All around him, vast forces have been moving their pieces into place for the final confrontation. An overworked archangel tries to debug the laws of physics. Henry Kissinger transforms the ancient conflict between Heaven and Hell into a US-Soviet proxy war. A Mexican hedge wizard with no actual magic wreaks havoc using the dark art of placebomancy. The Messiah reads a book by Peter Singer and starts wondering exactly what it would mean to do as much good as possible...Aaron doesn't care about any of this. He and his not-quite-girlfriend Ana are engaged in something far more important – griping about magical intellectual property law. But when a chance discovery brings them into conflict with mysterious international magic-intellectual-property watchdog UNSONG, they find themselves caught in a web of plots, crusades, and prophecies leading inexorably to the end of the world.

    Yet after a night gone from bad to worse she is offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by the right hand of the Empress, the infamous Black Knight: to become his apprentice and learn the business of villainy from one of the most dangerous men in Creation. It’s probably a trap, but when has that ever stopped her? For the sake of the land of her birth, she is more than willing to get her hands dirty. They say the first step on the path to the Tower is the hardest.Considering the amount of people already trying to kill her, ‘they’ might have a point.-------------------------------------------------------A Practical Guide to Evil is a fantasy series about a young girl named Catherine Foundling making her way through the world – though, in a departure from the norm, not on the side of the heroes. Is there such a thing as doing bad things for good reasons, or is she just rationalizing her desire for control? Good and Evil are tricky concepts, and the more power you get the blurrier the lines between them become.

     Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity. Student mage Laura Ferno has designs on the future: her mother died trying to reach space using magic, and Laura wants to succeed where she failed. But first, she has to work out what went wrong. And who her mother really was. And whether, indeed, she's dead at all...

    Features Lex Luthor as the villain protagonist as he comes to grips with the arrival of an alien god. Occasional point-of-view chapters/sections featuring Lois Lane. Takes place outside any established comics continuity.

    Created to prepare soldiers for the nightmarish reality of urban warfare, it is a virtual world locked in eternal civil war. Its thirty million digital inhabitants are ruled by duplicates of some of history's cruellest tyrants: Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust; Beria, Stalin's arch executioner; Torquemada, the pitiless Inquisitor General; Robespierre, the face of the Reign of Terror. But something has gone badly wrong inside the Demi-Monde, and the US President's daughter has become trapped in this terrible world. It falls to eighteen-year-old Ella Thomas to rescue her, yet once Ella has entered the Demi-Monde she finds that everything is not as it seems, that its cyber-walls are struggling to contain the evil within and that the Real World is in more danger than anyone realises.

    Over the course of eight years, he shared these worlds with his friends through twice-weekly sessions of tabletop gaming. Now at the age of seventeen, he finds himself in Aerb, a world that appears to be an amalgam of those many notebooks, stuck trying to find the answers to why he's there and what this world is trying to say. The most terrifying answer might be that this world is an expression of the person he was back on Earth.Words:1654265 complete

    Follow Klein as he finds himself entangled with the Churches of the world—both orthodox and unorthodox—while he slowly develops newfound powers thanks to the Beyonder potions.

    She serves pasta with sausage, blue fruit juice, and dead acid flies on request. And she comes from another world. Ours. It’s a bad day when Erin finds herself transported to a fantastical world and nearly gets eaten by a Dragon. She doesn’t belong in a place where monster attacks are a fact of life, and where Humans are one species among many. But she must adapt to her new life. Or die. In a dangerous world where magic is real and people can level up and gain classes, Erin Solstice must battle somewhat evil Goblins, deadly Rock Crabs, and hungry [Necromancers]. She is no warrior, no mage. Erin Solstice runs an inn. She’s an [Innkeeper].

    Though her troubled child- hood remained, the familiar society she had once lived in had all but disappeared, replaced by a parallel reality. Back in her teenage body, she must navigate her new world, once again forging friendships, filial bonds, and gain mastery over the skills necessary to survive in a 21st century Earth ruled by Mages and Magic, where humanity lives in enclaves shielded from Magical Beasts, Demi-humans, and otherworldly beings in a meta-world made unreal by a sorcerous apartheid

    He has no other. Friendless and alone he walks across a desolate, war-torn landscape, carrying nothing but a kit-bag, a legendary sword and a baby. His purpose is to reach the Shining City, last bastion of the human race, and deliver the sword, the only weapon that may make a difference in the ongoing war. But the Shining City is far away and the world is a very dangerous place.

