Dragons have awakened, attacking both the Eranoran Bond and Banat Republic. As the rival nations scramble to respond, Heir Imperator Andras Tundaer must lead an invasion of the Isle of Dragons. But with his reputation in tatters and children from both nations held hostage by the dragons, Andras races against time to uncover long-buried secrets and save innocent lives.

Prologue

My children!

Dilongaria, queen of dragons, roared her anguish. Her limbs, weakened from her long sleep, gave out and her torso fell to the stone floor, shaking the cave that she once thought would protect her family during their slumber. She closed her slitted eyes and didn’t want to look upon the nightmare that had greeted her.

All dead!

She roared again, long, mournful, agonized. The multi-colored crystals that made up her tribe’s lair trembled with her roars. She heard them crack. She heard them crash to the cavern floor. She didn’t care. She continued roaring her grief. If she brought the whole mountain down on top of her head, then so be it. It wouldn’t kill her and end her pain, for she was an earth-dragon. She would simply transform into the rocks and soil above her, a process as uncontrollable as her heartbeat, and then reform once she escaped the tomb. For there was no such thing as a tomb for her. Except, perhaps, one of pain.

Her throat turned ragged and her roars disintegrated into groans and sobs.

Then she did the hardest thing she ever had to do in all the eons of her life. She opened her eyes again.

Dozens of shrunken dragon corpses lay within the deep mountain chamber her tribe had called home after the gods retreated to the Core. Their glorious colors were gone, replaced with the gray, desiccated skin of mortal bodies. She could only tell them apart by the shapes of their heads.

At her feet lay Jax, an air-dragon who’d had the most beautiful blue scales of any dragon she’d known in her long life. He’d brought joy to them all when he’d turn clouds into ridiculous shapes.

Next to Jax lay Yan, her water-dragon skull as smooth as a porpoise. Yan could bring the sea to a boil or calm it into gentle lapping at the shore. She loved nothing more than to race beneath the waves among the sea life or dive into the deepest, darkest ocean trenches with nothing but her clicks to guide her.

Past Yan lay a smaller body. Dilongaria choked on a sob. It was Bajh, a fire-dragon. The serpentine corpse of her youngest child was curled into a fetal position as if he’d died in terrible pain. She lumbered across the chamber and stroked his delicate skull with a talon. She remembered how he’d virtually leaped out of his birthing crystals, ready to create new islands or burn away a dead forest so that a new one could grow.

A glint of metal caught her eye, and she looked up to see the body of her eldest son, Harak. His body still retained most of its silvery, metallic scales, but they simply covered her son’s metallic bones like a shroud. He lay near one of the leya crystals, which glowed with an unhealthy purple light. One of his left talons was embedded into the crystal as if he’d struck at it with his dying breath. His right talons held something close to his chest, but Dilongaria could not see what it was.

She crawled slowly toward Harak on her powerful hind legs, her claws digging into the rock as easily as soil. She took care to avoid crawling over her children, for her bulk could crush their remains to dust. She would ensure their bodies entered the Core as intact as possible.

Leya crystal shards were scattered about the lair. She didn’t know if they were the result of cave-ins during their long sleep, her anguished roars, or something else. Regardless, she paid no heed to the crystals she crushed beneath her claws and torso. Her only focus was her oldest son.

She stopped beside Harak’s corpse and gently used her right talon to pry his talon from beneath his chest. She winced at his cracking bones, but she had to see what Harak held. She sensed its importance. Knew it was something for which he’d died.

When at last she pulled Harak’s talon free, she looked upon a ragged and dingy piece of black cloth. Her mind still reeled from her grief and her abrupt awakening, so it took her several moments to remember that humans once wore things like these.

But that was impossible. How could humans have entered her lair? There were no entrances. The only way in was for Dilongaria to tell the earth to allow them entry. Humans couldn’t do that. They were animals. Intelligent animals, yes, but animals without the divine spark of a soul.

She stared at the leya crystal and Harak’s left talon embedded in it. A sickening horror arose from her empty belly, warring with the grief in her heart. The leya crystal should not be glowing purple. It should be a healthy red, like the horizon at sunset. It could only be purple if it were somehow corrupted.

Dragons could not have done this.

Realization struck Dilongaria. It came with explosive white anger, anger she had never felt in the thousands of years since the gods fled to the Core.

