SHORT STORIES: THE TALES OF THE LAST DAYS
Canada is a vast country with a short memory. But it now has short stories!
These short stories remember.
Set in every province and territory, each short stories are rooted in the specific history, geography, and mythology of the place it inhabits. Warriors of the Last Days, its novels and short stories, are building a Canadian mythology that does not exist at this scale. One story at a time. One province at a time.
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TALES OF THE LAST DAYS SHORT STORIES
ALBERTA’S SHORT STORIES TETRAPTYCH
(IN ORDER OF READING)
THE VALLEY
Something has been eating Gaétan Beaumont’s cattle. When he finds it in the coulees, the problem gets considerably larger.
THE WOLF
The cattle losses stopped when the creature left for Calgary. Then they started again. Different this time. Cleaner. Something that knows this land as well as Gaétan does — because it grew up on it.
THE HUNGER
When a wandering operator leaves the city after his mother’s death, a weathered, directionless man must walk northeast across a frozen highway, survive the winter, and confront the father he abandoned before hunger, memory, and old patterns destroy what’s left.
RIBS
Two voices: one furred, one human, collide in a ruined city. A story of hunger as motive and memory as map, told in an intimate, unsettling dual point of view.
EDMONTON SHORT STORIES
THE CARRIONS
The Carrions are the most feared scavengers in Western Canada, they settle only long enough to strip a place of everything worth taking before moving on to the next ruin.
But this time, they have found something different.
Something worth staying for.The Carrions have never wanted a home before. They do now. And they have no intention of sharing it.
MOKSGM’OL
When an unexplained Light alters the old-growth mycorrhizal network, a Gitga’at guardian must trace a cream-white Kermode bear that now carries the forest’s changed memory before that new chemistry remaps the coast and erases his people’s ways.
HAIDA GWAII
When cedar in his shed begins to map a face of its own, an expert carver with more reverence than certainty must reconcile craft, tradition, and a spreading forest intelligence before the waiting pod and the island itself force a reckoning.
OGOPOGO/N’HA-A-ITK
When a man who’s spent eleven years defanging a legend with patter finally meets the real thing at dusk, he must answer a cultural obligation he’s spent his whole life avoiding and decide what he’s willing to carry home.
TOWING THE LINE
A census worker documents a lakeside camp and watches a torch-fisher draw something from the dark. When the line claims a life, she faces a place whose name, and memory, will not be contained.
INTERPROVINCIAL CROSSOVER SHORT STORIES
THE SHIELD
When seismic signatures point from a mine toward an impossible reading at Hudson Bay, a methodical field scientist must head to Churchill to confirm and explain a colossal subsurface anomaly before its slow reanimation threatens the northern continent.
This short story and The Bay, set in Ontario, complete a crossover with The Red Hills story, set in Nova Scotia. This is the second part.
FLIN FLON’S SHORT STORIES TRYPTIC
(IN READING ORDER – FIRST 100 SUBSCRIBERS ONLY)
FLIN FLON’S HOLE
When a salvage team fails to return from Sub‑Level 9, a pragmatic forewoman haunted by loss must lead a small crew into a warm, impossible cavity, map, read, and stop whatever is signalling through stone before curiosity becomes a contagion.
THE EXPECTED
When an underground passage begins speaking in marks only she can read, Olivia, a precise assessor haunted by premonitory intuition, must follow the signal into a sealed chamber to learn its intent before those above seal the level forever.
THE SUNLESS CITY
When Olivia arrives at the central node of a sixty-five-million-year-old city, a reluctant translator of two natures must read the network’s simultaneous language and choose where she belongs, while the world above moves to close the door.
THE BORE
When a lifetime shoreline watcher detects unnatural growths and a trailing depression advancing inland, a meticulous, stubborn recorder (Marie Polchies) must convince her community to evacuate before the bore reaches the road in days and the tide swallows what remains of their shore.
