Today’s story offers a stellar glimpse inside the long road to lunar redemption.

The Lost Place
[Slice of Life] • 3,813 words

The most important day of her young life, the hardest challenge she’d have to face, and she failed… or had she? The thunderous sound, the dazzling light, the surge of magic… then she wakes up in a place bereft of all light and shape and sound, alone…

Sometimes, it just takes a spark to rekindle the light.

FROM THE CURATORS: Reading this story made us unanimously agree on two things: one, that we really dislike stories “starting with the protagonist blinking in confusion at a surrounding sea of featureless darkness,” as AugieDog put it. “They make me purse my lips like I’ve just taken a bite out of a lemon.”  And two, that The Lost Place solidly earned its feature nevertheless.  “It works here because of the context,” AugieDog said, while Horizon’s attention was captured by the sharp prose: “‘If this earns my vote,’ I said to myself while I was reading, ‘it will be the line about setting herself on fire which pushed it over the edge.’  It did, and that was.”

What happened to redeem the opening cliche?  “The author took two well-used tropes and set them together delicately to create something infinitely greater,” Present Perfect said. “Twilight learning to believe in herself, coached by a still-banished Princess Luna? That’s some really heavy, emotional stuff.”  AugieDog also praised that characterization: “The story also gives us a filly Twilight who is definitely on her way to becoming the character we know from the show, and gives us a link between Twilight and Luna early on in Twilight’s career.”  Horizon thirded that: “The story’s at its best when it’s showcasing the interplay between the two characters.”

We were also impressed that the story just kept serving up surprises.  “There was one sentence which brought tears to my eyes … it turned the whole story on its head,” Present Perfect said.  Horizon agreed, noting that “this is a story which rewards the reader’s patience,” and AugieDog summed it up: “It’s a quiet story in which stuff nonetheless happens, and I always like it when authors can pull that off.”

Read on for our author interview, in which Martian discusses amusing wrecks, stellar accomplices, and gas station haute cuisine.
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