Author Simon Phillips

Time Strip: Before the Fall: Psychological Time-Travel Science Fiction Where the Future Has Already Decided Caelen Marris begins his morning inside a future that appears to have solved the ordinary discomforts of human life. His apartment regulates its own temperature. The city manages traffic before congestion can form. Elevated trains move through London with barely a tremor, personal…

A body is discovered inside a sealed maintenance shaft in Sector Twelve, and the report begins to vanish before the investigation can properly begin. The Shaft Beneath Sector Twelve The first call reached Ralen Orst during the late recovery cycle, while he was standing beneath a row of restored lights that shone too brightly across the lower maintenance office. The lamps had been replaced after…

This Is Not the Usual Japan Post This is not the usual sort of post about living in Japan. There are no sightseeing recommendations, hidden restaurants, convenience-store discoveries or reflections on cherry blossom season. Instead, this begins on an ordinary train journey that ended with me unconscious on a station escalator, followed by my first ambulance ride in the seventeen years I have…

A record of the lower passages after the sounds ceased, where stillness was entered as repair, though those who walked below spoke of a quiet that listened. The Run That Held Its Silence The first man to notice the silence stood below the lane before dawn, with his lamp held at waist height and one hand resting against the damp sidewall where the brickwork curved into the older drain run. His…

Some castles preserve the authority of the families who rule them, while others appear to retain every footstep, fear, and unfinished secret carried through their halls. Bremyra Castle belongs to the second kind. Its stone corridors have witnessed royal childhoods, political marriages, religious authority, private loss, and the uneasy return of magic to a kingdom that has learned to fear those…

How the Viking Age reshaped England through towns, language, law, trade, and the long inheritance left by the settlers from the north. Where the Longships Became Streets The morning light came slowly over York, spreading through river mist and smoke until timber roofs, wharf posts, church towers, and the old Roman stones emerged from the grey. The Ouse moved beneath a skin of pale silver,…

When Memory First Learns to Become Stone The desert in Chronicles of the Spiral Ages is never empty. It carries the weight of vanished paths, old grief, black stone remnants, forgotten names, and marks whose meaning changes as civilisation learns to fear what it has inherited. In this mythic timeline fantasy series, history is more than background. It is the living pressure beneath every story,…

Before kingdoms raised their walls, before temples named their gods, before scribes pressed memory into clay or priests learned how to turn grief into law, the desert already remembered. In the Red Basins, heat moved over the sand like a living thing. Cairns stood where names had begun to fade. Black stone ruins broke the horizon, older than any tribe that wandered beneath them, older than the…

A sealed Fleet detachment arrives after the blackout and begins asking questions no one on Ashfall is meant to answer. The Transport with No Insignia The sealed transport arrived during the first low-traffic cycle after the station-wide blackout, when Ashfall’s public lights had returned and most residents had begun the careful work of treating the darkness as another entry in maintenance…

Free Story | Gothic Folk Horror | Monthly Free Stories When six children return from the forbidden keep with the Walkman their father lost there as a boy, the adults know at once that something has followed them home. Estimated reading time: 70–80 minutes. Reading checkpoints: Start from the beginning Continue from the woods Continue from the house Continue near the ending The story…

A Man of Faith in a Kingdom of Uncertainty In The Veil of Kings and Gods, Bremyra is not a kingdom at peace with itself. Its king is absent, its royal children carry burdens they were not prepared to bear, and rumours of war gather beyond its borders like winter clouds pressing against the hills. Into this unease comes Simion, a magician of the Order, dressed in black, quiet in manner, and far…

Where treaty replaced open war, and England was divided between Saxon and Viking rule. Where the River Marked the Land, and England Began to Divide The road east from Wessex held the rain from the night before, and every rut in the track carried a long strip of pale sky in broken reflection. Dawn had come slowly over the low country, drawing a thin silver light across meadow grass, reed beds,…

When Ashfall Station fell into darkness, the sounds moving through its walls no longer belonged to failing machinery alone. When the Station Went Dark The evening cycle settled over Ashfall Station with the tired calm of a place that had carried strain for so long that strain itself had become part of the atmosphere. Along the habitation ring, food stalls lowered their shutters one by one,…

When Survival Becomes the First Sign of Horror Rain presses against the glass of Vale House, soft enough to seem harmless until it begins to mark the room. On the table lies the recording equipment, the kind chosen because it feels deliberate, contained, almost old-fashioned; a machine with a patient wheel, a notebook, a pencil, a clean space on polished wood where memory is expected to become…

The room is quiet before the record begins. A table holds its polished surface against the morning light. A recorder waits beside paper, pencils, and the small, careful equipment of a man trained to preserve what others are usually content to forget. Outside the windows, winter sits against the glass. Inside Vale House, the ordinary sounds of family life continue through walls and corridors,…

An account of water darkened by ordinary injury, and of the pale lines that gathered around a feather where no bird had entered. The Water That Held the Feather The basin stood beneath the lower tap where the back room narrowed beside the wall. Its rim had been worn pale by hands, cloth, and years of use, with one side smoothed by labour and the other chipped where buckets had struck it in…

A Princess Standing at the Edge of Power In The Unmarked Path, Elana enters the story as a princess shaped by duty, family expectation, and the cold machinery of royal alliance. She is not introduced as a warrior, a ruler, or a magician. She stands beside the burdens of others, close enough to see what they hide, yet bound by a role that expects silence, obedience, and grace. That is what makes…