Demonic Possession: Part of the reason why necromancy is so dangerous is all the other things trying to enter the material plane when one is summoning the souls of the deceased and messing with sufficiently magicked bodies later on. Lajla got possessed when trying to summon back Róża, her newborn daughter, being barely qualified to even cast related spells. Marek took her strange behaviour for obvious signs of depression... until she attempted suicide. And succeeded the second time. To make things worse, when Marek eventually makes a Deal with the Devil to bring her back, the body of Lajla is possessed once more, this time by a trickster succubus, who openly starts messing with Marek. And once Marek gets rid of that thing, its boss, the Soul Devourer, takes possession of the slowly decomposing corpse to have a chat with the necromancer.
• Downer Beginning: The story proper opens with Marek and Lajla just lost their infant daughter, and things only go worse from there...
• Downer Ending: ...concluding with Marek murdering his best friend in another failed attempt to be back with his wife, this time realising he crossed a Moral Event Horizon and thus can never be back with his family, not even in the afterlife. And if one is familiar with Mirror Demon, it actually got worse from there.
• Dramatic Irony: The soul-selling ritual is banned from being performed, and all the copies of it were supposedly destroyed decades ago. Marek and Adam assume that's because No Man Should Have This Power. In reality, the ritual itself is simply faulty, giving up the soul of the mage for free and opening a dimension rift for the Soul Devourer to take over the body of the person performing the ritual.
• Driven to Suicide: After Róża's death and her failure to summon her back, Lajla succumbs to depression. Until one day Marek finds her in a bathtub with both of her forearms cut open from wrists to elbows. He barely manages to save her ...only for her to get more and more depressed and eventually she just cut her throat with a shard of glass.
• Emasculated Cuckold: Marek assumes his wife probably slept with someone else, and that someone else turns out to be Adam Tabaka, his very best friend. Marek can't bear the concept - she just couldn't and he just couldn't either, yet all signs make it look like they did. The reason why Marek can't believe it is due to it being part of an elaborate set up, planned by him, so he could perform a passion murder on his friend and fulfil a Magically-Binding Contract. To make things even more muddy, Marek has always been jealous of Lajla and Adam's friendship, even if he knew she was a loyal and loving wife, and Adam has been Marek's friend all the way back to childhood.
• Enfant Terrible: The botched ritual performed by Lajla brings... something from the other side. It doesn't even look human, as the infant has fangs, leathery wings and a thick, scaly tail, while being more interested in Lajla's blood than breast milk, badly injuring her. And Lajla is too depressed to care about any of this, treating the thing as her baby daughter. Including ignoring the red, glowing eyes.
• Even Evil Has Standards: As evil and scheming as the Soul Devourer is, even he considers dragging from the afterlife the soul of Lajla for the sake of reviving her to be beyond cruel. If her spirit refused to come back willingly to Marek, her own loving husband, then nothing good could ever come from forcing her back into life.
• Evil Sounds Deep: When possessing Lajla's corpse, the Soul Devourer speaks in deep, male voice, along with mocking Marek's reaction.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: An elaborate, memory-wiping gambit to perform a "pre-planned passion murder".
• Meaningful Rename: It's very subtle, but the narration does make a difference when describing Marek as Soulless^note An in-universe term for someone who sold his soul to the devil for a favour and soulless^note For Marek went off the deep end just to get things he wanted, including an elaborate murder of his best friend. He gives that rename to himself.
• Moral Event Horizon: Happens in-universe once Marek first plans, and then performs the murder of his best friend. Once he's done and off the hook of a demon that he sold his soul to, Marek realises that he's still soulless - just without the capital letter to it.
• Never Suicide: Zig-Zagged. Once the initial shock wears off, Marek realises someone like Lajla would never even consider suicide. He quickly finds out that Lajla was in fact possessed and the demons simply made her kill herself - and he ignored the symptoms.
• No One Gets Left Behind: Invoked for some very dark laughs
  When I will get myself out of this mess, I will return for that rat and bury him in my own garden. I owe him too much to let him rot all alone.
• Not What It Looks Like: It looks that, for whatever reason, Adam kidnapped and drugged Marek, while seducing Lajla and then murdering her after an argument, driving Marek mad enough to attempt to kill his best friend. Except in reality, it's all completely staged by Marek with the help of Felix, a memory mage, so Marek can perform a true "passion murder" of his best friend without a single regret or hesitation - a prerequisite to fulfilling his part of a Magically-Binding Contract. After setting everything up, Felix applied Laser-Guided Amnesia to both Adam and Marek and then let them go through the motions.
