TheOutsiders

In the Forge, power is not a system. It is a bargain. Every class, blessing and level is a gift from a god with motives of their own, paid for in belief and priced in things you cannot get back. The Outsiders is an anthology of the exceptions: eight standalone novels, each about someone the divine economy was never built for — a demon severed from its masters, a monster the ledgers count as property, a healer whose touch runs the wrong way, a god too good at his job.

The tales share a world and a rulebook but not a register. Some are quiet and literary, one is warm and low-stakes, all of them are character-first. For readers of Cradle and He Who Fights With Monsters who want the numbers to cost something. Read them in any order.

The Books

Book 1

Demon

The hive-mind's tether cuts mid-attack, and a weapon becomes a person hiding inside the academy he was sent to destroy. Every new power costs him a memory he can never get back.

Free

Free — join the newsletter

Book 2

Monster

Three hundred and forty-six deaths on a chain, and then a forgotten god notices. A class, a place, a chance to be more than a beast. Every gift is billed in blood.

Coming soon

Book 3

Godless

One blacksmith tells a god no. The favours stop, the well runs dry, the village turns, and an honest man discovers a blessing is a leash and a god only a tenant.

Coming soon

Book 4

Drain

A healer's touch runs the wrong way, and she learns she can lift a blessing clean out of a person and keep it. She tells herself they can spare it. Someone has begun to count.

Coming soon

Book 5

Warriors

Twenty warriors, one collapsed gate, no way home. Stranded beside a village with no use for soldiers, a commander who has only ever held weapons must learn to hold a hammer.

Coming soon

Book 6

Priest

After forty years of silence, the god answers a burned village's priest with a warrior's blessing he never wanted. Each time he uses it to save the living, it takes some of who he was.

Coming soon

Book 7

Gnome

Everything she touches turns to dust now, a titan's blessing crammed into forty-five pounds of gnome. Exiled, she does what tinkers do. She builds. Out of grief and scrap, a brand-new god.

Coming soon

Book 8

Too Good

Business is quiet for a god of lost causes whose last follower just walked out cured. Then a retired killer in borrowed priestess frills takes over his shrine, chair leg first.

Coming soon