Dark Fantasy

The drydocks of Shiranami are locked in iron chains. Under the ruthless eye of the naval provost, any shipwright caught altering hulls without a military clearance chit is hanged from the yardarms. Fumitaka only agreed to refit a privateer sloop in the dead of night because it was the only way to buy passage out of the disease-choked port for his foundling apprentices. But as he hammers the final heavy copper resonance plates onto the ship's keel, he uncovers the vessel's true purpose: it is not built to slip past the blockade, but to act as a massive kinetic bomb to ram the great sea-doors and drown Shiranami in a catastrophic tidal flood. With extremist zealots on one side and provost marines hunting him through the flooded slipways on the other, Fumitaka must take apart the ship he painstakingly built from the inside before it launches—and destroy his only way out.

In the Ashen Orbit, there is no sun—only the Great Aurora, a river of luminous air that drifts between fractured asteroid-cities. To lose the aurora is to freeze in minutes. When the light-tide begins to contract, the great powers deploy their square-rigged galleons, unleashing chromatic cannonades that turn the darkness into slaughter. Flag-Lieutenant Baltasar Orellana wants only to guide his weary fleet home, but Signal-Officer Elvira Cestari discovers that every artillery duel in the slipstream bleeds away the very atmosphere keeping the ring-cities alive. As fleets collide in brilliant flashes of shot and sail, four leaders must choose between crushing their enemies or watching their worlds drift into eternal cold.

A cave-diver must drop into an inverted subterranean world to poison its megafauna nursery, while an apex hunter from below must climb the reverse-gravity cliffs to slaughter the ceiling-clans for their obsidian. Two worlds face each other across a thousand-foot vertical drop, where gravity reverses precisely at the midpoint. Sorcha is a ceiling diver who treats mercy as a lethal luxury, and Ruiseart is a brutal floor-realm hunter determined to strip the upper world of weapons-grade glass. As their desperate realities collide over starving clans and exhausted resources, they will shatter the chasm itself.

In a winter-locked empire where the roads are safe only as long as the ruling wolves are fed, a lowly scavenger name Nayra-qa possesses a dangerous gift: the ability to see what broken things used to be. Tasked with an impossible rescue deep within enemy territory, Nayra-qa discovers that death is not the end, but a reset. Trapped in a brutal time loop, they must carry knowledge across iterations, navigating treacherous politics, scarcity, and a landscape that grows more lethal the closer they get to their target. Every death is a painful lesson, but the price of progress might be the one thing they cannot afford to lose.

Orynthia is a city-state built on a single, terrible necessity. While The Pharsalian Host waits beyond the outer walls with iron and patience, the city survives the encroaching Petrifying Ash only through the continuous burning of Pyrophos, a glowing mineral marrow that keeps human flesh from turning to stone.

But Pyrophos is controlled by the high courts, and policy in Orynthia is settled by blood. The ruling houses own duelists—bound mortal champions who fight in the Sunless Atrium to ratify treaties, dictate grain rations, and pass laws. Justice is not debated; it is bled for.

Praxos is an architect of ruin. A demolitionist by trade, he specializes in bringing down what others think is permanent. He is a man who dismantles reinforced walls and collapses fortified towers with careful grace, gentle with everything except stone and timber. When a sudden shift in the courts threatens to cut off the lower sectors from the Pyrophos supply entirely, Praxos realizes that breaking walls is no longer enough. To dismantle a monopoly that weighs the lives of the poor against the pride of the high houses, he must bring down the entire architecture of the duelists' court.

He will need inside leverage: Xanthes, an owned duelist who has never lost but is beginning to question the cost, and Oenone, a disgraced strategist of the high houses who understands exactly where the system’s load-bearing pillars are. Together, they must trigger a controlled demolition of the city's power structure—before the siege outside breaks in, or the rot takes them all.

The winter-locked empire of Tawantiyu is dying. Its emperor has frozen upon the Sun-Throne, leaving no legitimate heir, and the great houses tear at each other for the crown. But the empire's survival depends on a single bloody arithmetic: the roads between cities remain safe only as long as the ancient winter beasts—the Yana-wolves—are fed with imperial tributes. Rumi-qa, a disgraced former soldier who deserted the vanguard for a reason no one accepts, walks the frozen fringes. He alone knows the tribute system is a designed cull, and the great houses intend to expand it to secure their power. A hard deadline approaches: in exactly forty days, the celestial convergence will allow a usurper to permanently claim the Sun-Throne and expand the wolf-pacts. Hunted by the very empire he seeks to save, Rumi-qa must carve a path to the capital to shatter the throne itself, turning the physical dangers of the feral winter against the armies in his way.

