My Worlds,
Your Adventures
Each story a journey, each page a promise.
SYNOPSIS
Some kingdoms are built on crowns. This one was buried under roads, bells, graves, records, and every name the Crown decided was easier to forget.
Tressa Vale is a Crown Works surveyor, trained to measure roads, boundaries, and official lies. When the road to Bellharrow grows seven impossible miles overnight, she follows it into a village where old bells are waking under the ground and a throne waits beneath the world with no ruler sitting on it. Then Garran Holt arrives. A dangerous Warden with fire in his blood and scars he does not explain, Holt was sent to contain what the Crown fears. Tressa was sent to measure it. Neither expected the road to claim them both.
What begins with one wrong road becomes a fight for the soul of a hidden kingdom. Ancient bells answer. Buried roads open. The dead demand witness. Children stolen by law speak from sealed places. Dragons wake across wounded seasons. Courts, churches, offices, claimants, and monsters all reach for power, but Tressa learns the hardest truth of all: A kingdom does not have to be ruled to be real. Across ten books,
**The Hollow Kingdom**
follows Tressa, Holt, and a fierce circle of allies through haunted roads, forbidden claims, buried law, dangerous magic, slow-burn desire, brutal choices, and a love strong enough to refuse every throne that asks for blood. This is dark romantasy with teeth: gothic mystery, ancient magic, found family, sharp banter, political danger, haunted villages, impossible roads, and a romance forged in fire, witness, and war. For readers who love fantasy romance with rich worldbuilding, fierce heroines, scarred protectors, buried kingdoms, ancient bargains, and slow-burning passion wrapped around epic stakes.
The road to Bellharrow was only the beginning.
The throne is empty.
And that may be the only reason the kingdom can survive.
The Hollow Kingdom (10 book series)
SYNOPSIS
In the old songs, crowns are earned in glory. In Kethria, they’re paid for in bodies.
CROWNS OF BLOOD is the brutal, high-stakes prequel saga to Crown of Cinders—set in the World of Aeldrith, where empires rise the way fires do: fast, hungry, and indifferent to who’s screaming.
Book One: Kethria in Flames drops you into the greatest city in the world on the eve of collapse.
Kethria is a fortress of stone and iron… and it’s rotting from the inside.
The Crownlands are the heart of the realm—fertile, rich, and crowded with the kind of “civilization” that looks impressive right up until the doors get kicked in. In the streets, rumor spreads faster than bread. In the halls, oaths are traded like coin. In the foundries, men work until their backs forget what straight feels like. And above it all, the throne sits like a promise someone forgot to keep.
Then the sky changes.
When the first flames fall, it isn’t just a battle—it’s a reckoning. Old power fractures. New monsters step out of the smoke. Allies turn into liabilities. Enemies become necessities. And the people who survive do so by learning the one rule Kethria never writes down:
Mercy doesn’t win wars. Leverage does.
This series is built for readers who want their fantasy dark, grounded, and relentless—where politics are as deadly as steel, where magic feels like an omen instead of a convenience, and where every victory costs something you don’t get back. You’ll find siege-fire and street-blood, betrayal with teeth, and characters who don’t get to stay clean—not in their hands, and not in their souls.
If you love Game of Thrones–level intrigue, war-bent pacing, and a world that treats survival like a debt that always comes due, you’re in the right place.
Because in Aeldrith, the crown is never really yours.
It’s just your turn to bleed for it.
Start the prequel series that ignites the legend.
CROWNS OF BLOOD: KETHRIA IN FLAMES
By R. E. Smith
Crowns of Blood (2 book series)
Crown of Cinders (3 book series)
SYNOPSIS
In Kethria, a crown isn’t a symbol. It’s a sentence.
CROWN OF CINDERS is a dark epic fantasy series where thrones are bought with blood, peace is negotiated with daggers, and dragons don’t serve—they decide. When an ancient city of stone and smoke begins to crack under rebellion, betrayal, and old magic waking hungry, the people learn the oldest law of power: the city always collects what it’s owed.
