Nature Writ Red
Boy meets god. Things go badly.
Eight years ago, for the first time in human memory, a god was felled. Yet though its flesh rots, its mad essence beats still, smuggled in the veins of children and monsters.
Since time immemorial, gods have represented both calamity and opportunity. Their blood allows humanity to grasp beyond mortality and achieve greatness. Yet for every drop of blood gained, thousands die, slain by the gods’ supernatural prowess. Human civilisation shelters in the spaces between these inhuman disasters. But, spurred by the death of the most lethal of all gods, everything is beginning to change.
Part-time chef and full-time nuisance Orvi wants nothing to do with gods. Living in a derelict city, his only concerns are ensuring his adopted family’s restaurant is prosperous and how to best beat the neighbourhood boys in a fight. If he’s lucky, he might even snag a date with the farmer’s daughter at the market.
When the desperate grasping of humans and inscrutable machinations of gods threaten to tear the city from its inhabitants, Orvi’s attempts to keep his friends and family whole beckon catastrophe to their door. They’re left to leverage everything they have to keep the people they love safe.
But though Orvi cares nothing for the gods or their blood, the world won’t leave him alone forever.
Because in order to reach godhood, one must first leave their humanity behind.
Nature Writ Red is a dark fantasy bildungsroman that follows a boy alongside an assorted cast of characters as they try and fail and try again to make the best of what they have, even as powers beyond their ken drag them deeper, into increasingly perilous orbits.