SILENCE
When regional broadcasts stop and institutional communication collapses, a weary bilingual coordinator must keep essential services bilingual and hold his community’s fragile trust before language becomes the fault line that breaks the town.
THE CHEMIST
A Dominion of Damnation Story
Melvin is not happy.
He has been tasked to create an antibiotic against the Draining disease with a compound found in a tree fungi. He is not a biochemist.
He had to build an icebox out of sap, pine wood and bad temper. He is not an engineer.
There is what he calls a wombat chewing up his garden. He knows nothing of pest control. And he really needs a centrifuge. Plus, he is allergic to the fungus.
THE ORPHAN
After losing both parents after the events of the Light, a young Ellie sets out with nothing but the clothes on her back and a plastic bag of royal-gossip magazines. The connection is clear to her: Edward, Diana, the island, the water between. A twelve-year-old, a kiddie pool, and the Northumberland Strait…
The Orphan is a novella about grief dressed up as a quest, and about the stories a child tells herself when the truth is too large to carry.
This story is the first part of a PEI tryptic.
STORIES SET IN NEWFOUNDLAND
SANDRINE’S CROSSING
When a traveling nurse who walked across the ice begins to feel inexplicably “very well,” she must carry a set of notebooks west and find someone who will stop her before whatever follows her crosses the mainland.
THE AFTERMATH
When the painted houses begin to lose their light and people grow tired in a way sleep can’t fix, Mun Wavey, a reserved householder, must find what’s taking the city’s brightness before the harbour’s lifeline and the city itself fall silent
SHORT STORIES SET IN LABRADOR
SOPH
Soph is a mutant in more ways than one. She lives on the outskirts of a community near Wabush whose members believe that mutations are the punishment for the sins of the ancestors. Aside from her striking eyes, she has managed to keep the true extent of her mutation hidden.
But when the body of an executed mutant is carelessly discarded, a chain of catastrophic events is set in motion.
Soon, Soph’s secret is exposed, and she finds herself hunted by the fanatics of the Purity Movement.
THE SAHTÚGOT
A nuclear inspector travels north to document an impossible blue glow and finds a community’s prophecy, a diver’s vanished report, and a lake that keeps what was taken. An atmospheric moral thriller about memory, accountability, and the depth at which guilt settles.
TRIOXIDE
When the thermosyphons fail due to lack of maintenance after the Light, a systems engineer and a Yellowknives Dene rights-holder must salvage truth and names from logs and drafts to prevent history from being erased as arsenic contamination migrates to the river.
ANTIBIOTIC ITERATION
A Dominion of Damnation Story
Gary Mallet has delivered the mail across the Dempster Highway for twenty-two years. Blizzards, washed-out roads, snow worms: none of it has stopped him. He is not about to let a pharmaceutical crew stop him either.
When his truck disappears overnight, along with the rot antibiotic meant for every community in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, Gary does what any reasonable mailman would do: he goes to get it back.
He does not expect help. He does not expect it to come from a waitress named Pascale, who ended up in the wrong camp at the wrong time and turns out to be considerably more useful than she has any right to be.
The mail goes through. It always does.
THE DATE
A Dominion of Damnation Story
Mary Vittrekwa has been trying to introduce Gary Mallet to her niece Pascale for two years. She did not expect the Arctic to do it for her.
Gary stops by for tea with a story about a stolen truck, a pharmaceutical crew, and one remarkably useful civilian. Days later, Pascale arrives with a story about a mailman, a firefight, and one very long night she is doing her best not to think about. Mary listens to both accounts.
She already knows what neither of them will say.
Some things settle on their own. Like tea.
MEAT COVE
When a weary drifter follows a direction and finds Meat Cove, a man who has spent his life noticing patterns must decide whether to accept the village’s generous hospitality or resist becoming the next recorded visitor the sea requires.
ENGORGED
A paramilitary unit is deployed to the forests of Kejimkujik to retrieve traditional Mi’kmaq fungal Midewiwin (medicine), believed to hold the key to a cure for a strange post-Light disease spreading through the remnants of Canada.
