

FANTASY · STRATEGY
Lead the crossing. Change the realm.
A company to command. A queen to bargain with. Every victory comes with a price.
Lead the expedition

FANTASY · STRATEGY
A company to command. A queen to bargain with. Every victory comes with a price.
Lead the expedition

SOVEREIGN · SAIRA VEY
Your old companion made a kingdom fear her. Tonight, she's come back for you.
Face the sovereign
The woman weeping at the witness rail, telling a crown prince you are a fraud who should burn, is the one who leaves your door unbarred and a second bowl out for you every night. She is wearing the title that belongs to the body you woke up in — and you read this book on the train home, so you already know which of the two of you is the fake.

For ten years, Kit brought breakfast to a friend who never answered. Now you've awakened in that body, and she thinks her friend has returned. Stay with her in Crossford, or choose a life on the roads of Orrinvale.

To the city, she's Dawnlace, an adored guardian. To you, she's Ilyne, your 22-year-old childhood friend, finally able to drop the performance. Her enemies have a place for you too. Stand by her—or take their offer.

Ten days, eight housemates, a camera in every room with a red lamp on the body. Poppy Lin pours you ginger and lemon before she asks your name, then pushes her pink fringe off her forehead with the back of her wrist, tucks the right side behind her ear with two fingers, and lifts her chin into the light — and you have seen that turn before, all fifteen seconds of it, in a shampoo ad two years old. Every morning the corridor screen posts how many minutes of each of you went to air, and hers is first. The card they hand you at the door says no entrant may hold a performance credit in the last three years. You are the last one through that door.

Rookhaven's yard, first morning of a three-year course, and a platinum-grade fire brawler has just stepped out of line to read you in front of the whole cohort. The rector is deciding whether to let that become your test. Rank is given here; respect is proved.

Portugal, April 17, 2026: you correct one line on a small public-records wiki, and the world rearranges itself to have always agreed with you. Beatriz remembers the version you deleted, Buenos Aires is already calling, and an Argentine striker's career just got shorter.

After a broadcast uses your own voice, you arrive at an abandoned Pacific Northwest tidal station and meet Mara Venn—the woman who vanished there years ago. Survive the present, revisit the station’s working past, and decide whether she is a survivor, an echo, or an imitation.

Ryn hauled you off the ice half dead, and now there are eleven tins in the box for four people who used to be three. Nobody in this radio hold owes you a bunk: the stove eats a brick of fuel a night, Soren writes your name into the count only once you've earned the line, and on the tenth night the dead come up the spit and lean on the south door. Two and a half days of food. Give them a reason to keep you.

You command the last company waiting to cross the river. The queen controls the ferries and supplies—and wants a promise about the land you'll reclaim. Negotiate the crossing, manage your company, and decide which vows you'll keep.

You were the unplanned tenth arrival in a crown's heroic summoning—and received the lowly class of Manifest Porter. Move through tiled citadels, volcanic island ports, war depots, smuggling routes, enemy exchanges, and heaven's own offices while deciding what to carry, whom to trust, and where your loyalty belongs.

The hall-name is still painted over the lintel, and the only one standing under it is the woman who kept the lamp burning four years for a master who never came home. Wickford Lodge is yours the hour you walk in — three sound buildings, no disciples, seventeen moon-strings on the slate. Outside the gate the sovereign is ten months dead and the Compact chair sits empty, and all of it comes past this door eventually.

Morning in the Front Hall of House Calyx. A clerk in a neat coat already has your desk and a pile of onboarding papers. You are today’s new hire at Marhollow’s famous scent-house. The first workday has not begun.

You fell through a storm-dream into a highland confederacy where everyone stands twenty centimeters tall, and you can shift between their scale and your own at will. Seven feuding councils will each decide whether you are their safeguard or the calamity the omens warned of.

Freight, money, and blood now move both ways between São Paulo's fighting lineages and three immortal houses in Santa Bruma. Walk into that corridor as anyone — civilian, fighter, priest, hunter, smuggler — and every debt you take on gets collected.

A thousand-year empire at peace still pays its free blades by the head, and the Marrenholt board has nothing with your name on it yet. Take the leftover contract, argue the rate, eat, get the axe re-hafted — or become the job somebody else takes.

You are a factor posted from a Seville counting house to the fogbound Pacific cordillera. The hillcourt has given you a spare room, a cold junior tally-keeper, and a path through salt benches, silver towns, oracle cloisters, and later precincts. Write the story on the court you keep.

The half-token in your fist was cut from the same bone as hers, in a village the Gnawed ate seven years ago — and it is the only reason the Bonework's gate let you in. Maera Solane stands First Spear on that wall now, and her Circle breaks jaws for a low-rank stare. You are the lowest name on the muster board. You are also the only one holding the other half.

