Ongoing Web Novels

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.

Welcome aboard the Sultana V, where the vintage champagne is lukewarm, the influencers are hysterical, and the port generator just blew its final gasket. I’m Basmat, head pastry chef, and currently my entire career rests on forty pounds of melting Normandy butter. The only man standing between me and culinary ruin is Danim, the vessel’s insufferably calm chief engineer, whose idea of an emergency response is telling me to bake without electricity while flexing his grease-streaked forearms. Trapped together in the sweltering utility crawlways beneath deck, we’re supposed to be saving the yacht from running aground. Instead, we’re trading biting insults, sharing smuggled popsicles in the battery bay, and making decisions that are definitely going to void my employment insurance.

As a rogue, unstoppable wave of architectural nanites silently crystallizes the Jovian habitats into inert light-sculptures, humanity's time in the outer solar system comes to an end. Amidst the slow, beautiful apocalypse, three orbital caretakers—an structural architect, a deep-trench haul pilot, and an ecological curator—must race against the encroaching tide. Bound by duty and their own deadpan domestic banter, they desperately ferry the last remnants of human culture and botanical life ahead of the transformation. But as the crystalline infection leaps from station to station, they face the agonizing choice of what to save, what to leave behind, and what it truly means to preserve a legacy in a dying system.

In the Luminous Shallows, massive galleons cross between oceanic worlds by plunging down sheer saltwater cataracts in the dead of the void. Celso Valdevez is a working-class sail-rigger who stitches biotic canvas from the mantles of void-beasts. He doesn't want glory; he just wants to survive his brutal enlistment without losing his fingers to frostbite or kinetic blowback.

But when the fanatical Admiral Paiva orders a ruthless scorched-sky bombardment of a crowded atoll-refuge to extract its planetary core, the extreme magnetic firing vectors awaken something ancient and colossal. Phased leviathans rise from the deep, drawn by the silence of dying worlds and the thunder of imperial guns. Trapped aboard a flagship whose own cannons are now attracting horrific cosmic predation, Celso faces a lethal choice.

If he obeys orders, the void-beasts will tear the fleet apart from below. If he secretly sabotages the firing metrics to throw the cannons off-axis, the resulting cataclysmic blowback will cripple the Armada—and leave twelve hundred stranded sailors to drown in the dark.

Zadeya Feraoui is a street-smart scavenger living on the frozen edges of the Qas Bani Court, making a meager living by surviving the ice. She possesses a rare gift: whenever she touches a shattered object, she sees exactly what it was and how it was used before it broke. When the once-in-a-generation Winter Gates open, drawing outsiders to the isolated citadel for a season of brutal trade and lethal politics, Zadeya is conscripted to assess the ruins of a collapsed tower. There, she uncovers the shattered fragments of a high-profile murder weapon—a blade that proves the court’s most infamous execution was a sham. Now caught in the crosshairs of the powerful factions who profited from the lie, she must forge an uneasy alliance with Talib, a relentless enforcer of the court. As they navigate deadly games and an intense, dangerous attraction, Zadeya’s ability to read the past becomes the only weapon that might shatter the entrenched conspiracy—or get them both killed.

Vigdis once swore an oath she could never keep, and the border town of Skarstad paid the price in blood. To the locals, Skarstad is just a quiet logging community where the fog rolls in thick from the North Sea. But Vigdis, a healer marked by a broken vow, knows the town sits on a metaphysical fault line, a crossing point between the mundane and something far older. When a wounded outsider washes up with impossible injuries—and carrying knowledge of a threat the town has blindly ignored for a generation—Vigdis must decide whether to bandage him and look away, or break the uneasy truce keeping her safe. Forced into an alliance with a protector whose kind she once betrayed, she must drag an unwilling town back into a war against the supernatural. The only problem is the pull between her and the outsider—a pull that demands a truth she is terrified to face, and a sacrifice she has already refused to make once before.

On the barren, geology-starved continent of Locris, human life is an engineered miracle. Seven colossal, pre-cataclysm Mantle Spires dredge sub-atomic magma from the planet's core, synthesizing endless streams of fresh water, synthetic grain, and structural polymers for five militarized industrial powers. When Spire Four abruptly chokes on its own feed and vomits an expanding tide of light-devouring obsidian glass, the fragile peace between nations disintegrates into panic and accusations of resource theft.

Leonthes, an exhausted counter-sabotage praetor for the Thessalian Union, wades through starving breadline riots to inspect a grain silo turned into solid black bedrock. Deep beneath the crust, Nauplian bore-mechanic Thalassia navigates boiling coolant flues where automated repair swarms have begun hunting their human handlers. In low orbit, Hegemony lance-director Isidoros watches weapon telemetry that blames surface saboteurs, even as his orbital thermographs prove the rot is rising from the inaccessible planetary mantle. As the expanding glass swallows entire border cities and continental war looms, three sworn enemies must untangle a machine purge older than their nations before the continental crust collapses into the void.

