The Night Office never sleeps. For more than a hundred and fifty years, the Night Office has worked in the shadows, keeping all manners of tentacled beasties, gibbering madnesses, and slavering six-eyed goats from devouring you, your neighbor, and your neighbor's dog. And now, the Night Office needs you. This Advanced Psychological Strategies assessment is meant for field operatives who have just returned from a mission. It will validate your mental integrity, verifying that you have not been breached by space jellies or other malignant entities. Successful completion of an APS assessment will demonstrate a field operative's readiness to continue the perpetual battle against the Great Old Ones. WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:How to construct a therapeutic personality which can verify your mental integrity.How to navigate the Dark Labyrinth.How to acknowledge lingering psychic trauma that has prevented you from making friends.How...

The Hollow Prince is the second act of Mark Teppo's first collection, The Court of Lies. These six stories wander into strange cities—urban spaces where wolves live, where the sky bends back on itself, and where the back alleys hide dangerous remnants of old dreams. These are stories of liars, heartbreakers, and fabulists; the way they see the world is undoubtedly the way it truly is. Welcome back to the Court of Lies. The Hollow Prince is your guide, and you should not trust his disarming smile . . .

Rudolph! is a first-person account of the behind-the-scenes workings at the North Pole. Narrated by Bernard Rosewood, one of the elves of the North Pole Consortium, the story begins with Santa's realization that a young girl's request to get her dad back for Christmas isn't going to happen. Dad, you see, died in a car accident on a snowy road shortly after Thanksgiving. The NPC can do a lot, but they can't do miracles. Enter Rudolph, who has been hairless, cranky, and perpetually irradiated since the unfortunate malfunction of the Nuclear Clock in 1964. Rudolph is a survivor of the worst accident in the 400-plus years of NPC delivery, and if there is anyone on staff who believes in miracles more than jolly Saint Nick, it's Rudolph. Bernie, in a valiant effort to keep Christmas from going off the rails, is swept up into a Heaven-storming, Hell-crusading, Night of Bad Musical Numbers adventure to ensure that every child wakes up with presents on Christmas morning....

Issue #101 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies online magazine, featuring stories by Mark Teppo and Jack Nicholls.

The King in Scarlet is the final act of Mark Teppo's first collection, The Court of Lies. These five stories leap with utter abandon from the cliff of the real, journey far north the frozen top of the world, rattle along old train tracks, and urge you to ingest suspect psychedelics. These are stories of liars, heartbreakers, and fabulists; the way they see the world is undoubtedly the way it truly is.   At least one sentence of the previous paragraph is true. There is no escaping The Court of Lies. The horned King beckons you to approach his throne . . .

The Earth is dying. Humanity — over-breeding, over-consuming — is destroying the very planet they call home. Multinational corporations despoil the environment, market genetically modified crops to control the food supply, and use their wealth and influence and private armies to crush anything, and anyone, that gets in the way of their profits. Nothing human can stop them. But something unhuman might. Once they did not fear the sun. Once they could breathe the air and sleep where they chose. But now they can rest only within the uncontaminated soil of Mother Earth—and the time has come for them to fight back against the ruthless corporations that threaten their immortal existence.They are the last guardians of paradise, more than human but less than angels. They call themselves the Arcadians. We know them as vampires. . . .About the AuthorMark Teppo (born May 21, 1968) is an American author of contemporary fantasy and science fiction. His work is strongly peppered with references to occult concepts, most commonly those of Hermeticism and Alchemy. Prior to his current tenure as a fiction writer Teppo was a music journalist working both as a staff reviewer and editor for various publications such as Earpollution, Igloo Magazine, Earplug, and OPi8.com. Teppo is also Chief Creative Officer of Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad.