Darkness and Blight: A Gritty Dark Fantasy of Myth and Madness - Paperback

Winner of the 2025 Firebird Book Awards: First Place Fantasy, First Place Dark Fantasy, Winner, Most Innovative Use of Genre. Gold Medal Winner, 2025 Literary Titan Award. Silver Award Winner, Bookfest 2025

Lydarc the shaman is dying from the inside out. A shard of an Over, one of the godlike beings who shattered reality itself, has lodged in her chest, granting her the power to slay the monsters haunting her post-apocalyptic world. But that same shard fills her with berserker fury, apocalyptic visions, and endless pain. When her entire tribe is butchered and their half-lives condemned to the underlands, Lydarc faces an impossible choice: let them suffer in hell, or die herself to reach the realm of the damned.

The journey to hell demands blood. Lydarc assembles a band of outcasts for a suicide mission through nightmare landscapes where the living aren't meant to tread. Among them: a cryptic mentor with secrets of his own, a giant bear spirit animal, a book-hoarding dragon who just wants to help, and her ex-lover, desperate to rescue his lost daughter. But death is only the doorway. Beyond it lies betrayal, impossible trials, and a truth that will force Lydarc to choose between saving her people and preventing the complete annihilation of reality.

To resurrect the damned, she must become something more-and less-than human. To stop the Overs from destroying what remains of the world, she must unlock a transcendent shamanic power that could tear existence apart. In a realm where myth bleeds into quantum horror and every victory demands a terrible sacrifice, one broken warrior will discover that the deepest darkness isn't in hell. It's in herself.