Announcing the Season 10 Round One Lunar Award Winner

Celebrating the best Fantasy stories on Substack

The year is off to a great start in the realm of Fantasy. We had so many worthy tales that I agreed with Daniel there should be two runners-up.

Daniel read and judged the submissions without knowing who authored them. Because of this, his write-up below focuses on the heart of each story and why it spoke to him. He also went above and beyond with a thoughtful summary of several honorable mentions and other stand-out stories. I appreciate the time and dedication he spent highlighting the hard work of the indie writers in the Lunar community.

Congratulations to the winner,

Katharine Kapodistria

, and the runners-up, as well as to everyone who participated in the Lunar Award’s first round of 2025. You deserve praise!

Please read and share these stories widely to support the independent authors on Substack. Your likes, comments, and encouragement do not go unnoticed. You make these stories worth celebrating. ~ WM

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Lunar Award Winner | Skellig by Katharine Kapodistria

The winner of this iteration of the Lunar Awards was “Skellig,” a story that takes place on the barren crags of Skellig Michael off the coast of Ireland in the medieval period, at a time when the choppy waters of the straits are traversable only by wicker-framed skinboats. The action of the story centers on the main character, a monk named Oissene, an elemental creation whose sympathetic relationship to the isle’s rocks exemplifies Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy. Oissene was born in a storm and is certain he shall die in one. This aspect of the tale parallels G. Ranger Wormser’s short story “Haunted,” in which an amnesiac rescued from the sea during a violent storm is later revealed to be the very embodiment of the turbulent waters he has been drawn from.

The strength of “Skellig” lies in its tone and diction. It is written in plain, unadorned English. Inexperienced writers tend to line every rift with ore, filling page after page with purple panels. But the author of “Skellig” employs restraint and verbal concision (with the story being less than 1,700 words). Yet each word is operative and carries within it all the information the reader needs to trace the arc of the plot: “He knows where she lives — in a cave at the edge of the world. He is already at the edge of the world, so it cannot be far.” Readers of Isak Dinesen or John Gardner will recognize the potency of this spare style for fables and allegories: “Now the red of the sky was fading. In Russia the tsar, with ice on his eyelashes, was declaring war on Poland.” (Freddy’s Book, John Gardner, Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, p. 214)

Although “Skellig” is ostensibly set in a post-Benedictine Christian world, given that ora et labora has become an established mantra among the holy brethren we meet, the eldritch gods formerly invoked by the riddling Celtic olaves are very much alive. The tale is a comedy in the humanist understanding of the word, which is to say its protagonist is a Dyonisiac figure cut out of the cloth of Apollonian tradition who has been made to pass through a gauntlet of moral probations and Ovidian metamorphoses before achieving at the end of his journey a spiritual ascension (anabasis), a la manera Dante’s pilgrim in La Divina Commedia, and a rebirth—or, in this case, Brahmanic reincarnation—accompanied by a recognition (anamnesis) of his place among the rocks and his fellow ascetics on the island.

Skellig

Runners-Up

Blood and Death by

Maximilian P Siddell

“Blood and Death” is set in the rugged highlands of a brutal world of chthonian forces manipulated by sigils painted on the skins of the living and dead. It is a revenge story that breathes the haunted air of Macbeth and is told from the point of view of a warrior woman whose husband has been slain by an opposing tribe. The story is fully realized within a brief compass (less than 2,000 words), and the verbs the author chooses move the action along at a breathtaking gallop that makes for believable descriptions of the stress and rigors of hand-to-hand combat. The vatic abilities granted to the so-called Deathspeakers, along with an elaboration on the social bonds that exist between those who walk the earth and those interred beneath it, concretize this preliterate society and lends the tale an authenticity that makes the reader want to see the world expanded and further developed.

