save your sanity for later.

Posted by Electra Pritchett

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The question of what makes a monster in speculative fiction goes all the way back to founding mother Mary Shelley in Frankenstein (1818), and since then authors have never stopped coming up with plausible answers. With her novellas When Among Crows (2024) and To Clutch a Razor (2025), the first two entries in her Curse Bearer series, Veronica Roth puts her own Polish folklore- and fantasy-inflected spin on the topic, sketching out a world where monstrosity is hotly contested between self-appointed paladins and their prey.

When Among Crows introduces an urban fantasy-esque vision of contemporary Chicago through the eyes of Dymitr, one of the Knights of the Holy Order, who have made it their mission to slay so-called monsters. The Knights are global, and their “monsters” are quasi-mortal creatures of folklores the world over; but as Dymitr and his family are Polish, and he comes to Chicago and its Polish diaspora in search of Baba Jaga, the majority of the creatures in the story are drawn from Polish folklore: owl-shapeshifting strzyga, zmora who are masters of illusions and can taste emotions, południca (noonwraiths), upiór (vampires), and many more.

To find Baba Jaga, Dymitr seeks out a zmora named Ala, who bears a cruel family curse that shows her visions of the Holy Order’s murders. The curse drove Ala’s mother to her death, and now it haunts Ala, but Dymitr offers her a bargain: an end to the curse via a special flower he possesses, in exchange for an audience with Baba Jaga. Dymitr’s efforts to keep his own identity as a Knight under wraps are complicated by his sister, also a Knight, repeatedly showing up to try to help him—for Dymitr is regarded by the rest of his family as suspiciously soft. But if Ala and her strzyga friend Niko Kosta find out who Dymitr really is, they may never trust him again.

As it happens, however, Dymitr’s intentions are genuine: he says he wants to destroy a Knight of the Holy Order, and he means himself. Dymitr’s past with Ala’s family goes deep, and his seeking her out isn’t so random as it appears. The exchange that Baba Jaga eventually offers him is appropriately twisted: she’ll transform him into a zmora, in exchange for the sword that is sheathed next to his spine. The sword is the symbol of the Knights. Like Wolverine’s claws, drawing it hurts every time.

The Knights’ magic, it transpires, is not natural to them and is thus built on pain. Even the naturally magical creatures are apt to ask for things like a fingernail removed from a living donor to fuel their spells. The magic with which Roth imbues her world is bloody, then, and weighty for it, and the characters who walk through her magical Chicago are appropriately complicated, none more so than Ala, Niko, and Dymitr. It’s a tribute to Roth’s character work that Dymitr and Niko’s burgeoning relationship feels completely natural, even when their roles threaten to drive them apart.

Roth mentions in her author’s note for the series’ second volume, To Clutch a Razor, that writing the books has given her an excuse to learn more about Polish folklore and her own heritage, and the books will certainly pique the interest of people who are interested in that sort of thing, or who, like Roth (and me), are of Polish descent but didn’t grow up hearing these stories. There’s a huge variety of folklore creatures featured in the books, very few of which, besides Baba Jaga, I’d ever heard of before, and Roth is particularly good at weaving an individual creature’s unique characteristics into plot threads, especially in To Clutch a Razor. If you think of the genre as a whole, “Polish-inspired fantasy” isn’t a particularly robust category (particularly if you set aside The Witcher series), and Roth seems to have struck a rich vein of inspiration for these books.

As a protagonist, Dymitr is especially interesting. In When Among Crows he’s playing his cards close to his chest, both in the narrative and with the other characters, and the impression the reader gets is that he’s coolly, steadily strong and in control even as he recounts the moral awakening that led him to turn his back on his family and seek out Baba Jaga. Certainly, when he crosses blades with his sister there’s no impression of weakness. In To Clutch a Razor, by contrast, his transformation into a zmora has left him existentially off balance, and he’s not very good at illusions yet. This weakness is exacerbated by the fact that Baba Jaga retaining his sword will slowly weaken, drive him mad, and eventually kill him. In his weakened state, he can’t easily fall back on his prior Knight’s skills and has to rely on Ala for help: Not only has he been crashing in her tiny apartment, but together, they travel to his family compound in Poland to try to steal his family’s grimoire in hopes of trading it to Baba Jaga for Dymitr’s sword. Just as Dymitr tried to keep secret his being a Knight from those he met in Chicago, he’s now trying to keep his transformation into a zmora from his family of Knights, including his sister. Meanwhile, Niko—who serves as his community’s zemsta, an appointed avenger/fighter who takes on the Knights so others don’t have to—has been assigned to kill Dymitr’s mother. But this is an impossible task meant to kill him, as a punishment for not following his superior’s orders to the letter in the previous book.

