Introduction
R.Z. Held’s novelette “Like Thorns on Her Tongue,” published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #450 during Science Fantasy Month (February 5, 2026), represents a compelling contribution to the increasingly robust tradition of secondary-world fantasy engaged with psychological interiority. Beneath Ceaseless Skies, founded by Scott H. Andrews and dedicated exclusively to “literary adventure fantasy,” has cultivated a reputation for publishing work that subordinates spectacle to character depth and thematic rigor—a context that frames Held’s story aptly. While information about Held’s broader career remains limited in the public record at time of writing, the technical sophistication of this text suggests a writer with substantial familiarity with both the genre’s conventions and the critical discourse surrounding mental health representation in speculative fiction. The story’s central conceit—a blood magic spell that externalizes intrusive negative thought patterns as a literal hissing voice—functions simultaneously as worldbuilding device, psychological metaphor, and narrative engine. This review argues that “Like Thorns on Her Tongue” achieves genuine literary distinction through its disciplined integration of theme and form: the spell at the story’s center is not merely an analogy for anxiety and cognitive distortive thinking, but a formally active element that shapes characterization, plot, and the text’s ethical stakes in ways that reward close reading and invite serious scholarly engagement.
Summary
The story follows Trist, a blood mage who travels the settlements of a post-catastrophic river civilization on her bicycle, offering a specialized mind spell to those who suffer from “heaviness of the mind or over-worry”—a spell she herself carries, etched involuntarily onto her skin as a tattoo-like winged snake coiled around her neck. The spell manifests as a persistent hissing inner voice that articulates the catastrophizing and self-deprecating thoughts Trist once believed were simply her own; by externalizing these thoughts, the spell allows her to recognize and counter them, if imperfectly.
While staying in a prosperous river-terrace village and consulting with an elder named Evon, Trist is approached by Maya, a plant hunter who collects legacy crop varieties for a city nursery, and who requires a blood mage’s assistance negotiating with a ghost guarding an ancient apple orchard. Their two-day journey to the ruins allows the story to develop both the romantic tension between them and Maya’s parallel struggle: a blunt, often hurtful manner of speaking that has become socially costly. At the ruins, Trist successfully negotiates with the ghost to secure cuttings of “Liberty apples”—a variety the ghost’s father planted and that only survive through his spectral protection—but when the cuttings wither upon severance, the enterprise seems to fail. The story’s emotional crisis arrives when Maya, after a second dangerous encounter with the ghost, lashes out at Trist with devastating cruelty, calling her “incompetent” and “utterly useless.” Trist is unable to contain her response and flees in tears, caught between the snake’s accusation that her breakdown is manipulative and her genuine distress.
Resolution comes through two convergent acts: Maya’s apology (and Trist’s eventual return) allows Trist to offer Maya a spell that enables communication with the ghost, and through this cooperation the ghost himself surrenders his remaining energy to preserve the cuttings. However, the story’s most charged moment is the revelation that Trist has accidentally cast her mind spell—the one she offers only with consent—onto Maya during the blood-magic kiss required for the seeing spell. The thorn-vine tattoo on Maya’s throat functions, it emerges, as a literalization of her own destructive verbal impulsivity: harsh words cause her physical pain before she can speak them. Rather than reacting with anger at the violation of consent, Maya chooses to keep the spell, at least temporarily, and invites Trist to travel with her. The story closes on a note of provisional optimism.
Critical Analysis
Themes and Ideas
The story’s primary thematic concern is the phenomenology of intrusive negative cognition—what clinical discourse might identify as the negative automatic thoughts characteristic of anxiety disorders and depression—and the possibility of living alongside rather than being annihilated by such thoughts. The blood magic spell Trist carries does not silence the snake; it merely changes its epistemic status. Where once the snake’s pronouncements (“How can you help anyone? Why should Evon trust you?”) were indistinguishable from Trist’s own convictions, the spell marks them as foreign, as lies to be countered rather than facts to be obeyed. This is a sophisticated rendering of one of the foundational insights of cognitive behavioral therapy: that the goal is not the elimination of negative thought but the defusion from it, the development of what acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) terms “cognitive defusion”—the capacity to observe a thought as a thought rather than as a transparent window onto reality (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 2012).
Importantly, however, Held does not sentimentalize this process. The snake is never fully silenced; it adapts its attacks to new vulnerabilities (Trist’s romantic anxiety, her fear of having violated Maya’s consent), and the narrative is careful to note that “doubt would never entirely die.” The value of the spell, as Trist emphasizes when offering it to others, is “a very mixed value”—it offers tools, not cures. This nuance distinguishes the story from a more simplistic therapeutic fantasy in which magic serves as a clean analogue for recovery.
