Tizaar and the Black Maw

"A brooding descent into sorcery, sacrifice, and the strange intimacies of power." "Unsettling, seductive, and steeped in grime and the otherworldly, The Black Maw is the kind of story that crawls under your skin and makes you question who, exactly, you're rooting for." A standalone novella of Gloomstrand--dark swords and sorcery, heavy on the sorcery.A tower that drinks blood. A sorcerer bound to demons. A girl caught in his curse.Banished from the fog-choked courts of Anbolog under charges no one dares speak aloud, the goetist Tizaar wanders into the village of Davao-Noir, a settlement crouched at the edge of the eternal twilight land known as Gloomstrand. Here, time wears thin, language twists into unfamiliar shapes, and truth walks in shadow. Tizaar possesses only his mule, a sack of occult tomes, and the weight of four demons he has bound-Liliana, the succubus of Luxuria; Elinevera, mistress of Acedia; Xhosul, who feeds on Fear; and Vasskaul, the silent shadow of Pride.Seeking obscurity, Tizaar instead finds a tower looming black against the thorn-cloaked hills. The villagers do not speak its name aloud, but in hushed voices they call it The Black Maw. Once a temple, or perhaps a prison, it now stands broken-yet not dead. When Tizaar lays hands on the altar, the stones groan. The tower stirs.The Maw remembers blood.When a young village woman named Marianne is caught leading Tizaar's mule away, what begins as petty theft becomes an entanglement of trial, power, and sacrifice. By local law, Tizaar may pass judgment. But in Gloomstrand, justice is more than law-it is ritual. The altar is thirsty. The tower is watching. And Tizaar, seduced by old rites and voices that speak through stone, begins to believe he has found his place at last.Yet Marianne is no lamb. She is neither pure nor wicked, neither victim nor villain. Bound to the tower by fate and blood, she matches Tizaar in stubbornness and will. What unfolds between them is not love, but something stranger: a shared doom, a partnership in captivity, and perhaps, a path to understanding the tower's deepest hunger.The Black Maw is a novella steeped in forbidden sorcery, arcane dread, and the murk of inhuman pacts. It is a tale of a man trying to master a place that cannot be mastered, of demons that feed on weakness, and of a girl who refuses to die quietly on an altar.For readers who crave dark alchemy, cursed anti-heros, and sword-and-sorcery with teeth.GloomstrandGloomstrand is a haunted, twilight-bound region at the ragged edge of the knowable world-a liminal realm where the mortal and the mystical bleed into one another, and where the borders of Faërie fray like rotting lace. Here, the sun never fully rises. Time meanders, memory curdles, and the landscape itself seems to dream darkly. The land is wild and melancholic: forests whisper with voices not entirely their own, mists curl over barrows and bogs, and ancient dolmens stand like forgotten sentinels.