Straton Ilvenos once mapped the safest road through any mountain in the Myrren Dominion — until one survey too honest cost him his rank, his order, and his name. Now he sells what he still does best: maps of places people would rather keep dark.

A killing wind ahead of its season drives him to the Aekelion, a lone inn on the Skorrhas Pass whose stone walls have held back worse storms than this one for three generations — for a price nobody who shelters there is ever told. When the old keeper dies holding that price back with her own hands, Straton finds himself trapped for the length of the storm with the very Order that ruined him, and with raiders who'd just as soon put a knife in everyone under that roof.

He came to read stone and get paid for it. He's about to learn what happens when the thing keeping you alive is quietly, patiently eating you instead — and that the only way out might be to break the one shelter for a hundred miles in either direction.

The idiot on the other side of our shared workshop partition builds wooden logic puzzles so complex they require a geometry degree to open. I repair vintage mechanical cameras. We are sworn enemies in the daily war of his cedar sawdust drifting into my delicate brass shutter gears. But when a shiny corporate gentrification firm slaps a buyout ultimatum on our seaside Kamakura artisan arcade, I am forced to do the truly unthinkable: trust Tsuyoshi with my livelihood. Our only defense is pulling off a district-wide scavenger hunt to prove our foot traffic is worth saving. Suddenly, we're hiding custom-exposed film clues inside interlocking mahogany lockboxes, and navigating the friction of two wildly different workflows. The problem isn't just that working shoulder-to-shoulder under the red darkroom lamps is making me short of breath. The real problem is realizing his chaotic, sawdust-covered genius might be exactly what my perfectly ordered life was missing.

A low-ranking sect archivist discovers that the foundational technique binding their martial order together is inherently flawed and slowly killing its practitioners. Armed only with a mastery of the sect's arcane bureaucracy and procedural law, he sets out on a journey across hostile territories and remote outposts to uncover the truth behind a centuries-old wrongful conviction, unraveling the conspiracy of elders who benefit from the fatal flaw. Every outpost presents a new trial and a shifting goal on a perilous path to upend the sect's hierarchy.

The flooded marble streets of Aileanmhor belong to those who dare command the winds. As the devastating Great Surge approaches, the city's four most formidable seafarers—a daredevil sailmaker, a relentless naval lieutenant, a charming smuggler, and a fiery artillery savant—are forced into a desperate pact. The System rewards maritime mastery, but its highest tier of [Harmonic Navigation] requires total physical and emotional trust among its circle. Tangled in rigging, soaked by warm tropical rain, and intoxicated by each other's touch, these four rivals must master their growing desires before the tides drag their beloved city into the deep.

When a blood-debt goes unpaid, the creditors do not want silver. They want collateral. For the thief known as Qadir, whose strict code of stealing only to restore what was taken has left him penniless but alive, being traded to settle another man's ledger is an insult. Being traded to the caravan master Tariq—a man whose brutal efficiency and relentless forward momentum govern the trade routes—is a death sentence.

The bargain binds Qadir to Tariq's caravan as they cross the lawless expanse, moving from fortress to bazaar, station by station. Qadir intends to find the contract's hidden clause, break the binding, and walk away. But Tariq has his own reasons for demanding a thief who refuses to keep what he takes. As they cross violent territories and fend off rival factions, the hostility between them turns into a different kind of weapon. Both men are reading the same terms of engagement, and neither read the fine print.

They are bound by a ledger that requires a price neither is willing to pay. And the desert offers no chance of escape.

**Content Warning**: This is a dark romance featuring forced proximity, dubious consent, explicit sexual content, violence, and captivity elements. Both leads are morally compromised and do terrible things. Discretion is advised.

Klaasje Blaauw has never met a creature she couldn't soothe. Her psychic empathy and calm pulse have made her the most requested companion-beast handler on the continental sky-gondola lines. But her skills are tested when she is summoned to first class to handle an emergency: Lord Joris van der Meer, the mainland's most illustrious sun-falcon shifter envoy, is having a catastrophic bout of air sickness.

Terrified of turbulence and shedding fiery golden feathers all over the silk furniture, Joris is one air pocket away from setting the transport ablaze. Klaasje steps into his suite with dried mango slices and unflappable patience. As the gondola glides across sunlit mountain peaks, Joris finds solace in Klaasje’s gentle touch—and reasons to stay grounded by her side.

