Once Upon A Future

As a Second Ship’s Apprentice on the HMS Morrigan, the closest Bronwyn Mare has come to a demon is cleaning the litter box of the infernal Balor One-Eye in-between jumps to Greyspace. She’s not pretty, she’s not particularly funny, and as an Algonquin exile, even her heroic captain mostly knows her as that bloody nattie.

But a mysterious message from her estranged grandfather reveals that her destiny might just be more complicated. The impossible is happening – the multi-verse is evaporating into oblivion one reality at a time… and Bronwyn’s no-good traitorous father is the one behind it all. He’s left only one key, one hope of stopping the collapse of her world before it’s too late – and that secret is locked safely in the double-helix of Bronwyn’s own DNA.

To stop him, Bronwyn must join forces with a mostly-dead scientist, release an infamous killer, unleash a demon-king, and escape to the world-between-worlds of Greyspace for a confrontation that will either defeat her father once and for all – or destroy all of creation in the process.

Faster-than-light has never been so dark…

Inside the Core

The world spun away from Bronwyn. The lights, the colors, the smells and the touch of physical matter around her evaporated into the hazy semi-awareness of translation through greyspace. Her brain seemed to swell inside her head, hammering against her skull in time with her heartbeat. She choked back the bile bubbling up in her throat.

Worse than usual, she thought.

She kept her eyes shut. She always kept them shut on a jump – it helped with the vertigo. But she could still feel the Core. Its power burned in limbo, the sole heat and light of the Morrigan, a miniature sun that bound them all together within the boundless void.

Normally, there was a buffer between that power and Bronwyn. Diarmaid and Niamh, chanting in dissonant harmony, words at counterpoint, contained the power that lived in the Core. The heat dampened. The light shrouded. But this time, this jump, the levy was weak. Even through closed eyes, she could see the fissures in the sealing ward.

And she heard its voice.

His voice.

Balor.

HMS Morrigan design by Greg Close,
Cool computer rendering and realization by Paul B. Spence
No Demons were harmed in the writing of this book. Much.