MAGIC is the easily recognisable currency of childhood fantasies and dreams. It is a coin that, if turned by an inquisitive hand, flips tails down and exposes its bevelled head of the unexpected and the ‘contrarily real.’

In this 22nd Issue of The Quarry, warlocks, witches, and lost boys flying off into the night are minted alongside the instability of youth and identity, the metamorphosis of nature, and the intangibility of memory.

The malleable reality of an imaginary friend, appearance-altering powers and witch trials stand beside grief, with its distant shadow of healing and the deep wells of loss and war. Through their distinct reflections, these stories cast a watermark of magic upon readers.

What you would instantly recognise as sorcery, moonlit witch hunts and far-off lands, then dissolves into your mother’s kitchen, with lunch boiling away on the stove. A midnight visitor conjures the otherworldly, only for the early onset of dementia to dismantle the antithetical concrete that we have jammed between magic and the mundane.

So, let this anthology enchant you with not only its recognisable magic, but with that which you would have left to the box labelled scientific or commonplace.

—Niamh McGonnell-Hall (Editor)

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The mask of identity can veil or unveil the soul.

Ever-changing or stagnant, the writers in this issue explore

the river of our magical human essence.

They unwrap the tangles of identity to reveal its complexity,

and merge the real with the fantastical,

creating a juxtaposition

between the beauty of life and its harsh realities.

They explore the fragility of identity,

which can crack and dissolve with a single prick of pain,

whilst uncovering its power,

when identity remains a fortitude amidst disarray.

In this issue, the magical fabrication of humanity is divulged.

—Amy Shelton (Editor - Online)

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Time and magic dance together both

intangible but ever-present

existing upon our insistence.

Issue twenty-two has temporality woven into memory by a scribe of writers,

futures unlived and childhoods retread

The natural and arcane traversed across triptychs.

The liminal paths that guide us through the sublime invisible

are narrated by disembodied voices.

It’s in these spaces that magic decolonises dreamscapes and enervates the exile.

The recurrence of cadence across each piece

spirals inwards,

a nautilus soaked in the rainbow ochre of creation and decay.

—Gareth Cowley (Editor - Poetry)