What they did not account for is how much the wilderness has changed since the Fallout.
Or how large the ticks have become.
It will be no walk in the park.
INTERPROVINCIAL CROSSOVER SHORT STORIES:
THE RED HILLS
After instruments detect a 1.7-km subsurface anomaly with walls too precise for nature, a pair of scientists must reconcile measurement and myth to stop the tide from uncovering a two-hundred-million-year-old secret that may not want to remain sealed.
This short story and The Bay, set in Ontario, complete a crossover with The Shield story, set in Manitoba This is the third part.
ADLIVUN: THOSE WHO LIVE BENEATH US
When supply lines collapse and the ice begins to behave strangely, a careful hunter named Taktuq must follow a forgotten line of Inuksuit to the sea to learn what the water now hides before whatever waits beneath the lead changes the community’s future forever.
INTERTERRITORY CROSSOVER:
IJIRAIT: TOO FAR NORTH
When he detours to deliver a tropical postcard to Canada’s northernmost community, a stubborn mail driver must document and escape a subtle, contagious distortion of perception, one that steals whole moments from his memory, before the route itself becomes unreadable.
This is the second part of a Dyptic that started with the SPECIAL DELIVERY short story in Yukon.
INTERPROVINCIAL CROSSOVER SHORT STORIES:
THE BAY
When deep scans resolve a hockey-rink-sized hand pressed under the Canadian Shield, a stubborn, old‑school surveyor who trusts rock over instruments must prove an ancient presence is waking and evacuate the coast before the readings cross the danger line.
This short story and The Shield set in Manitoba complete a crossover with The Red Hills story, set in Nova Scotia. The story begins here.
DEATH ROW SHORT STORIES DYPTIC:
CLARENCE
What happened to Clarence before the events of the Death Row novel. How did he get imprisoned in a Maximum Security Prison before the Light, but most importantly, why?
NOMI
What happened to Nomi between the Light and the day, months later, when she ended up in front of a Maximum Security prison with a shotgun, determined to free her husband still stuck inside…
PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND SHORT STORIES TRYPTIC:
THE ORPHAN
After losing both parents after the events of the Light, a young Ellie sets out with nothing but the clothes on her back and a plastic bag of royal-gossip magazines. The connection is clear to her: Edward, Diana, the island, the water between. A twelve-year-old, a kiddie pool, and the Northumberland Strait…
The Orphan is a novella about grief dressed up as a quest, and about the stories a child tells herself when the truth is too large to carry.
RED
A young girl’s attempt to trade her shame for a guardian’s health uncovers an island’s long-buried claim on memory, identity, and the difference between taking and receiving.
THE BRIDGE
A Dominion of Damnation Story
When the bridge breaks and radio goes dark, a quiet woman who learned the old ways from an elder must convince skeptical farmers to shift crops and share Indigenous tidal know-how to survive a winter that could erase the island’s future.
NOVEL RELATED SHORT STORIES
FIRST 100 EXCLUSIVE NOVEL LINKS MONTREAL SHORT STORIES
THE LULLABY
A luminous, intimate post‑apocalyptic short story about a pregnant woman hiding in a cave, an unseen threat beneath the water, and the lessons parents choose to leave their child when world and body are failing.
RENÉE FROM THE SUMP
From a stump above a flooded trench, Renée and Andy must choose whether to stay and try building a life (and possibly a family) in a fragile new settlement, or keep running.
HEADING WEST
When two travelers decide to follow her, a reluctant drifter (Una) must stop them from turning motion into settlement before the system in the east notices the cluster and chooses who survives.
THE CARVER & THE STONE
When a crippled stranger points to a reinforced door beneath the old park, a pragmatic scavenger must choose whether to seize a hidden refuge before the cave’s dark secret consumes them both.
SHORT STORIES FOR ALL NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBERS
THE PENGUINS
When an abandoned exhibit starts producing a scent that rewrites instinct, a reluctant forager must break the lure and warn the living outside.
