The Black Pages: Dark Fantasy Collection

Some worlds were never meant to be saved.

Only survived.

Black Pages: Dark Fantasy is a collection of five independent stories set within brutal worlds of monsters, demons, necromancy, ancient gods and forgotten kings.

Moving through nameless forests, burning villages, ruined castles, black towers and cities built beneath the shadow of hungry gods, the collection explores a darker kind of fantasy, one in which magic rarely arrives without a price, power is almost always bought with suffering, and survival does not necessarily mean victory.

Each story introduces new characters, new settings and a different nightmare. Together, they explore what happens when ordinary people are forced into worlds governed by forces far older, stronger and crueller than themselves.

In Abyss, royal scout and cartographer Elizabeth Veyne enters an unmapped forest in the northern marches and discovers that some blank spaces exist for a reason. After fleeing a monstrous creature through the trees, Elizabeth falls into a deep pit, and awakens badly injured at the bottom.

The creature has fallen with her.

What follows is a stripped-back story of survival in which maps, titles and experience become meaningless. Elizabeth has no army, no magical weapon and no convenient rescue waiting above. There is only an injured woman, a wall of wet earth, and something enormous beginning to wake in the darkness behind her.

Bloodforge turns towards the destruction of home.

Bram has left warfare behind. Once a soldier capable of breaking men beneath a warhammer, he has built another life as a village blacksmith, husband to Anwen and father to thirteen-year-old Freya. His forge is no longer a place for weapons, but for horseshoes, tools, hinges, cradle fittings and the small pieces of iron from which ordinary lives are made.

Then the demons come.

As the village of Heritage burns and creatures move through its streets, Bram is forced to take up the weapon he swore never to carry again. But the horror lies in more than the monsters outside his door. Somewhere beneath the husband, father and craftsman, the warrior he tried to bury is still waiting, and part of him remembers violence far too well.

In Cinderborn, the collection abandons the human perspective almost entirely.

A necromancer named Varrus Kel murders a woman called Elowen and uses her death to summon something from the fire itself. He names the creature Cinderborn and binds it through magic to obey his commands, transforming a living force of flame into a weapon capable of reducing soldiers, villages and anyone who opposes him to ash.

But something of Elowen remains.

Fragments of memory begin surfacing within the creature: a home, bread, songs, a little wooden bird and, most importantly, the memory of a daughter named Mira.

As those remnants become stronger, Cinderborn develops into a story about identity, memory and rebellion. The creature may have been summoned as a weapon, but consciousness brings with it an increasingly dangerous question:

If something has been created to obey, does that mean obedience must remain its nature?

Dominion enters the drowned city of Tzun-Ka, where humanity exists beneath the rule of the Sszarik, a powerful reptilian civilisation whose temples, laws and rituals are built upon generations of human servitude.

Cara has never known freedom. The iron collar around her throat belonged to her mother before her and her grandmother before that. Humans labour in the reed pits, live in mud barracks and disappear when the priests decide their gods require sacrifice.

Above everything stand seven black pyramids.

Beneath the greatest of them waits the Maw.

When Cara is selected for a ritual from which nobody returns, she is taken beneath the pyramid and finally confronts the truth at the centre of the Sszarik empire. What she discovers changes the meaning of power itself. The civilisation that has spent generations teaching humanity to crawl may not have been built upon strength at all.

It may have been built upon fear.

Dominion expands dark fantasy into something larger: a story of oppression, inherited obedience, religious terror and rebellion, where breaking a chain does not necessarily mean escaping whatever was waiting at the other end of it.

The collection closes with Riverrun, a Gothic descent into a place where history has refused to remain buried.

Riverrun Castle has stood abandoned for two hundred years. Its towers have fallen, its walls are breaking apart, and even the surrounding countryside appears to have withdrawn from it. Local stories claim that King de Montfort the Red cursed the castle before his death.

A young thief and grave-robber considers such stories superstition.

What matters is the crown supposedly buried with the king.

Armed with rope, a knife, a lamp and the confidence of someone who has survived by stealing from people unable to stop him, he enters Riverrun in search of enough gold to change his life. Beneath the ruined castle he finds hidden passages, ancient traps, a burial court preserved in death and the tomb of a ruler whose cruelty survived far longer than his kingdom.

And King de Montfort has never been particularly tolerant of thieves.

Across all five stories, Black Pages: Dark Fantasy treats fantasy not as escape, but as danger.

Dark, violent and steeped in Gothic atmosphere, Black Pages: Dark Fantasy blends dark fantasy, supernatural horror, sword-and-sorcery, creature horror, necromancy and ancient myth with intensely personal stories of survival, family, grief and resistance.

Its worlds contain monsters, but the collection is equally interested in what creates them: cruelty disguised as authority, fear disguised as religion, violence disguised as necessity, and power convinced that possession is the same thing as ownership.

At its heart, Black Pages: Dark Fantasy asks a question that runs through every one of its worlds:

What remains when everything that once made you feel safe has been taken away?

Sometimes the answer is fear.

Sometimes it is rage.

And sometimes, somewhere in the darkness, something finally stands.