Adrift on a storm-lashed glacial sea, the eighty surviving members of the Sun-Hoof tribe cling to life aboard the Mor-Kahn—an eighty-pace coracle sewn from fifty mammoth hides. In the belly of the vessel, lashed to the main mast, stands the weeping White Stag, the last spirit of the inland forest. His breath lulls the predatory sea-beasts and keeps the leather hull from dissolving in the brine, but you cannot eat breath. Hidecombe, a blunt, middle-aged sinew-sewer whose hands are cracked from pulling frozen gut-thread, alone understands the boat's fragile anatomy. When the hunters' hunger turns into a mutinous frenzy for the stag's flesh, Hidecombe must keep her people from butchering the only thing preventing the ocean from eating them whole.

Inside the soot-blackened walls of the Skallagrim Abattoir, thousands of steam-driven hooks haul slaughtered beast carcasses along a mechanized labyrinth. But tonight, the butchered meat is pulling itself back together. An occult chimeric entity has hooked itself into the overhead rail system, turning the factory into an automated harvesting machine. Master Butcher Kolskegg arms his floor workers with bone-saws, while Chief Engineer Berglind fights to disable the runaway steam gears. Guard Provost Einarr hunts for the corporate saboteur who introduced the tainted herd, and Hrapp’s vat scavengers fight for survival in the flooded offal cellars. They must cut the power, or end up on the hooks.

Some martial sects seek enlightenment atop misty peaks. The Kettle-Claw Alliance seeks dinner. Across the scorched plateaus of the outer realms, Gijsbert van der Meulen and his heavyweight grapplers wander with a six-ton bronze pot strapped to their oxen, convinced that martial perfection is achieved by suplexing apex beasts into broth. But when the immaculate Iron-Braid Empire begins capturing the legendary horned leviathans to breed a world-crushing war herd, cooking becomes rebellion. To protect the wild planes, Gijsbert, spear-wielding chef Femke, and an increasingly horrified captive aristocrat must wrestle the continent's fiercest monsters before the warlord can saddle them. In this sect, honor isn't given—it's braised slowly over cedar wood.

The Great Span of Ozu-Eke was never made of stone. For three hundred years, armies and merchants have crossed the chasm on the petrified spine of an ancient sky-beast, slain in its sleep by the grandfathers of the realm. Now, the bones are groaning. Ebele-oma hangs between sky and abyss, desperately patching the splintering ribs with mortar, while Constable Ifeanyichukwu-eke demands the span bear his lord’s heavy siege engines. Far below in the canyon mud, Tobechi-adu watches parasitic bone-fiends wake from the marrow. If the bridge falls, two kingdoms will bleed—but the beast's ancient ghost is tired of carrying the weight of men.

In the sprawling trade delta of the Hundred Harbors, every merchant guild governs like a sovereign nation. For Shen Ruolan, a negotiator whose sharpest weapon is tactical wit, leverage is currency. When a routine negotiation turns into a massacre, Shen makes a desperate promise to a dying ally—a promise bound by an unyielding time loop. Forced to repeat the same bloody days, Shen must navigate the treacherous monopolies, shifting alliances, and sovereign laws of the delta guilds, armed only with retained memories and a relentless drive. Without magic or muscle of their own, Shen slowly uncovers the hidden mechanics of the time loop, turning past failures into future leverage. The path forward demands high-stakes bargains, the manipulation of sovereign powers, and the absolute unravelling of long-held secrets, all to honor a high-stakes promise to someone who cannot remember it.

The *Sgàth-Bhràghaid* was built to conquer the primeval rivers, an eight-hundred-foot hollowed cedar behemoth powered by fifty oars and sheer nerve. But when the mooring ropes snap, the giant canoe plunges down a roaring subterranean chasm. At the helm is Donnchadh, a pilot who thrives on velocity; on the prow is Beathag, picking off blind river monsters with obsidian-tipped arrows; on the decks is Muircheartach, happily grappling amphibious predators; and in the ballast holds is Fionnghal, screaming as the water rises. The Wild-Torrent System powers their skills only as long as the boat maintains terminal speed. To survive, they must fight, row, and level up before hitting the canyon wall.

Two paranoid dukes are about to turn the beautiful willow canals of Ifeoma into an artillery playground, all because each believes the other has built an unstoppable secret weapon. As a traveling shadow-master who makes a living projecting colorful steam illusions for tavern audiences, I realize the country doesn't need soldiers—it needs a magnificent show. Armed with *The Gilded Moth*, my clattering projection coach, an ancient box of light-bending crystals, and a mechanical terrier named Pipu, I set out to fabricate an entire legion of mythical guardians in the morning river fog. Pulling off the greatest theatrical hoax in history won't be easy, but with enough steam, clever mirrors, and dramatic flair, we just might put war out of business.