SHORT STORY: Water and Brimstone

“It is a lonely thing, to a die in a world that is not your own.”

My latest short story, “Water and Brimstone,” is now available in the October 2025 One-Year Anniversary issue of Macabre Magazine, just in time for Halloween! 

It is the story of two brothers in colonial America who uncover a way to free their village from the rule of five despotic warlocks. It is a story of the magic of true names, of transformation, and of parallel worlds. I hope you enjoy it.

My deepest thanks to Jimmy Blakemore, Alexis Samuels, and the readers and editorial staff at Macabre Magazine for selecting this story. This story is very important to me. I submitted it twelve times over the course of a year and a half, so I am thrilled that it has finally been given a home. 

Only keep scrolling if you’re interested in background information on what inspired the story.

This story came from the collision and combination of a few different ideas.

First was actually a bit of inspiration from the movie Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. One of many striking images from that film is the iteration of Vulture that breaks through into Gwen Stacy’s world. The character is styled like one of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and accompanied by grandiose, operatic voices. He’s a villain. He’s dangerous. But it struck me as incredibly lonely, this anachronistic being yanked from his own world and trapped in a bizarre parallel one just in time to be captured. The lone representative of a world of Renaissance pencil-and-paper, thrust into a future world of chrome and color, surrounded suddenly by forces fighting to shut him down. The seed was planted for the opening paragraph before I knew how the rest of the story would go. Somebody from a bygone era, trapped by the cruel mechanics of a parallel world, stuck on the other side of the looking glass.

This idea linked up with another, more general idea. Many people describe the original Star Wars film as sci-fi-fantasy: a fantasy adventure at heart with sci-fi cosmetics. I was intrigued by the idea of the opposite: something magical with a fantasy aesthetic, but with a sci-fi concept as its engine. The idea of an antique parallel world inspired by Across the Spider-Verse instantly coupled with this reverse fantasy-sci-fi. It was time to stick a multiverse plotline into a magical setting centuries past, not today, not in the future.

The last bit of inspiration that got rolled into this story came from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea stories, along with other stories that dabble with the magic of the “true name.” The essential name for a thing that, when wielded, gives the speaker power over the thing. It was a fantasy concept that I was anxious to explore, and that naturally found its way into this story as well.

There’s more that went into this story, but it was important to me to share some information about the amazing works that inspired me over the course of writing this. Thank you for reading. Thank you for your time. I never want to take it for granted. Wow, I’m appreciative to Macabre for sharing this one. Friendly reminder to other writers on their journey to publication that patience is your best weapon in this journey. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Keep submitting! And keep writing!