What I've Been Working On

Ald'Age: Arcane Oppression  ·  Book One

What if the thing that makes you different — the thing that gets you persecuted, isolated, labeled dangerous — what if the people doing the persecuting weren't afraid of it at all? What if they wanted it? What if they were taking it from you and using it for themselves while you disappeared quietly into the dark?

That question is the center of the book I've been writing.

The World

The story takes place on a planet called Ald'Age, in a nation called the Empire of Laun — which wasn't always an empire. It used to be a republic. A democracy. The kind of place where communities gathered under elm trees to make decisions together. That world is gone now, dismantled so gradually that most people alive today have never known anything different.

Magic has been outlawed. The official reason: magic is destabilizing. A threat to public order. The generation alive today has been taught nothing else, and most of them believe it. The soldiers who enforce the ban believe they're maintaining safety. The neighbors who don't ask questions think they're being responsible.

The real reason is more complicated, and worse. It's not persecution for the sake of elimination. It's harvest.

The people secretly running the Empire are not who they appear to be. And the Brightborn — the individuals born with innate magical ability, renamed Aberrants by Imperial decree to make what's being done to them feel more like pest control — are not being removed from society because they're dangerous. They're being removed because what makes them different can be extracted. Synthesized. Used.

The Story

elm tree etching · worn smooth

Aric Eldren is a teenage boy in a provincial town. He times his morning walk so he "accidentally" meets the girl he likes at the same corner every day and has never admitted this to anyone. He has a brass clock, a worn satchel, and a blank slip of paper he keeps meaning to write something important on.

He doesn't know he's Brightborn. He doesn't know his father is either.

He's felt something stirring in himself for months — wind responding to his mood, moments he can't explain — and he's told himself it will go away. He keeps meaning to ask his father about it. He never does. Because asking makes it real. And making it real means becoming one of those people.

He's watched what happens to those people.

His story begins the night the Empire comes to his door. What he loses, what manifests in a back alley too late to change anything, and what he carries west with his mother into a world he doesn't know — that's Book One.

No prophecy. No chosen one. Just a person caught in something larger than himself, trying to understand what happened and what to do next.

The Series

The story doesn't end with Book One.

Aric eventually finds his way to the resistance — not as a leader, not as a symbol, but as someone who shows up and makes himself useful. He becomes an operative because he decided to, not because anyone chose him. He and Raven, the girl from the corner, find their way back to each other across a complicated distance that takes more than one book to cross.

He doesn't save the world. He contributes to something larger than himself and that is enough.

Eventually he steps back. Builds something. Tells his son everything — from the time the boy can understand, six or ten years old, not seventeen when it's too late. Everything his own father never told him. Everything that silence cost.

And then, much later, when he has decided he is done — they reach into the one thing he built and protected, and he comes back in.

The series ends not with the Empire destroyed but with things measurably better than they were. With the next generation standing up — informed, prepared, unashamed of what they are. That's all revolutions ever manage. It turns out to be enough.

Why This Story

We're living in a moment where people are being told that what makes them different is dangerous. That the right response is to suppress it, hide it, make it smaller, make themselves smaller. Where the people doing the persecuting aren't afraid of difference — they're trying to own it, use it, profit from it.

I didn't set out to write a political book. I set out to write a fantasy story about a boy who loses his father in one night and has to figure out who he is without him.

But the world kept insisting on being what it is.

The elm trees in the story were cut down by the Empire when they took power. They thought that was the end of it. What they didn't understand about elms is that roots don't die when you cut the tree. They spread underground. They wait. They find water. They push up somewhere else when conditions are right.

That's the resistance. That's also, I think, the thing this moment requires of all of us.

I'm still writing. But I wanted you to know what I've been working on.

Updates here as it develops.

Book One · In Progress

Ald'Age: Arcane OppressionBook One