Blood and Death

The Bard of Bayonne by

Jack Massa

“The Bard of Bayonne” is a tale of magical realism set in a tenement in Bayonne, New Jersey, sometime in the mid-to-late 20th century. The narrator tells the story of his cousin, a boy who acquires preternatural insight and the eloquence of a bard when he inadvertently tastes an enchanted stew his Irish mother (a witch who has learned the dark arts from a voodoo practitioner in the same building) is preparing. In many places, the language assumes the velvety rhythm of some of the more intoxicating passages in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Though it could have been strengthened by eliminating a few sentences in the hallucination sequence at its core, the story is so well-paced and expertly told that, upon finishing it, I scrolled back to reread several parts, including a visionary moment when the narrator and his cousin (as boys) have been psychically transported from a playground to the pier and are looking out across the oily waters of the bay at the Manhattan skyline in the uncertain light of a cloudy day.

The Bard of Bayonne

Honorable Mentions

The Milkmaid by

Hanna Delaney

“The Milkmaid” would have fit nicely in one of the Fairy Book anthologies of the Scottish litterateur Andrew Lang. In it, we are introduced to a society of milkmaids who, as they labor away, gossip and talk idly of “love and happy endings”—because of all the stories submitted this was the most romantic. An anonymous suitor woos the stubbornest girl of the lot through a series of cryptic letters borne to her on the wings of white doves. The tale ends with a clever reveal that hits the reader with the suddenness of a mask on a stick lifted away at a domino ball.

Tragedy Mill by

Keith Long

One of the more unique stories (and the one I found to be the most moving) was a story entitled “Tragedy Mill.” In this world, the author creates a class of street-busking puppeteers called “Finger Weavers” who wear their curtained stages on a harness equipped with an apparatus that allows them to swing the entire stage behind them so that they can wear it like a rucksack. The story is so ingeniously constructed that it is difficult to summarize in a way that does it justice. Suffice it to say, the main character plans a performance before the king’s court knowing his father whom he has not spoken to in years will be among the spectators; and, like the mummers’ performance of “the Mousetrap” in Hamlet, he is hoping to elicit a response from the man he still loves.

Aunt Ellis by

Douglas McClenaghan

“Aunt Ellis” was, hands down, the most cinematic of the stories submitted. The dialogue, which is woven into the narrative so precisely that whatever each character is doing, or thinking is fused to what they are saying, reminds one of the electric badinage between Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley in Absolutely Fabulous. But despite the sophisticated hilarity, a menacing thread runs through this deviously plotted story, which involves a cursed heirloom and the dysfunctional family whose members have been trying for generations to fob the damned thing off on one another.

Additional Commentary

Several stories exemplified a “lunar” theme, likely in response to the prompt.

“The Trick Play” is a humorous take on the trope of the wizard’s duel. Amid the flash and bang of the melee (with its spectators gasping in the stands), we get a catalog of the respective properties of the moons and their influences that would have been at home in a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel.

“The Moon Queen” is a story about the fae folk, specifically a fertility goddess, who, when we first meet her, is in a makeup chair getting spruced up before she is to ride out in a horse-drawn coach across fields of wheat, like the actress in a Restoration masque. But the story is also one about a proud father and his distraught daughter.

In “Court of Miracles,” we are introduced to a world of three moons and the contending nations under their respective magical sway. It is a story in which the armies wage war with muskets and pistols.

A few authors adapted characters or plots from the myths of the world.

“Mulan Searches for the Medicine of Immortality” is written in the style of a Ming dynasty xiao shuo, such as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and begins with a lyrical set-piece that shades into the main action. The weaver-warrior, Hua Mulan, enters a teahouse to meet a famous character from European folklore who has traveled the Silk Road to join the eponymous heroine on a quest for an object of mutual interest.

“The Red Valkyrie” draws inspiration from the deep wells of Norse mythology, describing battles in an Asgard populated by the fallen einherjar and the frightful draugr.

Some stories were set against the backdrop of an original and deftly-limned world.

“Sinkhole” centers around a geological phenomenon in a gray realm whose gloom is penetrated by the dim glimmers of bug lamps and cigarette lighters. A group of monks belonging to an obscure faith delves into the unplumbed depths of the abyss, which gradually yields its terrifying secrets.