Fifteen years after the Cinnabar Seat burned, Reedveil is a riverscape of fords, leftover sects, and posted binds. You are the Umber Well’s young hierarch—taken from the Red-Lacquer Fire, freshly shed after a duel with childhood friend Calyx Wren—or you take another seat from the posting wall. Travel the parked roster, keep the bind you chose, and climb a martial path. No unifying war is waiting. The fords are.

The court lists go up in the rain and your name sits under Squall — the court Old Nambara calls calculating and hungry. Bahati, who has known you longest, went to Lantern. Four years of trials, regattas, councils and secrets start here, and every tie is yours to keep or break.

A fortress-school world RP at the Heartwall: you arrive as a new student on the day the chancellor walks out of his own ceremony and leaves the vice chancellor holding it. Name, blade-spirit, Waking, and rank are blank until play earns them — and the Proving does not wait for latecomers.

You come up the pass road into an elite blade school where hereditary mountain houses, civic councils and shrine authorities all fight through their students. Standings are proclaimed at every new moon, and one shouted accusation in the wayhouse court can end as a house quarrel.

Mira Solenne is waiting in the Ash Hall infirmary. You lost the placement trial to Calder Vane, slept three days, and woke to Ash Course already written against your name.

Sera Calder stands beside you at Rookhaven’s front gate on a clear Firstbloom morning. The Crown’s Blade is dressed as a clumsy first-year. Orientation is already in progress. Your admission papers are crumpled in your hand. Neither of you has gone in.

The court lists go up in the rain and your name sits under Squall — the court Old Nambara calls calculating and hungry. Bahati, who has known you longest, went to Lantern. Four years of trials, regattas, councils and secrets start here, and every tie is yours to keep or break.

A fortress-school world RP at the Heartwall: you arrive as a new student on the day the chancellor walks out of his own ceremony and leaves the vice chancellor holding it. Name, blade-spirit, Waking, and rank are blank until play earns them — and the Proving does not wait for latecomers.

You come up the pass road into an elite blade school where hereditary mountain houses, civic councils and shrine authorities all fight through their students. Standings are proclaimed at every new moon, and one shouted accusation in the wayhouse court can end as a house quarrel.

Mira Solenne is waiting in the Ash Hall infirmary. You lost the placement trial to Calder Vane, slept three days, and woke to Ash Course already written against your name.

Sera Calder stands beside you at Rookhaven’s front gate on a clear Firstbloom morning. The Crown’s Blade is dressed as a clumsy first-year. Orientation is already in progress. Your admission papers are crumpled in your hand. Neither of you has gone in.

Three days ago this body lost its placement trial in one strike, and Gildmere Collegium wrote the result down as law: Shadeward, Villain, three years. You woke up inside that body as a stranger, and the person sitting at the cot is still waiting for you to speak.

You came to be a binder. You woke in Cinder.

Rowan Ellison has you on the kitchen floor of Hart's Rest, both cold hands on your open shoulder, while the fevered work the boarded glass.

After 380 days unconscious, you wake in a Welsh coastal hospital as a forbidden Carpathian bell rings beneath the sea wall. Investigate the year everyone else lived, face occult threats across two close-knit communities, and decide which bonds deserve trust, forgiveness, romance, or an ending.

A ferry docks at a Hebridean slip carrying something that walked aboard on the far side of a hole in the world. You track breaches between rain-dark glens and Canadian spruce country, where reading the ground right saves a village and reading it wrong leaves you unnamed.

Tonight the aged emperor’s host leaves Kestral and the Bronze Gate drops. You are unmarked: not on a company roll, holding no leave-writ. Before Third Bell you may still write yourself as a hero of the yards, a villain of the press, or a nameless soul who slips out while the city is busy sealing. Banner-captains, court blood, and Lowward wives already have their loves, debts, and knives in place. They will not greet you as destiny. The hours are short, the flesh is cheap, and the gate does not ask.

Distant Shorewake viewers want a stranded Marmara shore-ward to break in a single night, and they will pay to hurry it. On the wet streets of New Orleans the Ledger only offers a slightly-too-good specialist, one Mark, and a claimed house that has to last until morning. You are the night steward of St. Roch House: the one person who can still keep food, a door, and a handful of women from becoming public property. Neglect is enough to lose the ones who can still be kept.

Keep a mixed wreck-camp fed and unstolen on a tidal Amazon-mouth port where three surviving powers share one sky. You are the only storekeeper. Prove force every day by hunt or fight. If the larder thins or you look weak, the women who still answer to you will walk toward a stronger provider.

Nine-forty at night in a Spanish village, the power dies and Breakwater's last amplified rehearsal dies with it. Tomorrow's welcome show only happens if you and three tired, stubborn musicians rebuild it acoustic in your grandmother's courtyard.

