“While the Titans reigned in the heavens above Ard, Lilith ruled from Kehena below, thirsting for the blood of the innocent to satiate her desires. The Dark Lord sent the darklings out from the Tower of Ibris to devour the people in her name. The Titans asked the great god Atua to send help. He sent his acolyte, the Alchemage.” – From the Book of Ard

When darkness enveloped Ard, the people cried out across the stars for help, and the Titans answered their prayers. The banished gods bestowed the glittering gift of magic to Humans, Elves, Animalian, and Nephilim alike. But the darklings, creatures of shadow and death, poured out like oil from the Obsidian Cliffs. These creatures, all gnashing teeth and shifting gloom, sought to devour the light of magic for themselves. As armies faltered and hope dimmed to a dying ember, the Titans themselves knelt in supplication before the great god Atua for help. He opened his hands and sent his most powerful weapon—the Alchemage.

These shadow hunters wielded not just magic, but the ether itself through alchemy, forging spells in crucibles of will and turning base elements into devastating power. But their victories were pyrrhic, paid for by their own souls. The very people they saved recoiled from them, branding them heretics and demons for turning away from the Titans. For a thousand years, this war of attrition ground on, a slow bleed against the world’s edge.
Canaan Treyhawke bled at the front lines beneath the Obsidian Mountains and lost his leg to war, but he fought on. He walks the grime-slicked streets of Perdition’s Point, a shadow hunter protecting a city that whispers “heretic” as he passes by. Canaan fights for his sister’s smile and the quiet safety of the woman he loves, and for a city that curses his name even as he strives to protect it. And now, he finds himself in the heart of a conspiracy that threatens to unravel the very fabric of Ard.

A shadow tamer—a mortal man twisted by his allegiance to the sinister Tower of Ibris—was on the hunt for the Progenitor. With this chaos tightening around him like a noose, Canaan must journey from the gilded spires of Signus Prime to the rain-slicked streets of the capital city of Adolphus. He must unmask the shadow tamer and sever this new threat before the darkness consumes everything.

A Dance of Darklings and Demons is a new dark fantasy novel by award-winning independent author Mark Piggott, coming soon from Curious Corvid Publishing.