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myth

Dawnbringer: Lightborn

Lightborn is the centerpiece of the Dawnbringer series of novels in the world of Irándiel, upon the small continent of Telmérion, cold and rugged and yet inhabited since the beginning of human history by the first family of humankind. Though the setting is high fantasy—a work of co-creative imagination fashioning a mythical world with its own history and geography—the plot and the ins-and-outs of the world are deeply realistic, portraying as it were an ancient and long-forgotten past of our own world. Or more precisely, what is offered here is a mythical exposition of the true past that we all share—with very little magic or other fantasy tropes, but with a great deal of “magic,” in other words, a world filled with wonders and terrors of all kinds, from the ancient guardians of the world, the Anaíon, to vicious and deadly beasts such as dragons, eötenga, and vru’ádach. The characters thus find themselves caught in the cosmic battle between light and darkness, between the weakness of love and the power of hate, which casts its rays and its shadows also into the heart of every man and woman. The journey marked out before their feet calls for integrity, fidelity, and heroism, and also something more, something that lies at the heart of every good adventure and every life, and which is the very measure of man. When Eldárien returns to his homeland after many years away—burdened by the awareness that he has perpetrated great evil at the hands of an Empire whose knight he has become—he encounters a continent riven by strife and war and threatened by creatures even more horrifying, born of the very darkness itself. He wishes to lay aside the sword, to leave behind a past marked with violence and bloodshed, but he also longs to aid his people against the forces that endanger their very existence. And such a path he cannot walk alone, facing obstacles both within and without, and he finds given to him both the light that he wishes to serve and friends to share the journey. All the while the land that he loves slides inexorably into conflict, into what shall be known henceforth as the War of Darkness, and he and those to whom he is joined are called upon to share the fate of their people, looking forward in hope to the promised coming of dawn after darkest night.
JoshuaElzner · 95.6k Views

House Of Puppets

Arthur Moreau disappeared during a live broadcast. No warning. No transition. No last words. One moment he was finishing a world event in front of fifty thousand viewers. The next, he was gone — and what arrived somewhere else was Gepetto: his character, his creation, the identity he had spent years building inside a game that no longer contained him. The world that received him has existed through dozens of eras. Civilizations rose and collapsed long before humanity had a word for either. What walks its roads now — human and elf and dragon and beast-kind and peoples whose names don't translate — are the living residue of everything that already happened here. The gods who shaped the early eras did not all survive them. The world doesn't advertise how much of it is arrangement of ruins. Elysion is a Republic in the way that a cracked foundation is still a building. Beneath the gas lamps and the elevated rails, the actual structure is simpler: those with enough weight act as though permission doesn't apply to them. The working class breathes chemical residue and calls it employment. There is no king. There are only consequences. The Church of the Solar God holds it together, which is not a metaphor. The Solar God is not a symbol. He walks. He acts. He has reasons of his own. Nine others arrived the way Gepetto arrived — carrying what they built inside the game, now operating in a world where what they touch does not reset. They are not heroes. They are ten people who understood a system well enough to reach its limits, placed inside a reality where the limits are elsewhere and the other Players have their own intentions. Gepetto does not try to fight it. He studies it. While others assert themselves through force or faith or the assumption that visibility equals strength, he builds something quieter. A structure: distributed, patient, invisible until it is not. The story that begins with one man in one city does not stay there. The skills are real now. The strings are real. And what they touch does not reset. Because the puppeteer pulls the strings. But in a world this old, someone is always watching. AUTHOR'S NOTE: House of Puppets is not a power fantasy. It's slow by design — the kind that accumulates, not the kind that stalls. The story starts small and expands aggressively. The pacing shifts across volumes. It will surprise you in directions you didn't see coming. Tonal influences: Lord of Mysteries, Reverend Insanity, the Soulsborne tradition, Dostoevsky. Not references — register. I'm a reader who started this by studying what great work does and trying to do that. The story is strange and volatile partly because of that, and I think that's also why some of it works. The ambition is real. The reading will tell you if it got there. [This work is currently on hiatus. I'm not sure when I'll be back, but I haven't abandoned it (at least not forever!). I promise to come back and continue the story later on.]
MisterElegance · 164.4k Views