After a week of dice rolling and vote collecting the results of round three of the Equus Battle Royal are in. It was very tight this time around, but in the end

Our victor is:

Story Title: A Mother Unicorn’s Advice to Her Daughter

Author: J. J. Roth

Equine Combatant’s Name: Mother “Badass” Unicorn

Species: Unicorn

She will be moving on to compete in future rounds, but not right away. Starting tomorrow our combatants will be:

A Complete Mare by Tamsin Showbrook

Vs.

Rue the Day but Laura VanArendonk Baugh

Excerpt from “To Ride a Steel Horse” by Stephanie Cain:

“Not this time.” Jack King was a white-bearded guy of about seventy, with sinewy forearms and powerful shoulders. He was shaking his head. “It’s dead, Demeter. Threw a rod. That’s a whole engine rebuild. Don’t throw good money after bad.”

Demy blinked several times, staring at him. In six years, nothing had been too much for Jack to fix. She’d bought the used Triumph as an act of defiance in the face of turning twenty-five—her sister had laughed and called it a quarter-life crisis. That had been the only truly good thing about her twenty-sixth year. That had been the year the magic took her mother and sister both, but Demy had gotten through it because of the, well, zen of motorcycles.

“I’m sorry, D,” Jack said, patting her shoulder. “Go next door and make Bear feed ya. I’ll drop ya by home when I close up shop.”

Demy shook her head. Jack was open until seven, and it was already past six. She didn’t want to be stuck at home with five more hours to get past midnight—there was too much temptation there. As much as she’d refused to follow in the footsteps of her matriarchs, she hadn’t been able to part with the various magical paraphernalia she had inherited. If she were home when the witching hour of Samhain hit…

“It’s fine. I’ll get Bear to take me home when he closes.”

Jack’s thick, white eyebrows shot up, but he smirked. “Raise a glass for me, too, then,” he said. “Happy Halloween.”

Demy trudged across the parking lot, her boot heels grating on the gravel. There were two dozen bikes parked outside the roadhouse, mixed with a few trucks from local non-bikers, because Bear made the best breaded tenderloin in north central Indiana.

She paused halfway across the parking lot and shoved her hands in her jeans pockets, tilting her head back to stare up at the stars that were beginning to appear. This bike had gotten her through the toughest years of her life. How was she supposed to just turn her back on it?

You could fix it, whispered a voice in the back of her head. Magic can do anything.

“Not anything,” Demy snapped, her voice harsh. It hadn’t brought her sister back. It hadn’t kept her mother from dying.

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After a week of dice rolling and vote collecting the results of round three of the Equus Battle Royal are in.

Our victors are:

Story Title: Riders in the Sky

Author: V. F. LeSann

Equine Combatant’s Name (if known): Peregrine

Species: Damned soul

They will be moving on to compete in future rounds, but not right away. Starting tomorrow our combatants will be:

A Mother Unicorn’s Advice to Her Daughter by J.J. Roth vs. To Ride a Steel Horse by Stephanie Cain

Excerpt from “Above the Silver Sky” by Daniel Koboldt:

“What do you want for your birthday, Neshka?” father asked.

There was nothing I truly needed. The rain that fed our valley gave us grain and berries and dew squash. We had sheep and hogs for meat, goats for milk. Bees for honey, and a never-ending stream of cool clean water. But mostly, we lived on the mushrooms. Soon my father would begin to teach me the arts of mushroom-tending, and one day I’d take over for him. I watched a trickle of rainwater as it meandered down a stepladder of red-and-white toadstools, each one just shorter than the next, and told myself it would not be so bad. But my lips betrayed my heart to him, and I said, “I want to see the horses.”

“Neshka,” my father said, in his sternest voice. “You know better than to ask for that.”

“Please, father? I only want to look.”

“That’s exactly what your mother said. She only wanted to look, and then the horses took her away from us. Is that what you want? To leave?”

“Of course not.” My voice sounded as small as I felt.

“Good.”

A pool of vague sadness welled up in me, for I’d meant to fight harder to see the horses. He would say no, then I’d throw a fit, and we’d meet somewhere in the middle. Maybe that was creeping up to the edge of the prairie-lands to watch them from a distance. Maybe it was simply hearing the story once more about my mother and the time she rode one. But the hurt in his voice took me aback, and his accusation stilled the arguments upon my lips.

Not that it mattered anyway, because at that moment, the rain stopped.

The gentle patter of raindrops faded into silence, a numbness against my ears. The trickle of water on those red-and-white toadstools slowed, then died. My father and I looked at each other, then up at the silver sky in askance.

“Has this ever happened before?” I asked.

He frowned up at the sky. “No.”

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