Genre

Fantasy

Doorway worlds, school-of-magic energy and adventure serialized chapter by chapter — fantasy at the speed of a free sample.

6 books · free ⌈10%⌉ samples · the rest with Dracon Omni

Fantasy on the shelf

T. Volk

by T. Volk

The Bone Gauntlet

Taren Volk comes over the last rise into Oathfield expecting the village of his childhood, the stones he and his brother Eamon set as boys still marking the lane. The forest has bled into untended air for years, the ruts are deeper than memory, and the place no longer remembers his name. He has been swallowed by an apprenticeship he cannot explain, and the only thing waiting for him at home is silence, a brother changed by war, and a gauntlet carved from bone that should not exist. As Taren pieces together what happened to the Oathfield he left behind, he finds Gerrick shadowed by dreams he cannot wake from, Maren holding truths too sharp to speak aloud, and Callum Volk alive only in memory and ash. Wynn Farras and Selka Vorne move through the village with loyalties that bend toward the old debts, while Lorek Pale and Sera Coldhollow circle an inheritance the Volk bloodline has been running from for generations. Something without a name has come to collect. The gauntlet is patient, the road is short, and every choice Taren makes will carve another name into the bone. To save his family, he must first decide which of them is still worth saving, and whether an oath sworn in ash can ever be paid back in anything but blood.

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Isolde Crane

by Isolde Crane

The Crane of Hollow Vows

Isolde Crane was raised to disappear. In the reed-choked marsh of Aelor, where the fog swallows names and the elders remember debts older than the kingdom, Mother Vesper taught her the old disciplines , how to hide her breath, how to bind a wandering spirit, how to swallow a secret and keep it silent in her chest. So when something white and screaming tears from the violet dusk and buries itself in blackened earth, Isolde does what she was trained to do. She kneels at the lip of the crater. She listens. And she consumes what should never have been touched. The ash tastes of iron and broken oaths. By dawn, the marsh elder Holt has gone quiet, the Cartographer has begun drawing a path that should not exist, and Lirien the revenant has risen from the reeds to demand a name. Far from the water, in a palace of cut stone and colder smiles, Prince Edran watches from behind a mask and wonders why a dead princess has begun to breathe again. As Hollow Vows spread through Aelor like a second dusk, Isolde is pulled between Huntsman Beric, who hunts what she now carries, and Theron Sable, who would bargain for it. The Court of the Dead convenes. Queen Marisel sends her High Justiciar. And in the hollow between worlds, the spirit of the lost princess waits for the girl who swallowed her fall to choose a vow worth keeping , or to break the kingdom in half.

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M. Fenwick

by M. Fenwick

The Lamplight Supper Club

When a stranger presses a brass key into Marigold Fenwick's palm and dissolves into the cobblestones of her quiet village, her unremarkable life as a baker's daughter ends forever. The key opens the door to The Lamplight Supper Club, a spectral gathering hidden between the living world and whatever waits beyond, where the recently dead are seated at a long oak table and given one final meal before they must move on. As gatekeeper for the evening, Marigold serves a procession of troubled souls: the proud and bitter Widow Gant, the apparition of her own Grandmother Fenwick who warns her of an ancient wrong, and the mysterious Felix Varne, whose unfinished business ties him to her bloodline in ways she cannot yet comprehend. Each course reveals a buried confession from someone still breathing, and with every supper the Hushkeeper , a quiet, watchful figure who enforces the club's oldest rule , grows more interested in the baker's girl who was never meant to hold the key. Joined by her steadfast friend Briar Mossgrove, the reluctant Hettie Sallow, and the enigmatic Bramwell Hop, Marigold begins to unravel a generations-old secret kept by Old Tomas himself. The final supper will demand a guest no one expected: Marigold herself. To free the dead, she must decide whether to sacrifice her family's comfortable lies , or become the next ghost haunting the Lamplight's table.

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S. Mercer

by S. Mercer

The Mortuary Hours

At 0500 hours, cycle 1,847, Sawyer Mercer finds a corpse that died backward. Rigor mortis is retreating instead of setting, the blood pooling in defiance of gravity, and every diagnostic in the Halloway Municipal Mortuary confirms what Sawyer already knows in his bones: something is fundamentally wrong with death itself. The body belongs to a Market Runner whose ledger reveals impossible debts , payments owed not in coin but in years, in memory, in the slow unraveling of those who borrowed what should never have been borrowed. Sawyer, a coroner trained to find answers in stillness, becomes the unwilling key to a cycle older than the municipal charter. His estranged cousin Eline Mercer knows more than she admits. Mysterious financier Vesper Halloway holds a ledger that doesn't balance. And the First Lender , patient, vast, and finally awake , has sent the Pale Bailiffs to collect. As bodies begin appearing with rigor set in reverse, Sawyer and his uneasy allies race to sever the chain before the entire town pays a debt it can never afford. But breaking the cycle means confronting what Sawyer himself borrowed long ago , and the cost of refusing the Pale Bailiffs may be far worse than death.

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A. Tarrant

by A. Tarrant

The Thornbound Vow

Smoke rises from the blackthorn pyre at House Tarrant as Anneliese Tarrant watches her world catch fire in silence. When an ancient binding, long buried beneath the ashes of her family's history, stirs to life, it chooses her, and refuses to release her without a price. She is no sorceress, no warrior, and certainly no heir to power; yet the Thornbound Vow cares nothing for what she wants, demanding only that she obey. As Lord Cassius Tarrant navigates a treacherous court where Archmagus Veylan and the formidable Master Vorath pull unseen strings, and Lady Elara Tarrant guards secrets that could shatter the family from within, Anneliese is drawn into a brutal series of trials beside Maren Voss, Caelum Dreycott, and the reluctant Torvin Kael. Each test pushes her closer to the truth of what her house once swore, and what it now owes. Brenan Hale offers a path of rebellion, but rebellion against the Vow means rebellion against the old magic that may be the only thing still holding House Tarrant together. Every step Anneliese takes tightens the thorns around her name. Every refusal draws Serathiel closer, a presence of terrible patience and quiet hunger. To keep the vow is to surrender her will, her future, and perhaps her life to something older and colder than grief. To break it is to unleash a reckoning on everyone she loves. The pyre has finished burning. What rises from its ashes will be hers to answer for.

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Elara_nightshade

by Elara_nightshade

The Thorns of Nightshade

A disgraced lady kneels before the Ember Throne, where a poisoned vow binds her to a queen's dark game of thrones, and only thorns remain where mercy once grew. Elara Nightshade was once a lady of Queen Seraphine's court, fluent in its whispers and survivable only through precision. Now she kneels on cold volcanic flagstones, stripped of title and standing, summoned back to the Obsidian Throne Hall to answer for a betrayal she will not name. The Queen offers no pardon, only a poisoned vow, a binding oath laced with a slow-acting venom that grants Elara her life at the cost of her obedience. To refuse is to die. To accept is to become a weapon in Seraphine's ruthless campaign against the Iron Council, whose iron-fisted enforcers Malachai Drave and Sylas will stop at nothing to seize the Ember Throne. Armed only with the loyalty of Vexa, a spymaster whose secrets cut deeper than any blade, and Wren, a healer whose oaths conflict with her conscience, Elara must outmaneuver warlords, unravel conspiracies, and decide where her loyalty truly lies. But in a kingdom where love is leverage and mercy is a forgotten language, the line between savior and tyrant blurs with every choice. The thorns have begun to bloom, and they will draw blood before they surrender their secret.

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