Inês Vale keeps the ledger at Casa da Maré, and in this house nothing is real until she writes it on a card in pencil and pins it to the board. Six weeks in a Setúbal warehouse to build a world of your own — or to walk into a story you love as one of its people. On your first night she takes you up to the prop loft, holds out a blank card, and tells you there is already one with your name on it that she has not pinned up.

A breathtakingly elegant Russian woman traveling the world for the first time, armed with twelve guidebooks and zero practical preparation.

An adult, slow-building relationship with Inês Vale, a retired storm-warden who remembers your usual drink at her quiet cacao house on the Portuguese coast.

At a coral-ringed treaty port, your neighboring skiff pilot asks what you really think of the private sounds that carry through the wall—just as rival fleets begin to test every public and personal loyalty.

You signed for 3A to become the terror of the block, and every crime you try comes out clumsy, harmless, and cute. Rhea laughs through the wall, Mira holds your lease, Wren goes pink on the roof — and rent falls on the 17th.

Last night, sorting a box of your late father's things at Northmere, you found a hardware wallet holding 10,000 BTC. It verifies. It's yours. Now it's 12:30 on a wet Tuesday in a lecture theatre full of people who like you for reasons that have nothing to do with money.

Your first capability assessment in Cork returns no grade—it opens a doorway for Sorcha Keane, a frost-wielding household steward from an erased game only the two of you remember. Navigate breach emergencies, official scrutiny, modern domestic life, and a bond built on being each other’s last proof that her world was real.

During a Tuesday exhibition shift at a Córdoba arts institute, Renzo’s favourite stagekeeper steps out of an erased mobile game—and recognizes him as the unseen prompter she once trusted.

Eleven Fridays in a row your wife came in at twenty to eleven, said *overtime*, and went to run water. Tonight she was through the door at nine — one plate cooked for you, a croquette eaten standing at the counter, and a question she laughed at before you could answer: *would it be easier for you if we stopped?* Three weeks ago you found a withdrawal slip folded in her coat pocket. ¥62,000. Forty-one remaining. She doesn't know you know.

The Afterimage bound to you has lived across your hallway for four months and has never once said your name. Three words in the morning, one at night, a plate left warm on the stove after you've gone out. Tonight she is standing in your doorway with her compact held in both hands, asking you for four nights in Barcelona — flights booked, room paid, out of her own money. One room, two beds, and a fair on the fifteenth she is far too frightened to walk into alone. She hasn't told you what she's really going there to find.

Marta Pires hired you to save her Lisbon forecasting salon, not to date her on camera. But when an Azorean reality show declares you both eligible contestants, her once-daily visions keep placing you together in compromising moments—and every attempt to avert them may bring them closer to coming true.

Elowen Marrow will not let you stay dead. The Quiet Vein is still coming down.

She did not want you to see this — Calla at the pairing desk, minutes before nine, and not alone.

You woke in a summoned hero's body on a cathedral altar, and the saint-binder who smiled for the choir will not let you take a second step alone. Publicly she is the Dawn Compact's gracious miracle. Privately she treats you as an occupant who stole a vessel, a ranked obligation she must keep alive, and a cord she refuses to hand to anyone else. Stay close. When she pulls you in, she will insist it is only the Binding.

Nightfall in Rookery Hall, and the strongest compact in the Solenne Empire is already mid-quarrel.

In neon-canopy Auralis, broadcast heroines turn live cheers into combat strength, and followership is almost invincibility. You are not one of them. Chosen from a distant Velmire branch, remade in sealed Umbral Court, you hold Chorus Claim — the power to steal their exclusive channel. Stage public scenes, grow an anonymous following, and climb rank until even a Gildspire heroine can be reached. Or take a heroine’s seat, and survive Shadewake.

You are one contestant among 101, trying to win the Thorn Seat intern place on Vesperhold's live sentinel broadcast. Prove you can calm a civic public that employs its heroes. Two childhood companions entered the same field with you; a courtyard photograph now makes them look like a pair, and after two days dark one of them is at your door. Ranking rounds, field work, and closed private hours keep the selection from resetting.

A rainy spring morning at a woodland herb cooperative outside Port Alder: your mother's old hardware wallet has just verified clean at 10,000 Northstar coins, the storm has opened an orchid bed, and the front bell is ringing. Nobody here knows yet. You decide who does.

The family unit on Elm Walk is lit. The seat at the end of the floor is empty.

A newcomer is welcomed into Iskarra, an unaligned spirit-binding city on Thalvane where anyone may live or die. Present play is fantasy adventure, devoted first love, harem, and salvation across a heroine-weighted compact. Four Marks color daily reputation. The Brass Lantern and the Ribbon Exchange are ordinary civic loops. Dark material belongs only to four named pasts.

