Helyna L. Clove

“Magic was always going to be my downfall.”

Calla has no memories of her childhood except for hazy, recurring nightmares. Working as a servant in Kiriong, the picturesque terrace garden home to one of the most influential families in the Kamphua Dominion, she’s content to live a simple life. As long as no one finds out about the forbidden magic stirring under her skin.

When the estranged family heir, Gray — a magehunter in servitude of the royal hold — unexpectedly returns home, Calla’s secret threatens to surface. Instead of turning her in, however, Gray offers her the one thing she always feared: to teach her how to use her powers. And as the turbulent tides of long-forgotten magic draw them together, Calla finds it harder and harder to deny her potential.

But Gray knows more than what he admits. In the aftermath of a vile political plot targeting him and with the shadow of a mage uprising cast upon the land, finding out what happened to Calla in her forgotten years might be their only chance to survive.

Except the knowledge could break them both.

It could break the world.

So when the universe falls to pieces, it doesn’t mean your life has to, right? That comes later.

Jeane Blake, captain of the spaceship Skylark, makes her living by looting dead worlds, planets fallen prey to naturally occurring wormhole-like rifts plaguing the cosmos. She survives the only way she knows: avoiding commitment and arguing with her dead foster father’s ghost. But when her crew stumbles upon an alien device that could collapse the wormhole network and wipe out all sentient life, they catch the hungry eyes of the Union, a tyrannical empire hunting the sinister tech.

As she flees the Union’s brainwashed agents, Jeane is forced to take on a shady mission and gets stuck assisting the runaway monarch of a technocrat planet. Queen Maura Tholis is seeking the aid of an interstellar resistance to reclaim her war-torn world, with another trouble-magnet device as her bargaining chip: a glove that allows her to command AI systems. Jeane couldn’t care less about the whole deal, but things become personal when the Union annexes the place she calls home. And it might be her fault.

Reluctant to become weapons in the hands of power-hungry militants and desperate rebels, smuggler and queen join forces. But to save their homes, they must redefine themselves, work with the enemy, and face personal traumas they’d buried long ago — and only stars know which challenge might break them in the end.

A standalone novella in the universe of Skylark in the Fog.

Noll and Jayce Morgan are lanehunters — that is to say they are used to perilous spaceship chases through the erratic, wormhole-like space-time tears that plague their cosmos. They are decidedly not used to one of those gateways suddenly changing up its game and separating the twins with only a slight hope of ever finding each other.

Now Noll has to ally with a reclusive alien, a traumatized spy, and a bizarre agent duo in service of the crumbling galactic empire ruining everyone’s day to save her brother’s life. The clock is ticking, but when the universe turns out to be even stranger than Noll imagined, she’s not sure her fear disguised as swaggering grit would pull her through once again.