An embittered teenager caught in a military conspiracy winds up psychically bonded to a God of magic: 1900's fantasy, slow burn m/m romance
I’m a part-time retail employee existing in a small town in rural Australia! I still have a copy of the first completed “novel” I ever wrote, circa 2007/2008; I’d love to think I’ve come a long way since my blatant Buffy rip-off at thirteen.
I have a degree in creative writing, and a few small nonfiction pieces regularly shared in a local magazine, but largely my distraction with completing and publishing a genuine novel distracts me from any other contributions – go big or bust!!
I enjoy books with darker themes that can still manage to be witty or wry, and quiet surrealism is a good way to win me over fast.
Favourite books/series include: The Raven Cycle, The Foxhole Court, Neverwhere, The Outsiders.
Hard scifi, contemporaries & less inclined towards first person POV, but I’m happy to hear a pitch for anything.
In Rhain, magic is a death sentence. Once, Arcanists flourished and lived among the people, using their gifts from the Arcane – the void between life and death – for their own purposes. But twenty years ago Emperor Ryker decreed that all Arcanists would automatically be drafted to the Imperial military, sent to the front lines to fight his unwinnable war in the North.
Nathaniel Carmonte lost his mother to those laws a decade ago. Now, he lives with his sister in their empty family home by the sea and wants nothing do with the military, magic, and politics that destroyed his family.
Except in one terrible night Nate loses everything he loves and instead gains something he had hoped he never would – magic. Spirited away into the grasp of the military to learn how to weaponize his magic, Nate thinks things can’t get any worse.
They can.
The only witness to a horrific conspiracy, psychically bound to a flesh-and-blood God summoned from the Arcane itself, Nate must go on the run from the whole of the Empire, desperate to keep the earth shattering power from the hands of the men who would use it ruin the world.
If there’s one thing Nate is going to learn it’s that things can always, always get worse.
The explosion nearly knocked Nate clear off the rooftop.
Beneath him, all the carefully placed shingles he’d spent the morning tentatively tacking into place shivered as the ground rocked, and he watched, dismayed, as several tore themselves free to plummet to the dirt. Nate himself clung tightly to the gutter, spitting out the nails in his mouth and dropping his hammer to keep from joining them.
“Carmonte!” called an aggrieved voice from the ground. “What the fuck did you do now?”
“It wasn’t me, Mr. Dallas,” Nate called, but he was barely paying attention, staring off in the distance with wide eyes. On the opposite side of the city towards Dime’s half-dead docks, he could see what looked like a wave of water crashing back down into the ocean. There was a pressure in the air, something suffocating like breathing through mud, and Nate shuddered as he crawled his way towards the ladder, anxious that at any moment another explosion would hit and he’d be sent crashing back to earth too.
Mr. Dallas was waiting for him in the doorway of his house, squinting mulishly through the streets where people were gathered together to whisper and stare. When he saw Nate’s dirty boots climbing down the final rung he turned that gaze on him instead. “And where do you think you’re going?”
“To see what’s happening,” Nate said, but Mr. Dallas’s hand clutched at his shoulder, yanking him brutally back before Nate could make a run for it.
“Don’t even think on it,” he said, face dark. “There’s no use heading over there, you’ll just get in the way.”
“My sister,” Nate said, trying to keep calm. “I have to see if she’s okay. She was working today.”
The look Mr. Dallas gave him was pitying but firm. “Your sister will be fine. Take more than that to squash you Carmonte cockroaches. Besides, by the time you make your way over there the whole are will be on lock down.”
I have several incomplete novels on the backburner, and an ever-growing doc of all the ideas I’d love to get around to once I have more space from this project.
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