• Odd Couple: A loving marriage between an all-loving magical healer and an occult-dealing necromancer.
• Our Zombies Are Different: A dead body can be reanimated to be a loyal thrall for the necromancer, with all the decomposition affecting its general capabilities (Marek is glad the poisoned rat he reanimated is fresh, making its incisors still firmly attached), while it takes a whole body to even try. Remove the head or even simply a leg, and things get wonky.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Both Lajla and Marek struggle with the death of their infant daughter, which is the source of all the drama and tragedy going on in the story. And while Marek, as a necromancer, can rationalise to himself that they will meet together eventually and be happy in the afterlife, Lajla gets worse and worse, until she attempts a few times to kill herself.
• Regained Memories Sequence: Marek is slowly regaining his memories after waking up in the attic. And then has a literal flashback, covering most of the story, right as he is about to deliver a fatal blow to Adam, his best friend.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: It takes a complete body to reanimate it, so the way someone or something died can make it impossible to even make a zombie in the first place.
• Schmuck Bait: The ritual to sell your soul for a favour turns out to be one, deliberately designed to give up your soul to the Soul Devourer and be at his mercy. In a "perfect" situation, the goal of the ritual is a simple Demonic Possession of the poor schmuck that decided to use it.
• Shared Dream: After Róża died, Marek had one of those with her, as her soul came to say her goodbye. They share both the dream Marek was having itself, but also the dreams about things that will never happen, as the baby girl is dead.
• Soul Eating: The demon isn't called Soul Devourer for nothing.
• Staking the Loved One: Marek had to fight for his life against possessed corpse of Lajla, eventually killing it for good.
• Trail of Blood: Marek panics when he notices it around the bedroom in which his wife apparently slept with his best friend, leading through the house and including Bloody Handprints. That's just part of the set-up, to further drive him into a murderous rage against Adam.
• Unexpectedly Human Perception: Necromancers can sense the presence of death using their smell. Not the decomposition, but the smell of death itself.
• Urban Fantasy: It's very much the contemporary world, but with commonplace magic, to the point of even having specific legal regulations on spells and rituals.
• What You Are in the Dark: What will you do to be back with your beloved wife and daughter after they are both dead? In the case of Marek, there is no price he would be unwilling to pay, and selling his soul to the devil is but the top of the list of things he does.

Milena Wójtowicz - Flight of the Whale

• 11th-Hour Superpower: She's a regular, mundane thief... until she decides to try to call magic for help when held at gunpoint, and all hell breaks loose because this time, she's on the other side of the dimensional "Patch", where magic can show its true potential.
• Aliens in Cardiff: A flying whale over Wrocław.
• Anachronic Order: The story keeps jumping between various points in the main character's life, along with the progress of her current heist job.
• Beneath Suspicion: She's a professional thief, which the police are, for the most part, unaware of - and the crimes they suspect her of can't be pinned on her anyway. Instead, they keep pestering her due to the fact that her father is a political activist, rabbling people against anything coming from the other dimension.
• Breather Episode: It's a light-hearted Urban Fantasy right after the incredibly dark and brooding What You Are in the Dark story about the temptations of black magic.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Even discussed toward the main character. She's clearly proud of being a no-good slacker.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: She originally went to bed with a student from Senegal, wanting to rile up Pa. Instead, and to her dismay, he congratulated her on "at least having a boy from here". So her next boyfriend was an alien "calf".
• Deadpan Snarker: The main character is a professional thief who lives in the shadow of her father's political "activity" and is constantly dragged by the police thanks to it. It's only natural she developed this attitude after the nth time of being tangled in Pa's mess, especially when dealing with law enforcement.
• First-Person Smartass: The main character is narrating the story and treats various characters (and the entire race of "brights") with open contempt, commenting on their stupidity, incompetence or poor fashion taste.
• Friend on the Force: The red-haired cop handling the main character. Also doubles as a Friend With Benefits.
• Giant Flyer: Giant flying whales, which is even in the title.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Downplayed. She has no issues with being sensitive towards magic, but it does get overwhelming when she's treated like a goddess by her "calf" boyfriend due to having a really rare talent.
