Welcome to FFA’s “landing page” for our venture into SPFBO. Below you will find our intro article which gives a glimpse into the competition itself, as well as a behind-the-book glance at our “esteemed” judges. Make sure to come back as we make a dent in our thirty (30) contenders, pick our semi-finalists, and whittle down to our ultimate finalist.
Our Titles
Confronting werewolves, exploring haunted forests, calming angry spirits, and befriending ancient vampires.
These are just a few of the tasks that Asher Norwood and his raven partner Aethon find themselves doing on any given day.
Asher is a sin eater, a guild of mages that exists to combat dark magic wherever it rears its ugly head. Invoking the forces of nature to protect a society that looks down on him, Asher will stop at nothing to defeat the monsters that plague his world.
Follow Asher on his journey to enchanted forests, remote mountains, monster-laden seas, and fantastic cities. A Season of Ravens is a collection of eight stories that combine to make the first novel of the Sin Eater Tales series.
The Moon is on the brink of war.
Alexander Dio, an officer of the Vulture Dragoons, flies in defence of the Lunar people against the monstrous armies of the Sun. He is ready for war – or at least he thinks he is.
But when Dio’s patrol finds a crashed ship out in the Sea of Tranquility, his life is turned upside-down. Because the ship is not from the Moon, and its captain is unlike anyone he’s ever known.
His name is Lucian, and he comes from the Earth.
Based on the ancient Greek story by Lucian of Samosata, this voyage of fantastic discovery goes back to the very beginning of science-fiction.
The Goranians thought they were ready to face demons in battle. But when the foretold War of the Last Day begins, one fact becomes clear: the doom of mankind is just a matter of time. Now its fate rests in the hands of a hapless trio.
A mage’s apprentice who relies on her wits rather than magic.
A princess who seeks the ultimate weapon against demons, but first, she has to survive the turmoil of civil war.
And a warrior whose swordplay could prove more useful against a threat graver than the bandits infesting his village.
Can the three unite and put aside their differences before it is too late? The entire human race is already on the brink of extinction.
In Deepwater, Princess Tempest believes her impending marriage to be the worst of her troubles; but when an attack is made on the king, starting a battle for control between the nations of Nyazere, she must flee the only home she has ever known and form new alliances if she is to survive. But beyond the walls of her city lies a dangerous road, where blades and coin matter more than legacy and titles.
The Almighty El is tired of his creations dying and his offspring questioning his competence. After purging his latest failure and raising up a new cosmos, he’s certain that this time success is assured. But just as his handiwork takes root, his greatest enemy rises from the void to challenge him in a vicious tentacled battle.
Leader of the Seraphim, Lucifer is sick of his father’s catastrophic missteps. And when he temporarily takes charge while the useless deity rests, he vows this rightful reign will be permanent. Except Lucifer soon finds himself not only dethroned, but kicked into the fiery flames of the Inferno.
Now as El’s family spirals into death and madness, he must fight to keep all of existence from imploding. And Lucifer’s hunger for vengeance has inadvertently paved the way for every celestial with a lust for power to ravage the multiverse in their bid for the coveted crown.
Can the embattled pair stop the playground of the gods from becoming a killing field?
Simon the fool, Simon the halfwit, Simon the lost is pursued across medieval Europe by a sinister league of conjurers, the Apostles of Light. Having erased his past, they will stop at nothing to steal his future as well. On the way, he joins the Knights of Palermo, a dubious band of wandering rogues, and attracts a mysterious young woman whose fate is somehow interwoven with his own.
Simon finds himself caught in a struggle for power between the shadowy Apostles, his adopted Knights, and a cabal of powerful women known to a select few as the Weavers. With only a broken sword and his own shattered memories, Simon must thread this maze of warring factions to discover who he was and why he is inexorably drawn to the haunted ruins of twelfth century Rome.
Bloody Scarlet, the skull collector of the Crimson Forest, is just a cautionary tale to keep children from wandering in and getting lost — isn’t she? Well something’s out there.
In a world dominated by a cruel Inquisition that sees demons and witches everywhere it turns, Keely just wants to make a dishonest living convincing the obscenely wealthy to part with their excess riches through guile and trickery.
When the Inquisition shows up to destroy her life anyway, Keely goes on the offensive rather than scurry back into the shadows. To set it up for a fall she lures the Inquisition into an invented race to find a heretical book of prophecy that may never have existed.
When Keely builds her lies on existing rumors, though, and points the hunt in the direction of the Crimson forest, a new player introduces herself to the high stakes con game as a deadly wild card.
Whether or not the woman in red is the real Bloody Scarlet, the closer Keely gets to the dark, twisted heart of the forest the more quickly things spiral out of control.
