Darkness Unbound

Two hundred years ago, something malevolent began to move. A dark and foreboding vessel trailing an umbilicus of dark writhing matter, a living spacecraft grown from flesh and horror, not built by any human hand, has set out across the void with a single, awful purpose. It has been coming ever since. And it is almost here.

In the gleaming domed cities of a 25th-century Earth, the Bell-Penton Corporation has just announced the discovery of the age: sublight technology, harvested from a newly charted world and promising to remake civilisation overnight. Nobody asks what it cost. Nobody asks what, or who Penton really met with to acquire it, or what he promised in return.

Freighter pilot Cal just wants a quiet run and a way to stay out of old wars. His friend Si wants him to stop moping about a woman. But the past two hundred years have been building to now, and neither of them is going to get what they want. Across the stars and beneath forgotten cities, a wizard and his companion chase symbols scratched into stone floors, symbols that shouldn't mean anything, except that they match something ancient and awake. Secret cults that mutilate themselves in worship of their terrible deities gather and prepare. And somewhere above it all, a corporation's darkest bargain is finally coming due.

As the hideously organic vessel draws closer, the line between hard science and old, terrible magic starts to blur, and the people who notice first are the ones least equipped to stop it.

Darkness Unbound is a sweeping collision of space-opera scale, body-horror dread, and old-world sorcery, a story of corporate hubris, forbidden pacts, and the things that wait patiently in the space between stars for someone foolish enough to invite them in.

The stars are screaming, and something is answering.