Tarik-dar’s hands used to perform miracles. Now they traffic in agony.

In a kingdom where inherited pain is the only magic left—and the only currency that matters—the Ascendancy holds power by bleeding it from the desperate and hoarding it in the vaults. Tarik-dar once held prestige as a high-society healer, until the night he looked at the corrupt warlord bleeding out on his table, calculated the cost, and simply chose not to close the wound.

Stripped of his rank and indentured for his crime, Tarik is thrown into the grim, reeking workshops of Master Sorosh-ran, the kingdom’s most brilliant and venomous extractor of suffering. To survive, Tarik must learn to carve raw agony from the veins of the broken, refine it into power, and weaponize it without detonating himself.

He isn't fighting to redeem his soul. He’s fighting to tear out the foundation of the very system he once served—one vial, one stolen extraction hook, and one dead enforcer at a time.

Keno has never held a blade, wielded a spell, or owned real leverage in his life. He survives on cold reads and desperate bluffs, dealing in words where others deal in blood. His latest contract requires him to slip inside the Keida Monastery and extract a captive named Chiyo. It should have been a suicide run; it is rapidly becoming something far worse.

Keida was not built as a sanctuary. It is a living tomb constructed around the Goshin—a submerged anomaly that is finally waking. As the relic stirs beneath the stone floors, the physical rules of the monastery begin to warp. Corridors stretch into endless shadow, the walls breathe with malice, and the zealous monks who hold the wards are losing their minds to paranoia. Trapped in a labyrinth that alters space, sound, and sanity, Keno must navigate a descending nightmare. When clever words fail against an entity that bends reality, he must discover what unbearable leverage he is willing to wager in a trap that will consume them all.

A plague province where the cure rots the host faster than the sickness, and everyone knows it. Toliman, a lock- and gatekeeper who knows every untracked route through the quarantine zones, has found one uninfected sanctuary beneath the city. But when the secret to keeping that sanctuary pure threatens to unravel, Toliman must decide what he will trade to keep the rot away, and who he will feed to the healers to do it. The price of survival is physical, the politics are corrupt, and the final reckoning demands blood.

In the sun-blasted caravan routes of the Gyarmath Basin, water is not merely currency—it is law. The Révész Syndicate, a ruthless cartel of distillers and warlords, controls every oasis and deep-well, strangling the desert traders and outlander settlements into compliance. István, a cold-eyed and brutally pragmatic bodyguard, plies his trade protecting the very merchants he despises. He is sharper than his clients, surviving by reading the silent language of desperation, debt, and the subtle shifts in power among the dunes.

When a catastrophic aquifer collapse obliterates the basin’s last independent water source in a single, devastating night, the delicate balance of the desert shatters. István’s current charge—a naive and idealistic scholar possessing the lost schematic for a deep-desert atmospheric collector—becomes the most valuable and hunted commodity in Gyarmath. To keep his client alive, István must navigate a collapsing society where survival means choosing between loyalty to his contract, the allure of monopolizing the new water source, and the terrifying reality that the Syndicate will burn the basin to ash before surrendering control. The trail ahead is paved with blood, broken oaths, and the creeping realization that the true power in the desert doesn't just drink the water—it bleeds it from those left behind.

Every night the city of Osumadu marches out its dead to hold the line against what waits in the ash-wastes. To feed that army, the living must bleed. Nduoma is a way-keeper, master of the city's hidden locks and forgotten gates, making a dangerous living moving illicit grain and desperate people through the cracks in the walls. When a botched smuggling run unearths a sealed vault beneath the oldest district, she finds proof that the city’s founding compact is a lie: the dead aren't marching to protect Osumadu, but to keep something else imprisoned. Now, hunted by the ruling factions who will execute anyone to keep the truth buried, Nduoma must use every locked door and secret passage she knows to tear down the city's foundation before the dead finally turn around and march home.