For most people, sleeping is an obstacle; something to get out of the way so they can get back to their day. For others, it’s an escape to nothing; a blissful break from the wears of life.
It’s the opposite for me.
I live so that I can dream. I trudge through work so that I can go home and close my eyes, awakening in the real world—one where dreams really do come true. A place where I can fight a king instead of my ever-disappointed boss, where I’m a warrior instead of a glorified telemarketer. A place where I matter.
Tigers instead of taxes. Monsters instead of men with too much power.
Reality is just the word we came up with to accept a boring life; a birthing place for grander ideas we so desperately wish could come true.
I choose to live in a world where they do.
When a crazy Precog handed Lani the coordinates to a stretch of ocean just off the Salt Spire, she should have thrown them overboard. Going there would be a horrible idea. Lani, though, was a pro at making bad decisions.
A not-so-chance encounter with escaped salt slave Adavera launches them on a path to forsake all that they know and dare to take on the cruel Corporation that controls every grain of salt on their planet. With the help of old friends, new friends, and people they are pretty sure might be enemies, Adavera and Lani travel outside the protective reef that keeps the worst of the Storms off the Islands and venture into a world of piracy, astonishing powers, and unexpected love.
The odds might be against them, but with a little planning and a lot of brass, this team of misfits intends to do the impossible. They have very little in common, except for two things:
They all want to blow the Crystal Corporation into oblivion…
And are willing to sacrifice anything to see it done.
Ruarshi Illyana, a sorcerer-physician from the far northern land of Miriyan, has traveled south to ply his trade in Europe. He is entirely content with the life of a wandering healer—right up until the day his assistant Wil is targeted in a terrible act of violence. His priorities shift overnight and he soon finds himself back in Miriyan, where he defies his training and his clan in order to study with a member of his country’s warrior caste. He quickly discovers that his unusual talents are likely to get him into trouble, a worrying development but not one that’s going to change his mind.
Meanwhile, discontented Miriyanti and ambitious Europeans are putting their nefarious plans for Miriyan’s future into motion. When his newfound abilities mark him out to play a major role in the vicious conflict that ensues, Ruarshi will have to use all his wit and skill to keep his friends and allies safe, or watch destruction overtake everything he loves.
Huon is weak. A surgecaller who escaped into the wilds, his only goal was to survive.
Now he is Oathbound, forced to fight in an arena, forced to become stronger than he’d thought possible.
As he realises he can become strong, the need for revenge fills his heart, and a new goal forms in his mind.
But his goal is impossible: kill the dragon rider, the Immortal of Fire.
To succeed, he’ll have to do more than just survive—he’ll have to advance beyond anything the realm has ever seen.
Let me introduce myself. I’m Nimue, and yes, I’m that Nimue. Maybe a little grumpy and foul-mouthed, but you try dealing with magical drama and living forever. It’s bloody annoying, which is why these days all I wanted was a peaceful life. Just a quiet cottage nestled in England’s Lake District and a nightly glass of mead.
Just my bloody rotten luck the past won’t leave me alone. I should have known. Magic always brings trouble.
When an old friend, Iseult, appeared bringing news that my old rival Morgawse was abducted, another impending catastrophe landed on my doorstep. And worse, the wizard responsible was my ex, Nostradamus.
Despite my better judgement, I let myself be dragged into another adventure and confronted my halfwit former flame as he waged some desperate mad quest. And worse, I listened to his nonsense ravings, and his warnings. He swore the heart of magical energy itself was threatened.
Help me fix it, he said. Why? Why should I care?
If I was smart, I’d walk away. Let someone else deal with the dark secrets and rescue magic. Except my friends expected me to step up, be the champion.
I never wanted to be magic’s saviour.
Maybe we’d be better off if magic died…
Newfoundland, Canada, 1992.
Gale Harbour hasn’t seen any excitement since the military abandoned the base there thirty years ago, unless you count the Tuesday night 2-for-1 video rentals at Jerry’s Video Shack. So when a dead body turns up floating in the town water supply, all evidence seems to point to a boring accident.
Niall, Pius and Harper are dealing with pre-teen awkwardness in the last days of summer before the start of high school. The same night the body is found, the three of them witness unusual lights in the sky over the bay.
Is it a coincidence? Are the lights connected to the rapidly-increasing string of mysterious deaths? And what does the creepy old lady at the nursing home have to do with it?
There is an evil older than time hidden deep beneath the waters of the North Atlantic. It is hungry, and vengeful, and it has its sights set on Gale Harbour to begin its path of destruction. All that stands in its way are a group of kids who would rather be playing Street Fighter II…
Like all Purebred with their menial jobs, Ken ekes out a living sweeping the floors of Kyoto Peacekeeping Central. His kind serve as a benchmark for XHumans to measure how far they’ve progressed, and a reminder of what homo sapiens once was.