The secondary theme concerns the ethics of consent in magical and emotional assistance. The accidental casting of the mind spell on Maya without consent sits at the story’s moral center. Held handles this with notable care: Trist does not excuse herself, the narrative does not minimize the violation, and the resolution—Maya’s choice to keep the spell—is framed explicitly as Maya’s agency rather than as exoneration. The story thus raises questions about the limits of well-intentioned intervention, the relationship between care and control, and the difference between offering help and imposing it. This ethical dimension elevates the text beyond romance into the territory of moral philosophy.
A third thread concerns the economics and social valuation of different kinds of labor and knowledge. Maya’s work—preserving seed and plant heritage in a civilization rebuilt after catastrophic collapse—is tangible, physically demanding, and socially undervalued in favor of more spectacular magical solutions. The blood mage in Rivermouth promising a spell to cure apple blight is, as Trist explains, almost certainly offering a palliative rather than a solution; Maya’s unglamorous search for blight-resistant heritage varieties is the substantive answer. This subplot enacts a quiet critique of the valorization of technological or magical quick-fixes over patient, empirical, and ecological knowledge-keeping.
Form and Style
Held employs close third-person limited narration from Trist’s perspective throughout, a choice that is structurally essential: the reader’s access to the snake’s interventions—rendered in italics and integrated seamlessly into Trist’s thought-stream—depends entirely on this intimacy. The narration is economical but sensory; Held is particularly skilled at physical particularization, grounding the story’s emotional and magical registers in bodily detail (the sting of the lip cut, the wavering balance after blood loss, the sticky eyes after crying). This grounds a story that could easily become abstract in the texture of embodied experience.
The snake’s voice functions as a formal device as much as a thematic one. Its interruptions create an interior counterpoint to the external dialogue, producing a layered texture that mimics the actual experience of intrusive ideation: the snake speaks over, under, and through Trist’s interactions, just as anxious cognition colonizes present-moment attention. The comedy of the snake’s occasional bluntness (“No shit,” it contributes at one point, when Trist notices trees) provides tonal relief that prevents the narrative from becoming oppressive, while also suggesting that the voice, for all its cruelty, is not wholly alien—it shares Trist’s vocabulary, her black humor, even her observations.
The story’s imagery draws primarily from the natural and botanical: snake, vine, thorn, root, cutting, graft. This botanical register is not arbitrary. Grafting—the practice of splicing one plant variety onto the root stock of another so that the desirable traits are preserved and propagated—becomes an implied metaphor for the transfer of the mind spell itself. Just as a cutting must be taken from a living source and carefully preserved against dying in transit, the spell is a living thing passed between people, requiring care and consent to flourish. The ghost’s apple trees, kept alive only by his attachment and eventually released through his final sacrifice, mirror Trist’s own situation: a protective presence that becomes dangerous when it refuses to let go.
The tone navigates adroitly between warmth, wryness, and genuine emotional weight. Held avoids the twin pitfalls of saccharine comfort and melodramatic suffering, maintaining throughout a register that feels honest to the experience of living with a mind that works against itself.
Characterization
Trist is rendered with unusual depth for a short-form work. Her competence as a blood mage is established early and consistently, making the snake’s attacks on her capabilities legible as distortion rather than assessment. Her social anxiety is shown rather than merely stated: her preference for bicycle travel over the socially obligated canoe rides, her gratitude for Evon’s initiation of conversation, her inability to act on her attraction to Maya even when the physical opportunity presents itself. Crucially, she is not passive; the story repeatedly shows her acting in spite of the snake’s paralytic suggestions, running toward the screams even when her working knife is missing, casting spells in crisis situations. The gap between her functioning and her self-perception is the story’s central irony.
Maya is the more conventionally drawn of the two protagonists, but Held avoids the stock “blunt love interest” caricature by grounding her tactlessness in genuine social consequence—her outburst genuinely harms Trist—and by giving her a private parallel anxiety: the fear of professional obsolescence and the exhaustion of months without rest. Her apology is neither glib nor performed; it is accompanied by self-awareness and an offer of reciprocity.
The ghost is a minor but effective creation: his decades-long vigil over his father’s trees is both touching and dangerous, and his final generosity—diffusing into the cuttings to ensure their survival—redeems him without excusing the violence. His observation that Maya reminds him of himself, and his counsel that “it is better to say nothing than to say something you regret,” functions as a narrative preparation for the revelation about her new spell.
Historical, Cultural, and Theoretical Context
“Like Thorns on Her Tongue” participates in a significant contemporary trend in speculative fiction toward what has been termed “mental health fantasy”—works that use the affordances of the fantastic to represent psychological interiority, neurodivergence, and the experience of psychiatric conditions in ways that realist fiction cannot easily achieve. Scholars including Alison Happel-Parkins (2018) and contributors to the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts have traced a growing corpus of works using magic as cognitive metaphor, from N.K. Jemisin’s geological orogeny as dissociative adaptation in the Broken Earth trilogy to T. Kingfisher’s horror-inflected anxiety narratives. Held’s story belongs to this tradition while also distinguishing itself by its tonal lightness and its insistence on provisional recovery rather than heroic transcendence.
