Looks like I will have to clear up something here: the story that won,
Wormhole, wasn't actually submitted for the writing contest - it had been sitting in my inbox, unread, for a little over a year. You can probably now guess from this info, that it was submitted for writing contest 38, before that stalled out. When I created the voting round for 39, I went ahead and realized that since it was still on topic, and I really would have felt bad for abandoning the
only story to have been submitted for 38, that I decided to go ahead and place it into 39. I think we can all agree that was not a bad decision. So with this background info out of the way, the author of this story was non other than...
Carl!
Second place, with one vote, goes to
Smoldering Crater, written by
DGFone. Untitled 1 was written by
Azdgari, and Untitled 2 (I just looked in my inbox, and it actually has a title -
Fire & Ice) was authored by
Flipmode. Thank you all for the stories - it looks like we will be able to continue with the writing contest once more!
Stay tuned near the end of the week for writing contest #40!