His life changes when eight-hundred-year-old Ryu crosses over from the World of Rivers and Lakes, looking for a lost temple; and Aya, a beautiful hacker whose Sensory Interface perceives the EtherCloud as Feudal Japan, learns that XHumans aren’t as perfect as they thought.
They’ve edited out the genes which allow for Cultivation.
That will give Ken a chance to surpass them.
And maybe use mythical martial skills to save the world from an oppressive government, spirit beasts, and alien invaders.
The second millennium has just rolled over. Armageddon, the destructive Y2K bug and a crazy time-storm is afoot. The ultimate battle between good and evil is about to take place on a distant magical world far away.Rock is one of the eight warriors chosen to fight in the ancient tournament that began eight thousand years ago. He is whisked away from planet Earth to fight on the floating islands that hover high above the magical world of Threa.Rock will be guided to the destination of the ancient tournament by the powerful, mysterious wizard, Grodin. Together, they will face countless dangers. Evil wizards, trolls and magical monsters are but a few of the many perils that lie in the path of these intrepid adventurers.Rock has the unprecedented power of the sword-wand to help him brave the many difficult challenges that lie ahead of him. He also has the services of the magical, black stallion, Thunder.
Everyone has an alternate form. Lucky people never shift into it. For everyone else, there’s the Magical Probation Department.
MPD Officer Angela Jones has spent her entire career helping shifters get back into their human forms and ensuring they can manage their magical powers.
Her methods are a little unconventional, but she’s built a strong community of people who help each other. A far cry from her coworkers who would rather emulate the tough guy hero of “Shift Enforcers,” protecting the world from shifters at any cost and grabbing all the glory along the way.
Angela has mostly resigned herself to never being promoted again. But a new source of magic downtown is causing havoc. She can’t convince her boss to look into it…until a fire-breathing dragon appears.
Now Angela is being shut out of the case of a lifetime, and the city she protects is in danger of being destroyed.
When shift happens, Angela must step up…even if it means risking her own life to safeguard others.
Jamie is a lonely, anxious kid when he has a run-in with a witch in a remote Somerset village. He’s almost forgotten about it thirteen years later when unpredictable storms and earthquakes hit England – and that’s the least of his worries. Suffering from anxiety, terrible flatmates and returning to his family home after his mother is diagnosed with cancer, he’s got a lot on his mind. But Melusine, the witch of flesh and blood, lures him back with the offer of cold, hard cash in exchange for his help investigating the source of the freak weather; something’s messing with the earth spirit, Gaia, and Mel means to find out who – or what – it is. As they work together, travelling to the bigoted Seelie Court and the paranoid Unseelie Court, meeting stoned fauns and beer-brewing trolls, Jamie must reconcile his feelings about the witch’s intentions and methods all while handling grief, life admin and one singularly uptight estate agent.
Murdered at seventeen by the Titan, Silver, God of Death, Aja Ashe wakes with her Dragon. Thrust into a bizarre world where her enemies are friends, and friends are enemies, she learns the truth about her parents and herself. Her mother is God, and her father is the Devil. She was the first thing born, not created. Enraged that Aja survived, Silver, God of Death, forces her to make choices to protect those she loves. Will Aja save the ALL or destroy it? If she survives, will she hate herself for what she’s done?
Lost and confused, his only hope for answers is Calidra—a woman living on the edge of the world with her partner. Forced to return home when her father dies, Calidra has put off facing her estranged mother for seven years, and she begrudgingly helps Fenn, forging papers for him so he can avoid the Queen’s Inquisitors.
But her mother is the least of her worries when they discover an ancient enemy is rising again. It should be impossible with the Iron Crown in power—and Fenn is terrified he might unwittingly be playing a part in the war’s resurgence.
Surrounded by vengeful spirits and powerful magic, Fenn’s desperate attempt to find his way home might well alter the fate of Tassar, and every power in it.
A city under siege by a barbarian horde…
A band of ruthless mercenaries…
A trap-filled dungeon…
A situation like this calls for the best wizard in town.
What they’ve got is the ONLY wizard in town: Newport Pagnell, oral hygiene specialist.
More used to soothing fevered gums and extracting rotten teeth, this dental spellcaster has to perform an operation like never before: extracting a fabled treasure from the jaws of certain doom. This time, he might have bitten off more than he can chew…
When Aldeaith joined the army, he left everything behind. His world, his family, everyone who thought him a fool. The new routine gave him a sense of security, and fighting proved easier than talking to people. But the peace couldn’t last forever.
In the Empire spanning thousands of worlds, there are bound to be dissidents. Dealing with them is a part of Aldeaith’s job and the most advanced magic known to man makes it easy.