She leaped toward the cavern’s crystal ceiling, transforming herself to earth just before her body slammed into it, and then raced up through the granite and rocks as smoothly as Yan—she choked back a sob—had slid through the oceans in her water form. She slid past veins of gold and iron, along with the roots of evergreens that grew along the mountainside. She tasted them all with her senses, a lush diversity of elements that made up this one mountain.

This had always been her favorite moment after she’d awakened from a long sleep. But now, it was gutted with rage. There would be no joy for her while traveling the earth or for the rest of her eternal life.

When she reached the summit, she sprang forth and reformed her body. She landed with a graceful thump that raised clouds of snow around her mountainous bulk. It was night, the full moon shining down upon her with a pale light that was no longer comforting.

She scanned her island from its highest peak. The evergreen and oak forests surrounding it were dark. It was summer down below, for the moonlight glinted off the green leaves of the oak trees. Beyond the trees were hills and grasslands. Her divine sight could pick out the movement of her servants. They had multiplied and thrived on the island during her sleep. At least they had not died.

Her dragon vassals still slept, though, deep within their own caverns. She would have to be strong when she awoke them and told them of her family’s murder.

Dilongaria looked beyond her island and toward the distant horizon in all directions. The continental lands that she remembered on the east and west of her island were still there.

But now, she saw the glow of the leyas rising from the continents like a soft orange mist in the darkness.

She roared again, but this time there was no sorrow in it. There was only rage and hatred.

Sometime during her sleep, they had figured out how to take what was not theirs to take. They had stolen the divine leya energy from her children. They had murdered her children.

If the gods in the Core had not yet punished them, then she would.

This was a sample chapter from my work-in-progress fantasy novel, Dragon Twilight (also a work-in-progress title). If you enjoyed it, please sign up for my newsletter to get updates on the novel’s release. Thank you!

In a world where the Shining God was defeated, a lone paladin seeks redemption for his part in her death. Wielding a divine sword, he battles the Enemy’s forces alongside a disillusioned priest and two gifted boys. As they confront slavers, corrupted soldiers, and new horrors, the paladin must resist temptation and guide his companions towards hope in a broken land. Read the first chapter below.

Chapter 1

The boys fled from the devils down the foggy railroad tracks and skidded to a stop before the paladin blocking their way. They looked up at him like he was some arrogant statue from the ruined churches of the Old Faith, holding back the Enemy all his own.

“You boys are runnin’ like you got all the hells on your heals,” the paladin said. He eyed the fog behind them. Black forms darker than hate flitted in the mist.

The paladin saw the confusion in the boys’ faces and didn’t need to be one of the Enemy’s mind rapers to know their thoughts. Who’s the bigger threat, their eyes said, the ravenous devil pack or the gaunt, bearded man with a ragged white cloak?

“Mister,” one boy croaked, “them’s devils back there!”

“I know what they are, boy. Get behind me now.”

They scrambled around the paladin, keeping as far from him as the tracks allowed, and resumed their flight. The paladin didn’t turn to see where the boys ran, but he hoped they watched what he did. He was about to give them a tale to delight their folks later to their warm hearths.

A score of devils hurtled from the mist. Glistening red and black skin pulled tight over lean muscles. Mouths with sharp yellow teeth wrapped halfway around their heads. Where there should have been eyes and ears were only smooth, mottled skulls. Some shrieked while others snapped their teeth like the clacking of dry bones. Some galloped on four limbs, while others loped on two legs.

The paladin drew the God sword from the scabbard on his back and touched it to his forehead. Then he dropped to one knee, closed his eyes, and prayed.

***

Jacob and Adam hadn’t run far before Jacob stopped and turned.

“What’re you doing?” Adam screamed at him, slowing.

“What’s he doing?” Jacob asked.

The man kneeled with his head bowed against his fancy sword. He seemed to ignore the oncoming horde of gibbering teeth and claws. Jacob had seen the cold resolve in the man’s eyes, heard the breezy courage in his deep voice. Pa had told him stories about brave men wielding beautiful swords, but he never thought those men or swords still existed.

“He’s praying,” Adam said breathlessly, tugging on Jacob’s arm.

“Praying to what? Everyone knows God’s dead.”

“We’re gonna be dead if we don’t go!”

The devils were almost upon the man, yet he didn’t move.