To Clutch a Razor’s going back to semi-rural Poland is a nice contrast to the prior story’s Chicago setting, and initially there’s an element of grim comedy to everyone sneaking around the Knights’ family compound during a funeral. That air is quickly dispelled when people start getting tortured: Baba Jaga wants Dymitr to kill his beloved grandmother, but Dymitr’s grandmother is completely ruthless, and his mother is worse. Dymitr says he can’t kill his grandmother, but as we see her and his mother through his eyes and as well as Ala’s (since she still remembers the murders that she saw in her visions, even though her curse has been lifted), it’s clear that Dymitr’s relatives have killed many, many “monsters,” a lot of them terribly. Dymitr found the moral clarity to realize that he himself had done wrong, and sought to change his ways. But what do his unrepentant family of torturers, bullies, and murderers deserve? And will he and Niko still be able to look at each other by the end of the book, assuming any of them survive the Knights?

The Knights’ magic is powered by their own pain, and it’s made them self-righteous and cruel, as they prey on those they deem inhuman with no more justification than that assumption. Dymitr’s journey away from the Knights seems like something that’s already completed in When Among Crows, but To Clutch a Razor demonstrates that it’s an ongoing process, and one that Dymitr actively chooses to continue: He doesn’t want to die, even if as a Knight he was prepared to, and so he keeps walking a road that leads farther and farther away from his family and who he was. Where it ends is an open question, but I would happily read as many books as Roth wants to write about this trio.

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Posted by Eugen Bacon

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Illustration by Akintoba Kalejaye

The Sauútiverse is an Afrocentric shared world inspired by the Swahili word “sauti”, which means voice or sound. This project was initially conceived alongside the Syllble base framework and has now thrived as its own entity. Together with a creation myth, this fictional civilisation of five planets orbiting a binary star, has a framework for collaborative worldbuilding based on a blend of African perspectives, histories, biologies, and inspirations. 

The federation of planets draws from real-life languages, cultural practices, rituals, and beliefs, and settles on the power of rich and complex sound magic as the pivot for cross-genre storytelling. A story bible keeps track of the realm, and offers a baseline for new contributors seeking to create in the Sauútiverse. Revelling in our first anthology, the award-shortlisted Mothersound: A Sauútiverse Anthology, founding members are on track for a second anthology Sauúti Terrors—an odyssey of perils: from legends and folktales to inheritances, gods, ancestral spirits, sacred prey, sentient creatures, beings of unreality, sonic storms, solar flares, and meteor strikes. 

As a founding member of the Sauúti Collective, also co-editor of the upcoming Sauúti Terrors, I offer a discourse on how this Afrocentric intergalactic world with its space travel, humanoid and non-humanoid creatures, artificial intelligence and intricate magic system based on sound, oral traditions, and music is finding momentum in a transformative global arena.  

Speculative fiction: It all connects

Speculative fiction is an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy and horror, and its subgenres, and the nature of it can enable responses to global racial, gender, environmental, and other crises, by offering a cosmological timeframe and perspective. In its qualities of non-realistic fiction, speculative fiction offers a safe space with which to explore realistic constructs that may be tougher to tackle or relate to in their fuller constructs or reality, for example: racism, sexuality, social injustice, dysfunction … in a form of subversive activism.

As part of a collective of African writers who have created an Afrocentric Sauútiverse of five planets, two suns, and a spirit moon, a world of science and fantasy, where there is no written language, we play with technology and sound magic to scrutinise the world as we know it, and use speculative fiction as a response to our world. 

Our stories engage with difference, for example empowering women—in my short fiction “The Mystery of the Vanishing Echoes,” a multiverse story published in Sherlock Holmes Is a Girl, Sherlock Holmes is a woman, Shaalok Ho-ohmsi, and her ward Watson is an orphaned child, Wa’watison—in short Wa’wati. 

