Novels by Shuaib Balikis

A single crown can weigh more than an entire mountain, especially when three different kings are trying to force it onto your head.Three foreign delegations had crossed the cosmic sea since dawn, their massive soul steel sky vessels moored to our eastern cliffside. Now, the main council hall of Oakhaven smelled of spilled wine, wet wool, and pure, concentrated panic."You must take the mantle, Soren!" Lord Vane of the High Spires shouted, slamming his ringed fist onto our polished oak table. His silver cloak rustled as he stood up, his pale eyes wide with terror. "The Devourer is gone, but the void is still vast and cold! If you do not claim supreme command over our three worlds, who will organize our defense when the next nightmare wakes?""He speaks the truth," Lady Yven of the Iron Reaches added, her dark leather ar

"Kill me," the man rasped. His bare chest heaved as grey smoke drifted from his hollow ribs. "Please. I have lived inside the dark for ten thousand years. There is no victory at the end of this path. Existence is just a cage that changes shape every time you break a wall."He hung suspended in the still air above our plaza, a broken mirror of everything I had almost become. His scar lines glowed with a faint, corrupted violet that burned like dying coal."I know that dark," I said, stepping closer to where he hovered. "I spent a hundred lifetimes watching the same people die in the same muddy stre

The sky did not fall; it turned into lead and crushed us into the dirt.The weight of the Devourer hit Oakhaven before its body even cleared the clouds. It was not just gravity. It was an absolute, suffocating pressure that felt like holding a mountain on the back of my neck. My knees buckled instantly, sending a sharp crack through the stone plaza beneath my boots.Beside me, Marcus fell hard, his heavy war-hammer clattering against the cobblestones as his amber aura dissolved like smoke in a gale. Lyra dropped to her knees, her hands trembling as her silver wire spools snapped one by one under the invisible strain.Soren, I cannot see the horizon, Kenji gasped, his forehead pressed flat against the stone.The air around us grew freezing cold, thick with the stench of stagnant centuries. Then came the whispers. They did not ring in our ears. They bled straight into our minds, heavy and slick as black oil.Why fight the circle? the vo

A sky full of black blood is a hard thing to ignore.I stood on the central lookout of Oakhaven, watching three separate crimson cracks tear through our horizon at the exact same moment. The wind off the valley died instantly, replaced by a cold, metallic stench that tasted like copper and old iron. We had barely caught our breath from the marches beyond the border, but the war had already followed us home.Soren, they are not waiting for us to group up, Lyra said, jumping onto the wooden platform beside me. She pulled her silver wire spools tight, her grey eyes scanning the mountain ridge.I see them, I said, keeping my hand steady on the hilt of my iron sword.The three Void Heralds had split our sky into three distinct battlefields. To the north, a towering shadow wrapped in pale bone armor was stepping through the timberline, rotting every pine tree it touched. Below our feet, the deep subterranean caverns were vibrating with a low, deaf

The ticking of copper gears inside Oros's exposed chest echoed through the frozen hall. I could not stop staring at them. They moved like a heartbeat. Like he was still alive even after all these years.Vaelen was no visionary, Oros said. His milky eyes stared at nothing. He was a coward with grand tools. He did not forge the loop to play at being a ruler. He built the clock because he was terrified.Terrified of what? I asked. My hand stayed on my blade. I did not trust him yet. Not fully.Of what lies outside the canvas, Oros rasped. He struck his bronze cane against the stone floor. Before time had a name, the cosmos was not empty. It was hunted. The Devourer of Starlight consumed entire realities as they were being born. Vaelen stole my blueprints, built the grand clock, and locked your world in a loop for ten thousand years. The loop was an artificial cage. It froze your realm in a single temporal pocket. It hid you from the Devourer's sight.<

I thought I knew what fear felt like. I was wrong.The tear in the sky did not look like a gate. It looked like a wound. A bleeding, jagged wound across the stars themselves. And I led fifty people straight through it.The moment we crossed, everything changed. The warm pine air of Oakhaven vanished. My lungs filled with something cold and dead. It felt like diving into an ocean that had been frozen solid for a thousand years.We landed on the Sea of Static. That is what I called it in my head because I had no other words for it. There was no sky. There was no ground. Just broken pieces of black rock floating over an endless grey nothing. The kind of nothing that looked back at you.Space did not work right here. One step forward stretched into ten miles. The next step snapped us backward like a rubber band. My stomach churned with every movement.Stay close! I shouted. My voice came out wrong. Muffled, like I was speaking through wat

