Novels by Orvaelis

The white light did not dissipate so much as it peeled away, layer by agonizing layer, like skin being stripped from a wound. Aderic hit the ground hard, his breath driven from his lungs as the crystalline floor of the valley shattered into a million shards of dead code. He scrambled to his hands and knees, his vision swimming with the afterimage of the void.Beside him, Kesthra was already upright, her boots sliding on a surface that no longer felt like stone. It was ash. Cold, gray, suffocating ash that rose in choking plumes with every movement."The valley," Aderic wheezed, pushing himself to a standing position. "Where did it go?"The simulation was gone. The battlefield of competing eras had been wiped clean, leaving behind a silence so absolute it rang in their ears. They stood in the center of a crater, but it was not a crater born of recent artillery. It was a scar of ancient, oxidized earth, ringed by the skeletal, blackened remains of a city that had been reduced to slag ne

The reality of Sektor D-9 didn't collapse with a bang; it fractured like a poorly rendered hologram. Aderic and Kesthra stumbled over a ridge of jagged obsidian, the ground beneath their boots turning from solid rock into a translucent grid of flickering light. As they crested the rise, the freezing air of the wasteland vanished, replaced by the suffocating, copper-scented heat of a furnace.Below them lay a valley that defied the laws of physics. It was a sprawling, chaotic theater of war, but not one belonging to a single era."Look at that," Aderic breathed, his voice barely a rasp as he gripped his side. "It’s not just one battle."In the center of the valley, a battalion of infantry in antique, iron-plate armor charged forward with bayonets fixed, only to be cut down by the high-frequency pulse-fire of soldiers in sleek, obsidian-colored tactical rigs. To the left, tanks from a forgotten century ground their treads into the soil, firing kinetic shells at hover-drones that zipped

Aderic didn’t wait for the echoes of his own footsteps to die down before he breached the command deck. The air inside was thick with the scent of ozone and the sterile, metallic tang of an overclocked processor. Commander Kesthra Morcant was where he had left her, still staring at the flickering map, her posture rigid, her hands hovering over a console that pulsed with a rhythm faster than a heartbeat.He didn't bother with a salute. He didn't have time for the theater of rank. He crossed the floor in three long strides, his pulse hammering a frantic, uneven rhythm against his ribs. He slammed the leather-bound ledger onto the console, the heavy, archaic volume skidding across the sleek surface and knocking over a data-pad."Read it," Aderic said, his voice barely a rasp. He was still vibrating from the run, his lungs burning with the sharp, freezing air of the fort’s lower levels.Kesthra glanced at the book, then at him. Her eyes narrowed, the scar on her cheek pulling taut as she

The construct—a jagged, stuttering reflection of Aderic—lunged. Its movements were not fluid; it tore through the air with the erratic, frame-skipping grace of a corrupted video file. Aderic barely threw himself to the left, his shoulder slamming into the bulkhead as the construct’s hand, elongated into a blade of pure, digitized static, gouged a deep trench into the steel where his heart had been a millisecond prior."Run!" Odrienne screamed from the infirmary doorway. She had pulled a heavy-duty stim-injector from the wall, its needle glowing with a volatile violet light.Aderic didn't need to be told twice. He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the searing pain in his shoulder, and sprinted down the corridor. Behind him, the sound of the construct’s pursuit was like the tearing of metal sheets. He heard the sickening shink-thrum of the erasure blade impacting the walls, carving a path of deletion through the fort’s infrastructure."The dungeons," Aderic gasped, his breath hitching as

Aderic did not head for the exit. The weight of the deception—the terrifying knowledge that his own hand had authorized the purge of his own life—pulled at his heels like leaden chains. He turned away from the main gate, his footsteps soft against the oxidized steel grates. He needed to talk to someone who didn't view reality through the prism of a military mandate. He needed the infirmary.The medical bay was located in the deepest sub-level of Fort Halvyr, a damp, subterranean cavern where the air smelled aggressively of ozone and rot. As Aderic pushed through the heavy, sliding doors, he was met by the hum of ancient medical scrubbers, their rhythmic clicking the only sound in the room.Odrienne Falk stood at a central workstation, her back to him. She was hunched over a holoscreen that displayed a pulsing, irregular waveform. She didn't look up when he entered; she seemed to be waiting for him."You’re the one who caused the tremor in the command deck," she said, her voice dry and

The silence that followed the soldier’s accusation was not empty; it was a physical weight, a suffocating shroud that seemed to pull the oxygen from the room. Aderic stood motionless, the ambient hum of the command console’s cooling fans sounding like a death knell in his ears. Around him, the other soldiers shifted, their armor clanking with the sound of hollow metal. They were waiting. They were expectant, as if Aderic possessed some divine ledger that could reconcile their impossible lives.Commander Morcant broke the spell. She stepped between Aderic and the soldier who had approached him. "Back to your stations," she ordered, her voice sharp as a razor. "This is a command deck, not a morgue. Dismissed."The soldiers retreated, their movements sluggish and disjointed, like puppets whose strings were fraying. The man who had spoken, however—the one who had claimed to have buried Aderic—lingered. He looked at the Commander, then at Aderic, his eyes glistening with a haunting, glassy