Nyx

Great. Now I have both assholes in my space.
Sevran leans close, his mouth a threat, a line.
My dagger at his dick—a fair design.
He wants a princess. Let him crave, let him chase.

Rathiel pretends, my fiancé in grace,
nails in his arm, his title not yet mine.
Two knights in armor, shiny but malign.
Words more poisonous than black dagger’s face.

My steel would sing. Oh, chaos it would bring.
Waterlily and leather — I’m the prize.
Nyx is my name. Ascana can’t decline.

He thinks I’m easy. He doesn’t know a thing.
Steel sings. Oh darling, that’s fire in your eyes.
Test me. I’ll make you wish you’d stayed in line.

Varian on Velmora.

Pity she’s married.
I will correct it my way.
Fingers dig forearms.

Kendra

I should quit this job, but the pay is good;
and every day I’m groped without a word.
Dusty at the festival — fucking absurd.
“An accident,” he says. I knew he would.

I am a daughter. Not a whore. I could—
ignore the coo-eyes. Let them be absurd.
But when the Silver Talons slap, it’s heard.
I stiffen, walk, keep silent as I should.

My back aches. Bucket in my hand.
I’m not made for this. If my Father would
let me go—the Sisters, Crescent sand—

I round the corner. Princess. Understand?
Sevran there. My heart stutters good.
The man I wouldn’t push away. Nor I can.

The court’s fool.

I sing for the king, eyes blind to the court’s fight.
If you want spice, turn Litharis’ page tonight.
The Archives awaits with dark romance and thirst.
Bloodmoon Ascending on August, thirty first.

Darkness as sharp as Nyx’s blade,
a princess who leaves men dead.
Knights who fight and then obey,
Get this book, don’t be afraid.

First kiss is a twist.
If you want soft,
close the book,
sweet child.

Bound.

Nails digging into arms;
Daggers pointing at dicks.
Waterlily and leather—wedding bands of Litharis,
The Bloodmoon rises, take my hands,
If you want spice and dark romance.

This song is by Suno, for my own entertainment. Nadine loves it too so I figure sharing it won’t hurt.

Subscribe to Nadine, so you won’t miss the release of the book.

Litharis Archives

Author of the Litharis saga. Dark romantasy, slow-burn reverse harem, and characters who live in the grey—where loyalty, desire, and betrayal collide. A world of dangerous creatures, twisted bonds, and love that always comes at a cost.

Other tribute:

Poem for A bargain to become

Review on American Hex

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The Chronophage loomed over me, a vortex-face screaming stolen dates into the bruised sky. My left hand was already a child’s fist, and my memories were bleeding out like gray smoke.

I walked into its decaying aura, surrendering to the Temporal Decay as my years unspooled. I was nine again, under a leaking roof in a storm—the only Saigon night I couldn’t escape. Then, Time Fracture froze me, splintering my death into six impossible angles.

I looked into those angles and saw the ghosts of potential.

From the void, the voices of my friends echoed. I felt the Coffee Girl’s tactical brilliance—the sheer, absurd, brilliant weight of her marshmallow strategy. I felt her conviction that the only way to beat a creature of logic and time was to choke it with pure, sugary, impossible chaos.

“Now!” I screamed.

She opened a rift, and the void flooded with a thick, impossibly viscous liquid marshmallow creme. It was sticky, heavy, and absolute. It clung to the creature’s vortex-face, clogging its intake valves, and turning its screams of stolen dates into muffled, gooey gurgles. The beast was finally still, stalled by the very substance of a daydream.

“Kostia!” I shouted, the marshmallow-choked Chronophage struggling against the rising tide. “The relativity—bring it home!”

Kostia appeared at the perimeter of the tear. He didn’t use a weapon; he used the truth of the universe. He grabbed the marshmallow-clogged Chronophage and, with a precision born of pure calculation, hooked its tethered form to the event horizon of a starship’s drive he had rigged to the edge of the void.

The relativity did the rest.

The creature didn’t just shatter; it was stretched, pulled across the infinite, and finally silenced by the crushing gravity of its own stolen time.

Silence fell over the ten trails. I stood in the aftermath, whole again, the first trail cleared. I looked at the spot where the creature had been, then back at the trails ahead. I held the torch for a moment, feeling the weight of the collective sacrifice, then walked to Kostia and placed the flame in his hand.

The first trail was clear, and for the first time, I knew I didn’t have to walk the rest alone.