THANKSGIVING APPERCEPTION
T.A. is taken from the Père Marquette park by the Carvers for “Thanksgiving obligations”.
As he stews in a boiling pot, he reflects on the life choices that lead him there.
THE SÈVEUX DYPTIC SHORT STORIES (FIRST 100 ONLY)
THE PEN PUSHERS
In a post–Light Montreal, a subterranean ruling class called the Sèveux survive by turning wood into bureaucratic “paper” via a chemically precise ink-and-sweat digestion ritual. When their emergency system fails to get the required approvals from a sun-bound group of Fence-Sitters, they escalate from coercive paperwork to open violence.
ZONING WARS
The Pen Pushers escalate the conflict further, issuing a demolition order on Père Marquette park in the hope of forcing the Fence-Sitters to sign the precious document while sweating heaps of the precious lactic acid they need to mingle with the ink for their digestion. It is all out war.
QUEBEC CITY SHORT STORIES
DEAD WATER
After the Light, Quebec City has become a haven for pirates, as people seek to control the navigable way in the hopes of restarting trade.
Phil, a rebellious young corsair, leads a rebellion against the outrageous taxes being levied by the powers that be and the cruel pirates that enforces it for them.
TUCKER
His constant habit of quoting scripture and his brass cross have earned him a new nickname: the Friar.
He spends his days working for the Kingz and his nights drinking to forget everything he has lost in Wabush.
|When he meets Rob, a man from Anticosti, and his towering companion, Big John, he begins to believe his life may still have a purpose.
God willing.
STILLNESS
When a relentless gale wind gives way to impossible stillness, a weather‑hardened farmer must outrun and expose an ecological horror spreading from the north before the silent prairie becomes a monument of bones.
THE LEGACY
When an emergency team is dispatched to an unresponsive potash facility, they must stop an emergent plant intelligence from reaching the surface and reproduce or watch the prairie be sown with something that learned to eat humans.
REGINA
The Swarm razes through the Capital. Uncannily told through the point of view of Hunger. One of the strangest short story in the entire Warriors of the Last Days Universe.
THE TOES DYPTIC:
THE TOE
When a wolverine bites off his toe while checking traps, a methodical Yukon trapper must track it, retrieve the relic, and deliver it to the Sourdough Saloon to complete a nearly century-old ritual before the loss becomes meaningless.
NIGHT OF THE LIVING TOES
Two years after the Christmas Eve events of Cold Storage, the purple Aurora is back and with it, motility into 62 dessicated mummified toes that go on a rampage inside a Gold Rush era style hotel…
Edouard is the only man that stands out between heat seeking gnarlies and a much needed pedicure.
Only in Yukon.
INTERTERRITORY CROSSOVER:
SPECIAL DELIVERY
When sightings of strange bipedal figures appear along his route, veteran mail driver Gary Mallet must deliver one impossible postcard and keep the communities he serves safe before the thaw unlocks something older and more dangerous.
This is the first part of a Dyptic that ends with the IJIRAIT short story in Nunavut.
SHORT STORIES DETAILS:
All our newsletters subscribers can enjoy short stories set in the universe of Warriors of the Last Days.
The short stories can be read in a ePUB format on a dedicated page. You need to have subscribed to either our First Premium newsletter or our general newsletter to be able to read the short stories material.
Each short stories are set in a different province or territory and explore different situations and themes, with different characters that are not necessarily the characters from the novels.
From the silly, the folkloric, the horrifying to the mythical, those short stories will explore a side of Canada you have never seen before.
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Stéphane Roy is a lifelong reader and writer with a deep love for science fiction, apocalyptic worlds, and tightly constructed mysteries. This is his first novel. He lives in the Yukon with his dog and his aquarium, where long winters, silence, and wide, sometimes glowing, skies leave plenty of room for imagining the end of the world, and what might come after it. He is also waiting, with cautious optimism, for the aliens to finally reveal themselves and straighten us all out.