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7 stories found · by Last update

Nine-Maps of the Hollow Passes

by L.A. Dunn

  • 5 Chapters
  • 46 Pages
  • 12,650 Words

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 Krasnograd Countdown

by A.R. Hammond

  • 7 Chapters
  • 82 Pages
  • 22,648 Words
  • 12 Views

Seventy-two hours. That is all the time remaining on the clock when a routine witness relocation in the isolated, snow-choked county of Krasnograd shatters. Bodyguard Viktor Volkov, a man whose tactical brilliance is matched only by his absolute pragmatism, finds himself trapped behind closed borders with a protectee who knows just enough to get them both killed, and an elite kill squad closing in. The only institution that can extract them is the regional Directorate—a corrupt, rusted bureaucratic machine that is functionally the sole barrier against complete societal collapse in the region. To survive the countdown and secure his charge, Volkov must outmaneuver the assassins hunting him while manipulating the very machinery of the Directorate that wants the witness buried. In a county where the cold is lethal and trust is nonexistent, every hour costs blood, every decision narrows his options, and Volkov is the only one who sees the board clearly enough to win.

The Tide Crossing

by Evangeline Vasquez

  • 7 Chapters
  • 77 Pages
  • 21,249 Words
  • 12 Views

In the metaphysical border town of Suna, things slip across the veil every day—sometimes memories, sometimes people, sometimes cursed relics. Tani is a thief with a strict code: she only steals to return what was wrongfully taken across the crossing. When a high-stakes commission forces her to assemble a crew and break into the vault of the town's most dangerous syndicate boss, her path collides with Liko, a lethal border-warder whose job is to keep both worlds separate. Neither can afford to lose, but their escalating rivalry uncovers a conspiracy that threatens to tear the border wide open. To save her town, Tani must pull off the heist of a lifetime, trusting the one man paid to hunt her down.

The Ledger of Blackcombe

by Sawyer Garrison

  • 7 Chapters
  • 82 Pages
  • 22,671 Words
  • 12 Views

The Blackcombe Ore-Works didn’t just collapse—it was buried to hide the truth. When a deliberately triggered marrow-stone blowout entombs hundreds of diggers in a single night, the merchant guilds expect the comforting silence of the grave. They didn't count on Falkner Penman.

A junior archivist choking on chalk-dust and toxic spiritual pressure, Falkner holds the one thing Blackcombe’s overseers are bleeding to find: Master Assayer Weaver’s final, unsanitized ledger. In a ruthless martial society where true cultivation is bought, hoarded, and refined on the broken backs of the lower classes, the truth is a fatal commodity. But Falkner isn't a chosen son with a divine sword. He’s a meticulous, fiercely competent tallyman counting the cost of survival.

Armed with unyielding memory and a precise map of Blackcombe’s most unstable deep-seams, Falkner plunges straight into a cutthroat cultivation economy. To honor a dying man's promise, he must claw his way up an uncompromising ladder of power, turning rival enforcers, corrupt refiners, and deadly spiritual hazards into his own stepping stones. He will leverage every ounce of raw primal ore and balance every drop of spilled blood to ensure the authentic record outlives them all. The guilds thought they were just burying a quiet bookkeeper; they're about to face the ultimate auditor of their sins.

The Archive of Broken Breath

by Sawyer Garrison

  • 7 Chapters
  • 88 Pages
  • 24,295 Words
  • 17 Views

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 Silt and the Scale

by Sawyer Lindqvist

  • 1 Chapter
  • 12 Pages
  • 3,561 Words
  • 2 Views

In the silt-choked delta of the Yaku-mayu, trade guilds enforce their sovereignty with poison and steel. Tawa-uay is a healer who knows exactly how a body fails, a skill he once used to let a powerful man die rather than save him. When a fresh death matches the exact method of his hidden crime, Tawa-uay is framed for a murder he did not commit, forcing him out of his clinic and into the cutthroat politics of the Guild of the River's Scales. Alongside a disgraced guild enforcer, an exiled poison-taster, and a river-scavenger who knows too much about the delta's currents, Tawa-uay must dismantle the conspiracy that seeks to hang him. In a city where every drop of antidote is rationed and every cure has a master, finding the truth means taking lives rather than saving them.

Leverage in Vengskyr

by L.A. Dunn

  • 1 Chapter
  • 14 Pages
  • 3,899 Words
  • 1 Views

Bramund has always been the one making the deals, arranging the contracts, and smoothing the paths for cultivators in the cutthroat tournament city of Vengskyr. He had the brains, but they had the power. When his sister Eirund is seized as collateral by the upper strata of the decennial fighting syndicate, words are no longer enough. To climb the brutal ranks of a city that literally tears itself down and rebuilds its walls every ten years, Bramund needs leverage. He strikes a deadly bargain with Varnsk, a disgraced and exiled master, to learn the forbidden arts of Strand-binding. But Varnsk’s training is a gauntlet of lethal trials designed to hollow out the apprentice's humanity. Now, Bramund must negotiate with his own breaking point, weaponizing his sharp mind alongside his newly forged martial prowess. Every tier he ascends brings him closer to Eirund, but the price of power threatens to make him indistinguishable from the monsters he is fighting to tear down.