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tragedy

Forbidden West: Ballad of Akelldema Miyamoto

Born in late 1864 beneath the cold skies of Hokkaido, Akelldema Miyamoto enters a Japan caught between fading steel and rising industry. His father, Hiroshi, once a formidable samurai, has sheathed his blade to serve as a physician to a powerful lord, walking the narrow path between tradition and survival. Through harsh herbal regimens and disciplined breathwork, he forges his son into something steadier than most boys his age, preparing him for a future neither of them can fully see. By 1879, unrest coils through the country. Old loyalties are hunted. Food grows scarce in certain districts. Rumors move faster than horses. In the lord’s estate, Princess Aiko Takamori stands at the heart of fragile political balance, and Akelldema, still only fifteen, finds himself drawn into her orbit even as the ground shifts beneath them. When violence can no longer be contained, Akelldema, seventeen and nearing manhood, is chosen to escort Aiko and seven loyal companions across the Pacific to California. What awaits them is not only gold and opportunity, but the consequences of ambition unbound. In the American Wset, the brilliant and obsessive Dr. Nikolai Richtofen has traded provisions to a desperate tribe in exchange for their medicine man, seeking to master life itself. His experiments awaken a corruption that seeps into the blood, spreading by bite and turning the living into something hollow and driven by a darker will. Separated from the princess and believing his duty has failed, Akelldema is cast into a fronteir where greed, secrecy, and infection thrive in the shadows of mines and desert laboratories. Armed with his father’s teachings and the discipline to resist the taint in his own veins, he must hunt for the truth, protect what remains of his honor, and confront the man whose curiosity has begun to unravel the boundary between life and something far more dangerous.
Future_Gadget_Labs · 4.8k Views

Lurops: God of the Broken Wave

In 1954, a nuclear blast went off in the Pacific. It didn’t kill the creature sleeping in the deep trench below. It woke him up. When he rose from the ocean, he wasn’t just an animal anymore. He was something bigger — a massive blue giant, shaped like a bell, with a mind that could think and wait and remember. He had already died once. He knew it wasn’t the end of everything. People didn’t know what to call him. The news called him a monster. Scientists gave him a long, strange name: RERUNBACKTOKAIJU. The kids who lived through the wreckage called him Lurops. He destroyed cities. He was burned by acid. He came back. Smarter. Stronger. Somehow, he even learned to surf. Over the next seventy years, he faced things no one could have imagined: a nightmare from the deep that ate living genes, a shining hero robot built from grief and bad guesses, a machine that slowly became the closest thing he had to a friend, a son who hatched without warning on a dark beach, and a terrible weapon made from his own mother’s bones. People tried to give him a role. Hero. Guardian. Monster. Savior. He refused them all. “I’m not yours,” he would say. “I’m just here. The waves are good. That’s enough.” But it was never just about the waves. It was about staying. About choosing not to end everything. About living in a world that hurt him — and not walking away from it. It was never simple. It was always more. LUROPS is a five-arc kaiju epic about destruction, inheritance, the stubbornness of survival, and whether a creature built by catastrophe can choose, with full knowledge of what it costs, to become something else.
Fruitmoody · 1.2k Views

The Heart of Sorrows Book 1: The Labyrinth of Endless Grief

He sacrificed everything and everyone to save her. Now she’s the monster he must kill. Zeek is a man running out of reasons to keep going. A wandering rogue turned pariah, he has spent years feeding the Heart of Sorrows—a living labyrinth built on ancient genocide, whose walls shift, whose dead rise, and whose hunger never ceases. He keeps returning for one reason: Lilliana. His wife. A woman of near-angelic descent who sacrificed herself for his survival and became the labyrinth’s unwilling queen in the process. Every expedition ends in failure. The blood of companions, hired blades, and friends alike stains his hands. Desperate and running out of time, Zeek assembles one final company: Verris, a brutal mercenary duty-bound to the men he lost inside those same walls; Kerris, a scarred archer who survived the labyrinth once and carries the grief of those who didn’t; Amon, a fire mage from Kemet who carries a reincarnated soul older than the corruption itself; and Heka, a Shu-Ra queen—a being the gods tried to erase from existence—who drifts in smoke beside the man she loves across lifetimes. Together, they descend into a nightmare that remembers them, adapts to them, and weaponizes everything they’ve ever lost. At its heart, The Labyrinth of Endless Grief is a story about love as an act of destruction. It encompasses the specific grief of watching someone you love become unrecognizable—not dead, but gone—and the terrible choices made in the space between who they were and what they’ve become. Zeek doesn’t just fight monsters. He fights his own hubris, his guilt, and the dawning realization that saving Lilliana may require destroying the last version of her that remains. The labyrinth doesn’t invent horrors. It finds the ones we never imagined carrying and leaves them with us.. This is a grimdark tragic romance inspired by Dragon Age: The Calling, the atmosphere of FromSoftware’s Souls series. Book One of the Heart of Sorrows trilogy.
Jordan_Peterson_2789 · 6.5k Views

CROWNED IN ASH : THE DEVIL'S ONLY PULSE

Power didn't taste like wine or gold. It tasted like ash. For five thousand years, Lucian Vane has ruled the shadows of Sicily as the untouchable Devil Don—a man whispered about like a curse and feared like a god. But beneath the empire, beneath the wealth and bloodshed, he is nothing more than a king in a graveyard. Cursed by an ancient betrayal, his touch is death itself. Skin to skin, and everything turns to ash. Empires have fallen beneath his hands… but so has every chance at warmth, at life, at something as simple as a heartbeat against his own. He has everything—except the one thing he cannot have. Human touch. Elara Valerius is the opposite of everything he is. Where his world burns, hers is empty. A Null. A void. A woman untouched by magic—and untouched by feeling. Raised without emotion, she moves through life with cold detachment, untouched by fear, love, or pain. So when she is offered in place of her sister to settle a deal with the Devil Don, she accepts without hesitation. Not as a sacrifice… but as someone who has nothing left to lose. She walks into his domain not to survive— but to finally feel something. Even if it’s death. But death doesn’t come. When Lucian’s lethal hand closes around her throat, the world does not crumble into dust. Instead, something impossible happens— The curse breaks. For the first time in five millennia, Lucian feels a heartbeat beneath his palm. For the first time in her empty existence, Elara feels fire. What binds them is not salvation. It is addiction. Their touch becomes a dangerous hunger—one that drags Lucian closer to obsession and awakens something fragile and dangerowithin Elara. But the truth carved into her very bones threatens to destroy them both. Because Elara is not just the cure to his curse. She is the blood of the woman who destroyed him. And the closer they get, the more the past begins to rise from the grave—bringing betrayal, vengeance, and a fate that was written in blood long before they were ever born. In a world where touch means death, they are the only exception. But some curses were never meant to be broken. And some loves were never meant to survive.
qudseesheikh · 1k Views