Aliette de Bodard brings readers fourteen tales that showcase her worldbuilding and characters, ranging from a dark Gothic Paris devastated by a magical war to Xuya, a far-future space opera inspired by Vietnamese culture where scholars administrate planets and sentient spaceships are part of families.

• In 'Immersion', a young girl working in a restaurant on a colonized space station crosses paths with an older woman who has cast off her own identity.
• In the novelette 'Children of Thorns, Children of Water', a shapeshifting dragon infiltrating a ruined mansion finds more than he's bargained for when his partner is snatched by eerie, child-like creatures.
• In 'Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight', three very different people—a scholar, an engineer, and a spaceship—all must deal with the loss of a woman who was the cornerstone of their world.

This collection includes a 20,000-word novella, 'Of Birthdays, and Fungus, and Kindness', set in Bodard's alternative dark Paris.