• Isekai: Inverted. The existence of trans-dimensional "Patches" means it's possible to easily get to either of the Alternate Universes, preferably by something that can fly.
• Last-Name Basis: The main character's father is known either as Sołtysik (his surname) or Sołtys^note sołtys is a Polish equivalent of a mayor in rural communities, making it fitting for a leader of a reactionary political movement (his political nickname).
• Ludicrous Gibs: The results of the main character magic and her general poor control of the surging power leads to few of the "brights" being turned into mince - some of them literally.
• Mage Born of Muggles: What makes it notable is that Malwina was born before the worlds connected and magic even entered the equation.
• The Magic Goes Away: At least on Earth. It takes just a few hours of exposure to Earth physics (or rather - simply those of "our" dimension) for the magic objects to lose almost all of their power, and things like flying whales to drop from the sky.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": The "brights" that tried to double-cross Malwina are all haughty and smug, until she suddenly starts using magic, tearing the nearest one into chunks of meat.
• Missing Mom: You learn more about Pa than about the main character, while Ma isn't mentioned even once.
• Mundane Utility: She's capable of easily sensing magic trinkets, as they sing to her. As such, she's a professional thief, specialising in stealing all the rare and special stuff, being able to spot it without any effort.
• No Name Given: Pretty much everyone is nameless, including the most important characters, who we only know by their nickname or job. It's not because they are truly nameless - it's just that it's narrated by the main character, who simply forgot most of the names. Blink and you will miss the fact she herself is named Malwina, and her surname is Sołtysik.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: "Brights" are a bunch of racist, imperialistic cunts that the main character describes as "the dreamed Übermensch of the Nazis", including just about all the antics that can go with such comparison.
• Riddle for the Ages: Thanks to a serious case of an Unreliable Narrator, it's left hanging if she was truly trying to get revenge for the murder of her boyfriend, or was as uninterested in the idea as she kept claiming to everyone.
• Screw You, Elves!: The "brights" are a particularly arrogant brand of Urban Fantasy elves that are just unbearably haughty and treat every other race with open contempt as inferior species. The main character makes a living by screwing with them, or even setting them up against each other.
• This Cannot Be!:
  • Apparently, this was the reaction from many physicists, right down to a wave of suicides, as they just couldn't wrap their heads around the laws of physics going on a walk as a result of the sudden opening of a connection with an Alternate Universe.
  • It's implied that this was also the reaction of the "brights" upon learning that "calfs" have stronger magic than them. After all, they are the superior species, which ended up with genocide and the enslavement of "calfs", making "calfs" flock as refugees to Earth.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Malwina has the barest of experience with her magic talent, so when she calls magic for help while in the other dimension, it's not pretty. However, her almost total lack of control over such massive power makes the "brights" run in utter panic.
• Urban Fantasy: Kinda. The magic on Earth doesn't work, or at least doesn't stay active for long, but it does become a permanent influence on the life of the planet. More so, there is a trans-dimensional gate to a world that does have and always has magic, along with fantastic creatures straight out of myth and fantasy novels.

Agnieszka Hałas - There is a Green Oak by the Sea

• Brain Uploading: A prototype technology known as immortalisation is being slowly introduced, allowing to continue existence as a Virtual Ghost, with so far few thousand early adapters. The world, or at least the Russian Federation, still didn't fully figure out how to deal with it legally, given that the person in question is both technically dead and very much alive.
• Dramatic Irony: For all the futuristic tech and advances in medicine, Alex will never reach the age of seven. Even if he didn't have a particularly awful glioblastoma, as a child, he would still be disqualified from Brain Uploading on principle. The whole issue is even invoked during one of the arguments Vera and Dieter have in private.
• During the War: Sergei's part of the story is set in February '42, during the siege of Leningrad. He eventually freezes to death.
• Goggles Do Something Unusual: During her Brain Uploading procedure, grandma Ludmila asked for separate editing of her memories of the siege of Leningrad, both for the museum dedicated to that subject and as a gift for her granddaughter, Vera, who is obsessed with tracing any information about her great-grandfather, Sergei. Both variants are uploaded on a set of VR googles, but since they are based on real-life memories, they strike with the full intensity of living and feeling everything Ludmila experienced as a child.
• Holographic Terminal: A common feature, which makes it particularly painful for Alex, as they give him guaranteed epileptic seizures. In fact, they are generally deemed bad for children, making audiobooks the favourite future entertainment for children.
