Dominic C. Voss

The Sunless Empire was hammered together across three centuries of naval slaughter by its living founder, the ten-foot demigod Mátyás. But gods rot like any mortal meat, and now the comatose patriarch is liquefying in his gilded berth, venting an uncontrollable biological decay that mutates living flesh into brittle, suffocating sea-coral.

Tasked with the fleet's most dreaded berth aboard the lone funeral sloop Vér-Harkály, Chief Surgeon Illyés Gyarmati wants nothing more than to lay down his saws after thirty years of colonial butchery. Instead, he must keep the decomposing demigod stable enough to reach the designated cremation star at the system's core. Behind them, the liberated outer colonies have mobilized their corsair wolfpacks, determined to shatter the sloop, desecrate the imperial corpse, and drown the five planetary rings in holy poison. Trapped between celestial broadsides and divine gangrene, Illyés must chisel, cauterize, and trepan a weeping god to keep the astral brine from turning to stone.

The Kveldsk Delta is drowning under black tides that rise higher with every spring moon. For three centuries, master turf-cutters have raised monumental sod barrows across the brackish ridges, bedding kings in damp peat alongside cold bronze blades to keep the subterranean earth-spirits sleeping and the tidal surges predictable. Now Queen Astridr lies dead in her reed pavilion, and the water is lapping at the outer dykes. Torbrand, the oldest mound-builder alive, has only twenty days of falling moon to build her resting place before the saltwater claims the final dry ridge. But inland refugees displaced by the encroaching ocean demand the sacred high ground for barley crops, and the queen's kin will spill blood before leaving their royal line unentombed. Torbrand must carve a grave out of the very ground the living need to survive, caught between ancient ancestral honor, starving families, and a sea that cannot be turned by bronze spears.