In another story, ‘Sina, the Child with no Echo,’ published in Mothersound set in the planet Ekwukwe, where everyone has an echo, I empower a disabled child born without echo, yet his neurodivergence becomes a gift and he finds himself a beast hunter, where beasts are very sensitive to echo but they cannot detect him.

The power of the word in the Sauútiverse is captured in the origin story “The Song of Our Mother” by founding members Wole Talabi and Stephen Embleton: 

Khwa’ra. [It is acquired.] 

Ya’yn. [It is uttered.] 

Ra’kwa. [It is released.]

Mothersound, our first Sauútiverse anthology, comprised mostly stories by members of the collective, and a handful of newcomers. 

We’ve written flash fiction, short stories, novellas, and novels in this universe. “Listen, Don’t Touch” by Cheryl S. Ntumy is a cautionary science fiction tale about technology gone amok, available free in Mythaxis Magazine Issue 42.

Xan van Rooyen’s “Heretic Harmonic,” published in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine Issue 94, combines sound magic with music and queer characters. 

My flash fiction “Epistles to Our Mother,” free online, offers a cosmological timeframe and perspective about what it means to be human, and it appears in Text Journal, in a special issue on writing from the fringes.

In novellas, Cheryl S. Ntumy’s Songs for the Shadows is a lyrical, immersive story of time, life and grief, while Wole Talabi’s Descent follows a team of explorers sponsored by kartels down to the planet’s surface, where they try to capture energy from an incredibly powerful sonic storm using new technology that has just been developed and is yet to be tested. 

In novels, Crimson in Quietus is the very first in the Sauútiverse, an inaugural novel that spans across the deepest parts of the five-planet Sauútiverse orbiting a binary star. This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, Australia, as part of the University of Tasmania’s Hedberg Fellowship. The three-month residency helped me crucially research and write the novel, borrowing from Tasmania’s rocky outcrops, natural caves, cascading waterfalls, rivulet trails, and swimming holes, woven into the Sauútiverse and encapsulating my African Australian heritage in a new kind of literary mystery where the investigator is not a detective, but a sound magic scientist. 

Excerpt: Prologue: Crossing to Eh’wauizo

THE CROSSING to Eh’wauizo, the spirit realm, is in the backwaters of a black river. Put a pinch of shadow and blood salt in your pocket, or sew it in a hem. Slip a button, a tooth, a chicken bone, a crystal or a small, shiny thing under your tongue for Ze-ne to collect. The ear of a ghost orchid, or the twig of a dragon-no’s blood tree is also good. It will ward off omens.

Tie a blindfold with a spotless garment—ebony or crimson—and listen for light. You will see silver specters in nondescript shapes turning to wine colors. Don’t mind them. Tend away from echoes and negotiate towards ripples of gentler waters whose lick at your calf then your waist then your chest then your neck especially frightens you as you submerge. Keep treading underwater even as your lungs swell.

Resist an urge to scream. Don’t struggle or hold your breath, even as your arms and legs begin to feel laden with rocks. Relax your body, think of the potential. Your chest is tearing, everything inside burning, but it isn’t. Your head will feel light, lighter still as you recognize the approaching Ze-ne-nazala, dear Ze-ne—the demigoddess of death—who will float you to a place of no fear.

This is Eh’wauizo, the dimension of our ancestors.

Through a different kind of writing, unique worldbuilding, we cultivate inclusive worlds and characters and explore our place in the universe. We engage with difference, subversive activists tackling racism, sexuality, social injustice, dysfunction… in a form of subversive activism. 

Finding continuum

From Mothersound, we have opened the world and expanded it with invitations to others to write in the Sauútiverse, as a pathway to feeding the continuum. 

We share with them our Story Bible, ask them to send a pitch that we review for alignment with the Sauútiverse, and give them a contributor’s contract, and they can write and publish stories in our Afrocentric universe. We are publishing more Afrodescendant newcomers in Sauúti Terrors, our newest anthology.

In the Sauútiverse, as we interrogate our world and imagine unlimited futures, we are finding ourselves and the “other.” Our Black speculative fiction is not exclusive, but inclusive—it’s an invitation that extends to you, the reader: “Come and see our world.” 

Through collaboration with other descendants from Africa, we are creating a continuum of storytelling in shared voices. 

See our Sauútiverse FAQs on how to create with us. 

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