“Wyrmslayer” is set in a world that bears the hallmarks of the Dutch Golden Age. A band of seaborn adventurers journey to an island in search of the wyrms whose nature and morphology are described in a passage that might have been taken from a Counter-Reformation bestiary.

“One Head as Tribute” channels the pulp style of Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague De Camp to tell of a warrior faced with the gruesome dilemma of removing the head of a giant he has slain, with the ending of the story grimly circling back to its beginning and title.

“The Lucky One” takes place in an unlucky dystopia reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, in which an elite caste of physicians controls the greater share of mankind by dispensing, in a piecemeal fashion, a cure to a mysterious ailment. But in this world, we learn that in time, the afflicted can become the very cure they seek.

Some tales were notable for the vehicles the authors chose to tell their stories.

“Witches Ground” is reminiscent of the lighthearted novels of Piers Anthony. It centers around a Holmes/Watson duo of sleuths (royal spies in this case) investigating a grisly murder whose clues lead them to a seaside region populated by witches. The prose is snappy and well-executed, often reading like a Mickey Spillane potboiler. The plot is immersive because the author is adept at the subtle detail: the cobbles out front of a pub near a waterfall are damp from the spray landing on the shingles and running down eaves.

“The Mirror,” set in the Wild West, centers around a family secret. A bearded stranger arrives at a remote house on the prairie and tells a tale of a magic mirror made of Venetian glass. Each scene is filled with tension, and the story that the stranger tells has echoes of “The Parable of the Three Rings” in Boccaccio’s Decameron.

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Closing Thoughts

Thanks, Daniel, for judging this round. I’m always impressed with your ability to analyze stories, both emerging and historical. If you, too, enjoyed Daniel’s commentary and his taste in fiction, check out his Substack.

I’ll contact the top 3 authors shortly to provide them with their optional offers and prizes. If they do not accept, the publication offer will be presented to the next highest-scoring story. At the end of the year, the accepted stories will be compiled into a book and published.

Round 2 (Horror) will have an open call on March 15, hosted by Shaina Read. In the meantime, we’ll prepare to receive your stories behind the scenes. Also, the First Chapter award is still under development, but the changes will be worth the wait. Thanks for your patience!

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List of participating stories and authors

Skellig by Katharine Kapodistria

The Lucky One by Amy Letter

The Red Valkyrie by David R.R. Greenberg

Blood and Death by Maximilian P Siddell

Peaches by Cameron Scott

Wyrmslayer by Ian Dunmore

Quick Recipe of a Wicked Soup for Kings and Queens by Isha Jain

The Bard of Bayonne by Jack Massa

Witches Ground by Leland Myrick

The Ballad of George by Stephen Duffy

Aunt Ellis by Douglas McClenaghan

Reality Show by Vu Phan

Heavenly Blue by Kerry Sutherland

Mulan Searches for the Medicine of Immortality by E. H. Lau

The Moon Queen by Melinda Craig

Cold Feet by Randall Hayes

Captain Aria by Caro Henry

The Gift by Kanwar P. S. Plaha

The Milkmaid by Hanna Delaney

Sinkhole by Brannley Miller

Forget-Me-Not by Liz Zimmers

The Mirror by Bridget Riley

Court of Miracles by Josh Tatter

A Thousand Eyes by Jeet Bhattachariya

One Head as Tribute by Eric Falden

The Trick Play by Michael S. Atkinson

Wraithcotte by Sam Rake

The “Mausoleum” by Mercedes de Santiago

Dragon Dance by H. A. Titus

Discordance Among the Songseers by Redd Oscar

Tragedy Mill by Keith Long

Some Gossip That Fell into My Ear When I Walked into the Auld Mathom Shoppe by Penrose Gulch

The Throne Room by Kaily House

Prince Rostflugelfee by Andrew Paul Ward

The Worlds Within by Nick Winney

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