Abandoned Towers 1st Annual Artist's Anthology

From The Song of Jaelyn by Craig Comer:

     For a time, Jaelyn watched the shore crawl past as the deck tottered and creaked under her. Without their main sails raised, their progress was painfully slow. Doubt and frustration began to steal her thoughts, and her joyful song turned into a mournful dirge.
     She spied a half-ruined stone wall perched on a bluff. Behind it, a spire rose like a broken finger. Whatever peoples had once lived there had long been extinguished; now wild vines and grasses claimed dominion. The sight warmed her spirits. Nature's power was eternal. It could conquer any foe, no matter its size or strength or bent.
     She summoned that power and let it flow through her. She could feel the nurturing fluid that rushed through the vines as they wove into the hard stone, and the strength of the grass as its roots dug tight into the soil. Beyond her sight, she sensed streams gushing down embankments and through glens. Rocks became slick and struggled under the weight of water.
     But as she drank in the wellspring of life, she began to sense Phorthes growing ever closer. The creature would not let her go so easily she knew in her heart. He was too cruel. She'd watched him allow desperate sailors to drift for days on flotsam, terrified and dying of thirst, before finally coming to rip them apart with his fanged maw and sharp claws.

From Mantle of Darkness by Wesley Lambert

     "Captain, what do you know about phantom islands?"
     Swan reclined against the bulkhead, intrigued.
     "Any seaman worth his salt knows about them, ma’am. They’re land masses that have a charming way of not staying put, or disappearing altogether. Some lie so low in the water that they get swamped by the waves, over time. Others are nothing more than mirages, the gifts of John Barleycorn, or errors in charting. I saw one, myself-years ago, about ten miles off Boston Harbor. A trick of the sun, no doubt."
     "Eugene very much believes in their tangible reality," Damaris Stanbury said. "He goes through phases of mind. Most days, he’s content at home, with me. But sometimes he hears the siren’s call to adventure, and woe to me that he hails from wealth, easily affording the indulgence of these whims. This is one of those times."