“Jacob, please, let’s—!”

“I want to see,” Jacob whispered, staring at the man.

White light burst silently from the kneeling man, forcing Jacob to shut his eyes and turn away. Adam gasped beside him. When the light faded, Jacob slowly opened his eyes…and felt his jaw slacken.

The man stood facing the oncoming devils with blue-white flames encasing his body. He didn’t seem to mind the flames, though, and strode toward the devil horde, his sword aimed at them. When four devils leaped at him, he cut them in half with a one-handed backswing, never missing a stride. The devils had time for a surprised scream before a blue-white flame turned their bodies to ash that floated to the ground.

The devil horde stopped as one. They cocked their heads, unsure.

But the man was not. He danced into their midst and hacked through the devils with inhuman speed. Each devil he cut down erupted in blue-white flames, their ashes drifting away. When some tried to flee, the man appeared before them with a grin and smote them down without a single wasted movement.

The battle was over in moments.

Jacob once saw two devils devour a ten-foot brown bear. This man had single-handedly destroyed twenty.

The flaming man turned his head toward the boys and bowed as if they had applauded. He walked toward them, and as he did, the blue-white flames extinguished like a candle before bed. He gave the fancy sword an artistic twirl so that he held the hilt, but with the blade resting against the back of his right arm.

Adam dropped to one knee. Jacob figured he’d better show the same respect and imitated his friend.

The man stopped. “Get up, you fools. I’m good, but I ain’t God.”

Adam looked up. “Then what are you, sir?”

He stared at the walled town behind the boys a quarter mile down the tracks. “Just a man,” he said. “And there’s a deceiver in yonder village whose head needs separatin’ from his neck.”

This was a sample chapter from my work-in-progress fantasy novel, Paladin of a Dead God. If you enjoyed it, please sign up for my newsletter to get updates on the novel’s release. Thank you!

Augustine Ward, the sole survivor of a devastating alien battle, must lead a ragtag team on a desperate mission to stop humanity’s extinction in four months. With treacherous allies, Ward races against time to stop an alien signal that could destroy Earth. Can this broken soldier find redemption and save mankind from annihilation?

Chapter 1

Despite wearing the best space suit the Olympians had offered humanity, Callisto was still colder than a hag’s left tit. My fingers were popsicles inside my thick gloves, my nose was numb within my plexisteel helmet, and my balls had snuggled their way back into my pelvis. My heads-up display said all systems were normal, but without my nanos it was hard to be sure. Lots of tech had fallen into the shitter over the last five years. It could’ve also been in my head. Walking across a dirty glacier in vacuum with Jupiter filling the sky messes with your mind no matter how many times you’ve done it.

My name is Augustine Ward, and I find lost things, including people. My job ain’t legal in the Commonwealth, and they will shoot you on sight if they catch you in quarantine zones like Callisto. But it was a living at a time when not many were available.

The cold wasn’t even the worst part. Nah, the worst part was my dread over grabbing the girl, Betty Grable. I shit you not, that was her name. Her Pathist parents were the traditional types, I reckoned. They’d paid me handsomely to bring her home, and she was gonna be none too happy to see me. She’d likely sunk so deep into the Hedon cult that I was gonna have to either drag her back to my ship or splint her. I hated splinting. Always messy.

But hell, I’m an optimistic fellow. Things could turn around.

At least Jupiter was goddamed spectacular.

I finished planting my insurance in the Hedon shipyard and hightailed it to the old Callisto hydrogen factory’s airlock. That’s right, the Hedons parked their ships outside, suited up, and then walked to the airlock. My recon over the last two days told me they either didn’t have the know-how to hook the docking tubes to their ships, or the docking tubes just didn’t work anymore. Or the Hedons were so wasted out of their gourds they didn’t care to figure it out.

I tapped the airlock controls, and the door slid open with a slight rumble that I felt through my boots. I closed the door behind me and activated the atmospheric controls. Air hissed into the compartment. My suit told me it was breathable, though high in mold and God knows whatever the Hedons were smoking these days. Probably wouldn’t kill me. I didn’t plan on sticking around any longer than I had to, anyway.

“I’m inside, Arial,” I said into my helmet com. “Keep the home fires burning, would ya, doll?”