The obsidian compass in my pocket did not tremble or waver. It just pointed forward, steady as a heartbeat, pulling us deeper into the black glass valley.We had been walking for what felt like hours. The grey sky never changed. The black sand crunched under our boots with every step. The glass spires rose up around us like frozen waves, their surfaces dark and empty now that the constructs were gone. Valerie kept her hand on my arm, her fingers cold against my skin."How much further?" I asked, pulling the compass out to check the needle.Valerie squinted at the distant horizon. "The needle is pointing toward that ridge ahead. I think there is something there. Something big."I followed her gaze. The ridge was different from the rest of the valley. It was smoother, more uniform, like a wall that had been shaped by hands instead of nature. As we got closer, I started to see the edges of carved stone beneath the black glass coating."It is a structu

The black glass valley was silent except for the low hum coming from my blade and the sound of my own breathing. My reflection stood ten feet away, its red eyes locked onto mine, that cold smile still stretched across its face. It raised its own black blade and dropped into a stance that made my stomach turn.That stance was mine. Every angle, every balance point, every subtle tension in the shoulders. It was the exact posture my grandfather had drilled into me since I was old enough to hold a stick."Impressed?" the reflection asked, its voice dripping with mockery. "I know every move you know. I know every weakness you have. I know the moment you hesitate, the second you doubt, the fraction of a heartbeat where your left knee buckles ever so slightly."I did not answer. I just settled deeper into my own guard position and waited.It attacked without warning. The black blade came at my ribs in a low horizontal sweep, fast, faster than anything I had ever

The black glass beneath my boots did not crack. It did not chip. It just reflected my face back at me from a thousand different angles, each one showing a version of myself that looked slightly more tired than the last.The flagship had come down hard on the shores of this uncharted continent. The hull was still smoking behind us, a twisted heap of brass and iron half buried in the strange dark sand. Clara had stayed behind to secure the bridge, but Valerie and I had pushed forward into the valley ahead. We did not have time to wait. The sky clock was still ticking somewhere above us, even if we could not see it through the strange grey haze that hung over this place.Valerie stopped walking and knelt down, running her fingers across the surface of the nearest glass formation. "This is not natural glass, Soren. Look at the molecular structure. It is hyper dense. Denser than anything I have ever seen in the academy labs. Someone built this place. They grew it like a crystal."I looked

The thing about facing a dead copy of someone you love is that your brain spends the first few seconds trying to convince you it is a trick of the light.I stood there in that freezing hangar with my iron pipe still raised, staring at the pale waxy face on the steel table. The copper wire running from the clone's neck into that glowing blue cylinder made a soft humming sound that vibrated right through the floor. Valerie had gone completely still beside me, her breath catching in her throat."Seven of them," Valerie finally whispered, her voice cracking. "You built seven copies of me?"Clara shook her head slowly, her hollow eyes not leaving the clone's face. "I did not build them. The capital academy engineered them years ago, long before I ever set foot in that place. They designed biological duplicates of you to serve as living calculating arrays for the global conspiracy. Each one is wired directly into the network mainframe. They process information faster than any machine ever c

When a mechanical clock three miles wide hangs in a bleeding sky, you stop looking at the clouds and start stealing a faster boat. That was the only thought in my head as I watched the burning quarry smoke roll thick across the high stone plateau. The riot was spreading through the Borean barracks below us, and the chaos gave us the perfect cover to move. Down at the private naval pier, a heavy armored Oriens transport vessel sat tied to the stone posts, its thick brass plated hull glowing dull red in the firelight.I paused at the top of the pier stairs and turned to face my grandfather. He had a captured steam rifle secured over his shoulder, his old hands steady on the stock. "Grandfather, keep the prisoners in the upper fort," I said. "Do not let the harbor guards regroup before we reach the main bay. If they cut us off from the water, we lose everything."He nodded, his fierce eyes boring into mine beneath his white hair. "We will hold the quarry, Soren. Get your

The man who hears his own dead voice speaking from tomorrow does not spend much time wondering if he should hit hard today. That voice, my voice, crackling through Valerie's copper receiver like a ghost in the wires, had told me exactly what would happen if I hesitated. So I did not hesitate. I stood in the mud with my hands clamped around the worn oak handle of my pickaxe until the pine grain bit deep into my palms. The cold static sputtered once and died, leaving only the sound of icy rain dripping off the dark basalt walls.Valerie's hands were shaking as she pulled the glass vacuum tubes out of the dirt. Her copper receiver lay in the mud between us, smoking faintly. "Soren, that was not just a trick on the wire," she said, her breath fogging in the cold night air. "The energy coming off the Abyss core distortions on the flagship is warping the local space around this island. It's not just radio interference. It is something much worse."I kept my eyes fixed on the