Anthology

by Petal project

**The Alpha Wolf Festival: The Year Before follows Derpy as he enters Petal Fields to train as his grandmother Okamihana’s champion, with one year remaining before the festival. What begins as a chance to reconnect with his family becomes a struggle over his freedom. Ancient grudges, expectations surrounding his father, and an arranged partnership with Hydra test whether his relatives truly want to understand him—or decide his future for him. With Revy, Tina, and his other companions beside him, Derpy explores powers even the gods struggle to understand. As family conflicts turn violent, he must learn whom to trust, how to protect his people, and what belonging to a family should mean.**

by Jon Praker

### ***A Descent into Mechanical Noir*** **Book I: He Who Walks the Nothing** Stripped of comfort, routine, and identity, Marek enters a stone cellar and falls into the Void—a metaphysical landscape that feeds on silence and reflection. Guided by the crushing pressure of the universe itself, he is forced to endure twenty-five brutal trials. Armed with only his breath and a dull blade that sharpens with his own honesty, he battles the Wolves of Habit, which are feral creatures born of his excuses and addictions. He climbs the Stair of Coins to face his financial and moral debts, and stands in the Temple of Two Ears to confront the devastating consequences of refusing to truly listen to those he loved. In the Forge of Identity, he hammers his fear, shame, and primal desire into a new tool of survival. Ultimately, Marek does not find clean forgiveness; instead, he finds the God-Spark within himself, willingly accepting the burden of the dark life he almost lived as a permanent compass to navigate his way back to reality. **Book II: The Geometer** Back in the waking world, Marek operates Aperture Mechanical Solutions, repairing engines while trying to maintain his grip on his newly forged identity. But the shadows have followed him, personified by KlusterFux—a volatile, jester-like manifestation of Marek’s anger, calculation, and survival instincts who chimes with phantom bells and burns with red eyes. The battle here shifts from gaining power to mastering restraint. Marek faces the gods of False Mastery, Leverage, and Empty Rooms, learning the agonizing discipline of refusing to dominate others or force outcomes to soothe his own discomfort. In the ultimate act of psychological alignment, Marek integrates KlusterFux entirely, accepting his own capacity for violence and darkness so that it can never blindly govern him again.  **Book III: Listen While It Whispers** Marek and Donjha are pulled into a terrifying new architecture—a recursive, fractal manifestation of their own relationship. This realm does not test their strength; it weaponizes their distance. They navigate infinite hallways, locked rooms, and a heartbreakingly perfect house they never actually lived in, witnessing every possible outcome of their shared choices. The environment perfectly mirrors their instincts, physically expanding the space between them whenever Marek tries to chase her or she tries to flee. Finally, they encounter the "Fourth Point"—a pure geometry representing the vast, indifferent system that contains them both, proving that they are not the center of the universe. They escape the trap not by saving each other, but by letting go of the desperate need to control the other's choices, returning to the real world to build a life in real-time. You don't fix the machine by screaming at it. You fix it by listening while it whispers. **Enter the VoidDoctrine.** From the grease-stained concrete of small engine repair to the infinite, crushing geometry of the human mind, author Jon Edward Praker delivers a visceral masterpiece of industrial mysticism. This isn't just a story of addiction, heartbreak, and recovery. It is a mechanical blueprint for the soul. The Nigredo Logic Group proudly presents a trilogy for those who have fallen, those who are climbing, and those who know that the darkest parts of themselves aren't enemies—they are adaptations. *He Who Walks the Nothing.* *The Geometer.* *Listen While It Whispers.* **Available now.**

by Jane Austen

Before Pride and Prejudice, a teenage Jane Austen was already taking aim. Scribblings collects the work that bookends her career: the riotous juvenilia she wrote to make her family laugh — lovers fainting alternately on a sofa, a History of England by “a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian” — alongside the two novels she began and never finished. She set The Watsons aside around 1805; Sanditon was cut short by her final illness in 1817. Together they are Austen unguarded: the first jokes and the last pages. The Watsons appears here in the 1923 edition in which L. Oulton carried Austen’s fragment through to an ending; the preface is by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh.

by Sammie Settlemire

Wren is three when her mother asks who she wants to live with. It is not a question. It is a trap, and the answer she cannot say splits her childhood in two. What follows is the story of a girl who learned to read rooms before she could read words, and the people who saw her when her mother would not.

by Vexen Spell

**You find yourself in the zombie apocalypse with a Serial Killer, a Mafioso, a Loser, a Hockey Player, a Bounty Hunter, and a Preacher’s Son.**   **What could possibly go wrong?**   Welcome to the end of the world.

by Jessica C. Wheeler

*She’s Fine* is a collection of satirical short stories about women who are, by every visible measure, doing just fine. Thank you for your concern. No need to call anyone. Behind the appropriate pauses, polite nods, and well-practiced coping strategies, these stories examine the considerable amount of effort it takes to appear effortlessly fine. Blending sharp satire with tenderness, the collection finds meaning in the seemingly ordinary. Some characters bend. Some come apart with admirable efficiency. Others discover that holding it together is less impressive once it becomes clear who benefits from the arrangement. Clever, character-driven, and emotionally exacting, *She’s Fine* offers a candid look at contemporary womanhood and the gap between public composure and private reality. With humor that ranges from wry to quietly mortifying, these stories celebrate women in all their complicated humanity. They’re gracious, occasionally unhinged, and far more interesting than the version they present to the world. They’re fine. Really.

by Curtis Alcutt

**GOING DOWN**\ *A Supernatural Anthology Thriller* Every elevator ride in Mason Towers tells a different story. A nervous woman riding down to meet a blind date. A guilty man confessing to a stranger who turns out to be a detective. A widow returning to the building where his wife disappeared fifty years ago — and finding her waiting. But beneath the building, carved into the sub-basement floor directly under the elevator shaft, something has been waiting far longer than any of them. Mason Towers is a 33-story Freemason-built high-rise in downtown Oakland, California. It was constructed in 1923 on a site the builders chose deliberately — a convergence point where something ancient, something sealed, something that predated even the Templars by centuries, lay dormant beneath the earth. The building was never meant to be just a building. The elevator was never meant to just take people somewhere. Every 33 years, on the night of October Friday the 13th, the building takes three lives. Fire. Fall. Electrocution. Always the same three methods. Always ruled accidental. Always before dawn. Someone has always known. He has worked in this building for thirty years. He is mute, which means everyone talks freely around him. He hears everything. He has been preparing for October 13th, 2025 his entire career. His name is Earl. And he has never said a word. *Going Down — ten episodes. One season. The elevator is waiting.*

by Sammie Settlemire

Sorenson: 9th & Ash follows a woman standing at the fault line between her past and the world she refuses to inherit. In a neighborhood where every street remembers what you survived, Sorenson becomes a mythic‑surreal portrait of resilience — a story where trauma has teeth, hope has a spine, and the ordinary corners of 9th & Ash crack open to reveal the strange magic of rebuilding a life from the ruins.