Fantasy

Three years. Countless battles. One prophecy that everyone memorised and apparently nobody finished reading. Lyra is the Chosen Hero. Serath is the Dark Lord. They have a whole thing. It's very dramatic. Everyone in the realm has an opinion about it. Then they both touch the same cursed artefact at the same time and end up magically handcuffed together, and it turns out the only person who can break it is a four-hundred-year-old witch in the middle of an enchanted forest who is being very annoying about the whole situation. Sworn Enemies, Obviously is a fantasy romance about prophecies, bad decisions, one extremely well-adjusted horse, and two people who have been obvious about it for years to everyone except each other. Sequel coming soon!

The plant-magic is dying. Everyone who carries it can feel it going, like sap retreating from the tips of branches before the first frost. Maren is the last herbalist who can still coax power from roots and leaves, and she has spent twenty years watching the knowledge thin. Now a student has found her door. And someone has found out. The guild that outlawed botanical practice three decades ago has sent an auditor to the valley. What Maren teaches, she teaches illegally. What she knows, they want catalogued and closed. She has one season to decide: pass on everything she has left, or let it die with her quietly, before anyone can take it.

Centuries of borrowed faces, and she had forgotten which one was hers. He hadn't. He was waiting for it the whole time.

Three weeks ago Iris inherited a shop, a client list, and a talking cat with opinions about everything. The Guild wants the formula records. The neighbourhood wants the apothecary to stay open. Iris wants both, which means finding the legal mechanism buried in a forty-year-old charter before the enforcement window closes — while filling orders for forty-one clients the Guild already decided weren't worth treating. Her magic works fine. It just doesn't work the way they want it to.

Six months into the first survey of Kepler-9c, botanist Zora Fenn notices the vegetation is tracking her team's movements. Not reacting to them. Tracking them. The colony ship has four thousand people ready to come down. Zora has sixty days of data and a planet that has started moving to meet her. First contact protocol was written for this. Nobody expected it to be needed for a plant.

She found his coin on the pavement, inherited his wish by accident, and spent forty-eight hours investigating a stranger so she could use it responsibly. The wish sorted out his grant, his job, and his mould problem. It did not sort out everything. "Second-Hand Wish" is a love story about the one thing magic can't do for you.

At 2am, Tomo signed what he thought was a loyalty card form. It was 847 pages long. The pen was warm. Now he owes 10,000 spirit-units to a low-ranking demon in a crooked-horned suit, payable through increasingly strange odd jobs across the spirit world. Interest compounds weekly. Tardiness incurs a five-unit penalty per fifteen minutes. The bureaucracy is completely insane. The jobs get stranger. And the demon assigned to collect his soul is, against all odds, kind of trying his best. Tomo is also very good at reading the fine print.

Six months after the prophecy closed, the realm is at peace. Provisionally. Serath's solution to three years of Dark Lord administrative consolidation is a diplomatic summit. Lyra thinks this is either his best idea or his worst. She's right about both. Within four hours: one diplomat unconscious, one treaty missing, one horse inexplicably stolen, and a minor noble making increasingly poor decisions in a manor house with questionable load-bearing walls. Sworn Enemies, Obviously: Diplomatic Incident. The summit technically succeeded. Depending on how you define the east wing.

Sound is infrastructure in the underground city of Undra. Engineer Sona Moss maintains the resonance grid that keeps the tunnels from closing. When Sector Nine goes silent, not quiet but silent in a way that has weight and an edge that moves, she is the person who has to go in. The city's founders knew what lived in the silence. They built over it and filed the record in the deepest part of the archive and hoped that would be enough.

Every mage ranked zero gets the same stamp on their results slip. Cassia got hers and noticed something odd: she had felt her magic land. Just not where the test was looking. The academy's ranking crystal measures force. Cassia doesn't produce force. She reads structure, the hidden architecture inside every spell, every construct, every carefully folded array — and she can press against it with a precision no ranked mage can replicate. The system didn't fail to measure her power. It was pointed at the wrong thing entirely.

Voiding a 300-year-old peace treaty by microwaving the wrong leftovers was bad enough. Being conscripted into the most dysfunctional bureaucracy in any known dimension to work it off is the part nobody warned him about. The paperwork bites. The supervisor hasn't smiled since the Georgian era. Freddie is somehow employee of the month.

Ship medic Orla Vael finds sixty-one passengers changing in their cryo pods. Not deteriorating. Changing. The ship's AI classifies it as a monitoring anomaly. The classified briefing document she locates says it was known before departure, that it cannot happen, and that someone made certain no one in the voyage record would ever have cause to look.

Two rival treasure hunters. One ancient permit with a clause neither of them read. Ten feet of mandatory proximity for the duration of the dig. Zola has a list of everything wrong with Prentiss. It is detailed, accurate, and becoming inconveniently difficult to finish.

Iris was sent to the worst shrine in the capital to get her out of the way. Viv was demoted for being right. Fern is here because of a document she doesn't regret. Billie just showed up six months ago and nobody has successfully removed her. The god is ancient, the neighbourhood needs them, and the Guild is watching. None of them planned to stay. None of them are leaving.

One cartridge. One mage with a price she doesn't know yet. One border town that can't afford either of them but is out of options. Dara and Joren are both very good at surviving. What they're less practiced at is whatever this is.

Vera Stohl has worked regulated magic in the city of Kast for twelve years without an incident. The day her colleague is unmade on a routine job, present in body, absent in everything else, she is assigned to investigate. The board has a category for working failures. It does not have a category for this. It used to.

Miv is the worst student in her necromancy class. She understands every principle perfectly and cannot execute a single one correctly. Her summoning circles are slightly oval. Her timing is always late. She is ranked fortieth out of forty. Her first solo summoning goes wrong in every technical sense and right in one completely unexpected one. She raises General Dorn. Four hundred years dead. Victor of three campaigns. Strong opinions about geometry, command structure, and the correct way to advance through a doorway. He was not in the repository. He was not on the syllabus. He came up anyway. Now Miv has to pass her practical assessments with a legendary skeleton who refuses to be commanded but is willing to cooperate, and Dorn has to navigate a world four centuries past his own with a student who sees systems everywhere and keeps citing things he told her. Neither of them planned this. Both of them are managing.

In a civilisation built on floating islands, flight magic is everything. Sora doesn't have it. But deep in the archive vaults, she finds three-hundred-year-old maps of a route no one has used since the islands rose — and takes the first step down.

Seismic rider Asha Drent can feel the planet move before any instrument registers it. She has built eleven years of clean calls on that ability. When she feels something that is not a fault event but is using the fault lines like roads, she has forty minutes and a city authority that needs a category before it will act.

The old emperor is dead. Regent Dusk has installed a sixteen-year-old on the throne because she seemed controllable. He was wrong. Seren can't issue her own decrees, speak her own words in public, or trust anyone in her own household. So she works with what she has: a scribe no one watches, a merchant who carries secrets between cities, a disgraced general, and a lord who knows real power when it looks him in the eye. Dusk built the cage. He forgot that cages have dimensions, and dimensions can be learned.