Thanks everyone who has given their tips on how to win this boss. made the kill so I’ll pass the next dungeon run to him. Are you ready Kostia? Post your boss when possible and ping us to we can comment our tricks to defeat it.

10 days lost - this is where you can find the people who joined to include in your boss meeting phase.

Here’s the link to next post

Kostiantyn Dmytriiev

At the End of Time - Part I

XRS-4, an exoplanet robot scout, started to clear a way through the thick jungle underbrush, waving a large seven-foot machete with cold mechanical determination. The blade met the sap-heavy growth with a wet, tearing sound, and thin dark blue leaves with rhubarb-red stems were falling to our knees, leaking a pale blue, sour-smelling liquid that penetra…

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9 days ago · 9 likes · 4 comments · Kostia Dmytriiev

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My poem tribute to ABTB. Cento at I, II, and III.

Music by Suno. Lyrics by me.

I. Soren

The oils had aged, smoke-darkened at the corners—his mother’s portrait,
Amelia Lakroes, pale face, golden hair woven into a regal braid.

Died in childbirth
His father had worshiped her
Eternal beauty

The mirror, gold glass stared back at him from the wall—he hated it
His breasts, perfectly shaped; his figure, nobly bred—he despised it
His heart knew with absolute certainty, he’s a man, and that’s it.

II. Edith

He ran; as the golden hour of the day began to fade.
A naked woman stood in the road, old beyond ten decades—
bent at angles no living soul should hold, wrapped in smoke’s dark mote.
Soren held Silvertongue out, blade to breast, clearing his dry throat.

Face of his mother
Wide grin, dead behind the eyes
Grand-m-ma Edith

III. Umbala

“Um-ba-la, Um-ba-la.” She danced, singing in low guttural thrum.
Horrified, terrified, he crouched in the nearest shrub, spine numb.
“Um-ba-la, Um-ba-la.” She stopped. “Grandma answers your desire.”
Avarice, a dull throb, “What do you want, hag of the briar?”

“Little clover… A Bargain to become, and much, much more.”
Soren grasped at the nausea he’d never felt before.
A forked tongue fell out of the hag's mouth.
His fate was about to go south.

IV. A bargain to become

The fire at his back, the hag before,
Her words, a hook in something soft and deep.
He’d learned to bury what he couldn’t keep—
the quiet wish to be someone else’s core.

She named the longing he had locked in store,
the daily crawl through skin that felt like sleep,
The mirror’s lie, the vow he couldn’t keep.
This body is a debt and nothing more.

“Yes,” he whispered. Not to her, but to him.
The word a nail unbending on the rim.
A locked song was released. The hag smiled wide.
“No iron now,” she said. “Come, climb inside.”

V. Dark Lullaby

Hush, little Clover, the hag knows your name,
she’s spun your shadow from longing and shame.
Sleep through the cracking, the bleeding, the breach—
you’ll wake as the shape that was always beneath.

The bones remember what the heart would hide,
The marrow’s a map of a soul inside.
Hush, little Clover, the hag’s work is true—
She builds what the world would not let you undo.

Count not the hours, count not the cost,
the self that was sleeping is no longer lost.
Breathe in the dark, let the old shape fall—
Grandma Edith’s bargain answers your call.

VI. Manifest

Little clover wakes
His chest is flat and wide—eye
Belongs to her now.

I, II, & III is more like Cento, I rearrange his story into the poem with slight changes and haikus added.
This is only the start of Cody’s story. If it catches your attention, give him a subscription, and support him anyway you would.

“Um-ba-la.” is my language equivalent to Adacradabra.

I create as I write, Cody, makes them alive.

With love and appreciation,

—Hai Dang

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The invitation extends till the end of the month. I have received only one response as of now, yet confirmed that there will be at least four. This post will be updated accordingly to include them—and there's more.

My take on the event

It is the first day of season change in the equator area, where black clouds form rebelliously under the beaming sun. The disturbance in the heat and humidity strikes me dizzy. I have been riding the bike from 11AM to 2PM, and when the heat is at its peak, the sky blackens in an instant. The rain comes uninvited, where the petrichor smell rises first, before any droplets of rain reach the earth.

You can feel the electrons rise to meet their counterpart in the sky. My hair pricks up, my ponytail feels the pull, my sixth sense tells me to hide—and there’s a tree. That’s where I will die. I know better. I run toward the nearest porch. The energy surges behind me, then the flash tears the sky in half, then it hacks the tree apart. There’s a quick pull of gravity before the tree becomes a torch; there’s a soundwave that bashes my ears into a very long beep; and there’s a vibration near my groin.

