The Pyre-Sloop of Nyírbátor

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.