• Hypocrite: Ludmila is bashing Germans for obviously being nazis forever and ever, while already being a Virtual Ghost uploaded on Bayer's server, using their experimental digitalisation technology.
• Longevity Treatment: And it's even state-refunded for septogenerians, allowing them to shed a few decades back. The goal, however, isn't fully noble - most rejuvenated people stay in the workforce, so there is no need to pay them pensions.
• Next Sunday A.D.: The story is set somewhere in the mid-to-late 2030s, while written in 2018. Most of the cutting edge technology is just an extrapolation of what we have nowadays, sans Brain Uploading - which by itself is still in its infancy and prototype testing.
• Not What It Looks Like: Very early on, it looks like a confrontation between February '42 spent in the hell of besieged Leningrad and the cosy atmosphere of Heidenberg... except the "German" part of the plot is set on Next Sunday A.D., almost a century later.
• Outliving One's Offspring/Death of a Child: Alex has an inoperable and barely treatable glioblastoma. He's five when diagnosed, and even future medicine is helpless to treat it. Vera and Dieter do their very best to stay calm and make the rest of his life as painless as possible, while trying to prepare themselves for the inevitable.
• Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!: Grandma Ludmila is still angry about the plight she suffered from German hands during the WW2 and regularly goes on angry tangents about how All Germans Are Nazis, century later.
• Shared Dying Dream: Maybe. In the end, Vera dreams about taking the just deceased Alex to the green oak by the cove from his favourite fable, where Sergei's ghost is already waiting for the boy.
• Self-Made Woman: Vera is a Russian immigrant who worked her ass off as a cleaning lady to afford living and studying in Germany, but in the present, she's a successful programmer with a comfortable, affluent life.
• Workaholic: Dieter finds solace from Alex' sickness in overworking.
• Whole-Plot Reference: To the Ruslan and Ludmila by Pushkin, right down to character names.

Anna Nieznaj - Fiery Tail

• Absurdly Youthful Mother: Justified, as the mother of the narrator spends God knows how much time in space, putting into equation both Time Dilation and Sleeper Ship. When she finally reaches Earth, her own daughter, who was in preschool when she left, is an elderly lady. And if nothing bad happened to Earth in the meantime, the narrator would be looooong dead, but she was a Human Popsicle for quite a while, too.
• After the End: The Earth ecosystem got almost entirely annihilated by a swarm of asteroids and the story is set at an unspecified time in the future, with survivors stored on a space ark recolonising the Earth.
• Apocalypse How: An almost textbook example of a planetary-scale extinction event caused by an asteroid bombardment. By the time Earth is recolonised, there are no mammals bigger than rodents.
• The Ark: Space variant, with a small armada of Sleeper Ships launched away from Earth to wait out its destruction by the asteroids and then the resulting ice age.
• Bold Explorer: The Scouts, going on a space-exploring mission mere months before it was revealed there was a whole swarm of asteroids heading towards Earth.
• China Takes Over the World: Or at least the specific colony established by the lander of the main character. Notably, if the general's name isn't just a case of As Long as It Sounds Foreign, that means the Repubic of China, the one with the white sun on the flag.
• Colony Drop: An entire swarm of asteroids hit Earth, obliterating all life on the surface, or at the very least the vast majority of it. Human civilisation on the surface is completely erased.
• Contrived Coincidence: Out of all the Scouts, the main character's mother is the Sole Survivor, just so they can meet together.
• The Cynic: The narrator is a deeply cynical elderly woman who has almost nothing beyond disdain towards fellow humans and their insistance to fight for survival against all odds, finding it all amusing and not much different from a bunch of apes doing the same millenia ago.
• Earth That Was: Played with. Earth is still around and in the process of recolonisation by the lucky few that managed to escape, but as a result of being hit by a whole bunch of asteroids, not even the continents and oceans have the same shape, and much of the biosphere has changed, too. The story is set in an unspecified time since the original impact event, so it might as well have millions of years later, with further, normal alternations happening to Earth's surface in the meantime. For all intended purposes, it's a space frontier story, just set on a once again virgin Earth.
• The Elites Jump Ship: Zig-Zagged. All the brightest, most useful and most qualified are picked for the limited room on board of the space ark, but the rest of the Earth's population reads this as the rich and politicians saving their own skins (which wasn't even true), trying to storm the launch sites and then even shoot down the ships on the orbit.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Earth was struck by a swarm of asteroids. The result is the near-total extinction of life on the surface, redrawing the maps of continents and oceans and whittling down humanity to the few thousands that were packed into The Ark.
