## One Message Remains

**Author:** Premee Mohamed  
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**Description:**  
Pageantry, pomp, pretense, and peril—"The General's Turn," originally published in The Deadlands, drew readers into the dark world of a ceremony where Death herself might choose to join the audience... or step onto the stage. Award-winning author Premee Mohamed presents three brand new stories set in this morally ambiguous world of war and magic.

**Included Stories:**  
1. **One Message Remains**  
   Major Lyell Tzajos leads his team on a charity mission through the post-armistice world of East Seudast, exhuming the bones and souls of dead foes for repatriation. But the buried fighters may have one more fight left in them—and they have chosen their weapons well.
2. **The Weight of What is Hollow**  
   Taya is the latest apprentice of a long-honored tradition: building the bone-gallows for prisoners of war. But her very first commission will pit her skills against both her family and her oppressor.
3. **Forsaking All Others**  
   Ex-soldier Rostyn must travel the little-known ways by night to avoid his pursuers, for desertion is punishable by death. As he flees to the hoped-for sanctuary of his grandmother's village, he is joined by a fellow deserter—and, it seems, the truth of a myth older than the land itself.

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## Posts about this title from Tattooed Bibliophiles

**Tattooed Bibliophiles**  
**Zee**  
**• Jul 1**

**_Officially,_ the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction is an annual $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction. **  
This award is intended to recognize those writers Ursula spoke of in her 2014 National Book Awards speech—realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.**  
**_Practically,_ it's a TBR for those of us who read sci-fi with purpose, with intent, with a critical reading eye looking for "the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope." (-a quote from Ursula herself)**

**Shortlist for this year:**  
- **_Audition_ by Pip Adam** (Coffee House Press, June 10, 2025)  
- **_Sunward_ by William Alexander** (Saga Press. Sept 16, 2025)  
- **_Call and Response_ by Christopher Caldwell** (Neon Hemlock, Oct 14, 2025)  
- **_Midnight Timetable_ by Bora Chung**, translated by **Anton Hur** (Algonquin, Sept 4, 2025)  
- **_The Works of Vermin_ by Hiron Ennes** (Tor Books, Oct 14, 2025)  
- **_Notes from a Regicide_ by Isaac Fellman** (Tor Books, April 15, 2025)  
- **_Mad Sisters of Esi_ by Tashan Mehta** (DAW Books, Sept 9, 2023)  
- **_One Message Remains_ by Premee Mohamed** (Psychopomp, Feb 11, 2025)  
- **_Slow Gods_ by Claire North** (Orbit, Nov 18, 2025)

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