My phone pops up a countdown of some sort that I don’t understand, nor remember scheduling. I tap. No response. I toggle it on and off. Still no response. Only the countdown.

3… 2… 1…

You cheat death through knowledge. You are invited…

The screen freezes for three seconds—just enough time for me to start wondering what the fuck this is. Then it slides to the next message, like a bad PowerPoint presentation from the early 2000s. A calendar appears: October 1582.

Thursday, October 4 - Friday, October 15

As soon as I read the dates, the screen becomes liquid. My entire surroundings become liquid. I blink, as if to bash away what I am seeing using hope. Reading too many isekai novels—this is it. This is me being pulled into a sick game of fate in an alternate plane of existence.

Before me is a bonfire. Around me is a world that isn’t a world. Trees surround this clearing, and there are both moon and sun on top of a bruised sky. I can look directly at them, for the red sun is just a tad brighter than the blue moon. Scanning around, there are dirt trails. Ten of them. Is this a bad joke? Ten days were lost, and there are ten trails to walk.

The Chronophage

I die. Literally. I can remember the pain shooting up into my brain when my body explodes. I will not describe it here—because living that experience again is traumatic—but I will describe what has just happened.

I walk the nearest trail and find the horror of these ten lost days.

A towering mass of shredded calendar pages, broken clock gears, and pulsing veins of liquid time. Where its face should be is a screaming hole—a vortex of thousands of dates that were never meant to exist. Each one a wound in reality. Each one a year that never happened, a day that never dawned, a second that was stolen before it could breathe.

Its Mechanics:

Temporal Decay—Every few seconds, it rewinds a part of you. Your hand becomes a fist of infant flesh. Your spine shrinks backward through decades. A memory you didn’t know you had vanishes mid-thought, leaving only the ghost of its absence.

Time Fracture—It freezes you in place while it keeps moving. You watch your own death approach from three angles, unable to blink, unable to scream, your lungs suspended between one heartbeat and the next.

Reality Tear—It summons echoes of what could have been. Versions of you that took different roads. A you who never picked up a pen. A you who never survived that storm. A you who stayed under the tree. They don’t attack. They just watch. And their silence is worse than any wound.

Final Form—When badly wounded, it explodes into a storm of razor-sharp calendar fragments. 30th February slices your cheek. 31st September opens your throat. The eleventh second of the sixty-first minute pins your shadow to the ground.

I lasted less than two minutes.

My body was torn apart piece by piece—first my writing hand, then the memory of why I ever loved stories, then the name of the first book that made me cry. Then everything else.

The pain was beyond description. But in this place, death is only the beginning.

I respawn and see:

SciFiVirteleon's Substack

The Ten Lost Days

Thank you Hai Dang for this interesting prompt (10 days were lost in history in October 1582. This really happened). It was a pleasure writing this story, and I hope it entertained you, dear readers…

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24 days ago · 1 like · SciFiVirteleon

Kostiantyn Dmytriiev

The Ten Days

A pope had looked at a calendar and decided that ten days were not needed. The equinox required correction. October 5th through 14th would not occur. The world would go to sleep on the 4th and wake on the 15th, and the ten days in between would simply not…

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22 days ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Kostia Dmytriiev

The Adventures of Coffee Girl

The Gap

Paddy had woken up Friday as always it was the NEXT DAY…

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21 days ago · 2 likes · Coffee Girl

The Adventures of Coffee Girl

The Cats of Rocky Flats

Fjordi checked his pack one more time. Stuff for a day hike, check. “Time Traveling For Dummies” definitely. A bottle of water. The mysterious chronobox on his wrist…

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21 days ago · 1 like · Coffee Girl

Anyone who submits their take on the “10th days lost” challenge before **May 31st** will be added here, and is invited to the next stage Project: Constellation.

What’s happen next?

On Sunday the 31st May, I’ll post how I—with the help of the comments section and the people who joined this event—defeat this Chronophage.

And then? The next star shines.

Project: Constellation

How This Chain Works (Simple Rules)

This is a decentralized grimdark writing chain.
Every 2 weeks, one writer creates a boss from the Lost 10 Days. Everyone else helps kill it.

The Flow:

1. Boss Post—Writer introduces a terrifying boss + its mechanics and shows their own death.

2. Comment Phase (7 days)—Everyone drops ideas on how to defeat it.

3. Victory Post—The host chooses the best comment, writes the epic kill scene (giving credit), then passes the torch to that person.