But no magic can help him when the rebels are people he grew up with. Now, he has to pick a side and prove his loyalty among mounting distrust.
To come on top, he must learn to navigate something trickier than any battlefield: other people.
The fate of the Empire depends on it.
On the barren, war-ravaged demon world of Eriis, the fierce queen Hellne fights to keep her people alive and her son Rhuun’s heritage a secret.
On the green and gentle human world of Mistra, demons have faded into myth. Only a handful of old men and fanatical children still guard The Door between the worlds.
Different and shunned by his demon kin, Rhuun finds refuge in a book that tells of a human world of water and wonder. Forced by his mother’s enemies to flee Eriis, he finds himself trapped on the other side of The Door in the very place he has read and dreamed about—Mistra.
Chained to the deadly whims of a child who guards The Door, Rhuun must balance serving and surviving, even at the risk of exposing his true identity. Riskiest of all is his task of kidnapping an infuriating young woman who is about to find out that the demons of Eriis are much, much more than just an old bedtime story.
Anya longs to be a warrior like her grandmother, the legendary witch-warrior of the Shaanti, and is ready to defy her grandfather’s last wishes and take the ink. With her village captured and best friend killed by the invading Kurah, Anya must defeat them before the rest of the Shaanti fall. But the Kurah have a secret weapon: an exiled Shaanti god in search of revenge.
Escaping to the Rift Forest, Anya must rely on her reluctant ally, Vedic, to find her way through the woods and free the goddess of her people. But what is Vedic keeping from her? How can Anya unite the forest and the Shaanti against their common foe? And with the fate of the world in her hands, just how far is she prepared to go to defeat her enemies?
On the students’ trip to New York City, the wolves rounded up the people. Then the trolls sealed off the edges of the island with stacks of crushed cars, and the goblins set about constructing a portal; a portal that would bring something horrible to this world…and all of this happened before the students had even left the American Museum of Natural History. Now, armed with strange weapons they acquired in the museum, seven students find themselves on the run in a frightening urban environment overtaken with dragons, ogres, and an undead populace intent on changing the city into a fortress.
Nothing will ever be the same again.
Torak, a young servant, lives a mundane life in the weapons academy catering to the needs of swordsmen and nobility. That life is irrevocably changed when his father’s identity as a dragon is revealed in dramatic fashion. Torak is forced to leave his servant’s life and fight not only for his own survival but for the survival of all the races in the lands.
Desperate to make something of himself, a man named Saolan is one day given the opportunity to become a sorcerer’s apprentice, on the condition that he agrees to fight a despicable creature known as Mooneye.
Join him as he journeys through an enchanted forest, a peaceful port town, an underwater kingdom and many ancient wonders left behind by the sorcerers of old.
To Gosha Armitage, magic is a four-letter word, but in her mother’s world of witchcraft, words have power, power Gosha will sacrifice everything to acquire. When a murderous sorcerer masquerading as a New Age guru conspires to consume the life force of her best friend, the reluctant witch has no choice but to embrace her heritage, submit to her mother’s caustic authority, and descend into a clandestine world of magic and intrigue with only her wits, five spells, and her favorite lipstick to help her. After a lifetime denying her connection to witchcraft, will Gosha learn to trust her mother’s training in time to save her friend?
Two queens.
One rules by fear, her citizens laboring to fund the lavish lifestyle of the wizard class. The other believes in justice and compassion, earning her the love of her subjects…and the enmity of her wizard peers.
Both will die.
In one wizardom, a secret rebellion brews. A hero to the people rises, fueled by a mysterious sorcerer’s blood magic. But at what cost?
Conspiracies and assassins lurk in every shadow, threatening the throne of another nation. The scheming wizard behind it will stop at nothing to claim the crown. Yet, even he is a pawn.
What force is behind it all? What is their endgame?
The story begins in Shidokan where Winter joins the mystical Zendragon order, seeking to control his emotions and master his ki. But he is full of anger towards his mother’s killer, and anger poisons his spirit. He meets Akami while she is being pursued by Dragonscorpion ninja’s, and he seeks to prevent her from being used by ruthless men to attain the Shogunate. In the end Winter’s desire to revenge will test his spirit, for a Zendragon is supposed to rise above anger and break the cycle of vengeance, but does he have the strength to do it?
Then the story moves to Garderon, where Lord Zigurashi has opened a magic portal leading there and sent his armies to make war on the westerners. Winter joins a group of western heroes and seeks to find the riftblade, the sacred artefact capable of closing the portal and ending the war with Garderon. Can he save them from conquest, or will the demonic enemies who plague his every step spell his doom?
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Zombie Walkabout. Where the dead give you a reason for living!