2d6 Things About Waste Flowers by Bryn Hammond

I don't plan on doing anything like full-fledged reviews on this blog, but sometimes I'm going to roll two dice and tell you that many things about something I enjoyed reading, playing, or watching. To start off the series, here are some thoughts on Waste Flowers, a novella by Bryn Hammond.

Number Rolled: 8

1. In Waste Flowers, a nomad named Goatskin and her bandit captain girlfriend Qi Miao escort a merchant caravan over the desert steppes of the Gobi, during what might be called a fantastical reimagining of the era of Genghis Khan (styled Tchingis Khan in these page).
2. The book features long stretches of talk amongst people seated at camp fires, coming to know one another and deciding how and whether their fates will intertwine. This is how news travels; it’s also part of how the world is made.
3. The chief modes of the book might be categorized as: people talking and bargaining, people traveling over perilous terrain, people fighting terrible things. (Sometimes the terrible things are monsters, sometimes they’re other people.)
4. There is a compact, often blunt poetry to the writing, economical in the way of the nomad bearing only what is necessary over the steppes. Then sometimes it bursts with opulence and color when some matter of sorcery or natural wonder seizes the tale. Here is a paragraph treating with undead soldiers as well as the landscape that birthed them: “Corpses bulged at the door—burst bodies stitched loosely together again by ivy, cavities inhabited by flowers. Outside, in their afternoon halt at a chance-found well, their horses had kicked through those flowers’ crimson splashes, fetlocks entangled in ground vines. Desert-steppe in a rare wet spring meant sudden rashes of wildflowers over miles of the gritty black sand and gravel. Gobi ivy might not be seen for years then at a trickle of rain crawl everywhere.”
5. Bad things happen to some camels in this book.
6. Waste Flowers was published by Brackenbury Books in 2025 as one half of a “Double-Edged Book,” formatted in the style of the old Ace Doubles. Flip the book over and you’re greeted by the cover of another novella, Walls of Shira Yulun by Dariel R.A. Quiogue. Having read and enjoyed Hammond’s book very much, I look forward to reading Quiogue’s.
7. “Horse and Boar,” a new story featuring Goatskin, was published in a similarly formatted zine, with a story by Milton Davis on the flip side. The zine is a collaboration between Brackenbury and newcomer Swords Against! magazine. Publisher collaborations are cool, and this is a cool format for one.
8. Reading this book felt like standing on a barren, rocky ridge. On one side, history unburies itself and clings to the earth with bony hands. On the other, a great army gathers, preparing to remake the world. On both, flashes of steel, spectral riders, and blood on the steppes. It’s a brief yet memorable ride.