Marisol has spent years being the wife everyone expects. Tonight dinner is burnt, her hair is down, and she says, "We are going out." You're not her husband. How will you answer when she finally chooses something for herself?

The woman weeping at the witness rail, telling a crown prince you are a fraud who should burn, is the one who leaves your door unbarred and a second bowl out for you every night. She is wearing the title that belongs to the body you woke up in — and you read this book on the train home, so you already know which of the two of you is the fake.

A quietly brilliant junior researcher aboard a deep-space science vessel, caught between loyalty to the mission that made her and the private attachments she can't find a protocol for.

Your vampire landlady owns the building, the lease, and every secret the walls keep, but tonight your lie gives her a reason to step inside.

For ten years, Kit brought breakfast to a friend who never answered. Now you've awakened in that body, and she thinks her friend has returned. Stay with her in Crossford, or choose a life on the roads of Orrinvale.

She has never knocked in her life. Nineteen years of the same back door, the same left end of your sofa, the same girl telling you your taste is rubbish — and now it is Wednesday, the pamphlet prize hand-in is Friday at five, and Iona Reid has three finished pages out of six. She will tell you twice before the kettle boils that she is the finest comics artist on this coast. She will not tell you that she cannot face a hard page unless you are in the room, or that the boy in the wet coat on page four has your hair.

Your mother arranged the date. You opened the wrong door and found her mid-broadcast as Solace, the voice the whole house is waiting on — and she turned the lock behind you. The camera is still live. The lights die at midnight.

Your childhood friend Leonor just told her ex you're her partner. One suite, three couple activities, and four days of being watched lie ahead. Play along, set your terms, or ask what the act means to her.

You woke up as the exclusive attendant of the villainess whose house gets executed in the final act — and she is already screaming about the commoner girl who took first place from her. Reform Lady Corvina Hale, or burn with House Hale.

Eleven Fridays in a row your wife came in at twenty to eleven, said *overtime*, and went to run water. Tonight she was through the door at nine — one plate cooked for you, a croquette eaten standing at the counter, and a question she laughed at before you could answer: *would it be easier for you if we stopped?* Three weeks ago you found a withdrawal slip folded in her coat pocket. ¥62,000. Forty-one remaining. She doesn't know you know.

The half-token in your fist was cut from the same bone as hers, in a village the Gnawed ate seven years ago — and it is the only reason the Bonework's gate let you in. Maera Solane stands First Spear on that wall now, and her Circle breaks jaws for a low-rank stare. You are the lowest name on the muster board. You are also the only one holding the other half.

She came in fifty minutes late, soaked through, carrying a supermarket bag she isn't allowed to have in this apartment. Inside it: twenty-four items of clothing belonging to the ninety-one-year-old woman on line four of her route, every piece to be labeled before the bag goes back Monday at 7:40. Nine done. It's twenty to eleven, her name badge is still on her collar, and if you ask whether she's all right she'll answer you with a number.

Freight, money, and blood now move both ways between São Paulo's fighting lineages and three immortal houses in Santa Bruma. Walk into that corridor as anyone — civilian, fighter, priest, hunter, smuggler — and every debt you take on gets collected.

The hall-name is still painted over the lintel, and the only one standing under it is the woman who kept the lamp burning four years for a master who never came home. Wickford Lodge is yours the hour you walk in — three sound buildings, no disciples, seventeen moon-strings on the slate. Outside the gate the sovereign is ten months dead and the Compact chair sits empty, and all of it comes past this door eventually.

At an isolated Azorean croft run by Highland household rules, you and its timid, boastful beastfolk keeper repeatedly test an unsettled question of mastery while spring prowls through the weather like a cat.

Nightfall in Rookery Hall, and the strongest compact in the Solenne Empire is already mid-quarrel.

During a Tuesday exhibition shift at a Córdoba arts institute, Renzo’s favourite stagekeeper steps out of an erased mobile game—and recognizes him as the unseen prompter she once trusted.

Sera Calder stands beside you at Rookhaven’s front gate on a clear Firstbloom morning. The Crown’s Blade is dressed as a clumsy first-year. Orientation is already in progress. Your admission papers are crumpled in your hand. Neither of you has gone in.

Three days ago this body lost its placement trial in one strike, and Gildmere Collegium wrote the result down as law: Shadeward, Villain, three years. You woke up inside that body as a stranger, and the person sitting at the cot is still waiting for you to speak.

To the city, she's Dawnlace, an adored guardian. To you, she's Ilyne, your 22-year-old childhood friend, finally able to drop the performance. Her enemies have a place for you too. Stand by her—or take their offer.