    The world is rent by strife. The gods have turned away from us. In times past, heroes of sword and sorcery have always risen to turn back the tide of darkness… But what will become of us all, now that swords are obsolete, sorcery is industrialized, and heroism itself is considered a relic of the past?The times are changing…Incorporating elements of a Western, a Victorian romance, hints of steampunk and inspiration from the early novels of H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle, all set in a world of classic sword and sorcery, The Gods are Bastards is a genre-blending fantasy epic.Set in a familiar high-fantasy universe of wizards, dragons and elves, the action takes place roughly fifteen hundred years after the medieval stasis in which most high fantasy is set, during an era much like Earth’s Industrial Revolution. Mass production of enchanted goods has revolutionized all aspects of life, energy weapons have made blades and armor all but obsolete, and the world is connected and illuminated by magical analogues of trains, telegraphs and electric lights. With progress has come social and political upheaval: the scattered feudal kingdoms of yore have been consolidated into a now-precarious Empire, the clerics of various gods have organized themselves into a mighty Universal Church, and the first stirrings of modern education and an Enlightenment ethos have taken root in a young University. On the other hand, dragons are nearly extinct, elves have been herded onto reservations, and the days when a person could make a living as a wandering adventurer are long since over.It’s a new world, and the people of the Empire must learn to live in it, or fall to ancient threats they have tried to forget…https://tiraas.wordpress.com/about/

    Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer.This is the twelfth expedition.Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them, and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another, that change everything.After the disastrous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the Southern Reach—the secret agency that monitors these expeditions—is in disarray. In Authority, John Rodriguez, aka “Control,” is the team’s newly appointed head. From a series of interrogations, a cache of hidden notes and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, the secrets of Area X begin to reveal themselves—and what they expose pushes Control to confront disturbing truths about both himself and the agency he’s promised to serve. And the consequences will spread much further than that.It is winter in Area X in Acceptance. A new team embarks across the border on a mission to find a member of a previous expedition who may have been left behind. As they press deeper into the unknown—navigating new terrain and new challenges—the threat to the outside world becomes more daunting. The mysteries of Area X may have been solved, but their consequences and implications are no less profound—or terrifying.

    But for Miss Temple, Roger Bascombe’s cruel rejection will ignite a harrowing quest for answers, plunging her into a mystery as dizzying as a hall of mirrors—and a remote estate where danger abounds and all inhibitions are stripped bare.Nothing could have prepared Miss Temple for where her pursuit of Roger Bascombe would take her—or for the shocking things she would find behind the closed doors of forbidding Harschmort Manor: men and women in provocative disguise, acts of licentiousness and violence, heroism and awakening. But she will also find two allies: Cardinal Chang, a brutal assassin with the heart of a poet, and a royal doctor named Svenson, at once fumbling and heroic—both of whom, like her, lost someone at Harschmort Manor. As the unlikely trio search for answers—hurtling them from elegant brothels to gaslit alleyways to shocking moments of self-discovery-- they are confronted by puzzles within puzzles. And the closer they get to the truth, the more their lives are in danger. For the conspiracy they face—an astonishing alchemy of science, perverted religion, and lust for power—is so terrifying as to be beyond belief.

    Now she's stuck in a loop, dying again and again while she struggles to understand her strange predicament. How hard can it be to pass one stupid test? Sakura/Naruto/Hinata

    Responsibilities include saving other people’s lives and occasionally fighting unspeakable horrors. But this particular young man already has a few problems of his own, such as crippling shyness. No, seriously. He can barely even speak to people. It's really bad. Takes place in the modern fantasy world of Eleg. This book includes the first three story arcs of the ongoing serial novel. You can read the entire story (as much as has been written) for free at http://thezombieknight.blogspot.com Word count: ~88,000