“If by ‘home fires’ you mean the ship’s engines,” my ship replied in a female voice, “then I have not turned them off since you left. If you are referring to the song written during World War I titled ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning (‘Till the Boys Come Home)’, I have located a copy of that song which I can play for you now.”

“I meant the ship’s engines, doll, but thanks for the offer. I’ll contact you when I need a pickup. Ward out.”

“Be safe, Auggie.”

Arial’s helpful interpretations of my Georgia idioms—and her use of my nickname—would’ve been endearing if she weren’t the multi-dimensional hall monitor of the Olympian aliens who had pledged to kill all humans in four months. Tends to put a damper on a friendship. But more on that later.

I decided to trust my suit’s assessment of the air and unlocked the helm. The air smelled like I thought it would. Reminded me of the dive brothel me and some basic training comrades visited on Luna twenty years ago: funky tobacco, cheap perfume, and an overflowing commode.

I slapped the helmet on the magnets behind my head and opened the door to the factory proper. It slid open on squealy, un-greased wheels. I made sure my earbuds were secure and then entered the Hedon den of sin.

Lots of people think the Hedon’s are a death cult, especially all the good Pathists that make up most of humanity now. They say the Hedons would rather kill themselves than live through whatever extinction event the Olympians were gonna throw at us.

I didn’t think they worshiped death so much as they just didn’t give a shit anymore. Their security was a case in point. Nobody challenged me at the airlock or when I strode through the shadowy corridors. Where there were lights, they sputtered between glaring white and sickly green.

I’d studied the factory’s layout before arriving, so I knew where I was going. But even if I hadn’t, all I would’ve had to do was follow the loud music—with all its thumping and bumping and groaning vocals—that shook the whole moon. Took me less than a hundred paces to arrive at the dance party.

The former warehouse was mostly dark, but colored lights flashed in time to the music and illuminated the writhing bodies on the dance floor. I figured a couple hundred of them, men and women in various stages of dress and undress. They leaped around and rubbed against each other in ways that would’ve made an Quickened blush. The air temp and humidity were more oppressive than Savannah in August. A sheen of sweat broke on my forehead.

I scanned the crowd looking for Casper Bonny’s throne. The man was born and raised a pirate before the Virus, which meant he never had nanos and therefore had not gone batshit crazy when the Virus struck. My intel said he gave up piracy after the Virus and decided to splurge his ill-gotten-gains on sex, drugs, and more sex and drugs. Because, why not? The Virus destroyed humanity’s ability to wage war, therefore we couldn’t fulfill our promise to the Olympians and would thus go extinct. Hedon membership swelled with Pathists, ironically, who didn’t want to hunker down in their shelters, pray, and wait with stoic patience for the apocalypse like the rest of their brethren.

For me, I reckoned it was my work that kept my mind off those things.

Betty’s parents said she’d been kidnapped by the Hedons and forced to serve in Bonny’s harem. I highly doubted that she’d been kidnapped because that would’ve required initiative and planning by the Hedons. The girl had more likely joined the Pathist exodus to cults awaiting the end in their own ways. I figured mommy and daddy preferred to think someone had kidnapped their little girl rather than she had chosen to spend her last days grinding in a broken-down factory on a Jovian ice ball.

On the far side of the dance floor was a dais with an old, leather sectional couch. Over the couch hung a Hedon flag—black with a crude white circle and an equally crude “H” over the top. Casper Bonny sat in the middle of the couch surrounded by young, sycophantic women and men. He wore a dark red, satin bowling shirt with flared collars. His black hair was coifed into a pompadour, with large sideburns that had hints of gray. Despite the relative darkness of the place, he wore sunglasses that dipped down his nose so that he could look over the tops of the lenses at his followers. A cigarette hung from one corner of his mouth and his tattooed arms hung around two young women on either side.

The girl on his right was Betty Grable. She’d dyed her natural black hair all white, and she wore a tight black tank-top and matching leather shorts. Her bare left leg was covered in ivy tattoos. She looked quite different from the photo her parents gave me of a smiling 16-year-old in her Sunday’s best, but the upturned nose and triangular face were the same.

I pushed my way through the crowd toward the asshole king.

This was a sample chapter from my work-in-progress sci-fi novel, The Arena (also a work-in-progress title). If you enjoyed it, please sign up for my newsletter to get updates on the novel’s release. Thank you!