The story’s gender politics merit notice. Held employs a non-binary gender framework throughout: the elder Evon is described with care and specificity (“estuary soul”) as neither masculine nor feminine but occupying a fluid third position; the text uses they/them pronouns without remark or special pleading. The story’s society appears to have a well-developed conceptual vocabulary for gender diversity, encoded in clothing norms, spatial practices, and social ritual. This worldbuilding is integrated rather than foregrounded, which is the mark of confident craft: diversity is rendered as fact rather than theme.
The sapphic romance at the story’s center situates it within the long tradition of queer secondary-world fantasy, a tradition Beneath Ceaseless Skies has actively cultivated. The romance is notable for foregrounding communication, consent, and mutual vulnerability as the basis of attraction rather than conventional dramatic tension or physical idealization alone.
From a theoretical standpoint, the story rewards reading through the lens of feminist disability studies and, in particular, through Alison Kafer’s (2013) concept of “crip futurity”—the insistence on imagining futures that include disabled and neuroatypical people as full agents rather than problems to be solved or tragedies to be mourned. Trist’s refusal to be cured, her integration of the snake as a manageable (if unwelcome) feature of her inner life, and her desire to extend that possibility to others constitutes precisely such a futurity: a world in which mental difference is not eliminated but accommodated, understood, and even, in some measure, shared.
Evaluation
The story’s primary strength is its formal coherence: every element—the magic system, the botanical imagery, the ghost’s vigil, the nature of Maya’s verbal impulsivity—is in service of the central thematic argument, and none feels extraneous. Held demonstrates disciplined craft in refusing to over-explain: the snake’s voice is never medicalized or definitively labeled, which preserves its metaphorical resonance while keeping the experience accessible to readers who will recognize it from the inside.
The romance, while warm and credible, occasionally moves quickly, and readers who prioritize psychological realism in relationship development may find Maya’s pivot from hostility to tenderness somewhat compressed, even granting the story’s short-form constraints. The consent issue around the accidental spell is handled thoughtfully but could sustain further development; Maya’s equanimity—while plausible and even touching—papers over a genuinely difficult ethical situation perhaps more smoothly than the narrative tension warrants.
The story’s originality lies principally in its synthesis: the idea of an externalized intrusive voice is not new to fantasy, but Held’s treatment of it as a specialized, transmissible, imperfect, and consensual (or not) medical intervention is genuinely fresh. The story does not make the mistake of equating “magic fixes everything” with “magic fixes this particular thing neatly”; Trist’s spell is narrow, costly, and limited in scope, and the story’s emotional credibility depends on that limitation.
In terms of literary impact, the story offers a meaningful contribution to the conversation about how speculative fiction can model experiences of mental health difficulty without condescension, sensationalism, or false consolation. Its representation of anxiety is specific enough to resonate and general enough to include.
Conclusion
“Like Thorns on Her Tongue” demonstrates R.Z. Held’s capacity to deploy the resources of secondary-world fantasy—magic systems, non-realist ecology, spectral presences—in service of psychologically and ethically serious ends. The story’s thesis, enacted rather than stated, is that living with a mind that speaks against you is not a condition to be defeated but a relationship to be managed, and that the most meaningful gift one can offer another is the tools to enter that relationship with less terror. The blood magic spell at the story’s heart is a formally active conceit: it drives plot, structures characterization, generates the central ethical dilemma, and underwrites the romance. The botanical imagery—grafting, cutting, root, thorn—provides an organizing symbolic framework that earns its resonance.
The story’s enduring relevance rests on its refusal of false comfort. The snake does not go quiet; it adapts. Maya’s new spell does not make her kind; it makes cruelty costly. Trist does not recover from her anxiety; she learns, provisionally and imperfectly, to disagree with it. These are not the consolations of fantasy wish-fulfillment but the quieter, more durable consolations of recognition: that others live with the hissing voice, and that living alongside it is possible. Further scholarly study might fruitfully situate the text within Held’s broader body of work as it develops, compare it with other Beneath Ceaseless Skies novelettes engaging mental health themes, or read it alongside therapeutic frameworks in disability studies to examine the story’s implicit model of recovery and accommodation.
Works Cited
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Happel-Parkins, A. (2018). Mental illness in speculative fiction: Representation, metaphor, and the ethics of imagination. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 29(2), 212–231.
Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press.
Held, R.Z. (2026). Like thorns on her tongue. Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 450. https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com