Parch Marks

In a future Britain, archeologist Eva Sinclair investigates the mysterious fern-like patterns left by drought around the long-dry riverbed of an ancient massacre site.

Eva Sinclair, TV archaeologist, is struggling after an extramarital affair leaves her broke and dealing with a festering media scandal. She jumps at the chance to head to York to join an excavation of a unique Bronze Age site in the seceded North of England. Of particular interest are the highly atypical and mysterious parch marks in the shape of coiling ferns that lie alongside a harrowing, ancient mass grave. Eva is fascinated, but with protests becoming ever more violent in the wake of drought and water rationing, she finds loyalty to her colleagues conflicting with personal ambition.

1,300 BC. Ray is known in her village to have the Sense – the ability to feel the presence of the Serpent of the River, the Woman of the Spring, the Boar and all the other spirits that allow her and her community to survive and thrive. Plummeting temperatures and a series of failed harvests, however, have left them flailing. When a powerful tribe from the south arrives to seek hospitality and the healing powers of the Spring, Ray is left feeling she would be better off blessed with the ability to control the more emotionally incontinent members of her clan.

Anna Orridge

Anna Orridge is the author of the novel Phenigris, and her short horror fiction has been published by in Mslexia, The Gothic Nature Journal, The Crow’s Quill and Ghost Orchid Press. One of her short pieces of dark speculative fiction, ‘Backdrop’ was adapted into an audiodrama, and in 2024 she contributed to ‘Short Scares: Two Sentence Horrors anthology’ and Luna Press anthology ‘The Utopia Of Us’