Strange Faetes

Book One of A Starwalker Oddity — Adult Epic Science-Fantasy by R.S. Taylherman

Humanity did not choose Ruenova. It arrived the way refugees always do: with almost nothing, on terms it did not set, into a world that was already ancient and had no reason to accommodate it.

That was centuries ago. Humans are still here. Still guests, in the eyes of most. Still learning what it costs to live inside a planet that holds its history the way Ruenova does — not as record, but as living memory, woven into its energy, its land, and the civilizations that have been shaping it long before the Starwalkers ever arrived.

Strange Faetes begins at the point when the terms of that arrangement start to break.

The Story

The Arak Aeon is coming. A dual lunar eclipse that every civilization on Ruenova has been watching for, and dreading, and positioning around for generations. When it arrives, the world will not look the same on the other side of it. Everyone who matters knows this. Everyone is acting accordingly.

Almira is human, which already makes her marginal on a world that did not build its systems with her kind in mind. She is also, by the judgment of forces older than any political structure currently operating on Ruenova, something that should not exist.

The question the novel asks about her is not whether she is special. It is whether being chosen, without consent, by something ancient and indifferent to your circumstances, is a gift or a trap.

Her brother Arlo moves through a different part of the same world, learning things about Ruenova's deep history that the dominant powers would prefer stayed buried. His thread and Almira's are converging. Neither of them is ready for what they find where those threads cross.

Above it all, a sovereign of a dead empire is moving his pieces into position. He does not want Ruenova's land. He wants its memory. He understands that whoever controls what history says about this moment controls everything that follows it.

The Characters

Lana has been in debt to powerful people for long enough that she has stopped calling it what it is. She and Kele run contracts for the man who holds their names in red ink, doing the jobs that pay in coin and ask nothing else. What they have built between them is not a family in any formal sense. It is something quieter and more durable: the kind of trust that forms when two people have kept each other alive long enough that neither one can remember who started it.

Arlo follows his sister the way he has always followed her: because she taught him that worry arrives second, and the distance between them is the one cost he has never been willing to pay. The search is costing him more than that now.

Almira has been drawing power from Ruenova's living systems in ways a human should not be able to since she was young enough not to know better. The forest keeps the score. She has never been told what it is counting toward. She is not waiting to be told. She is trying to survive long enough to find out on her own terms, in a world that is paying far closer attention to her than she has been willing to admit.

The first novel in a seven-book series, complete at 117,000 words.

R.S. Taylherman is currently seeking representation.