• Extinct in the Future: The asteroid impact and the resulting ice age managed to kill the vast majority of animal and plant-life on the surface. There are no mammals bigger than rodents, but at the same time wild birds are mentioned as still not used to human presence. It is unclear if the survivors managed to preserve any animals of any kind, but it's unlikely.
• Fling a Light into the Future: Done thrice:
  • First is the Scout programme, which selected the best and boldest to send them into a centuries-long space exploration, that would find usable planets for human colonisation.
  • Then there is the Space Ark, packed with as many humans as it can hold, because there is just no way to save the Earth itself from colliding with a whole bunch of asteroids.
  • In the end, they launch an automated probe into space, to continue exploration and data collection for future generations, just in case things go shite on Earth once again.
• Future Food Is Artificial: Protein bars are all in vogue, but it's hard to tell if they are the main source of nutrients or just treated as MRE during the mission both women embark on.
• Genius Bruiser: The mother was picked as "the best of the best" in all possible fields, so she has an easy time fighting her way through the guards around the launch site.
• Here We Go Again!: The narrator makes a comparison between hominids leaving the jungles of central Africa to slowly spread and fight their way to the top of the food chain and humanity taking the first steps of recolonising Earth after an impact event.
• Humans Are Bastards: Constantly invoked by the main character, but it seems to be that she's a deeply cynical person herself, rather than people being as bad as she portrays them. Still, even ignoring Unreliable Narrator, humanity, when faced with impending doom, descended into complete and utter chaos, going for a pointless slaughter rather than simply accepting their doom.
• Living Is More than Surviving: One of the gripes the main character has with what's left of humanity is that they are all too focused on surviving here and now and getting too afraid as a result to bother "checking what's behind that hill", and she's now way too old to keep doing it herself. Since she firmly believes that what put humans on top of the food chain was being a race of Bold Explorers, she can barely stand it.
• Nepotism: The main character thinks the only reason she was picked for the short list of people packed into The Ark was due to her mother being a famous space explorer and, thankfully, her father being a well-known medical researcher. It's impossible to tell if that's true, because she's a highly Unreliable Narrator.
• No Name Given: The only person with a name is General Liu Shuang.
• Ragnarök Proofing: It doesn't matter if it's a century or a million years after the impact event - no technology would last as long. The fact that the story implies it's at the very least a few millenia after the asteroids hit definitely puts all the equipment under this trope. Ironically, the most proofed ship, the one used by the Scouts, has a failure when entering Earth's orbit, killing everyone but two cosmonauts on board - and one of them is left crippled anyway.
• Shout-Out:
  • To Return from the Stars - the mother of the main character is gender-flipped Hal, an uneasy spirit that constantly seeks new frontiers and just returned from a centuries-long space mission, finding herself on a completely different Earth than the one she left.
  • Also to Interstellar, with the uneasy relationship between an astronaut parent and left behind daughter, with an apocalyptic backdrop.
  • And the ultimate fate of survivors is a parallel to that from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, except they are recolonising Earth, rather than being on an alien planet - but things changed so much, they might as well be somewhere else.
• Sleeper Starship: Originally, those were intended for long-range space exploration of a just fledgling programme... until humanity found out there is a bunch of asteroids heading right towards Earth, repurposing the small fleet into The Ark for as many people as they can cram into it.
• Slept Through the Apocalypse: The vast majority of the survivors were already in cryosleep when Earth was destroyed. The main character was among the "lucky" few that were awake during the event, which she scoffs off as a "great tale to tell" to the young.
• Tall Poppy Syndrome: The people left on Earth did the classic bucket of crabs, attempting to simply shoot down The Ark out of pure spite for being left behind to die.
• Time Dilation: The Scouts return about a century after The Ark landed, but the survivors are still in their prime.
• Unreliable Narrator: The narrator is a cynical, elderly lady. Just about every piece of information we get is through her jaded filters, but it's made clear she's notoriously wrong about things, along with near-non-stop projections of her own beliefs and issues on others.
• Used Future: The main character insists this is where things just must go eventually, but other than her own outlook on the subject, absolutely nothing suggests it. In fact, Ragnarök Proofing is in full force.

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