A Chimerical Hope · Eifre Quest · Gathered Apocrypha
Behold the heartlands. The sky is a dark ocean of fractal whorls, writhing tendrils, and black turbulence. The horizon is broken by trees of chitin and cuticle. The land is ravaged by plagues and malediction, and every day settlements are lost to defectors and crepuscules.
Long before the Pantheca was ever conceived, the mantids stole magic from the draconic vesperbats. That power saw them vanquish the bats and claim dominion over heartlands and its races. A thousand years later, the bats are creatures of myth, but those vanquishers, the vesperbanes, still stake their claim, leashed by the syndics, and justifying their continuance by constructing cities, healing those who can afford it, and slaying their defecting peers. They promised to bring forth a Dream of peace and flourishing.
But these banes, charged to be the stewarts and wardens of this land, are instead mercenaries who would crack skulls for coin — who kill people just by existing.
This is the Pantheca of Mantiskind. Behold the most just, most stable society the heartlands has known. May it everlast.
A Chimerical Hope is the story of Team Duskborn, a trio of nymphs united by tragedy, thrust into a world eager to kill them or use them, each driven by an impossible dream.
Read the first chapter here, or see all chapters here (along with a complete blurb).
Black Nerve: Eifre Quest is a story driven by user suggestions.
You are a young mantis who hopes to become a scholarly vesperbane, but the examiners do not see your potential.
Read the first chapter here, or see all chapters here (along with a more complete blurb).
Black Nerve: Wasp, Beetle & Snake is an abandoned story. The first chapter follows the struggles of a hopeless, estranged surgeon in a dying town. Snippets and summaries of the second chapter have been released.
Black Nerve: Silk & Ember is the memoir of a hero and chosen one who lost. Tlakida is an orphan raised on the stories of heroic vesperbanes, and idolizes the ranger of Udgrov, who disappeared without a trace years ago. She needs to become a vesperbane herself, for glory and for power, and to protect her home. She has nothing else.
This began as the first story set in the heartlands, but I am no longer interested in continuing it. See the outline here.
You can still read the prologue or the first chapter, or see all chapters here.
Snuggly Serials 