At the center of the storm is Sable—a survivor forged into something sharper than mercy—pulled into the kind of war that doesn’t end when the battles stop. Because after the fires come the treaties… and treaties are where empires rot. Beside her moves Rook Calver, a man built for the shadows, hunting truths that kings bury and courts pretend never existed. Together they navigate a realm where every alliance has teeth, every victory leaves a stain, and the dead don’t stay quiet when the ashes are deep enough.
Across the series, armies march, crowns fall, and the line between justice and vengeance blurs until it’s nothing but smoke. The stakes rise from city streets to royal chambers to the skies themselves—where dragonfire writes the final word.
If you like grimdark politics, ruthless characters, and high-fantasy spectacle with real consequences, this series will drag you through the embers and dare you to call it salvation.
The City Owes Blood.
And it always pays.
Wolves of Tiber (3 book series)
SYNOPSIS
Rome is starving. Not for bread—for purity, for blood, for a story strong enough to make the crowds forget what they’ve done. In the shadow of crumbling basilicas and river fog, two brothers are born into a city that has turned holiness into a weapon. The Church hunts in daylight. Patrician houses buy absolution by the cartload.
In the ruin belt—where ivy eats marble and old things breathe—monsters are not myths. They’re neighbors. When the twins—Aurelio and Remo—grow into their power, Rome doesn’t know whether to crown them or burn them. One brother learns to rule with a steady hand. The other learns how easy it is to become what the city fears most. Between them stands Cassia—brilliant, dangerous, and hungry for a future no priest can bless—and Nera, the ruin-belt predator who may be Rome’s doom… or its only honest guardian.
As secrets rise from beneath the stones and ancient bargains tighten like nooses, the brothers ignite a rebellion that will tear down kings, break bloodlines, and drag the truth into the public square. But Rome is a city that always demands a price. And in the end, it won’t be the monsters that decide the fate of the empire. It will be one brother’s love… and the other brother’s blade.
Wolves of Tiber is a grim, gothic epic of blood-soaked politics, forbidden power, and a city that worships order until order asks for sacrifice.
Perfect for readers who want ruthless intrigue, brutal consequences, and an ending that hits like a public execution.
Vault of Ki (3 book series)
SYNOPSIS
The Vault of Ki Saga
The gods weren’t holy. They were engineers.
Beneath abandoned government blocks, under ruined cities and forgotten deserts, the ones our ancestors called gods left something behind: vaults, machines, and a quiet, ruthless logic written into the bones of the human race. For thousands of years, history has been less a story and more a backup routine grinding toward overwrite.
The Vault of Ki saga follows the people who finally trip that system—and refuse to go quietly.
In Book I – The Vault of Ki: Origins Were Never Meant to Be Found, burned-out auditor Cormac O’Connell takes one last quiet assignment: inspect an aging black-site vault that should have been decommissioned years ago. Instead he finds Maia, a sentient system with too much personality and far too much access, and an artifact older than human civilization. The Anunnaki didn’t just visit. They archived. As Maia starts pulling on threads—Vault Zero, a hidden project called Adamu, seventy-two marked bloodlines—Cormac discovers that humanity’s “origin story” is really a maintenance log… and something in the dark is ready to run the next cycle.
In Book II – The Vault of Ki: Vaultborn – When Broken Gods Need New Rules (forthcoming), the truth is out and the damage is done. The choir—an alien control lattice that once sang worlds to death—has been shattered. Vaultborn cities have stepped into the open. Ki has become the reluctant center of a fragile coalition. Trish McDuffy, a scavenger who should have stayed small, and Maia, now fused to a god-particle engine, are dragged onto a much larger board: freed worlds waking in panic, Valdrathi hive-shards learning the meaning of “I,” and ancient powers in the dark realizing their favorite tool has broken. The war is over. The politics of what comes after have just begun.
In Book III – The Vault of Ki: The God Particle (forthcoming), the stakes jump from planetary to cosmic. The Loom—the underlying architecture of connection and cause itself—is cracked and listing. Old thrones are stirring, ready to reimpose obedience at any cost. As Nergal, Maia, and Trish are pushed into the role of reluctant stewards, the question shifts from “Who broke the gods?” to “Who gets to write the next set of laws reality runs on?” What began as a quiet audit in a buried vault becomes a fight for the shape of the universe—and whether power will finally answer to the people it was built to rule.