One Message Remains: Four innovative, deeply psychological stories

One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed

Yes, we are cruel. Yes, the world does not use that word as a compliment as we do.

Premee Mohamed is one of my favorite writers in the field. With 2025’s themed story collection One Message Remains she reminds me once again of why I like her work so much.

These four stories all take place either within the decadent, aggressive nation of Treotan, or in one of the nations it has invaded. Treotan, dying from within, still relies on its military and continues its invasions. Mohamed uses these tales to explore some ways in which small, imperfect acts are the seeds of resistance.

These are long short stories. “One Message Remains” is basically a novella. Mohamed uses the length to write layer after layer of detailed description. Whether it’s the badges and feathers that adorn the fur hats of the officers at an execution, the methodical description of a machine, or a family dinner in a time of stress, these scenes and details make the world of these tales real. Admittedly, sometimes it’s real the way the nightmare is.

“One Message Remains,” follows a naïve, rule-bound Major on what he truly believes is a mission of mercy in a newly conquered nation. The dead of that nation have other ideas.

“The Weight of What is Hollow” is my favorite story in the book. In Treotan, some prisoners are hanged on a gallows made of bone. The craft of building the bone gallows has been passed down, generation to generation. A young apprentice is ordered by a military officer to make a change that goes against her tradition and her ethics. To refuse puts her family at risk, but to comply betrays what she believes in.

In “Forsaking all Others,” a Treotan deserter flees to his grandmother’s remote village. A story she tells him and another deserter he met on the road makes him see his world with new eyes.

I’ve reviewed “The General’s Turn” here. Before I read “The Weight of What is Hollow,” it was my favorite Treotan story. The few surviving aristocrats of Treotan play a vicious game with captured enemy soldiers, in defiance of international accords and their own laws. One odd thing about Treotan, though… every now and then, Death herself shows up.

The stringing of these four stories together almost creates a novel, although we aren’t following the same characters. The themes are the same, and in “The General’s Turn” we get the image of a bone gallows, “the pink-white geometric perfection against the dawn sky.” Through these four different journeys we see the bleak spiritual landscape of the nation of Treotan; and we learn about resistance.

In “One Message Remains,” Major Lyell Tzajos leads a group of military men on a mission into a conquered land. Together, they identify mass graves of the conquered enemy, all of them close to battlefields. They dig up the bodies and their personal effects, obsessively record them, and bring the corpses back to Treotan. Then they notify the families of the dead so they can come retrieve their lost relatives.  It’s clear from the uniform reactions of the locals that this is an insult and atrocity, but Tzajos can’t quite see it. He also doesn’t seem to understand that the use of a machine called the Teleplasm Recovery Unit is, in fact, the real reason for his assignment. Treotan collects the spiritual remains of its enemies to use as an energy source.

When the story opens, Tzajos has more personal concerns. He is trying to draft a letter to his wife back home. She wrote him that she heard his assignment was a punishment detail, and he vehemently disagrees. Somehow, though, the drafts he writes end up with different words—names he doesn’t recognize, words he doesn’t understand, and references to battles he was never at. It is as if someone is writing through him. When he and his soldiers are caught in an ambush by the local resistance, only then does he begin to understand why the dead are left where they fell, why their personal effects are not collected, and what a desecration he has been part of. Still, it takes his own affliction to open his eyes to the world around him.

The story is engrossing and satisfying. For me, the genius is in the details; the exquisite explanation of the Teleplasm Recovery Unit, the glances and expressions of the men around him, and the landscape.

In “The Weight of What is Hollow,” description is also strange, exact and vivid. Here we see a bone gallows through the eyes of a woman who builds them. Taya and her family, the gallows-builders, attend an execution. Because of a flaw in the mechanism, which was built by Taya’s uncle, the condemned prisoner doesn’t break his neck, but suffocates slowly, taking several minutes to die. This would be a source of shame to the family, and they are understandably tense when Colonel Gerhach appears at the house that evening, but he is not there to blame. Instead, he says he and his fellow military rulers liked the innovation, and wants to have more gallows built to insure that the act of death is a final torture. He doesn’t want the uncle to build the gallows, however, but Taya, and he intends to oversee the construction.

The family’s situation is precarious. They have always held to tradition, and their tradition is that execution is not supposed to be torture. Still, they have no legal or political power, and in fact, they are a conquered people themselves, the first people in Treotan, who were conquered by those who are now the ruling class. Taya argues, but knows that her developmentally delayed younger cousin is too vulnerable a target for them to refuse Gerhach’s order. Her aunt insists Taya will follow Gerhach’s wishes to keep the whole family safe.

Between the day-to-day acts of Taya and her family we also see the instruction manual Taya is writing, for future gallows builders. Taya’s people survived after conquest by becoming part of the structure of oppression. To hold on to their own values and honor, they developed rules about the building and use of the gallows. Most of the rules Taya is formalizing are around construction, but not all of them. With Gerhach, Taya and her family realize that their rules have no meaning. They can either refuse to turn their devices into torture machines and be destroyed, or set aside their own values to survive, and lose their souls. I was on the edge of my chair because I couldn’t see any way Taya could rebel and survive… but (spoiler alert) she found one. As I said above, it is a small, imperfect act, but maybe it shows the way.

Rostyn, a deserter, flees to his grandmother’s remote village with another deserter, in “Forsaking all Others.” The grandmother welcomes both of them, tells them a story about a demon, and then continues on with other stories—stories about the death of her beloved husband, and how it changed her. The twist comes at the end, when we learn the demon story was neither innocent nor random, but my biggest take-away from this one was that when the revolution starts, you might be surprised by who leads it.

Like “The Weight of What is Hollow,” “The General’s Turn” features a device, an intricate, graceful instrument of torture, the “game board” for an elegantly cruel game. The story features a “game within a game,” as the master of ceremonies of this torture/pageant/execution decides to change the rules. What follows is a tense three-way contest of secret messages and double meanings, while the narrator/MC comments on the decadent audience, who disgust him, and his own increasingly desperate attempts to convince himself that Treotan is right and merely misunderstood. The revolutions of the gears, the tawdry costumes of the other “players,” or the crass comments of the watchers, who are supposed to be engaging in a solemn ritual of justice, make this tale word-perfect, and reminds me of something Elizabeth Hand might have written in the 1990s. Of course, Mohamed’s sensibility is completely different.

These are dark and disturbing tales, but if you like that, and you like being encouraged to think, or you just love beautiful prose, pick this one up.