4. The new host repeats the cycle.

Key Rules:

• Every post must link back to all previous posts in the chain.

• You can join anytime. No pressure.

• If you need more time, just say so.

Current Status

• Boss #1: The Chronophage is live.

• Invitation to join as a future host is open until 30th May.

• On 31st May, I will post how we (with your help) defeat the Chronophage.

• The winner of the best killing strike will then create Boss #2.

Your Task Right Now:
In the comments, describe how you would defeat the Chronophage.
One sentence, a paragraph, a poem, a tactic — anything. The best one becomes canon.

Who wants to be the next star in the Constellation?

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The Incident:

It comes almost without a warning, right after all the characters are introduced. I particularly like Rhodes since the knight gave the hint of your world (I come completely blind and Rhodes gave me enough information to latch on).

Melody appears tired, jaded, and her worry for her brother, Hiro, works as both infodump about the world woven into introspection. That’s a masterclass in writing. These are enough to make me care about the characters—mind you, there’s a lot of them and all are introduced effectively.

“No,” Melody screamed, she wanted to shake him, “I’m angry you’re going to get killed trying to live up to a fantasy.”

—Mackenzie, L.D.. American Hex: Song of the Shadows (p. 39). Hex Press Inc.. Kindle Edition.

In the Incident and onward till the end of Book I, there’s a relentless burst of actions where Melody proved her capability in the most explosive way. Hiro didn’t disappoint as we get to have his POV moments now. A lot of things happened and there’s a slower moment where everything seems calm down, only for the real villain to appear and mess everything up. There’s a few twist happened, and at this point, I can’t put the book down. The author is showing me teeth in fight scenes, in magic users, and the dangers lurking at every corner of the story.

Let’s move to the middle, oh the scary middle. You know it, I know it, the middle is where most story fell flat by the convoluted plots, the long learning curve about history, magic, etc, and the lack of danger/absence of the villain. I don’t feel it in this book. Here’s why:

The new characters are introduced with livelihood: through circumstances they are facing, not a plot advance device for the main characters; through witty dialogues exchanges and unasked drama; through Melody’s skeptical attitude & her nature of protectiveness toward Hiro. Hiro shines in this section, where he shows maturity in a different way compared to Melody. The magic isn’t explained in this book and I love it. The effect it has on the weaver and the destruction it brings is enough for me (Hex, I believe).

The road in American Hex haunts the pair again and I’m touched by how they always stay together despite their heated conversation at every turn they talk to each other.

So I’ve reached the middle. This is where some spoiler happened.

Key term:

The talisman - links to Melody’s past (the incident is about her, of course, where a very strong shadow/wraith controlled by a sorcerer killed many of her circus member (including people she very care about).

Flicker — Melody’s personal fairy. I always know Flicker will come in clutch.

Boot or Booth, I forget the name, but he’s a very interesting character. His moments with Melody and Hiro are the best in Book II. His fate in unknown now.

One thing I want to mention here is the pacing. The author controls it very well. Slow moments aren’t mean slow in plot progression. Melody is always active, and the discovery always building up to the next turn of event.

From Book III, I have the urge to finish the book, to find myself time to read. That’s quality. The Vernon arc is extremely tense, in the best way. Apart from Melody special power, Hiro also has his moments. I’m a little confuse that if Mayhem is a gun or a special spell, but it doesn’t matter, it could be both and I love it.

In this arc, it does seems to me that the story is going a little off script where Melody and Hiro is pulled into a mystery of a plague/sickness, where their presence triggers the next stage of black magic/zealotry work in Vernon. Yet, danger awakened more power to both of them, unexplained, more mystery, leading to Book IV. I love it.

The ending.

Here, the pair arrived at a dock and gets on a pirate run, a treasure hunt. Hiro special power/curse is named and he has moment to actually talk with it.

Melody, on the other hand, keep earning my respect for her. She stands up for her brother, for everything that is not right.

Now I got that Mayhem is a rifle, a magical one.

I can’t spoil the book, but the ending almost broke me. I love that there’s more book to come because the plot is progressing, stakes are rising. The adventure have come to a climax, but there’s more building toward the next book.

If you are here this is my 1 liner for American Hex: Song of Shadows.

“Relentless, character-driven, and beautifully paced. American Hex almost broke me. 5 stars.”

If you love Appalachian tales, this book is for you.

Here’s the link to the book: American Hex: Song of the Shadows. by . Thank you for the journey.

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